Greg Sargent: Fake GOP rage over Biden's 'unity' speech is a sucker's game

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/21/gop-response-biden-speech-unity/

President Biden declared in his inaugural address that our prospects for much-needed “unity” are threatened by various political forces. Among them, he said, are racism, nativism, political extremism, white supremacy and domestic terrorism.
Republicans promptly decided that in condemning those things, Biden was actually talking about them.

Republican officials and their media allies are now widely condemning these words as an attack on themselves and their voters. The obvious trick is to game the media into saying Biden is already reneging on his unity promise by being divisive.

But there’s a deeper ploy here. With this new fake outrage fest, Republicans are working to reframe the national debate over how to repair the damage done during Donald Trump’s presidency on terms favorable to them.

This reframing is designed to bury their own culpability for the injuries they inflicted by actively enabling Trump and by deliberately harnessing the destructive forces he unleashed toward their own instrumental ends.

“If you read his speech and listen to it carefully, much of it is thinly veiled innuendo calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book, calling us people who don’t tell the truth,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) complained to Fox News.

“The next four years will be about shaming, blaming and cancelling until diversity of thought is completely extinguished,” sobbed the chairwoman of the Minnesota GOP.

*snip*