Republican's don't need experience or even sentience to do the evil they intend.
THE GREATEST EX-PRESIDENT in the history of the United States is, indisputably a toss-up between Jimmy Carter and John Quincy Adams. Adams for his career in the House of Representatives, a champion of abolition, Jimmy Carter for many more years doing so much in so many ways. I was not enthusiastic for Carter as President but there is no ex-politician whose work I admire more, now. Of all of those who lived after their presidency, those two have done the most with the rest of their lives. Neither of them were, notably, successful as president. John Quincy Adams' attainment of the presidency was marred by the sleaziness that is inevitably to be had when the goddamned atrocity of the Electoral College comes into play and the opposition to Northern presidents by the united slave power. Jimmy Carter's presidency was a victim of a number of factors, not least among those is the constant hostility to Democrats by big media and small. The use of demeaning stereotypes of Southerners was, ironically, one of the things that especially the DC and NYC based media used against him. Some of that certainly figured into the hostility to Bill Clinton and held over to Hillary Clinton, though she was hardly a Southerner. I've always wondered what the Sulzbergers had it in for them over. Probably something as petty as that.
He, like other Governors who have not worked before in Washington, made bad choices in staffing and appointments, more in line with being ineffective. The Washington establishment doesn't play well with outsiders and the outsiders are seldom equipped to assert themselves. Carter was certainly a victim of the always unrealistic demands of the left of the Democratic Party and, as is so often the case since 1960, the Kennedy myth. In the end I think what really did him in was being gamed by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller who gulled him into letting the deposed Shah of Iran into the country, which, of course, set off the hostage crisis that effectively ended any hopes of Carter winning the election of 1980, ushering in the most criminal administration by numbers convicted till to day, the Hollywood created Ronald Reagan who both the DC establishment and big media adored because he gave the rich so much as he shafted the middle-class and the poor. There is nothing the "liberal media" adores as much as they do someone who will redistribute wealth upward, those who aren't all in on that can be counted on to either follow the corporate line to their own advantage or to disdain anything like effective administration by a truly progressive president. We can see both of those at work on Joe Biden, the most effective Democratic President since LBJ, though unlike LBJ he managed to pull out of a hopeless war instead of getting mired in the one his predecessors set up as destroyed the great deliverer of equality and economic justice in 1968, leading to the previously most criminal president in American history, Richard Nixon.
I have come to truly despise the racket that journalism is, though its necessity is an admitted reality. It was that would-be, self-promoted alternative to corporate media that did so much to open my eyes as to the reality of self-seeking and corrupt journalism, National Public Radio when I noticed the abrupt change of tone between the coverage of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the beginning of when I came to regret all those donations I'd made to "public" radio. After that it was other "alternative" organs of the media which I saw may not have been corrupted by corporate largess, as NPR and PBS certainly were, but which were as counterproductive in their unrealism. The more idealistic they pretend to be, the sooner they cave.
The Progressive magazine was the first subscription I dropped largely out of a realization that it was pretty useless in terms of realistic political action. That massive asshole, the self-righteous Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff played an enormous part in my disillusionment with the Madison Wisconsin alleged radical POV. I knew Hentoff was an a-hole before saying Hentoff was an a-hole was cool. When he went to work for the fascist-right it didn't surprise me, I'd already identified that as a certain feature of the, especially, Marxist "left" in the neo-conservatives. In the years since I've been online and have looked ad depth into the archived publications of the Marxists and near-Marxist "left" and seen how many of them sold out, some of them for their profit and as a boon to their careers in journalism. I have, as well, due to reading more of the primary material than was ever available to me before, come to believe that any determined secular, atheist, materialist ideological orientation will eventually, in more ways than one, destroy the actual left of radical redistribution of material wellbeing equally. There was not any Communist subjected to that legendary martyrdom of red-scare blacklisting who I know of who was not all in on supporting one or another of the greatest enslavers, oppressors and mass murderers in human history. Though there were some non-communist lefties who got unjustly sucked into that due to their unwise and naive association to actual Stalinists and Trotsyites and, later Maoists, though Hollywood legend and published myth of the passion of the commies had made such targeting more informal and less an aspect of House Committee show hearings than in the low point of HUAC.
Other organs of the "alternative" lefty media to disillusion me similarly were The Nation magazine, especially after it was bought out by it current owner, and In These Times. While there are certainly some good people who wrote and still write for all of those, the history of those publications and their current in-house ideologies have been a boon for the Republican-fascists. The ideology of "free speech-press" absolutism" is one of the worst of those among those who work in the media, especially those who claim to be lefties who support equality. Holding that someone, especially in the mass media has "a right to lie" is a certain basis for fascism to win. Media corporations, like all corporations, will, eventually prove to be anti-egalitarian and if not explicitly so, will demand abstract principals of corporate equality and professional privilege that will redound to the benefit of those with money and, so, power.
