Quo Vadis GOP?

[Berkut]

Fuck, I will travel to Georgia just to test that fucking law.

OMG VOTER FRAUD

The law in question is around giving people standing in line food and water. I won't travel to Georgia to actually vote.

[Grey Fox]

You are a heteronormative white man, you are probably eligible.

[DGuller]

Fuck, I will travel to Georgia just to test that fucking law.

OMG VOTER FRAUD

The law in question is around giving people standing in line food and water. I won't travel to Georgia to actually vote.

Not even once?

[jimmy olsen]

Stick a fork in him

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/01/politics/matt-gaetz-campaign-funds-investigation/index.html

...

Information that may connect Gaetz to a fake ID scheme at the center of the case against that second Florida politician, Joel Greenberg, was presented to federal investigators in a meeting early last year, according to two other people familiar with the matter.

In the meeting, which has not been previously reported, a witness provided evidence linking Gaetz to Greenberg, the former tax collector in Seminole County, Florida, who was arrested last year on charges that include sex trafficking of a minor and fabricating fake IDs.

Greenberg has pleaded not guilty and is set to go to trial later this year on the ID and sex trafficking charges, as well as charges that he stalked a former political rival.

News of the meeting offers details about the Justice Department's early awareness of the congressman's relationship with Greenberg.

According to one of the people familiar with the matter, an employee at the tax collector's office saw Greenberg and Gaetz on internal office surveillance video looking through driver licenses on a weekend evening.

In a text message exchange shared with CNN that the source said was between Greenberg and the employee, Greenberg confirmed he was in the office "showing congressman Gaetz what our operation looked like."

That witness shared the information with prosecutors from the local US attorney's office and US Secret Service agents investigating Greenberg's case in January 2020, the person familiar with the matter said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/us/politics/matt-gaetz-justice-department.html?referringSource=articleShare

WASHINGTON — A Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments, according to people close to the investigation and text messages and payment receipts reviewed by The New York Times.

Investigators believe Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector in Seminole County, Fla., who was indicted last year on a federal sex trafficking charge and other crimes, initially met the women through websites that connect people who go on dates in exchange for gifts, fine dining, travel and allowances, according to three people with knowledge of the encounters. Mr. Greenberg introduced the women to Mr. Gaetz, who also had sex with them, the people said.

One of the women who had sex with both men also agreed to have sex with an unidentified associate of theirs in Florida Republican politics, according to a person familiar with the arrangement. Mr. Greenberg had initially contacted her online and introduced her to Mr. Gaetz, the person said.

...

[Caliga]

  I dunno Tim.  If the guy is a Trumpist, Trump's fans couldn't care less how morally repugnant someone is, as long as they repeat the same empty slogans and promises.  Case in point: Trump.

[Tonitrus]

I wonder what the Qanon take on this is?

[Razgovory]

I wonder what the Qanon take on this is?

Deep state plot.  The deep state is accusing the virtuous of the same crimes the deep state committed.

[The Minsky Moment]

Raz is right - this will reinforce their worldview big time - it proves that child sex trafficking among the DC elite is real, and even worse, that the wicked Hillary Clinton and her FBI minions are framing innocent Trump backers.

[Sheilbh]

Very much enjoying Boehner sparking up, opening a bottle of Shiraz and going off on one:

Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia
How America's center-right party started to lose its mind, as told by the man who tried to keep it sane.
By JOHN BOEHNER
04/02/2021 05:36 AM EDT

John Boehner served as speaker of the United States House of Representatives for nearly five years (January 2011-October 2015), and represented the Eighth Congressional District of Ohio from 1991 to 2015. He now serves as senior strategic adviser for Squire Patton Boggs LLP. This essay is adapted from his book ON THE HOUSE, to be published by St. Martin's Press on April 13, 2021.

In the 2010 midterm election, voters from all over the place gave President Obama what he himself called "a shellacking." And oh boy, was it ever. You could be a total moron and get elected just by having an R next to your name—and that year, by the way, we did pick up a fair number in that category.

Retaking control of the House of Representatives put me in line to be the next Speaker of the House over the largest freshman Republican class in history: 87 newly elected members of the GOP. Since I was presiding over a large group of people who'd never sat in Congress, I felt I owed them a little tutorial on governing. I had to explain how to actually get things done. A lot of that went straight through the ears of most of them, especially the ones who didn't have brains that got in the way. Incrementalism? Compromise? That wasn't their thing. A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. That's why they thought they were elected.

