The Big Story Is Biden's Attack On MAGA As "Semi-Fascism"-- The Break I've Been Waiting And Hoping For--
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The Big Story Is Biden's Attack On MAGA As "Semi-Fascism"-- The Break I've Been Waiting And Hoping For--
Is This The Political Course Correction We Have Needed?
Almost lost in the high density coverage of the Trump stolen documents drama and the intense debate over the administration's moves on student debt, was the speech given this week in which President Biden delivered an unprecedented (for him) blast at the "MAGA Republicans," as "semi-fascism."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-maga-republicans-semi-fascism/
As to be expected, the psychotic Trumpworld media is exploding in both phony outrage and euphoric glee, now that Joe has delivered them their new Hillary-style "deplorables" quote with which to further consolidate their brainwash program over their zombie followers. Fox and Newsmax have subsequently broken new ground in using the airwaves to turn their viewers into rabid Hyenas. Although this is an expected reaction, it is not remotely the sole purpose of his statement.
President Biden did not "make a gaffe" by using this formulation. I can virtually guarantee that this was calculated. Critics on both the right and the left (progressive pundits who are whining "oh he didn't go far enough, there's no 'semi' to it.") are blind to the deeper significance of this attention grabbing statement. President Biden has just kicked his most trusted political adviser Anita Dunn to the curb, a fact asserted even by yesterday's edition of Vanity Fair.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/biden-condemns-gop-semi-fascism
I'll demonstrate why this is, what it means, and what we can do with this. Even were the President or his press spokesmen to "walk back" this characterization a hundred times, I'll state emphatically that he meant every word.
Who Is Anita Dunn?
Dunn was brought back to the White House in an official capacity in April of this year, having stepped away after the 2020 election. I've written about her since the inauguration as a corrupt corporate centrist, whose divided loyalties represented a danger to President Biden's agenda for an "FDR-style" Presidency. She has been Biden's Rasputin, Svengali and Iago, wrapped up in one.
Because she is credited with Biden's successful election strategy for courting GOP suburbanites and pursuing bipartisanship, she was highly ensconced in Biden's circle of trust. (Dunn herself in an outrageous reported statement said "covid is the very best thing that ever happened to Joe Biden," giving the pandemic top billing for the election success)
Also she has a personal history with Biden going back to the Obama administrations, and her husband Bob Bauer serves the President currently as White House Counsel. And as has been documented, Dunn's lobbying efforts have worked at crosspurposes with the administrations she ostensibly served, such as that of Michelle Obama's healthy eating initiatives.
https://theintercept.com/2020/02/28/joe-biden-obama-anita-dunn/
Dunn's corporate lobbying firm (SKDK) was simultaneously representing the big corporations which were funding the extreme religious right through ALEC. She also represented environmental criminals whose companies featured "fracking." Dunn also was personally providing legal and PR advice to Hollywood rapist/predator Harvey Weinstein.
As has been documented in profile pieces in "The Atlantic" and other mainstream press (links below) she conducted a virtual reign of terror within the Biden campaign which left a trail of Democratic bodies and broken policies on the roadside. It was she whose committment to centrism led to the use of Joe Manchin as the bridge to the GOP Senate leaders to bring them on board with Biden's program. This tactic was not only mostly fruitless up until recently, but created the false reality that there was ever an interest in bipartisanship from the MAGA Congress or McConnell, as evidenced by the need for a reconciliation vote to get the climate/ inflation bill passed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/anita-dunn-biden-adviser/617185/
It was Dunn who wasted 17 precious months while advising the President to negotiate with Manchin, as he watered down administration policies repeatedly in the name of "finding ten GOP Senators" who were interested in bipartisanship. And of course, those ten GOP Senators were about as real as the 11,000 votes that Trump demanded Raffensberger find in Georgia to overturn the vote.
Dunn instigated an internal conflict in the Democratic Party to brand as radicals the progressive supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She ostracized those who were critical over the administration's slowness to act on voting rights, abortion, climate, the fillibuster, reigning in the hedge funds, and immigration. Many of those treated badly represented the core activist base of the Democratic Party, for whom criticizing the administration was painful, and should have been unnecessary.
