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The Stupid. It Hurts.
As a longtime political operative, I love the “art of the comeback” or the retort. They often occur during televised political debates. When I was coaching congressional candidates for debates, we often proposed retorts to accusations or statements our opponents were likely to raise. Conversely, we warned of ones they might use.
One of the best retorts in political history occurred in 1988 during the vice presidential debate between two US Senators – Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX) and Dan Quayle (R-IN). Chris Lamb tells the story:
George H.W. Bush, having served two terms as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, ran for president in 1988. Bush selected a relatively obscure 41-year-old senator Dan Quayle as his running mate. Quayle tried to deflect questions about his age and inexperience by comparing himself to John K. Kennedy when he ran for president in 1960.
Quayle’s advisors told him not to bring up the comparison during his debate with the Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen.
Quayle ignored the advice.
“I have as much experience as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency,” Quayle said during the nationally televised debate.
Bentsen famously turned to Quayle and said, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Bush-Quayle won the Presidential Election, but Quayle was forever reduced to a punch line in US politics.
The moral of this story is that your opposition is watching and listening to your talking points.
As a fan and supporter of the former Vice President, this is painful but true.
So when the White House chose to use the temporary and highly successful Paycheck Protection Program from the $2.2 trillion bipartisan CARES Act in 2020 as their comeback to attacks over Biden’s illegal student loan “forgiveness” fiasco, I scratched my head.
Partisan lefties in the media and Twitter unthinkingly praised the White House’s lame counterattack, including the irrepressible Congressman and failed former Democratic presidential candidate, Eric Swalwell. “More of this, please,” came from the wife of Russia-collusion hoaxer and former White House national security aide, retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman.
To the untrained eye, this looks like French Laundry-style hypocrisy. Forgiveness for me, not for thee. But it doesn’t take an IQ over 70 to figure out what a non sequitur this is. We’ll let US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), co-author of the Paycheck Protection Program and himself the beneficiary of college student loans he just recently paid off, explain why:
With the government forcing companies to close their doors, tens of millions of Americans were headed to the unemployment line, and millions of small businesses were headed for bankruptcy. That was an unacceptable outcome, which is why I worked with Democrats and Republicans to create the Paycheck Protection Program.
My plan was as straightforward as it was novel: to create a federal grant for small businesses to keep their employees on payroll. This payroll grant, structured deliberately as a forgivable loan, had one key condition: that 80 percent of the funds go to payroll. While some lobbyists (and even Democratic lawmakers) in Washington begged for a blank check to small businesses, I refused. This temporary program was intended to keep employees on payroll during what we were told would be a two-week lockdown to “slow the spread.”
The coup de grace:
President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan could not be more different, despite his lame attempts to draw similarities between the two.
Let’s start with the obvious: federal student loans were just that, loans. The whole idea was that students would take the loans to pay for an education that would lead to a job that repays them (along with the massive interest accumulated).
There are other practical differences as well. The president is now asking those same small business owners and employees, most of whom never went to college, to shoulder the burden of college debt for others. . .
Again, don’t just take my word for it. In the words of President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser and Harvard economist Jason Furman: “Student loan relief is not free. Part of it [will] be paid for by the 87% of Americans who do not benefit but lose out from inflation.”
That is why it will do nothing for the people Democrats used to claim to protect: working families with minimal or nonexistent student debt. Unlike my payroll grants, forgiving student loan debt won’t create jobs, save small businesses, or reopen the American economy.
The Daily Wire features additional takes worth noting:
“So it is now the White House’s position that if the government forces you to shut down your business and provides you just compensation to keep people employed, that’s the same thing as you failing to pay the college loans you voluntarily undertook,” Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro tweeted. “Geniuses.”
“Obviously someone passed around a memo deciding to compare PPP to student loans when the programs have entirely different purposes…” NewsNation reporter Zaid Jilani wrote in a Twitter thread. “Politicians and nonprofits, most of whom supported PPP, are retroactively portraying PPP as a privilege or giveaway when it was really just a backstop to prevent mass worker layoffs after govt forced businesses to close.”
“This is the first time I can recall that an administration started attacking a program they themselves support in an improvised effort to defend another program they proposed,” he added.
“So you’re saying that the government forces my business to close, and I have to take a PPP loan to pay my employees during that time, and then later that same government will put me in a database and use it to attack me,” journalist Stephen L. Miller tweeted. “The WH Twitter account didn’t think this one through.”