Some of them, well, you could tell they weren't paying attention because they were just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night. Ronald Reagan used to say something to the effect that if I get 80 or 90 percent of what I want, that's a win. These guys wanted 100 percent every time. In fact, I don't think that would satisfy them, because they didn't really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.

To them, my talk of trying to get anything done made me a sellout, a dupe of the Democrats, and a traitor. Some of them had me in their sights from day one. They saw me as much of an "enemy" as the guy in the White House. Me, a guy who had come to the top of the leadership by exposing corruption and pushing conservative ideas. Now I was a "liberal collaborator." So that took some getting used to. What I also had not anticipated was the extent to which this new crowd hated—and I mean hated—Barack Obama.

By 2011, the right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives. When I was first elected to Congress, we didn't have any propaganda organization for conservatives, except maybe a magazine or two like National Review. The only people who used the internet were some geeks in Palo Alto. There was no Drudge Report. No Breitbart. No kooks on YouTube spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.

"He's a secret Muslim!"

"He hates America!"

"He's a communist!"

And of course the truly nutty business about his birth certificate. People really had been brainwashed into believing Barack Obama was some Manchurian candidate planning to betray America.

Mark Levin was the first to go on the radio and spout off this crazy nonsense. It got him ratings, so eventually he dragged Hannity and Rush to Looneyville along with him. My longtime friend Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, was not immune to this. He got swept into the conspiracies and the paranoia and became an almost unrecognizable figure.

I'd known Ailes for a long time, since his work with George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. He'd gone to college in Ohio, and since we had that connection, he sought me out at some event and introduced himself. Years later, in August of 1996, when I was in San Diego for the Republican National Convention, I ended up having dinner with Ailes and a veteran broadcasting executive named Rupert Murdoch. At that dinner they told me all about this new TV network they were starting. I had no idea I was listening to the outline of something that would make my life a living hell down the line. Sure enough, that October, Fox News hit the airwaves.

I kept in touch with Roger and starting in the early 2000s, I'd stop in and see him whenever I was in New York for fundraisers. We'd shoot the breeze and talk politics. We got to know each other pretty well.

Murdoch, on the other hand, was harder to know. Sometimes he'd invite me to watch the Super Bowl in the Fox box, or he'd stop by the office. Wherever he was, you could tell he was the man in charge. He was a businessman, pure and simple. He cared about ratings and the bottom line. He also wanted to make sure he was ahead of any political or policy developments coming down the line. He was always asking who was up, who was down, what bills could pass and what couldn't. If he entertained any of the kooky conspiracy theories that started to take over his network, he kept it a secret from me. But he clearly didn't have a problem with them if they helped ratings.

At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes. I once met him in New York during the Obama years to plead with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air. It was making my job trying to accomplish anything conservative that much harder. I didn't expect this meeting to change anything, but I still thought it was bullshit, and I wanted Roger to know it.

When I put it to him like that, he didn't have much to say. But he did go on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.

"They're monitoring me," he assured me about the Obama White House. He told me he had a "safe room" built so he couldn't be spied on. His mansion was being protected by combat-ready security personnel, he said. There was a lot of conspiratorial talk. It was like he'd been reading whacked-out spy novels all weekend.

And it was clear that he believed all of this crazy stuff. I walked out of that meeting in a daze. I just didn't believe the entire federal government was so terrified of Roger Ailes that they'd break about a dozen laws to bring him down. I thought I could get him to control the crazies, and instead I found myself talking to the president of the club. One of us was crazy. Maybe it was me.

I have no idea what the relationship between Ailes and Murdoch was like, or if Ailes ever would go off on these paranoid tangents during meetings with his boss. But Murdoch must have thought Ailes was good for business, because he kept him in his job for years.

Places like Fox News were creating the wrong incentives. Sean Hannity was one of the worst. I'd known him for years, and we used to have a good relationship. But then he decided he felt like busting my ass every night on his show. So one day, in January of 2015, I finally called him and asked: "What the hell?" I wanted to know why he kept bashing House Republicans when we were actually trying to stand up to Obama.

