Your Sunday School was filled with talk about the shenanigans at Mar-a-Lago, and about student loan debt forgiveness. In the State of the Union classroom on CNN, Dana Bash talked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) about that, which was a major theme of her presidential campaign. Here's a bit of that.
Bash wondered about fairness, and other kinds of debt that the government isn't helping with. Warren said she thinks "a lot about fairness," before reciting her own story of going to college when a semester cost $50, getting a part-time job and being able to pay for her education. That's not the case now, where "our public education system is no longer creating opportunities" for folks without financial means.
Instead, we're saying to these young people, you have got to get an education, but we are going to wrap the chains of debt around you. And, for many, you're going to be paying it for decades into the future, including getting Social Security checks garnished. That's not the America we want.
She didn't address the 'fairness' question, and Bash noted the package doesn't do anything about the cost of education. There are "a lot of problems in the whole system," she said, and this is one tool Biden had to help. She said the Dems "have put multiple plans on the table" to deal with the other issues, but the Rs won't get on board.
I didn't research her comment about the Rs not getting on board, but given the last two years, I don't have any immediate reason to doubt her on it.
For your Extra Credit, I decided to spend time with the panel on Fox News Sunday, where there was some discussion on President Biden's comments on extreme MAGA folks - those comments were amplified, of course, in his address on Thursday. We'll get to that a bit more in a minute. Here are what I'll call his trial balloon, and some of the discussion.
What we're seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It's not just Trump, it's the entire philosophy that underpins - I'm going to say something, it's like semi-fascism.
And later, he said, after calling Maryland's Gov. Larry Hogan "a Republican you can deal with,"
We disagree, but at least he's within the mainstream of the Republican Party. I respect conservative Republicans. I don't respect these MAGA Republicans.
Juan Williams, a panel regular, was asked how Biden's comments compared to Hillary Clinton and her 'deplorable' comments?
Williams started with a date: January 6, 2021. Clinton's widely (and often purposefully) misconstrued statement happened before that date, and Biden's was after it.
After January 6th, you had the reality that there were a group of people, Trump supporters, who attacked the Congress of the United States to stop the certification of a legitimate, fair election. You had people in the crowd who wanted to threaten, if not hang, Vice President Pence. You had a situation where there were Trump officials who were pressuring state officials to manufacture votes and send phony electors to the Congress of the United States. I think if people behave that way, then they can be -- they can expect to be called semi-fascist, fascist, because it's antidemocratic action. You're acting against the constitution of these United States...
There was some disagreement from others on the panel, as you might imagine.
I was wondering, on Wednesday - but I wasn't typing, so we skipped that regular feature last week. I did manage to get a couple of #tbt posts out on Thursday, both related to topics we're still talking about now.
The first, from 2012, was a Point/Counterpoint recapping a Facebook conversation on voter ID laws. It was short and sweet - here's the crux of it; the red and blue are indicative of the political leanings of the participants.
It sounds like Obama can't get re-elected unless he has all these people that can't prove who they are to vote for him.
Ha ha - sure sounds like Romney can't get elected without these new laws keeping people from voting...
Funny - sad funny, not haha funny - how little things have changed in a decade, isn't it?
The second #tbt was a Quick Take on FBI transparency from 2016. Here's a bit of that.
And now? There's some additional consternation, albeit perhaps more limited, as the FBI has decided to release information from their investigation.
(September 2, 2016) the FBI is releasing a summary of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's July 2, 2016 interview with the FBI concerning allegations that classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on a personal email server she used during her tenure. We are also releasing a factual summary of the FBI's investigation into this matter. We are making these materials available to the public in the interest of transparency and in response to numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests...
Your TGIF was untraditional, which seemed fitting given the week's news. Given the discussions on Biden's brief remarks about MAGA extremists - NOT about all Republicans, he made clear - I shared a section of his address from Independence Hall.
But first, we must be honest with each other and with ourselves.
Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.
Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.
Now, I want to be very clear -- very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.
I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.
But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.
It's important to see his full comments in context, because the Rs and the pundits don't want you to see that: they want the soundbites, and the arguments, and the battles. And that's consistent with how they regularly behave.
I pointed all that out in a Sidebar, with previous examples to show that it's a pretty consistent practice in those circles. The examples were from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The former talked inelegantly about people "clinging to guns or religion" and the latter famously gave us the 'basket of deplorables." But unless you looked for it, you couldn't find the context of those remarks to understand the point they were trying to make.
The media, which has an obligation to report the truth, and to separate news articles from opinions, didn't do a good job with either of these statements. Too often, they would report on the most inflammatory parts and, if you read the rest of the article, you could probably find a link to the entire quote. Of course, they know how few people read the entire article, right? Oh, hell - let's be honest - they know how many people read only the headline.
The pundits, with no such obligation to the truth, blatantly ignored anything other than the most incendiary words - it was as if the rest of the quotes were not even spoken. I remember watching clips from the talk shows and the cable shows, and if anyone tried to mention the full breadth of the comments, they were shut down immediately: "Yeah, but he said..." "Yeah, but she said..." "Yeah, but no one's going to remember that part, they're only going to remember the part that we're talking about..." "Yeah, but..."
The real villains here, in all three cases, IMO, are the Republicans who whole-heartedly embraced the soundbite, particularly Clinton's 'deplorables' comment. They owned it! They put themselves in that basket, they put their colleagues in that basket, they put their donors in that basket, they put their constituents in that basket, and they put everyone who voted for any Republican in that basket.
And just like back then, the Rs are going overboard again, broadly painting themselves with an industrial sprayer, when the comments were wielded with six-inch-brush.
And so it goes, as Linda Ellerbee used to say.
Have a good week.
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