Cathartic. That’s what it was.
Page through the whole dictionary looking for a better word to describe President Joe Biden’s speech on the first anniversary of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and you will not find one. The address, delivered from Statuary Hall, which was so memorably besieged one year ago, was an act of catharsis — a purging of emotional toxins built up from too much time hearing too many lies too brazenly told by those who seek to deny or minimize what happened.
The insurrectionists were patriots, they say. The violence was peaceful, they say. The things we saw we didn’t see, they say. And down is left and up is sideways and monkeys drive rainbow-powered cars and yada, yada, yada, Republicans and their media henchmen shoveling diversionary bushwa by the metric ton.
Biden wasn’t having it. In Thursday’s speech, he cut through it all like a blowtorch through butter, calling out “the former president” — he never used the Florida retiree’s name — for weaving “a web of lies.” “He’s done so,” said Biden, “because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest … and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”
It’s not that Biden said anything we had not heard before. But we’ve heard it from pundits. The relief felt Thursday lay in the fact that the president was the one saying it, that he brought to bear the authority and prestige of his office to speak the truth bluntly and without equivocation.