"Well, you guys don't have a plan," he whined.

"Look," I told him, "our plan is pretty simple: we're just going to stand up for what we believe in as Republicans."

I guess that wasn't good enough for him. The conversation didn't progress very far. At some point I called him a nut. Anyway, it's safe to say our relationship never got any better.

Besides the homegrown "talent" at Fox, with their choice of guests they were making people who used to be fringe characters into powerful media stars. One of the first prototypes out of their laboratory was a woman named Michele Bachmann.

Bachmann, who had represented Minnesota's 6th Congressional District since 2007 and made a name for herself as a lunatic ever since, came to meet with me in the busy period in late 2010 after the election. She wanted a seat on the Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful committee in the House. There were many members in line ahead of her for a post like this. People who had waited patiently for their turn and who also, by the way, weren't wild-eyed crazies.

There was no way she was going to get on Ways and Means, the most prestigious committee in Congress, and jump ahead of everyone else in line. Not while I was Speaker. In earlier days, a member of Congress in her position wouldn't even have dared ask for something like this. Sam Rayburn would have laughed her out of the city.

So I told her no—diplomatically, of course. But as she kept on talking, it dawned on me. This wasn't a request of the Speaker of the House. This was a demand.

Her response to me was calm and matter-of-fact. "Well, then I'll just have to go talk to Sean Hannity and everybody at Fox," she said, "and Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and everybody else on the radio, and tell them that this is how John Boehner is treating the people who made it possible for the Republicans to take back the House."

I wasn't the one with the power, she was saying. I just thought I was. She had the power now.

She was right, of course.

She was a conservative media darling and, by then, the conservative media was already eyeing me skeptically. She had me where it hurt. Even if I wanted to help her, and I sure as hell didn't, it wasn't a decision I had the power to make on my own. That power belongs to a little-known but very important group called the Steering Committee.

I knew there was no way the Steering Committee would approve putting Bachmann on Ways and Means. The votes just weren't there. If I even pushed the issue, they wouldn't have let me leave the meeting without fastening me into a straitjacket. But then, Bachmann wouldn't go on TV and the radio to explain the nuances of House Steering Committee procedure. She'd just rip my head off every night, over and over again. That was a headache I frankly didn't want or need.

I suggested the House Intelligence committee to Bachmann as an alternative, and mercifully, she liked it. It would be a good perch for anyone wanting to build up their foreign policy chops for a run for president, which she was already considering— Lord help us all. None too pleased was the man preparing to take up the gavel as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers from Michigan, an army veteran who had also served in the FBI. So I took my lumps from Rogers, and Bachmann took her seat on the committee.

The funny thing is, Michele Bachmann turned out to be a very focused, hardworking member—even though she spent a few months later in 2011 on a short-lived campaign for president. She showed up to the committee, did her homework, and ended up winning over her fellow members with her dedication. Mike Rogers was impressed—and I have to admit, so was I. The whole situation ended up working out well for everyone. As one of those old Boehnerisms goes, "Get the right people on the bus, and help them find the right seat."

In January 2011, as the new Republican House majority was settling in and I was getting adjusted to the Speakership, I was asked about the birth certificate business by Brian Williams of NBC News. My answer was simple: "The state of Hawaii has said that President Obama was born there. That's good enough for me." It was a simple statement of fact. But you would have thought I'd called Ronald Reagan a communist. I got all kinds of shit for it—emails, letters, phone calls. It went on for a couple weeks. I knew we would hear from some of the crazies, but I was surprised at just how many there really were.

All of this crap swirling around was going to make it tough for me to cut any deals with Obama as the new House Speaker. Of course, it has to be said that Obama didn't help himself much either. He could come off as lecturing and haughty. He still wasn't making Republican outreach a priority. But on the other hand—how do you find common cause with people who think you are a secret Kenyan Muslim traitor to America?

Under the new rules of Crazytown, I may have been Speaker, but I didn't hold all the power. By 2013 the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash. And now they had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn't even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz. He enlisted the crazy caucus of the GOP in what was a truly dumbass idea. Not that anybody asked me.

