Video: Jennifer Rubin NAILS IT – Biden’s “Pathetic” WaPo Op-Ed Was Written “as if the mob had assembled itself…[omitting] the central role of Trump…the Republican Party & the MAGA movement”

I certainly haven’t agreed with everything Jennifer Rubin’s said over the years (e.g., when she used to be a conservative and write the “Right Turn” column in the WaPo) , but she really nails it in this video. The key points that jumped out at me are:

• “I have to hand it to Vice President Kamala Harris, the dignity she displayed, the self-restraint was really a model.”
• “I have a certain bone to pick with the president, and that concerns frankly the oped he wrote for the Washington Post, which I currently work for. He implored us to remember January 6. So far so good. He reminded us that this was an abomination, a violation of the tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. He talked about…democracy prevailing. The only thing he missed was President Trump. Amazingly the entire thing was written in passive voice, as if the mob had assembled itself…all of this omits the central role of Trump and the central role of the Republican Party and the MAGA movement. Why bother doing this if you’re going to exempt the people responsible for this heinous behavior?“
• “Well, I have theories. One is that Biden doesn’t understand the difference between respecting the institution of the presidency that is the incoming presidency and the obligation to respect his victory, and the obligation that sometimes comes with that to also be completely candid honest and not cover up for your successor’s errors, whether they were in the past the future or the present. And in this effort to bend over backwards to treat Trump in a way he was not treated, he winds up enabling him covering him normalizing him. It was really pathetic and I use that word advisedly because that is the single adjective that I heard over and over again from Democrats…”
• “And I think we get down to the central dilemma of the Biden presidency. On one hand he was absolutely the right person to manage the country coming out of COVID coming out of recession. He was able to push through a really impressive array of legislation. But he missed I think and part of this is age part of this is generation part of this is his breeding in the Senate he missed the central challenge which is to bring a knife to the knife fight which is to use every weapon available in the Arsenal of the bully pulpit to inform and remind people of who Trump is and what the message is that Trump is trying to convey which is fundamentally anti-democratic anti-American. And so he winds up defending some peculiar sort of 19th century sense of cordiality, of comity. And in the midst of an effort that we are all struggling with to remind people of the truth of January 6th, he actually makes things worse. And that makes me sad, it disappoints me. And once again it leaves me wondering, had he stepped away as he suggested he would during the campaign after a single term, given Kamala Harris a full primary and others a full primary whether we would not now be facing the return of Donald Trump which is a national tragedy.”
• “…[the Trump presidency] is going to be bad and it’s going to reinforce the message that Democrats have to make, which is Republicans are the party of the billionaires and the big corporations who are now bending over backwards trying to please them, Democrats are the party of the…ordinary people, the average American, and Democrats have to make that message clear every single day.”
• “So what do we do in the upcoming year? Well, I think there are several things we can all do: one is we do not get the luxury of exhaustion. I’m sorry, yes we were tired at the end of the year, you had your holiday, get back in the game! Democracy is not voluntary. If we want a democracy, if we want to maintain our basic fundamental freedoms, if we want to maintain an inclusive society, we have to work for it. Our leaders are not up to the task. We saw that with Biden. We’ve seen that with Dick Durbin. We’ve seen this time and time again. It’s us, we are the people who are going to have to combat the MAGA scourge over and over again. We’re the ones who are going to have to sound the alarm, are going to have to push lawmakers to object and to block initiatives we’re the ones who are going to have to encourage state and local officials to fill the gap. It’s not going to be anybody else. And frankly there are many many groups in this country, most especially, African-Americans who have never had the luxury of giving up on America,and despite the vile treatment that they  have received over decades over centuries, they have not given up on this country. And none of us has the luxury of doing so.”
• “I don’t think it’s worthwhile to watch hours or even an hour of cable TV news. It’s not productive. It’s annoying and it’s not informative, it is not helping you to become an advocate for democracy. I would be much more selective in the media you watch…”
• “You’re not going to be able to change the world. I’m not going to be able to change the world in one day. But every day you should think about one thing you can do to promote democracy, to promote literacy in media, to reach out to neighbors, to make your community a little bit more functional. We’re going to have a very long road ahead but the good news is there really is a community of people, 50% of the electorate, and frankly if you count people who didn’t even bother to vote more than 50% of the country is with us. And those are the people we’re going to have to engage, those are the people we’re going to have to reach out to…”