There’s a lot of “saying the quiet part out loud” these days!
Take The New Republic: “Republican Congressman Says Quiet Part Out Loud on Doomed Border Deal”:
Texas Representative Troy Nehls on Wednesday urged Congress not to do anything about the border at all.
“Why would I help Joe Biden improve his dismal 33 percent, when he can fix the border and secure it on his own? He can secure it on his own through executive order.”
And here’s Steve Benen at MSNBC: “As tax plan advances, GOP’s Grassley says the quiet part loud”:
NBC News also reported:
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, cast doubt Wednesday on passing a bipartisan tax bill, saying it could make President Joe Biden “look good” and improve Democrats’ chances of holding the White House in the 2024 election. Grassley said re-electing Biden could hurt Republican hopes of extending Trump-era tax cuts.
“Passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — mailing out checks before the election — means he could be re-elected, and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” the Iowa Republican said.
The problem is not that the Iowa Republican opposes the underlying legislation; the problem is that his principal concern is avoiding governing successes that might make President Joe Biden “look good” in an election year.
So “the quiet part out loud” is Republicans admitting they don’t want to do things they think are good because Joe Biden is president, it’s a campaign year, and they don’t want to do anything that might be good for his reelection.
I don’t think that’s the quiet part. It’s just out loud.
One of Donald Trump’s innovations is that a lot of politicians realized that instead of saying things so that your base could hear what they wanted to hear while the general public might hear something more innocuous, you could just say what the base wanted to hear. (It’s why, say, Donald Trump is now consistently embracing “dictator” comments in a way no previous president would have ever done.)
And why not? Grassley represents Iowa, which is no longer a swing state. Nehls won his Texas district with nearly two-thirds of the vote.
What reason do they have to leave the quiet part quiet. Their constituents and donors don’t want Joe Biden to win. They’re fine waiting on tax cuts or border enforcement a few months if that means making the dreaded Democrat go away.
The good thing about this trend is we don’t have to parse — or pretend to parse — political statements anymore. It’s all out there. Let’s take it at face value.
What I’m watching
I saw the cult classic “Eraserhead” showing at my local arthouse theater last weekend, expecting David Lynchian weirdness that was formally interesting but maybe not that meaningful to me. Instead, I spent the next few days thinking it evoked the kind of terrifying insanity of my early parenting months better than any movie I've ever seen. Stunned. A completely unexpected experience.
Again, my local arthouse theater programmed it this weekend, or I might not have sought it out. So grateful they did. I'm not sure I can ever watch it again, and I can’t really recommend it except to film weirdos, but — I'm not joking here — it's a movie that made me feel seen.
Such a wild, surreal movie. I haven't seen it in decades, but I can remember turning off the video--man, to have seen it for the first time on the big screen!--and thinking to myself "no one told me this was body horror!" (Only: whose body? That's the question, I guess.)