And:

Jonathan Swan
@jonathanvswan
When @SpeakerBoehner was recording his audiobook I was told by sources that during these wine-soaked sessions he would deviate from the book's text and insert random violent attacks on @tedcruz. Well, here's some tape (listen to the end):

https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/1378005545718800388

[jimmy olsen]

Raz is right - this will reinforce their worldview big time - it proves that child sex trafficking among the DC elite is real, and even worse, that the wicked Hillary Clinton and her FBI minions are framing innocent Trump backers.

Not going to help him as he rots in jail

[Berkut]

Very much enjoying Boehner sparking up, opening a bottle of Shiraz and going off on one:

Wow, what a hero.

Sure would have been nice if he had said any of this at the time.

Fuck him. He sold out his country. He can rot in hell with all the rest of them.

I am sure when Moscow Mitch retires, he will write some fucking book talking about how appalled, why JUST APPALLED! he was at all those crazies and that douchebag Trump!

They can all rot.

[Razgovory]

Very much enjoying Boehner sparking up, opening a bottle of Shiraz and going off on one:

Wow, what a hero.

Sure would have been nice if he had said any of this at the time.

Fuck him. He sold out his country. He can rot in hell with all the rest of them.

I am sure when Moscow Mitch retires, he will write some fucking book talking about how appalled, why JUST APPALLED! he was at all those crazies and that douchebag Trump!

They can all rot.

It's not like this was hidden. We knew Boehner couldn't keep his caucus in order.  We all knew what was happening at the time.  This isn't new information.  Keep in mind that the Republican rank-and-file wanted this.  Derspeiss stated that he wanted congress to obstruct Obama as much as possible and he delighted in the political theater of it.  Hansmeister was saying that Republicans need to keep their base motivated and never, ever compromise. 

[Syt]

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/546591-republican-battle-with-mlb-intensifies

Republican battle with MLB intensifies

Republicans are spoiling for a high-profile fight with MLB as they ramp up pressure on the league's commissioner to reverse a decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta over Georgia's new voting law.

GOP lawmakers are publicly scrutinizing Commissioner Rob Manfred's membership at Georgia's exclusive Augusta National Golf Club and threatening to take away MLB's long-held antitrust exemption.

The fight is quickly spreading to other states as well, with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) saying he won't throw out the first pitch at the Texas Rangers' home opener after MLB adopted "what has turned out to be a false narrative about Georgia's election law reforms."

"It is shameful that America's pastime is being influenced by partisan politics," Abbott tweeted.

Conservative writer and radio talk show host Erick Erickson, who is based in Atlanta, called on other Republican governors to follow Abbott's lead.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) took a shot at soaring ticket prices at expensive ballparks like Yankee Stadium, where the average ticket price last year was $145, according to Statista.com.

"If needing to show an ID to vote is racist, perhaps NY Yankees tickets that average over $100 are discriminatory? Will 'woke' @MLB mandate free tickets to allow equal access?" Paul tweeted.

A couple hours later, Paul suggested a Republican-wide boycott of professional baseball.

"If @mlb is boycotting states that pass Republican election integrity laws, maybe Republicans should boycott Major League Baseball?" he tweeted.

The suggestion came after former President Trump on Friday urged his supporters to "boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with Free and Fair Elections."

GOP strategists are confident that the MLB fight is a winning issue for Republicans.

"It's good politics," said Ford O'Connell, a Republican strategist.

"This is not the last time the Democrats are going to try to do this, bully corporate America into taking their side," he said, urging Republicans to run TV ads in Georgia pushing back on claims of voter suppression and highlighting the economic impact on the state.

Republicans argue that Democrats and the media have dramatically overstated the provisions in Georgia's new election law, especially when comparing it to rules in states like New York.

The decision to relocate the 2021 MLB All-Star Game is estimated to have a $100 million impact on the state economy, something that Republicans argue will hit many small and medium Black-owned businesses in the Atlanta area.

Chip Saltsman, a Republican strategist based in Tennessee, said "this is an unforced error by Major League Baseball."

"They've forgotten who their base is, they've forgotten who buys a lot of tickets and, quite frankly, they spoke before I think they knew the details, the commissioner did," he said.

"Six months ago, Georgia was a little bluer than usual and this tints it back to red," he added, referring to the teetering status from a Republican-leaning state to one that voted for President Biden in November and then two Democratic Senate candidates in January.

