Sarah Sanders roasted by hometown paper for 'word salad' SOTU response

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union Address was roundly slammed by Austin Bailey in an editorial for the Arkansas Times published on Wednesday.

"Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene might not have liked it much, but President Joe Biden exceeded expectations with his State of the Union address. Hecklers tried but failed to knock him off his game. His signature empathy infused the hour-plus speech, and at the end there was little doubt this 80-year-old man isn’t done yet," wrote Bailey. "As the celebratory afterparty rolled on in the U.S. House chamber, Gov. Sarah Sanders commandeered TV screens to darken the mood. Excerpts her office shared earlier in the day hinted Sanders’ speech would include her standard snarling about wokeness and the radical left. No surprises there."

Among other things, Sanders claimed that a "woke mob" was taking over the United States, and under Biden, "we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags and worship their false idols." She even claimed that when Trump was president, she sort of felt like she was in the military, when she wasn't.

The speech, wrote Bailey, was "a word salad of talking points and name calling, with some attempts at folksy relatability thrown in," that was "light on policy, heavy on menace."

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Bailey also criticized Sanders for claiming that Democrats started the culture wars when she "[launched a] skirmish against transgender people unprovoked," for championing the bravery of the Little Rock Nine while touting a school voucher program "all but guaranteed to worsen segregation in Arkansas schools along racial and socioeconomic lines," and for blaming Biden for drug crises around the country when "suffering families didn’t seem to bother her before."

Sanders' speech has been largely panned around the country, with MSNBC's Joe Scarborough calling it "dystopian," and Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt accusing her of "abusing" America.