Almost Marx …

Here is the version of Mr. Douthat’s commentary on Biden’s ‘State of The Union’ address featured on the NYT front page:

The actual column framing:

Headline: Biden’s Message: What Trump Promised, I’m Delivering

In 2016 Donald Trump ran for president against his fellow Republicans and then against Hillary Clinton by promising economic nationalism: a break with the bipartisan enthusiasm for globalization, an end to outsourcing, a manufacturing revival, new infrastructure spending, frank competition with China instead of friendly integration.

Seven years later, President Biden just gave a State of the Union speech whose key themes and most enthusiastic riffs could have been lifted — albeit with more Bidenisms and fewer insults — from Trump’s populist campaign.

There was an implicit condemnation of both parties for their neglect of the heartland and industrial policy and infrastructure. There was a lament for the forgotten man, the Americans “left behind or treated like they’re invisible” and “the jobs that went away.” And there was a none-too-subtle subtext in the policy boasts: What Trump once promised, I’m delivering. A bipartisan infrastructure bill. Tougher buy-American rules. Reindustrialization. Taking on Big Pharma. Big investments in technological competition with Beijing.

…

Like Joe Biden, Mr. Douthat is a political hack/opportunist, whose latest political iteration is steeped, in an uncredited attempt to rehabilitate de Maistre’s Decadence… Douthat tired of lecturing American Women, on their sexual promiscuities, assertion of their right to Abortions on demand, the low birth rate of the white middle class women, and the epidemic of out-of-wedlock births of young black girls: all of this hand-wringing held together by concerned, but ersatz Public Moralizing.

Note the recitation of the ‘the most familiar of Democratic themes’

All of this was wrapped together with the most familiar of Democratic themes: Tax only the rich, don’t ever touch Social Security and Medicare, spend infinitely on education. Meanwhile, Roe v. Wade and the supposed crisis of democracy, so central to the Democrats’ midterm campaigns, were invoked as partisan rallying cries but mostly pushed deep into the speech, long after the president was finished with his main pitch — an argument for a new economic nationalism, brought to you by Blue Collar Joe Biden.

Mr. Douthat has missed the continuing crisis in American Life, that is the still collapsing Neo-Liberal Swindle. The Homeless Crisis, in the bastion of The Silicone Valley, the breaking into railroad cars of desperate people in Los Angeles. There are more telling examples of the Economic desperation in America! All this, while Billions are being spent on America’s Proxy war in Ukraine, that supports Neo-Nazis, and its front man/apologist Zelensky!

Interjection:

It must be a deep wound to Douthat, and his ‘Right to Life’ cadre that ‘Abortions’ can now be accomplished, not by surgeons, but a pill? And that the Post Office is mandated to carry this medication to all States?

‘We’ do not need Joe Biden, in his last act, nor @DouthatNYT exhumation of de Maistre. We need an FDR and a Ferdinand Pecora!

Almost Marx