Some of the Republicans who are pouncing on the MLB issue most aggressively are lawmakers with an eye on running for president in 2024.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a potential White House contender, published a letter to Manfred on Monday asking if he would resign his membership at August National, host of the annual Masters tournament, which did not allow a Black player to compete until 1975 and did not admit a Black member until 1990.

"I write to ask you whether you intend to maintain your membership at Augusta National Golf Club. As you are well aware, the exclusive members-only club is located in the State of Georgia," Rubio wrote.

The Florida senator also asked whether MLB would suspend commercial ties with China and Cuba because of those countries' records on human rights.

"Taking the All-Star game out of Georgia is an easy way to signal virtues without significant financial fallout. But speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party would involve a significant loss of revenue and being closed out of a lucrative market," Rubio wrote.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), another potential White House contender in 2024, said he will join an effort to review professional baseball's long-held antitrust exemption.

"It's a curious business decision, for MLB to announce that they hate most of their fans. Let's see how that works out for them," he tweeted on Friday.

Cruz circulated a list of official MLB sponsors and asked, "Do all or them oppose voter ID? Are all of them willing to be the woke enforcers of the corrupt Democratic Party?"

Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist based in Kentucky, said the decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta has become "a cultural flashpoint" that unifies Republicans who are otherwise often divided on policies like trade and immigration.

"Republicans see this as another one of these cultural flashpoints, a 'whose side are you on?' moment," he said. "The Republicans largely defined themselves the last few years not really around policy but mostly on jumping on these moments. From that perspective, it makes a lot of sense."

Trump famously picked a fight with ex-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other professional football players who knelt during the national anthem at the start of games to protest police brutality.

Then-Vice President Mike Pence even walked out of a game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers when several players took a knee.

In the current fight with MLB, Republicans are the "righteous on this one," Jennings said.

"The decision that was made by baseball was based on a complete lie," he asserted. "The disinformation around the Georgia law is causing these corporations to make terrible decisions."

Republicans have frequently pointed to an analysis in The Washington Post that said a section of the new law that created an additional mandatory day of early voting on Saturday and codified two days of early voting on Sunday actually "expanded early voting for many Georgians."

The Post also gave Biden "four Pinocchios" for claiming the new Georgia law would end voting hours early so that working people can't cast their votes after their shifts are over.

An analysis by The New York Times, however, identified 16 provisions in the law that it said would "limit ballot access, potentially confuse voters and give more power to Republican lawmakers."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) weighed in more generally on Monday by warning corporate America not to get involved in high-profile political fights.

"I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics," he said. "My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don't pick sides in these big fights."

[viper37]

I like the irony of Mitch's statement

[Syt]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/30/there-is-not-systemic-racism-says-governor-who-named-april-confederate-heritage-month/

'There is not systemic racism' says a governor who named April as Confederate Heritage Month

Fox News host Laura Ingraham welcomed five Republican governors on Thursday night for a conversation broadly about politics in the United States but often specifically about the broader cultural fights that have gripped the political right.

The discussion occurred the day after President Biden's first address to Congress, during which he outlined a broad agenda focused on demonstrating the value of government. Ingraham picked out three clips of Biden's speech for her guests to consider — two of which focused on a brief section of the address that dealt with systemic racism.

In one clip, Biden says that "we have to come together to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the people they serve to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system, and police reform in George Floyd's name" — referring to the man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis last year.

Ingraham asked Gov. Tate Reeves (R-Miss.) to respond.

"Governor Reeves, activists say it is criminal to say there is not systemic racism in the country," she said. "That video of George Floyd, other law enforcement involved shootings of African American men, the video plays and unrest often erupts. Your reaction to what he claimed about the systemic racism."

"There is not systemic racism in America," Reeves replied. "We live in the greatest country in the history of mankind. And I'll just tell you in Mississippi, I was very proud of the fact that last year we had, we had peaceful protesters, but we did not have one event in which there was a riot. And the reason for that is because in our state, we back the blue, we support the police."

Notice how this works. Ingraham plays Biden's clip — and then reframes the question as being about something that "activists" purportedly say (though such assertions are certainly rare).

She presents the widely-seen video of Floyd's death as problematic not because of what it depicts but because of the effects of what's shown. Then she asks Reeves to weigh in.

He gives the correct response, in the sense that a Republican speaking to Laura Ingraham on Fox News is expected to give a particular response: There is no systemic racism in America.

