Will Biden’s domestic War on Terror have the same features as George W. Bush’s War on Terror, including a complete disregard of civil liberties and the Constitution? From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:
President Biden in his primetime speech Thursday sure sounded like a man preparing to criminalize Trumpism. Is the White House expanding the great policy error of our time?
He looked shaky as he hobbled onstage Thursday night, but at the podium the drugs kicked in and Joe Biden delivered a commanding speech, by his standards. He handled an early bout of hoarseness like a pro, matched affect to content most of the way, and fumbled few words and none seriously.
But something was off from the start. Biden’s handlers had the otherwise inspiring setting of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall bathed in so much blood-red light, he looked like an opening act for Queensrÿche or Rammstein. Trying to create a setting for judgment and warning, they overshot the staging and made the white-haired ex-Senator look like a vampire sat up from a crypt.
The content matched the ominous staging. Biden delivered a remarkably menacing manifesto.
The only political speech I can remember that rivaled Biden’s address for darkness is Donald Trump’s own much-pilloried tirade against “lawlessness” at the 2016 Republican convention (I was there and called it “relentlessly negative… pure horror movie… with constant references to murder and destruction”). In fact, replace “illegal immigrants… roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens” with “MAGA Republicans… [threatening] the very foundations of our Republic,” and that speech of Trump’s reads eerily like the one Biden just gave, which Fox host Bret Baier agreed was “essentially a convention speech.” Both described a lost paradise that may be regained, if only we rid ourselves of a verminous infestation of lawbreakers.
