By Joe Saunders August 20, 2024 at 8:31am
Someone should have told Jamie Raskin to learn his speech better.
The Maryland congressman found himself literally at a loss for words when his teleprompter apparently failed Monday night during a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
And at a moment when he was trying to embarrass former President Donald Trump, Raskin only ended up humiliating himself.
Raskin, one of the most inveterate liars in a Democratic Party that regularly boasts a bumper crop of dishonesty, was harping on the Democratic bugaboo of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion, when he cited the chants allegedly heard from rioters screaming “hang Mike Pence.”
Check it out here:
JUST IN: U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin completely freezes up on stage at the DNC as his teleprompter appears to fail on him.
“Someone should have told Donald Trump that the President’s job under Article two of the Constitution…”
*Long pause*
“Someone should have told… pic.twitter.com/DNGYlzKlMT
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 20, 2024
“Someone should have told Donald Trump that the president’s job, under Aritcle II of the Constitution…,” Raskin said before coming to a complete halt, then resuming with repetition.
“Someone should have told Donald Trump that the President’s job, under Article II of the Constitution, is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed — not that the vice president is executed.”
Have you watched any of the DNC?
It was a nasty jab at Trump, and it it might have sounded clever enough to Raskin when he was writing the speech — or to whomever wrote the speech for him. But when he was forced to pause in the middle of it, to say the effect was ruined would be an understatement.
Here’s the speech in full. The breakdown moment occurs about the 40-second mark.
On a night that featured speakers that would have embarrassed any political party with an ounce of self-respect — failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, perpetually inane Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even the particularly cringe-inducing speech of President Joe Biden — Raskin managed to outdo them all.
That’s impressive by itself. And outdoing Biden in the arena of humiliation in public speaking is an accomplishment indeed.
And then there’s the context. The fact that Trump himself only narrowly escaped death at the hand of a would-be assassin just a little over a month ago makes political jibes with the word “executed” unseemly at best. Given that, the timing of a blunder like this could not have been worse.
Beyond the technical problem — and the national embarrassment of a man losing his oratorical crutch in a humiliating moment on national television — there was the irony of Raskin harping on law and order to promote Vice President Kamala Harris, the junior partner in the Biden-Harris administration that has made a mockery of law for the past four years.
Someone should have told Donald Trump that the president’s job under Article II of the Constitution is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed?
Does Raskin think that the Biden-Harris administration is faithfully executing American law when it allows millions of migrants from around the world to illegally stream across American borders?
Does Raskin think the Biden-Harris administration is faithfully executing the law when the president repeatedly attempts student loan “forgiveness” that gets swatted down in court, including the Supreme Court?
Does he think the American public truly believes the Biden-Harris administration is taking care that American laws are being respected when it wields the laughably named Justice Department as a weapon of naked political power against Trump?
The lawless rot at the heart of the Biden administration — beginning at the top, with a president stained by his family’s influence-peddling scheme going back to Joe Biden’s days as Barack Obama’s vice president — is pretty much the opposite of “taking care that the laws are faithfully executed.”
It’s the kind of lawlessness that has metastasized throughout the Democratic Party, as witnessed by the “progressive” prosecutors who let criminals run free in Democratic cities and the politically driven Democratic district attorneys who’ve pursued prosecutions of Trump in Manhattan, New York, and Fulton County, Georgia.
It’s the kind of lawlessness Democratic nominee Kamala Harris championed when she helped raise money to bail out for rioters arrested during the Democratic-backed violence that swept the nation’s cities in 2020.
Raskin, who has been one of the Biden family’s top defenders during the House Oversight Committee’s investigation of Hunter Biden activities, has already established a reputation for being able to lie with breathtaking ease.
He should be able to do it without a teleprompter by now. Someone should have told him to learn his own speech.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
