I thought both Pelosi and Schumer made decent responses to Trump's failed, low-energy Oval Office speech, you remember, the one last night where he unsuccessfully made a half-assed attempt to rally Americans to his vanity wall. Bernie's response-- the video above-- was clearer and better. He also used the word "lie," something Chuck and Nancy were too delicate to do. And speaking of "too delicate," PolitiFact's analysis of Trump's lie-strewn speech was nothing short of PATHETIC, describing out-right attempts to manipulate his views with bogus claims as "partially accurate," "uncertain," "dubious," and-- at worst-- "misleading." Why are they so scared to call him a congenital obsessive liar? They had no such compunctions about one of the freaks behind his wall resolve: "Trump said in 2017 that building a wall between the United States and Mexico would curb opioid use in America, but experts told PolitiFact that they were skeptical a wall would have a drastic impact. (Conservative pundit Ann Coulter said in 2018 that "100% of heroin/fentanyl epidemic is because we don't have a WALL." We rated that Pants on Fire)."More people watched Chuck and Nancy than TrumpanzeeThe Associated Press did a slightly more credible fact-checking job, although was still too much into imagining their job of fact checkers is to "represent" both sides. Still, like Bernie, they pointed the lies right out: "In his prime-time speech to the nation, President Donald Trump declared a border crisis that’s in sharp dispute, wrongly accused Democrats of refusing to pay for border security and ignored the reality of how drugs come into the country as he pitched his wall as a solution to varied ills." A lot of people wanted Ted Lieu to give the Democratic response. Like Bernie, he's very clear-spoken. This morning he told me that "Trump's fear mongering speech was so misleading that even Fox News fact checked him. There is no border crisis. Here are the facts: Violent crime is down; property crime is down; immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit less crimes than native born Americans; border crossings are at a 20 to 45 year low; and border apprehensions dropped by 75% since 2000."Back to Bernie... his first point, that "we don’t need to create artificial crises, we have enough real crises," led to an explanation of a crisis that Trump doesn't even have the mental capacity to understand is a crisis: "The scientific community has made it very clear in telling us that climate change is real and is causing devastating harm to our country and the entire planet. They have told us in no uncertain terms that if we do not transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, our nation and our planet and the planet we will be leaving our kids and grandchildren may well become unhealthy and even uninhabitable in the not-so-distant future."Reporting this morning for ABC News, Matthew Dowd wrote that Trump "doesn't seem to understand that the majority of the country is opposed to him on this issue, as all public polling shows that Americans are against a border wall, blame the president for the shutdown and are supportive of the Democrats position of reopening the government. Until the president understands that, or enough Republicans in Congress finally get the religion of reality, this shutdown will go on." He portrayed Trump's address as "the Hollywood equivalent... of releasing a movie for the 12th time after it bombed at the box office a little over two months ago."
The president's speech from the Oval Office provided no new information for this debate we are in over the government shutdown and border security, did not expand the audience who would be receptive to the president's message and will not move a single swing voter in America or in Congress to the president's position.Other than all that, it went well.One of the fascinating things about the president rerunning this same message but merely switching the venue to the Oval Office, is that the box office receipts already came in on this project on Nov. 8, 2018, and the message pushed by the president failed miserably at the polls. In fact, the president and his immigration message lost by a historic margin in a midterm election.So why would you roll out the same message which failed just a few months ago and think it would be successful? My guess, just like some in Hollywood, is that when you lack creativity and you have something that got an applause line years ago, you try it again....[I]t might be a good idea for the president to invest in a new script, new creative people, and refrain from relaunching a rejected movie. For a man who seems to crave ratings wins, the president might not want to stick with this immigration box office failure much longer.
Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), one of the strongest voices on the immigration issues that Trump can't seem to be able to cope with, noted that Trump "sounds like a broken record. He reverts to the same old script-- demagoguery and xenophobia-- because that’s all he knows how to do. The fact is that even the Department of Homeland Security says our Southern border, where the Trump administration wants to build a wall, is more difficult to cross without authorization today than ever before. Apprehensions are at the lowest rate ever. And as much as he wants to paint a different picture, immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native born Americans. Furthermore, we know that the majority of drugs come in at legal points of entry-- not where there is no wall. This has never been about security. It is simply political... It is time for the president to give up on his vanity wall fantasy and allow us to focus on what matters: ending this shutdown. The American people are sick and tired of his border wall obsession. What they want is a stable economy, good healthcare, an end to a government shutdown that grows more harmful every day, and common sense reforms to our immigration system. This speech belongs in the dustbin-- it is time to move on and get things done for our country."We're eager to see Mike Siegel in Congress after the 2020 elections-- the same way we were eager to see Pramila, Alexandria Ocasio, Rashida Tlaib and Ted Lieu make it to Congress in previous cycles. There hasn't been a Texan like him in Congress in a very long time-- too long a time. This morning he told me that "Any Texan within a day’s drive of the border can see through Trump’s phony 'crisis.' The real emergency is the Republican-imposed shutdown which is depriving Americans of essential pay and services. Enablers like Michael McCaul here in TX-10 are praying voters have short memories. I’m counting on Congressional Democrats to stay strong against the useless, immoral Wall-- and Trump’s hostage-taking tactics."UPDATE:As you know, Trump is a ratings-queen so he'll be happy to know that people watched his tired, lifeless speech. He may be less happy that Chuck and Nancy had more viewers though. The Hollywood Reporter: "The quarter hour (9-9:15 p.m. ET) containing the president’s speech drew a combined 28.1 household rating in metered markets on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CNN, Fox News and NBC. The following 15 minutes, including analysis and the Pelosi-Schumer rebuttal, averaged 29.3 across those same networks, a bump of about 4 percent."
