Jeff Maurer makes a good point

In his latest post, satirist Jeff Maurer argues that the Democrats in Congress walked into a trap "genitals first" when the OAFPOTUS "invited" Congress to stand in support of a fairly basic premise of national sovereignty. (My representative, Mike Quigley, skipped the speech.) The OAFPOTUS counted on the Democrats remaining seated, and he was right. As Maurer says,

Obviously your “first job” as an elected official is to represent the people who elected you, not anyone else. The statement is true if you put any other group in the sentence: “The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not Austrians.” Yes, of course — Austrians have their own weird, lederhosen-wearing government to protect them, the American government is for Americans. Plus, if Democrats had stood up, Trump would have been screwed — it would have been like the Louis CK joke about the “do you like apples” scene in Good Will Hunting.

Presented with an opportunity to literally stand up for the American people and leave Trump with his dick twisting in the wind, congressional Democrats instead provided a snippet for Republican attack ads this fall.

I think Maurer rather oversells it, as the only people who will care one way or the other about that moment 90 minutes into an already horrible speech are the people like Maurer and me who already care about it.

But Maurer makes another point, which I think is much more important:

[A]s much as people see extreme right-wingers as overzealous bastards, they’re at least overzealous bastards for the in-group. It’s the old “he’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch” thing. To the extent that Trump is more Chieftain than president, he’s unquestionably a Chieftain for the American tribe. And therefore people sometime dislike his methods but broadly see his goals as directionally correct.

Extremists on the left, though, are seen as siding with the out-group. And that’s because…well, because they often do side with the out-group. There’s a long history of far leftists siding with the Soviet Union, Cuba, or — more recently — Hamas. There is currently a dialogue on Twitter about a crazy woman taking a dump on a New York subway train, and a small number of people are siding with the subway pooper — some folks will do anything except take society’s side. This orientation is rightly seen as anti-social, and it’s hard to win people over when your message to those people is “you are the absolute worst."

... [I]f Democrats think that Republicans’ mindless tribalism means they can engage in mindless tribalism of their own, I think they should think a little harder about who makes up the “tribe” in question.

I don't know if he's right, but I believe he might be. And I don't know if his prescription is right, either, but I believe it might not be.

This primary season will be interesting, that's for sure. Will we field candidates who voters will actually elect? We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity here. I will be furious if we squander it.