In today’s Amiable Skeptics episode, which will go up early this afternoon but was taped later in the day yesterday, Adam Baldwin and I briefly discussed the upcoming State of the Union speech. Adam had found a fun betting site for the SOTU, which I put in the headlines, and we made a few of our own predictions. As I told Adam, the mainstream media had already written their comeback story around a “feisty” narrative, and only a literal faceplant by Joe Biden would keep it from rolling out.
Don’t believe me? Check out the upcoming episode at 2 ET, which mainly focuses on the Rust shooting, the conviction of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, and Adam’s long experience with firearms on Hollywood productions. You can check out the success of my prediction in the MSM headlines easily enough, however. The Bat-signal went out early and has come out strong, and if Biden wasn’t “feisty,” it was “fiery.”
How do we know it was a Bat-signal? Axios trotted it out before the speech, in an exclusive initially titled “Biden’s Feisty Reset” in an e-mail sent around yesterday. Axios later changed it to “Biden plans feisty economic reset.” This is what tipped me off for my conversation with Adam, and the results didn’t disappoint, so to speak:
- Axios after the speech: “President Biden eased Democrats’ concerns about his age with a feisty and commanding State of the Union address Thursday night.”
- NY Times: In-Your-Face Biden Takes on Trump and His Own Doubters
- NYT’s lead: “This was not Old Man Joe. This was Forceful Joe. This was Angry Joe. This was Loud Joe. This was Game-On Joe.”
- WaPo front page: Fiery Biden takes on GOP, makes case for second term
- WaPo story headline: Biden delivers State of the Union with fiery political tone
- WaPo story lead: “President Biden delivered a fiery State of the Union address Thursday night…”
- WaPo video headline (I kid you not): “Biden’s feistiest State of the Union exchanges” (WaPo really commits to the bit!)
- Punchbowl: A feisty Biden blasts GOP foes
- Also Punchbowl: “If you are a casual political observer, you tuned into the State of the Union Thursday night and saw a feisty President Joe Biden…” It’s a twofer!
- Reuters: Biden takes on Trump and Republicans in fiery State of the Union speech
- Semafor: “President Biden delivered a fiery stemwinder against Donald Trump in a State of the Union speech that served as a general election preview.”
- Associated Press: Biden uses feisty State of the Union to contrast with Trump, sell voters on a second term
Worth noting: A look at the URL shows that the AP initially used “fiery” in its headline and replaced it with “feisty” at some point. Actually, let’s take a look at the first three paragraphs of the AP’s report, because they managed to stuff it full of admiring language about Biden. Emphases are mine, of course:
President Joe Biden delivered a defiant argument for a second term in his State of the Union speech Thursday night, lacing into GOP front-runner Donald Trump for espousing “resentment, revenge and retribution” and for jeopardizing freedom at home and abroad.
Reveling in the political moment, Biden fired multiple broadsides at “my predecessor” without ever mentioning Trump by name — 13 times in all — raising his voice repeatedly as he worked to quell voter concerns about his age and job performance while sharpening the contrast with his all-but-certain November rival.
The scrappy tone from Biden was a sharp break from his often humdrum daily appearances and was intended to banish doubts about whether the 81-year-old president, the country’s oldest ever, is still up to the job.
Now, let’s see what this would look like from reporters who wanted to inform their readers rather than sell them. Here’s how Roll Call reported on the speech in its first three paragraphs:
President Joe Biden used his State of the Union address Thursday evening to try again to convince voters his policies on economic issues have made their lives better.
The 81-year-old Biden stepped to the lectern in the House chamber amid questions and concerns from Republican lawmakers about his age and mental capacity. The president delivered the prime-time address while also battling dismal poll numbers on his job performance, favorability, handling of key kitchen table issues and ability to serve another four-year term.
As expected, Biden defended his record on the economy and described it as fundamentally strong — and better than he inherited from former President Donald Trump, his likely general election foe. “I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now our economy is the envy of the world. Fifteen million new jobs in just three years – that’s a record,” Biden said as Speaker Mike Johnson shook his head behind him. “Unemployment at 50-year lows. A record 16 million Americans are starting small businesses and each one is an act of hope.”
There isn’t a fiery or a feisty to be found anywhere in this report. That makes it one of the most genuinely informative media reports on the SOTU, as well as one of the most credible.
As many of you already know, I no longer bother with SOTU events, both because of the affront they create to small-R republican values as well as their utter political meaninglessness. Beege did a fantastic job with last night’s live blog, which I did follow, and which I suspect offered a much more accurate picture of a hopped-up president remaining barely coherent while he started a State of the Union speech with an update on Ukraine. Apparently no one in the above media links thought that was strange in the least, especially given the border crisis that has even Democrats screaming for relief.
For another reliable and independent overview, my friend Scott Johnson sums it up at Power Line as “the SOTU from hell.” Scott’s description might explain why the Protection Racket Media is already circling the wagons around “fiery” and “feisty”:
• This was a terrible speech terribly delivered. It’s a good thing no drug test was required before the address. Biden sounded hopped up. He spoke too fast. He slurred his words. He was frequently difficult to understand. He shouted a variety of clichés and shibboleths as though we might otherwise miss their depth and meaning. The disparity between the shibboleths and the shouting was almost funny. …
• This SOTU was a nakedly partisan campaign speech. I have to think that viewers lacking the persuasion of Democratic partisans were quickly turned off. In any event, the speech was a disgrace.
• And that’s not all. The speech was also disjointed and telegraphic. It covered everything from potato chips to computer chips. If it conformed to the laundry list mode of bad State of the Union addresses, this was a laundry list in Morse Code. You had to know the lingo of the proposed laws on Biden’s list. I had no idea what he was talking about when he got to his list.
Now this is the Joe Biden I recognize. Biden has always yelled during his speeches, has always demagogued (“Gonna put y’all back in chains!”), and has in recent years looked more brittle than “scrappy” while doing so. It’s 24/7 “Angry Joe” to the point of “Old Man Shakes Fist At Clouds.” Much more now than earlier, Biden’s diction and coherence gets lost when he reverts to “feisty” mode, and both Scott and Beege point that out in their observations about last night. Rather than a reset, this looks like a reversion to the norm at best, and at worst raises questions about just what Biden’s pre-speech “prep” involved.
Yet, the media wants to sell this same tired product pushing the same tired demagoguery as New And Improved Joe — With 30% More Added Vitamins!
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