It has become an axiom for me that one of the most unforgivable sins in politics is contempt. Voters will forgive mistakes and honest differences but will not quickly forgive contempt.  Biden’s speech in Atlanta was dripping with contempt for half of America and anybody with any honest difference of opinion on either the voting rights bill HB1 or the termination of the Senate filibuster to pass it.

Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ was such a display of contempt and it was not used in a public speech, but at a private gathering.  That one word was very costly, often used against her in the campaign.

Why would Biden loudly insult half of America when the Congress is so evenly split and while his poll numbers are crashing lower than Trump’s ever did?  My guess is that his handlers and speech writers are in a blue bubble unable to acknowledge any legitimacy to the opposition. It is forever the 1965 Civil Rights movement.  Referring to the Georgia Election bill recently passed as Jim Crow 2.0 is hyperbolic nonsense.

Kimberly Strassel in todays WSJ, Biden Follows the Trump Play Book:

Where are those Washington Post “fact checkers” when you need them? They were on the hop for the Trump speech, documenting some 90 “untruths” in the course of that campaign rally. Mr. Trump rolled out his claims that Georgia’s vote-counting system was rigged, beset by disappearing drop boxes and floods of absentee ballots cast by dead people, felons, nonresidents and teens. Georgia election officials disproved all this.

Mr. Biden’s speech was every bit as divorced from facts. He baldly claimed Georgia Republicans enacted an election law designed purely to put up “obstacles” to voting. He said the law made it “harder for you to vote by mail” and limited “the number of drop boxes and the hours you can use them.” These changes, he asserted, were designed to create “longer lines at the polls,” causing hungry voters to give up. He promised the state GOP would “subvert” future elections with a provision allowing it willy-nilly to “remove local election officials” it doesn’t like. The law overall, he claimed, enables Republicans to get “the result they want—no matter what the voters have said, no matter what the count.”

These claims are as wild as any Mr. Trump made—even if the fact checkers have gone conveniently deaf. The Georgia law leaves in place no-excuse absentee voting—and actually makes it stronger, by getting rid of signature matching. It expands weekend early voting and sets minimum Election Day voting hours. It enshrines in law the use of absentee-ballot drop boxes—which didn’t exist in Georgia before their temporary pandemic use. Yes, the state Legislature can remove officials, but only after proving “malfeasance” or “gross negligence” over at least two elections. And Georgia’s broader electoral safeguards remain in place—the exact checks and balances in place when Mr. Biden carried the state last year. The president’s claims are straight-up fiction.

The broader Biden-Democratic claim that election-integrity measures make it “harder to vote” is one big untruth. California has among the loosest election laws in the country, New Hampshire the toughest. California routinely ranks at the bottom for presidential election-year turnout, New Hampshire at the top.

Peggy Noonan also in the WSJ, Biden’s Georgia Speech is a Break Point:

When national Democrats talk to the country they always seem to be talking to themselves. They are of the left, as is their constituency, which wins the popular vote in presidential elections; the mainstream media through which they send their messages is of the left; the academics, historians and professionals they consult are of the left. They get in the habit of talking to themselves, in their language, in a single, looped conversation. They have no idea how they sound to the non-left, so they have no idea when they are damaging themselves. But this week in Georgia Mr. Biden damaged himself. And strengthened, and may even have taken a step in unifying, the non-Democrats who are among their countrymen, and who are in fact the majority of them.

In the National Review, Ben Sasse Blasts Biden’ Senile Demogoguery:

“It makes no sense to federalize our elections right now,” Sasse said. “Last year, we had a president who disgraced his office by trying to steal an election. What stopped that? Our decentralized state-based systems of elections are what stopped last year’s attempt to steal an election.”

“It makes absolutely no sense to try to go into nuclear partisanship now when we could be talking about actually preventing another January 6th by doing the hard and actual bipartisan work — not the grandstanding for Twitter — to reform the Electoral Count Act, which is 130 years old and obviously doesn’t work that well.”

“Americans don’t want one-party rule — by the Democrats or by the Republicans. Both of these parties are really crappy,” he said. “Getting rid of the filibuster means you don’t have to try to talk to people on the other side of the aisle and get to a 60-vote threshold for legislation or a 67-vote threshold for rules changes. It means that one of these two terrible parties will get to do a lot more stuff a lot faster that will inevitably be incredibly unpopular with the American people.”

Also at National Review, McConnell Tears into Biden’s Atlanta Speech: ‘Incoherent, Incorrect, and Beneath His Office’:

“A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the Framers built the Senate to check his power,” McConnell said. “This whole display is the best possible argument for preserving the Senate rules that extend deliberation, force bipartisan compromise, and let cooler heads prevail.”

Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, Biden’s Georgia Election-Law Distortions:

So is Mr. Biden’s claim that making voters request an absentee-voting application rather than mailing one to everyone “voter suppression” accurate? Let’s compare Georgia with a liberal state, New York.

Like Georgia, New York requires people seeking to vote absentee-by-mail to request an application and doesn’t mail applications to everyone automatically. Yet while Georgia allows anyone to vote by mail, New Yorkers can’t vote absentee by mail unless they are out of town on Election Day, ill, disabled, taking care of someone who is ill or disabled, in a Veterans Health Administration hospital, or in jail for a nonfelony offense. Last fall, New Yorkers voted down a constitutional amendment to liberalize the state’s laws on vote-by-mail by 55% 45%. So when will the president travel to Times Square to condemn New York as an existential threat to American democracy?

Tuesday was merely campaign kabuki to show progressives Mr. Biden was doing his darnedest to get their priorities approved. But it’s unlikely to help his party in 2022 that the president is focused on passing a federal election takeover through embellishment and vilification, rather than addressing Americans’ actual concerns—inflation, Covid, border security, jobs and Russia. And he’s undermining confidence in our elections in the process. Congratulations, Mr. President, way to go.

From Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch- About that Speech.

If Georgia has been moving toward Jim Crow 2.0, one has to wonder: Why are so many blacks moving there, never mind staying there? The black population of Georgia nearly doubled from 1990 to 2019. Whatever you think about their right to vote, a lot of them voted with their feet to live in Georgia—and disproportionately from states like Chuck Schumer’s New York, where voting is notoriously difficult compared to places like … Georgia. Again, Georgia has 17 days of early voting. New York? Nine. Georgia allows “no excuse” absentee voting. In 2020, Andrew Cuomo signed a bill allowing people to use COVID as an excuse. A ballot initiative to allow “no excuse” voting failed by a healthy margin in 2021, a state where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by more than 2 to 1.

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