All of this is to get to the current media campaign to destroy Joe Biden's hopes of reelections and, with that, the hopes for any kind of real democracy to survive in the United States, certainly any hope of doing what he has done more than any Democratic president since LBJ, making real progress towards economic and legal equality.
There is a lesson in the history of Democratic presidencies in the post-WWII period. Truman was an old Washington hand and won election after his first term in the wake of FDR's death. Kennedy was sold as young and vigorous and was killed in office. I think with him you have to put his brother Robert Kennedy whose nepotistic appointment as Attorney General is something which has never been adequately subjected to critical evaluation but which, the more I read about it, a mixed benefit to the country. His central set of Harvard boy advisors is, as well, something that needs to be looked at harder and longer than the Ivy League set who has been in charge of doing that has ever given it. Robert Kennedy's hatred and, especially, disdain for LBJ had no small hand in sandbagging LBJ's presidency in the aftermath of JFK's assassination and one of the biggest landslide victories over the racist, nuclear-war fantasist Barry Goldwater.
LBJ was another old Washington hand and a Texas politician. Admittedly that almost certainly guaranteed a history of corruption (certain states are endemically corrupt, it would seem) BUT AS PRESIDENT THERE IS NO ONE ELSE APART FROM FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WHO DID MORE TO PROMOTE EQUALITY UNTIL JOE BIDEN. I will repeat that the high point of the egalitarian-democratic traditional American liberalism that is in so many ways the opposite of "classical liberalism" came in the early years of the Johnson presidency when the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid and a host of other such programs became the law of the land. There is no other President in the post-WWII period who did more to further the promises of the Declaration of Independence than that old, crude, vulgar Texan. Though the involvement in Vietnam is believed to have done in his presidency, RFJ having gone from an anti-communist member of Joe McCarthy's red-hunting staff to the AG in his brother's anti-communist presidency which entangled the country into the war in Vietnam, suddenly discovered he was really a peace-dove and an anti-war campaigner - once Senator Eugene McCarthy showed how vulnerable Lyndon Johnson was by almost winning the New Hampshire primary. Gene McCarthy's post-senatorial career as an enemy of the Democratic Party is another example of how the "left" has been anything but an effective and reliable force in fighting against our indigenous American fascism which in the same period became the bulwark of the Republican, now Republican-fascist party.
After that there were the presidencies of three young Democrats, all of them promoting their candidacies on the basis of their inexperience in Washington, Carter and Bill Clinton and in Barack Obama's case his youth and vigor, all of them in some ways trying to go for a repeat of the "Camelot" Kennedy cultism that was the basis of John Kennedy's candidacy and administration. Clinton and Obama managed to get reelected in no small part due to their opponents being rather ineffective. I remember someone saying it was his luck that Republicans nominated Bob Dole, someone that no one outside of Kansas liked. Clinton made some of the same mistakes Carter did in bringing his staff and friends from his Governorship with him, where they were ineffective and at times embarrassing, though none of the many more embarrassing than Clinton who, as the late Molly Ivins said, we had a right to expect he'd keep his fly zipped. His ineffectiveness as a Democratic President and an inept politician was on full display as Republicans and the mass media attacked him and his staff and made him a far less effective president than he could have been. I used to say he was probably the smartest man to have been president till that time but one of the least wise. His idiotic behavior during Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 certainly had a hand in her Electoral College loss to the worst man to have ever been elected president, Trump. I will never forgive his meeting with the Attorney General as Hillary was under investigation, an investigation that about ran out before he pulled that grotesquely irresponsible stunt. I blame the AG as much as I blame him for it, she should have known better. I could go into other problems such as his appointment of the beyond her abilities Janet Reno as Attorney General and others.
Barack Obama's two years in the Senate were an even slimmer Washington experience than John Kennedy's and it showed. No Democrat since Johnson in 1964 had a better hand dealt to them by the voters and no Democrat has wasted more of what he was given than Obama. His one big accomplishment, The American Healthcare Act was in every way more an achievement of Nancy Pelosi who, when Obama and Harry Reid were ready to throw in the towel, insisted on it being passed. Obama idiotically traded things away on the insanely stupid hopes of being crowned "a bipartisan" president by the national media to lying Republican frauds like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, he did that often enough that I came to believe it was an excuse for him not delivering what his own supporters wanted. Democrats and the country paid a huge amount for Obama's futile attempt to get the love and respect of the people he obviously valued most, Republicans. Many of his appointments were good but some of them were extremely bad, the corporate "Democrat" Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff one of the worst. A lot of the good he achieved was through his choice of Joe Biden as Vice President, providing him with the long years of Washington experience that he didn't have and Hillary Clinton who, by that time, had put in the years of learning the ropes that neither Obama or Bill Clinton had.
