Editor’s Note: Say What? is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: The biggest issue on the minds of politicians and everyday citizens alike has been the COVID relief bill, or more precisely the pork-laden stimulus that accompanied it and the shameful politics that delayed passage of even a meager 600 bucks until these last days. President Donald Trump threw a monkey wrench into the works by calling for an increase from $600 to $2,000 per person at the 11th hour. Republican and Democratic senators went back and forth on whether to pass the bill that had already passed in the House.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY): I don't want to hear that it costs too much to help working families get a check when they're struggling.
Senator David Perdue (R-GA): I'm delighted to support the President and his 2,000 ... It's really a $1,400 increment over what we've already done.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT): Do we turn our backs on struggling working families? Or do we respond to their pain?
Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA): We're talking about sending checks, the vast majority of which will be going to people who've had no loss of income whatsoever.
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA): My Republican colleagues seem more interested in funding defense than in funding the defenseless.
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): The best stimulus there is is a job.
Tim: Meanwhile, the nation's lonely eyes turned to Georgia and the two Senate races there that will finally determine just how much power Democrats will possess for the first years of the 2020s and the capacity of Republicans to stop them. Consider the leftist landscape if Democrats win both races. Democrats would control the White House and both chambers of Congress, albeit by razor-thin margins, allowing them free rein to advance their full progressive agenda. But if Republicans can win at least one of the two Senate contests and maintain control of the Senate, together with a newly conservative Supreme Court, they could block the inevitable gross excesses of the left and at least allow conservatives to sleep at night.
With the eyes of the nation and much of the world on Georgia, the man named by the Electoral College as the next president went on the offensive against the Trump administration, claiming it's been uncooperative in the transition after four years of destabilizing the federal government and our foreign alliances.
Joe Biden: For some agencies, our teams received exemplary co-operation, from the career staff in those agencies. From others, most notably the Department of Defense, we encountered obstruction from the political leadership of that department. The truth is, many of the agencies that are critical to our security have incurred enormous damage. Many of them have been hollowed out and the despair of our alliances and a general disengagement from the world.
Tim: If Trump cared what Biden or even his fellow Republicans think of his carrying on the fight, he sure didn't show it, as usual, laying out the case for a fraudulent election in detail over the holidays, with the most prominent charge relating to vote dumps in the middle of the night and early morning after the poll watchers had departed.
President Trump: At 6:31 a.m., very early in the morning, Michigan suddenly reported 147,224 votes: 94% for Biden, 6% for Trump. At 4:42 a.m., Wisconsin reported 143,279 votes, almost all of them for Biden. A similar massive drop of ballots happened in Georgia at 1:34 a.m., again, almost all of these votes for Biden. These gigantic and ridiculously one-sided spikes were miraculously just enough to push Biden into the lead in all of the key swing states.
Tim: Just because the media dismiss the facts Trump laid out and the sworn allegations in hundreds of affidavits without investigation, and one court after another refuses to hear the cases brought by the Trump campaign, doesn't make those facts Trump just presented any less true. Such facts will continue to haunt the majority of Trump voters who believe the election was not free and fair and also the next man who will begin his presidency with a massive cloud of doubt surrounding him.
With Trump preparing to depart, the GOP establishment has started to reassert its power as it begins to separate from the man who won the presidency and both houses of Congress four years ago. Witness the quintessential Beltway pundit known for his focus groups, Frank Luntz, complaining on Fox News about Trump refusing to roll over.
Frank Luntz: It's having an impact on Fox, it's having an impact on Republicans in the House and the Senate. It feels like this president's trying to do as much damage as he can, not just to Mitch McConnell but to Republicans in the House and in the Senate. The president's glad to go along because it will help in that final race of 2020 in Georgia. I'm afraid and I believe that those two Republicans may well lose on the 5th of January because of what the president is doing right now.
Tim: If those Republicans win in Georgia, will Trump get the credit? Of course not, but Republicans have an array of worries with Biden heading for the White House. Primarily, U.S. policy on China and big tech, according to Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado.
Representative Ken Buck (R-CO): You see where the vice presidential pick was from and the support that she had during her career, and then you see the money that flowed into the Biden campaign and it's payback time. It's time that the Biden Administration makes sure that Google, Amazon, and the others are taken care of. They'll do it by placing personnel in key positions as well as continuing the flow of money back and forth. It all comes back to the fact that Google and Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter are monopolies, and they enjoy monopoly status. They crush their opposition and they are protected now by the Biden Administration.
Tim: Big tech has been cozy with Democrats for years, but as we enter the new year, the biggest challenge facing the new administration and Congress remains COVID-19, even with two vaccines in use. More than a million people were vaccinated by the end of 2020. The infection rate and death toll from coronavirus spiked in a third wave of infection, but we now see cases falling in 35 states and rising in only one. The media that protected the saintly Anthony Fauci for months are now willing to take him on since Biden won the election. Witness this exchange, the kind you never would have seen during the presidential campaign, between Fauci and Dana Bash of CNN.
Dana Bash: You acknowledged to The New York Times that you've moved the goal posts in terms of what it would take to reach so-called "herd immunity" in the United States. My question is, why weren't you straight with the American people about this to begin with?
Anthony Fauci: No. No, actually, Dana, I don't think it can be interpreted as being straight or not. We have to realize that we have to be humble and realize what we don't know. These are pure estimates and the calculations that I made, 70, 75%, it's a range. The range is going to be somewhere between 70 and 85%.
Tim: Fauci has always been a Rorschach test since he entered the public view. He would often make statements that were interpreted completely differently by the left and right. But Fauci will likely be comfortable with Biden. After all, Biden's been in D.C. for almost 50 years, Fauci for more than 40.
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