The Dem-wits failure to BE CHARGED WITH their crimes is only temporary. Sooner or later they will make the right slip-up and who knows what will happen.

The LORD works in mysterious ways.

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The Guardian
Attack, attack, attack: Republicans drive to make Biden the bogeyman
David Smith in Washington

1/17/2022

It seemed that Joe Biden would be bad for business in “Make America great again” world.

In theory, the US president, a white man with working-class roots and moderate policy positions, was a more elusive target for Donald Trump’s increasingly extreme support base than other prominent Democrats.

But after his first year in office, it transpires that Biden is not too boring to be a rightwing boogeyman after all.

“He’s our best salesperson,” said Ronald Solomon, a merchandiser who sells a $21.99 T-shirt depicting the president with an Adolf Hitler-style mustache and the slogan “Not My Dictator”. “Sales for Trump stuff and anti-Biden merchandise is the highest it’s been except for the three months leading up to the 2020 election.”

The demonization of Biden as a Hitler, Stalin or anti-white racist bears no relation to reality. But for many Republican voters it appears to stick, the product of relentless conservative media attacks, the president’s own missteps, and seething frustration during a seemingly never-ending pandemic.

At first Biden did excite less animus than Barack Obama, the first Black president who was subjected to conspiracy theories about his birthplace and the rise of the populist Tea Party movement. Biden never had to go through the misogyny endured by Hillary Clinton.

His policy record was also non-incendiary. When Trump supporters gathered at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference under the banner “America vs socialism”, the biggest hate figures were Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a liberal Latina from New York.

Since moving into the White House, however, Biden has granted Sanders a prominent voice in shaping his policy agenda. The unexpected scale of the president’s ambition to spend trillions of dollars on coronavirus relief, the social safety net and the climate crisis has fed into a Republican narrative that he is a puppet of the radical left.

And although Biden’s identity as a white man neutralised other “isms”, he cannot escape ageism. At 79, he is the oldest American president in history, his every verbal slip seized upon as cause to doubt his mental fitness. Last May, Fox News host Sean Hannity displayed a sippy cup with the presidential seal on it, floating the nickname “Sippy Cup Joe”.

In August, Tucker Carlson told viewers of the same network: “Maybe the most important thing we’ve learned is that Joe Biden is not capable of running the country. Joe Biden is senile.” (Such commentators rarely note that Mitch McConnell, Republican minority leader in the Senate, is also 79.)

Another popular line of attack is to compare Biden to Jimmy Carter, whose presidency in the 1970s ended in failure after one term. “Joe Biden Is Jimmy Carter 2.0,” said one such press release from the Republican National Committee. “On Joe Biden’s watch, America is grappling with a gas crisis, record-breaking inflation, weak leadership abroad, and Americans trapped behind enemy lines, all reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter years.”

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This fellow knows the stories, but, is having a hard time with the truth.

kommonsentsjane