The Republican response to President Joe Biden’s second State of the Union address was almost embarrassingly predictable. But “embarrassing,” we mean they embarrassed themselves. The MAGA wing were childish hecklers. Even the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, looked like a miserable robot. Then came the GOP response, conducted by Donald Trump’s second misleading press secretary-turned-Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders (who now refuses to back her toxic former boss). It was more Republican doom and gloom, so unpleasant even her own town’s paper tore it to shreds.
As per Raw Story, The Arkansas Times, based in Little Rock, where Huckabee and family live, ran a morning-after op-ed by Austin Bailey, who praised Biden for keeping his cool while the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene acted like brats. Biden, Bailey wrote, oozed his “signature empathy.” Then Sanders came to “darken the mood” with her “standard snarling about wokeness and the radical left.”
Bailey went on to describe Sanders’ speech as a “word salad of talking points and name calling, with some attempts at folksy relatability thrown in.” He also torched arguably her most shameless claim: that the left started the culture wars, which the GOP never wanted to fight. Bailey countered that the right launched a “skirmish against transgender people unprovoked.”
Moreover, he was appalled that she brought up that her alma mater, Little Rock Central High, was at the center of “Little Rock Integration Crisis,” in which nine Black students were denied access when the school was being integrated. Cut to 2023, and under Sanders’ rule the state is about to be inundated with an education reform package that will foist conservativism upon students:
This linking of Central High’s history with Sanders’ voucher scheme to funnel tax dollars to public and private schools was another brazen choice, another example of the doublespeak at which Sanders is so shameless and so skilled. The bold education reform she’ll unveil at the Arkansas Capitol this week is all but guaranteed to worsen segregation in Arkansas schools along racial and socioeconomic lines. Calling education the civil rights cause of our time even as she plans to gut public education as we know it is the kind of unapologetic liberal-tears bait that keeps Sanders’ fans coming back for more. This strategy is a proven winner around here.
Sanders probably didn’t read this. After all, we all know what she thinks of reporters.
(Via The Arkansas Times and Raw Story)