Jamie Raskin is one of our winning Blue America candidates, and he just delivered a barnburner of a speech -- just what we need to be energized -- last night at an appearance with Elizabeth Warren. Via New Republic:
“They can make a white supremacist the chief strategist for the White House,” he said, invoking Steve Bannon. “They can make an anti-public school activist [Betsy DeVos] the secretary of education. They can make Jeff Sessions the attorney general of the United States of America, but my friends, we are still here.”
The “we’re still here” message echoed Bill Maher’s defiant theme after the election—a slogan HBO is now selling on baseball caps. But Raskin elaborated on it, even working in a Batman metaphor:
They can put Goldman Sachs back in charge of the Treasury Department, but we are still here. They can try to dismantle the EPA, but we are still here. They can put a fox in charge of every hen house—they can put the Joker, the Riddler, and the Penguin in charge of Gotham City—but we are still here, and we’re not going anywhere.
Raskin had a bit more to say about Bannon. “We’re not letting any prepped-out Harvard Business School neo-Nazi strategize us into becoming Germany 1933,” he vowed, “and we will not let a cabinet of robber barons and white nationalists destroy everything the civilizing movements of the last century created.”
Laying into Trump, Raskin struck some Maureen Dowd-ish notes, variously calling the president-elect “the Wizard of Bankruptcy,” “the King of Debt and Sweetheart Contracts,” and “the Prince of Tax Avoidance.” But his best dig was a classic: “We are not a country that grabs other people by the genitals as a form of social introduction.”
Warren, the acknowledged master of anti-Trump snark, came with some fresh material of her own. “He said one thing that was right,” she cracked. “I’ve said it, too. The system is rigged. But let’s be clear—it is rigged in favor of billionaires like Donald Trump. Trump promised that he would drain the swamp in Washington, but so far he seems to be just loading the swamp with more swamp monsters.”
I haven't found video of it, but if I do, I will add it here.
