Democratic strategist and USA Today contributor Kurt Bardella’s formula of political analysis is to blindly point to a list of history’s bad guys and declare that is who the GOP is imitating. On Wednesday’s MSNBC Reports it was Nazis and Bolsheviks that were said to be comparable to pro-life Republicans who don’t like the media.
Host Alex Witt introduced Bardella with his current job titles, but also, “he was previously a spokesperson for the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.” She left out that he was fired from that position.
Still, Witt applauded President Biden’s recent attacks on Republicans, “So, we've seen a, kind of, notable shift, I mean, it’s powerful right? The president going harder against the Republican Party in this last week. What's behind it? What's the strategy?”
They are not powerful, it’s just typical Biden mudslinging, but Bardella-- who has previously blamed Republicans for shootings, declared white people think its fine to kill other people, declared the GOP to be worse than Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and as recently as Sunday declared the GOP to be a terrorist cell—reached for even greater absurdities, “We're watching right now, a very radical and extreme Republican Party mirror what we have seen in other places like Nazi Germany, like other places like the Bolsheviks, we have seen this playbook before.”
As for why the Republicans are like Nazis and Bolsheviks, Bardella claimed “We have seen a ruling party try to use things like propaganda, try to silence the free press, try to restrict what women can do, we have seen this playbook before and it always ends disastrously for the majority of the people who are subjected to that.”
Bardella never defined propaganda and how that differs from spin that Democrats also engage in. Nor did he cite any evidence of trying to silence the free press, certainly harsh criticisms of the press are not even close to the same thing as trying to silence it, and the obvious reference to pro-lifers being compared to Nazis and Bolsheviks is prima facie absurd.
Still, Bardella thanked Biden for his rhetoric, “That's what the warnings signs that we're seeing from the president right now. He's ringing the bell that we need to check in, pay attention because this is a dangerous line that the Republican Party is under full embrace of autocratic ways and means is nothing but disastrous and we have to stop it.”
While that was the most incendiary part of Bardella’s remarks, they were not the only crazy thing he said. Earlier, he declared, “that the presidency of Joe Biden is really a three-act play.”
The first of these “was getting us through the pandemic, something that we've never experienced before, getting shots in arms, getting the vaccines out and distributed and he did that.”
Biden had nothing to do with that, the vaccine roll out just fell into his lap. For the second act, Bardella praised Biden “passing a juggernaut of historically significant legislative accomplishments” before getting to “the third chapter which is leading us into the election, this fight for the soul of the country, the fight for the soul of democracy.”
With this segment is easy to see why Mark Leibovic described Bardella in 2013 as “not much of a true believer in any political cause. The Republicans simply found him first. He told me that he was not so much an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ as he was an ‘O’ — ‘an opportunist.’”
This segment was sponsored by Prevagen.
Here is a transcript for the August 31 show:
MSNBC Reports
8/31/2022
11:21 AM ET
ALEX WITT: Well, for more, I want to bring in Kurt Bardella. Kurt’s a Democratic strategist and USA Today contributor, he was previously a spokesperson for the Republican-led House Oversight Committee. Good to see you, my friend. So, we've seen a, kind of, notable shift, I mean, it’s powerful right? The president going harder against the Republican Party in this last week. What's behind it? What's the strategy?
KURT BARDELLA: Well, I think, Alex, that the presidency of Joe Biden is really a three-act play. The first act was getting us through the pandemic, something that we've never experienced before, getting shots in arms, getting the vaccines out and distributed and he did that. Act two was getting stuff done, passing a juggernaut of historically significant legislative accomplishments from infrastructure to climate change and Inflation Reduction Act to the CHIPS bill. He got those things down. Now we're in the third chapter which is leading us into the election, this fight for the soul of the country, the fight for the soul of democracy.
We're watching right now, a very radical and extreme Republican Party mirror what we have seen in other places like Nazi Germany, like other places like the Bolsheviks, we have seen this playbook before. We have seen a ruling party try to use things like propaganda, try to silence the free press, try to restrict what women can do, we have seen this playbook before and it always ends disastrously for the majority of the people who are subjected to that. That's what the warnings signs that we're seeing from the president right now. He's ringing the bell that we need to check in, pay attention because this is a dangerous line that the Republican Party is under full embrace of autocratic ways and means is nothing but disastrous and we have to stop it.
