(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Republicans use week's major news story to attack Biden. Our pathetic media acts like this is news [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-06 Someone wrote this in all seriousness: “Swagger”? Are you kidding me with this, Politico Playbook? If you wanted to deploy the term “swagger” in relation to a president’s State of the Union address—if you really wanted to do something that ridiculous and intelligence-insulting—you might just as easily decide that Biden giving the order to have the balloon taken down on Wednesday and then having the mental fortitude to wait until it could be done safely was a matter for swagger. You might decide that the mic drop of releasing information that Chinese balloons crossed over parts of the United States three times during the Trump administration, apparently undetected, was a matter for “swagger.” But nooooo, Republicans have been out claiming the whole episode shows Biden’s weakness, so Politico’s view is that … it must at least have left Biden chastened. As if, in the absence of a Chinese balloon, Republicans would not have come up with some other thing to blow up into a scandal over the past week to try to set the stage for the State of the Union. It was always going to be something. And Politico Playbook was always going to treat that something as a serious concern for Biden. “As of last night, House GOP leaders were still entertaining holding a vote before the speech chiding the administration’s response,” Playbook reports. What a surprise coming from the people who are hauling former Twitter executives in to explain why they didn’t allow nonconsensual intimate photos of Hunter Biden to be circulated by right-wing operatives in the weeks before the 2020 election. What a total shock coming from people outraged that the FBI hasn’t “raided” Biden’s house looking for classified documents after Biden allowed the FBI to search his house for classified documents. The entire business of the United States House of Representatives under its current Republican leadership is to damage the Biden administration. Whatever was in the news over the past week, Republicans were somehow going to turn it into a pre-SOTU attack on Biden, and if nothing was in the news, they were going to dredge up old stuff or invent something out of thin air. But it’s the media that gives those attacks power. So, yeah, they’re going to do what they can with the Chinese balloon. And that’s what Playbook is doing—giving Republican attacks power, rather than putting them in context. Listen to this episode of The Downballot for an in-depth analysis of the 2024 Arizona Senate race and the implications of Kyrsten Sinema's re-election decision. Special guest Victoria McGroary, the Executive Director of BOLD PAC, will also discuss the efforts to prevent losses among Hispanic voters and the fight against disinformation in Spanish language media. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/6/2151434/-Republicans-use-week-s-major-news-story-to-attack-Biden-Our-pathetic-media-acts-like-this-is-news Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/