When Balint’s time expired, and the out lawmaker yielded back, Bondi asked for a moment to respond, and used it to go on the offensive: “You didn’t ask Merrick Garland anything about Epstein,” she said. Balint shot back: “Weak sauce.”
Bondi then escalated: “And with this anti-Semitic culture right now, she voted against a resolution …”
Balint cut her off: “Oh really? Do you want to go there, attorney general?” she said. “Talking about antisemitism to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust?”
The lawmaker then got up and left the room.
Counter-attack, counter accuse. They are all just following the lead of the president, and his party before him, he just took it to an extreme level. It doesn’t matter what the facts are. The only way to deal with these people is to ignore their bad faith attacks and counter-attack them. Going on the defensive is what they are used to, and is psychologically works on the low information voters that trust the worst people, a large group.
When you defend against an attack, a charge, it lend credibility to it as confirmed by multiple studies over the decades. As such the manipulators learn when attacked to counter-attack, counter-accuse. The more it makes you go on the defensive the better it works, to obscure the issue with slander and emotional arguments.
Instead, stick with your attack, or answer with your own attack, such as calling out what they are doing and why. But that is considered bad form with our democrats, still playing politics under the 1990 model of Bill Clinton and playing for the monied interests, rejecting populism and reform as the great danger, not the other party.
The Republicans haven’t been respecting that old decorum for decades, but this president brought it to a new extreme level, and we continue to afford them courtesies that aren’t returned that allows them to walk all over us. That is what the donors want of course, but the donors don’t even know what is in their own best interests. Popular reform is the only way to get out from under fascists fixing elections to permanently affix themselves in power, an end that kills the Republic in all but name, the Reason for Being of our politicians and members of all three branches of government to stop, to prevent.
Throwing the game to allow it, is a betrayal of their oaths itself. Ignorance is no excuse, and they aren’t ignorant, they know they aren’t playing real politik. We need to get some new leaders now, or else. The very least these politicians we are stuck with can do, is not afford courtesies to the republicans in questioning them that allows them to derail any oversight with counter attacks. Stay on message, when they distract with slander, call them on it, and their motivations, undermining the republic, a betrayal, say that. It’s true, and it’s the only way Bondi and her ilk will learn to respect and fear congressional oversight.