It was also Dunn who marginalized Hispanic constituencies by blocking Julian Castro and others from speaking at the nominating convention in 2020, and limiting Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to a two minute slot. Dunn's advice antagonized the youth voters by opposing student debt relief, the reason it took so long to do something big on the matter. For those who were disconsolate about Biden's deal to appoint anti-abortion Federal judges in Kentucky as an attempt to mollify McConnell, (finally reversed) this pernicious influence of Dunn's "centrism" is the source.
And not least, Anita Dunn has gone "scorched Earth" since her re-emergence, as she purged the White House communications team, elevated the "centrists" in the political team, and revived the bankrupt policy of "Triangulation" with the virtually non-existent moderate MAGA. Shortly after Biden's election victory she enlisted former Clinton adviser Rahm Emmanuel in pursuit of this, the architect of the disastrous triangulation policy with the Gingrich GOP in the mid '90's. Emmanuel's advice led to the awful Clinton crime bill, welfare reform bill, and NAFTA. She attempted to install Emmanuel as Secretary of Transportation, a nomination which provoked so much Democratic outrage that it was pulled. He was forced to settle for an Ambassadorship to Japan instead.
Dunn's purpose is to appeal to upper income white suburbanite voters who wanted to keep their taxes low, their AR-15's numerous, and their neighborhoods and schools lily white, but who supposedly were distrustful of Trump and could be won over. This is why the administration has been either slow to act or taken less than half measures on those policies which the President was elected by Democrats to address.
The mantra of not antagonizing the supposed moderate GOP base and Senate leadership became the hard and fast policy throughout Dunn's role as lead political adviser, the primary victim of which has been President Biden's agenda itself.
The Utter Fraud Of The Term "Ultra-MAGA"--
When Dunn was brought back in April, eyebrows were raised over the fact that her appointment was not vetted by any form of ethics investigation.
https://theintercept.com/2021/05/04/anita-dunn-ethics-disclosure-biden-skdk/
The reason it was done this way was not to protect her from GOP attacks, rather from uncomfortable questions about her potential conflict of interest through her lobbying clients by Democratic liberals. Her attacks on progressive Democrats (which include a substantial majority of younger voters and Greens) as "really nasty people" were sure to be scrutinized, as was her relationship to Weinstein.
What she brought in with her was a report in the form of a long printed document outlining what would be the new political strategy going into the mid-terms, which included the coining and use of a special term, "ultra-MAGA."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/20/biden-attack-ultra-maga-agenda-blunder/
This was her proposed response to frustration among various large Democratic constituencies with the President's seeming unwillingness to openly confront the obstructionist GOP and the Trump insurrection's key loyalists, as they continued their trampling of the Constitutional rights and welfare of non-GOP Americans. Dunn proposed this new formulation to give the President the appearance of being combative, while still carving out an argument for centrist positioning so as to not antagonize the so-called GOP center. That way, the White House could confront the Trumpians but characterize them as an extremist small minority which most Republicans are secretly ashamed of, and wished to not be associated with. In other words, a great big piece of fan fiction became the President's playbook for the mid-terms and 2024.
Let us not forget that those members of MAGA whom Dunn insisted were moderates, voted for Trump twice, not withstanding his implication in treason vis a vis Russia, corrupt dealings with the Saudis, profiteering with his family off of the Presidency, attempts to rig the election, and his conduct of mass murder through negligence of one million Americans by mishandling covid. In what universe are people who would vote for that a second time considered moderate? Well, one in which Anita Dunn's corporate clients are funding them, for one thing. It is crucial to understand that the President's decision to jettison the "ultra-MAGA" terminology to instead issue a wholesale indictment of the GOP, is in fact a repudiation of the centrists political strategy, one that cannot be put back in the bottle, nor should it be.
Anita Dunn Would Have "Triangulated" With Pro-Hitler German Conservatives
Any serious student of history who has looked at the failure of the German Social Democrats to contain and defeat the rise of the Nazis should see the obvious parallels to Dunn's folly today.
As I documented in a previous article, the German Democrats were deluded in their belief that Hitler could be "tamed" by the Chancellorship, that the Nazi Party was divided into a handful of extremists in the SA, versus the more moderate rank and file, and that Hitler would be held in check by the leadership of the Army. Also since the Nazis never achieved a majority, stuck at 36% of the vote, they would be constrained by both the left-wing and the conservative parties. The political opposition to Hitler sought to weaken him by enabling the so-called moderate mainstream Christian conservative parties as a counterweight, whose loyalties aligned with with the landowning aristocracy, the Army, and the churches.