Reeves has had a pretty good week. In addition to his Fox News appearance, he got Monday off since it was a state holiday: Confederate Memorial Day. In fact, he was speaking to Fox at the tail end of what he on April 7 declared to be Confederate Heritage Month. April, according to the proclamation obtained by the Mississippi Free Press, should be a period in which Mississippians "honor all who lost their lives in this war" and to "come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage."

There will be people who argue that this holiday isn't a reflection of systemic racism because of the various ways in which it can be cast otherwise. It's an effort to learn from the past, they might say, not an endorsement of it. One might claim that there's nothing inherently racist about celebrations of the Confederacy (which this obviously is), perhaps because they view the Civil War as being centered not on slavery but on, say, states' rights. Or perhaps they'd argue that this day isn't ingrained in the system, it's just a one-off event.

That particular argument is undercut fairly robustly by the fact that Mississippi state law mandates the holiday, one of three Confederacy-related state holidays on the calendar. It is clear that the system in Mississippi encourages a generous view of the Confederacy, a rebellion against the United States that was predicated on the enslavement of Black people.

The vagueness about what constitutes systemic racism provides an opportunity for it to be framed as one sees fit. Republicans often like to conflate the idea with assertions that America itself is racist, which is like saying that Verizon was a blogging company when it owned HuffPost. There certainly are people who claim that America is itself racist, but that group doesn't include Biden.

In an interview with NBC News's Craig Melvin that aired Friday morning, Biden was asked about the comment that stirred up this conversation about America being a racist country — a comment from Sen. Tim Scott's (R-S.C.) response to Biden's speech.

Scott "said, among other things, America isn't racist," Melvin said to the president. "Is it?"

"No, I don't think the American people are racist," Biden replied, reinforcing the theme from his speech that America and its people are equivalent. "But I think after 400 years, African Americans have been left in a position where they are so far behind the eight-ball in terms of education, health, in terms of opportunity."

"I don't think America is racist," he continued, "but I think the overhang from all of the Jim Crow and before that slavery have had had a cost, and we have to deal with it."

This is a common presentation of the perceived problem: an extended period of time in which Blacks were overtly disadvantaged systemically both meant that there are retained deficiencies — like a lack of accrued family wealth that can accompany homeownership — and lingering, more deeply buried examples. That Black people are disproportionately killed by police is one that's at the center of the political conversation at the moment, and one that spurs a lot of discussion about what does and doesn't count under the loosely and subjectively bounded constraints of "systemic racism." But there are other examples where Black people experience systems differently: non-White students being disproportionately suspended from school, Black people still facing discrimination in housing, higher mortality rates for Black babies that declines when their doctors are also Black.

Some of the existing discrepancies may be functions of the overhang to which Biden referred. Some may be propagation of passive discrimination. Some may be circumstantial. But because there's a political incentive to downplay the existence of racism — as we explained on Thursday, White Republicans see discrimination against Whites as equal to discrimination against Blacks — there's also a motivation to cast a wide array of racial disparities as a priori being unrelated to race.

So we get exchanges like this, between Ingraham and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.).

"You watched Joe Biden last night deliver his first address to a joint session of Congress," Ingraham said. "He repeated twice this proposition that we are a systemically racist country."

He didn't, of course. He said that there was systemic racism in the criminal justice system and that it "plagues American life in many other ways." But such subtleties are not Ingraham's forte. So she asked DeSantis to opine on what she said Biden said — that "we are a systemically racist country."

"Well, it's a bunch of ... horse manure," he said. "I mean, give me a break. This country has had more opportunity for more people than any country in the history of the world."

The audience applauded.

"And it doesn't matter where you trace your ancestry from," he continued. "We've had people that have been able to succeed."

This idea that there are no systemic disadvantages for groups because individual members of those groups have overcome disadvantages is a bunch of ... well, you know. But this is the political argument popular on the right: the Democrats say that America is racist; we say that anyone can succeed if they work hard! It's an obviously appealing argument particularly for people who want to believe that their own success is a function of their own innate abilities and not of advantages they might have enjoyed.

It's not a useful way to approach a complicated, nuanced issue, however. Were there a real interest in tackling that issue, this superficial rhetoric might pose a disadvantage.