Either the political geniuses at the White House think you’re stupid, or they are stupid. My vote is clearly for the latter. It’s so stupid, it hurts.
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That’s what I said, isn’t it?
Sometimes you need to insist, “I’m afraid you are mistaken. This issue is about you.”
No.
Then you ought to try reading again so you can point out the difference.
No, thank you. I think I understand what you said. You were speaking of countering and arguing, right? You said, “I don’t understand that. I say if you’re not explaining, you’re losing.”
I say, “If you are explaining, you’re losing.” Let’s let it rest there.
Will try not to get in the middle of this interesting discourse. My only question: What is Fang Fang’s position?
Reverse Cowgirl?
The best I have seen tonight. But where are you when si kicks my ass about my proof reading? My law firm does not pay my paralegals to check on my night time sites.
I have no dog in this fight.
Every time a conservative or a Republican complains that the media isn’t ‘fair’ they bolster the insidious lie that journalism is about truth and neutrality. It isn’t. It has never been. And it never will be.
And if we wake normies up to the fact that every statement about politics (which, today, is every statement) is first and foremost about pushing a narrative then the ability of the news media to shape the battlefield will be severely diminished.
Whether this makes ‘sick burns’ more or less powerful is up for debate. Personally I think a general weakening of epistemological hubris would be a good thing.
Hey, I saw it when it was still in the member’s feed.
I always thought that was Samuel Clemens, but it wasn’t. It appears to have been first written by Jonathan Swift in 1710 but not in the fiem we know.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
Good points, but are there really a lot of complaints from conservatives that the media aren’t fair? I’m not sure my observations are thorough enough, but it seems to me the fairness issue is raised more often by the left when they claim that conservatives complain that the media aren’t fair, when that isn’t really the heart of the complaint at all.
Rubio and Shapiro use too many words. Seriously. Their response doesn’t compare favorably to “you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
I think the correct response to the student loan vote buying scheme is to use one of the Left’s favorite words: it simply isn’t FAIR. It’s not *fair* to those who responsibly paid their loans off and to those who *will* pay off others’ loans via their taxes without the benefit of receiving the “education” (sneer quotes required for 85% of degrees conferred).
It’s like Salieri to Mozart in the movie Amadeus — too many notes [words]. Although Salieri was badly mistaken in his case. Art ain’t politics.
Wonderful clip!
Did you hear the applause? And they picked Romney! Makes you wonder about all elections.
Congratulations, but the world is round and stuff, and it was promoted so quickly that a lot of people could have easily slept through it all.
But the Left doesn’t care about Fair as much as about their favored groups. To them, it’s not Fair that someone has to have so much student loan debt to go to Harvard where they can learn how to best use their gifts to change the world.
We’re not speaking to the Left, are we? We’re speaking to LIVs. And they tend to be concerned with “fairness.” Roy Blunt agrees with me, although he used the phrase “monumentally unfair.” Good.
I wonder, isnt this a violation of privacy laws? Can the White House just dig into any file cabinet in any federal agency to dig up documents to smear political critics?
Only a Democrat White House can do it. A Republican White House gets the treatment meted out when a couple people dug into Bill Clinton’s draft records. And it isn’t literally the White House that does it. Ask Joe the Plumber how it works.
@soupguy Are you suggesting that the Congresswoman acted ill-advisedly in her criticism of the student loan forgiveness since she had the PPP “loans” forgiven? She’s not stupid and it takes someone stupid or ignorant to compare this two things.
Or the people whose tax records were illegally leaked by the IRS to Pro Publica. President Biden didn’t do it directly, but he provided an $80 billion reward to the perps.
No they were tweeted from the White House account first… Isnt that a violation of the Hatch Act? Using the official white house twitter account to smear critics?
Really? I didn’t know that.
I’m not sure about the Hatch Act. President Clinton removed a lot of the Hatch Act restrictions on political activity by government employees, thus making for some murky situations.
Here is the tweet:
A quote from NewsWeek:
The article:
https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-defends-tweets-marjorie-taylor-greene-gop-leaders-1737446
Did the White House or others on their side, bother to mention that PPP loans were only “forgiven” if the money was used to pay employees?
Of course not.
And, unlike the Student Loans, PPP loans were promised to be forgiveable at the inception of the loan, provided that the funds were used to pay the employees.