It took less than one year for Hitler to seize power, ban opposition parties and press, shut down parliament, purge the SA, the Army, to nazify the churches, nationalize the police, crush the trade unions, and begin the opening phases of the Holocaust. The "mainstream moderate Nazis" were a figment of the opposition's imagination, as they capitulated to the populations desire for a "strongman" government to restore order. The German Social Democrats, like the Dunn centrists today focused their fire against their rivals in the German left, in the name of capturing these "moderate Nazi" votes for the next election. That is, the election that never happened. Some of this history is documented in an earlier article which we published here on the failure of German centrists at that time. (link below)
https://therosenreport.blogspot.com/2022/03/today-in-history-march-30-1930.html
Is The President Now Done With Dunn?
I hope and believe the answer to this question is yes. There are three reasons to conclude this. Obviously to characterize ALL of MAGA as semi-fascism, is a thoroughgoing break with his previous use of Dunn's terminology "ultra-MAGA." The President seems to have reached some conclusions based upon the reaction to his anti-inflation/climate bill, the blood curdling threats against federal agents of the FBI and IRS instigated by Trump personally, (including armed attacks against same) and the reaction to his student debt relief bill.
The use of the White House website to churn out a list of MAGA Congressmen who had their PPP loans forgiven is an unprecedented act of combativeness which for many of us definitely hit our "sweet spot." The response from Democrats to the White house counterpunch was not simply "right on," but "finally!"
The President clearly has been affected by the passion and activism of those people who are defending abortion rights. He is likely unnerved by the polls showing a 5% approval rating among young voters, hence his "better late than never" break with Dunn on student debt.
Also clear to Biden is that if the GOP wins the Senate and the House, we as a nation and a democracy are dead. Every vital function of the Federal government in protecting its citizens from the rapacious fascist Billionaires who run the GOP will be dismantled. And we can be assured that very, very few of Dunn's GOP "moderates" will stand up to the semi-fascist MAGA leadership to reverse this. They will be on board the train ride to Hell as conductors, not passengers.
I believe that the recent mobilization of Democratic activists has broken through the controlled environment created by Dunn's palace guard, and shaken up the President. There will be some who object to this argument who choose to believe that the President has been in full control of his administration all along, and didn't need outside intervention to make these changes. That would be largely a loyalty reflex kicking in, because in raising this I am popping a bubble of wishful delusion. No President, including the greatest of them such as Lincoln and FDR has ever been in full control of their administrations or political parties.
There have always been factional battles between loyalists, pragmatists, ideologues and those with conflict of interest. Cabinet meetings throughout history have resembled the Octagon of mixed martial arts fame, and bloody arguments are routine. Power seekers have erected palace guards to control information and access, in the name of protecting the President from distractions, but in most cases those involved have their own agenda. And great Presidents, like many previous sovereigns, Popes, and historical leaders described in Shakespeare have always outflanked "court politics" by developing independent outside sources for intelligence and advice, because they are aware of the propensity of career political climbers to be deceptive, egotistical and self-interested. These have been known by the phrase "the kitchen cabinet".
My take on President Biden's very, very good week is that he has taken a big step, hopefully not too late, in becoming not only a good President, but a great one, because he has thrown out Anita Dunn's centrist playbook from Hell, gone on the offensive, and decided to follow his own well developed instincts.
However, we should be aware that Dunn has accomplices and was not a lone wolf centrist in the President's inner circle. There are others on the inside who share her conflict of interest. We need to escalate our efforts to consolidate and maintain the President's apparent new course.
Some of what I've written here will meet objections. There will be questioning of sources, (which I'll list) parsing of sentences, accusations of fabricating a narrative, reading into things aspects which are not there, and so forth. That is everone's right as consumers of information. But the question is, "why, given our situation and what this potentially means, would anyone want to prove me wrong?"
President Biden has given us the go signal to take off the gloves with MAGA, to declare political war on the insurrection, and use the "F word" to characterize the racist theocratic ideologues of the GOP. He is telling us what he will do going forward, and asking for us to join him. What he is asking of us will require a lot of courage, and as with the 1960's civil rights movement, there will be casualties as well as great accomplishments. The fight is on. The question for us is, are we in, or out?
