Distinguished pol of the week: Biden hits his stride
By Jennifer Rubin
Republicans who excuse a coup, vilify the FBI and rationalize defeated former president Donald Trump’s holding on to highly sensitive national security secrets as he left the White House are whining that President Biden, at a fundraiser, called the MAGA movement “semi-fascist.” If anything, he has understated the problem by, as he did in his speech from Philadelphia on Thursday night, painting the MAGA movement as distinct from the “mainstream” GOP. A couple of Republicans (such as Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois) hardly constitute the “mainstream.” Rather, consistent Republican truth-tellers are outcasts in a party that is destabilizing democracy, condoning violence, pursuing White Christian nationalism and deploying nonstop lies.
The good news is that Biden has decided to prioritize candor. The most consequential remarks of his presidency may be this from Thursday: “Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated. … You can’t love your country only when you win.” Rarely has an American president uttered a more accurate or blunt assessment.
Alas, the mainstream media cannot seem to process the notion that defense of democracy is not “partisan.” By adopting that frame (and rending garments over Biden’s defense of democracy), they implicitly make Biden’s point: Republicans are anti-democratic, so a defense of democracy is inevitably a condemnation of the GOP. The disease of whataboutism, false equivalence and cluelessness about the threat to democracy continues to plague too many news outlets.
In any event, Biden’s bold defense of democracy (what Anne Applebaum calls “the risky and genuinely brave decision to use emotional language in defense of our rules-based political system”) reaffirms the presidency as the most important defender of our Constitution and democratic norms. (“I believe it is my duty — my duty to level with you, to tell the truth no matter how difficult, no matter how painful.”)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/04/distinguished-pol-week-biden-hits-his-stride/