Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene might not have liked it much, but President Joe Biden exceeded expectations with his State of the Union address. Hecklers tried but failed to knock him off his game. His signature empathy infused the hour-plus speech, and at the end there was little doubt this 80-year-old man isn’t done yet.

As the celebratory afterparty rolled on in the U.S. House chamber, Gov. Sarah Sanders commandeered TV screens to darken the mood. Excerpts her office shared earlier in the day hinted Sanders’ speech would include her standard snarling about wokeness and the radical left. No surprises there.

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The governor started with a smile but quickly pivoted to attack Biden as old, weak and unfit. And Democrats are crazy, she said. It got pretty dark and weird.

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A word salad of talking points and name calling, with some attempts at folksy relatability thrown in, Sanders’ rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address was light on policy, heavy on menace: “Democrats have failed you,” “Biden’s administration has been hijacked by the radical left,” “He is simply unfit to serve as commander in chief.”

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Perhaps people from other states who haven’t seen Sanders in action since her days with the Trump administration expected her signature surliness to have softened by now. If those people existed, they were set straight.

“She came across as mean, and she’s not mean,” CNN commentator Van Jones said afterward, offering the same perplexed defense so many others who know Sanders personally like to give.

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Isn’t she mean, though? Taking a dig at the already marginalized transgender community on national television seems pretty mean to me. Sanders contrasted herself with Biden by noting that while she’s the first woman governor of Arkansas, “He’s the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob who can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

If it’s true that the culture war is an unwanted assault foisted on Republicans by the left, as Sanders claimed during that nationally televised speech, why launch this skirmish against transgender people unprovoked?

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Sanders tried to paint these post-Trump years as an utter national failure, pointing to border security as an example of how low we’ve fallen. “Democrats destroyed it,” Sanders said of the border security she suggested was achieved in the Trump administration. Remember those days when errant children were caged away from their families indefinitely and nursing mothers saw their babies torn from their arms? Sanders defended those brutal policies at the time, even citing the Bible. “It’s biblical to follow the law,” she told reporters back then. So her choice Tuesday night to hold out the suffering of mothers of addicts hooked on smuggled drugs as her reason to attack Biden’s border policies seemed a poor calculation. Suffering families didn’t seem to bother her before.

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With a nod to the stormy history of segregation and integration at her alma mater, Central High, and a boast about her father holding the door open for the Black students who’d been denied entry decades before, Sanders took the opportunity to tease her long-awaited/dreaded education reform package. It will be “the most far-reaching, bold, conservative education reform in the country,” she told the nation.

This linking of Central High’s history with Sanders’ voucher scheme to funnel tax dollars to parochial 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.

 

 

 

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