Joe Biden is under attack for the thing which has made him a more effective president in his first term than either Clinton or Obama was in their two terms or Jimmy Carter was in his one. Just as Lyndon Johnson was a far more effective president, especially early in his presidency than JFK was early in his. I will note that one thing about them, unlike Kennedy, Clinton and Obama, neither of them were a product of the Ivy League level of academic credentialing, the Ivy League level universities and colleges seeming to more often than not be factories for producing anti-democratic gangsters than public servants.
But most of all I think the success of Biden and Johnson WAS A PRODUCT OF THEIR LONG EXPERIENCE, EXPERIENCE WHICH DOES NOT COME WITHOUT AGE. The fetish of youthful presidencies, the Kennedy mystique and all that rot has certainly not worked to produce good Democratic presidencies. When your motives are as corrupt as those of a Reagan (not a Washington insider) George H.W. Bush (a corrupt DC insider and corporate gangster) his son the youngish Supreme Court appointed BUSH II and, like Reagan a governor without much work in DC, you don't need the experience because they weren't working against the corrupt machinery of both the mass media, corporate criminal operations, the political corruption that is endemic at all levels of our politics and, especially, as elevated to ersatz sanctity by that most corrupt organ of our federal government, the Supreme Court.
To promote equality, justice, ECONOMIC JUSTICE MOST OF ALL, you need a real Democrat who has long years of experience working among the gangsters and crooks and who know how to work things. That won't come without blemishes and scars, Lord knows I used to be critical of Joe Biden for what he did in the Senate at times and I was very skeptical of his ability to win the election and do things. But, as I pointed out, the Black Women of South Carolina knew better than I did. He has won me over as his presidency has gone on, not lost me like the others did. He got us out of the hopeless, unwinnable quagmire of Afghanistan that Bush II got us into and which neither Obama nor Trump got us out of. I will not forget that Biden first went to Washington as an opponent of the War in Vietnam, I think the lessons he'd learned by the time he got to that seat of corruption bore fruit as he refused to go back on Trump's irresponsibly set deadline for pulling out of Afghanistan, though he certainly knew he would take a hit for how it happened and he bravely pulled out of that hopeless mess. He did what Johnson was gulled by the Harvard Boys into not doing. And don't believe for a second that any mainstream organ of journalism would slam Trump for the even worse consequences of holding to his deadline, that's something they only do when it's a Democrat.
I will never again be supporting a "youthful" Democrat of little Washington experience. I don't ever want another Democratic governor to figure they can do what they might have done in their state to the country because unless it's some kind of Republican corruption, such as Reagan and Bush II committed there and expanded in DC, it won't happen. It takes an old Washington hand to make the kind of change that Democrats need and so many others hope for. It won't be someone who is endorsed by the lefty magazines or sites because they're too busy preening in their lifetime extension of the collegiate experience or trying to relive the romance of the hopeless cause of the Marxists or imagining themselves as extras in some red-scare era movie or show. I'm done with all of that, they were never really in it for real equality or real economic justice or anything real. I looked at their sites recently and found out their heads are still stuck up the same asses they were in 1968 and, reading the archives online, the left has had its head stuck up since Victor Berger was being disdained as a "sewer socialist".
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GIVEN THAT IT IS STILL THE RELIABLE ENGINE OF FASCIST MANIPULATION and attaining illegitimate power, that the Electoral College is not being attacked with full force in order to abolish it has to be a conclusive symptom of our own failure to protect democracy and its benefits. Every voice that is not constantly raised against it, pointing out how Trump and Trumpist Republican-fascism, the Bush II crime spree and Republican-fascism in general openly relies on gaming it with the help of billionaire gangsters domestic and among foreign dictators is a voice that is selling out democracy by default.
Any political commentator who is not attacking that slave-power imposed atrocity on our political system is a traitor to egalitarian democracy, the cannot even be held to be a supporter of what we traditionally consider to be American democracy. The Electoral College is among the central corruptions of our system, that along with the anti-democratically structured Senate and the massive corruption inherent in the way the Supreme Court is structured are things that no real supporter of egalitarian democracy could possibly ignore as clear and present dangers. That it will be hard to get rid of it is no excuse to attack it now and constantly until it is either made ineffective by state laws that respect the national majority vote or by its abolition in favor of direct election of the president. The Trump scheme worked out by "constitutional scholars," no doubt an off-shoot of such Ivy League fascist schemes as the "unitary executive," could never have been tried if the Electoral College was not there as an opportunity of corruption. It has worked twice since 2000 to impose Bush II and Trump, it was the basis of the scheme to steal the 2020 election. Its got to be destroyed or American democracy will fail and real, egalitarian democracy will not ever happen here.
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