I can't possibly find a thing to disagree with this piece the estimable Charles Pierce posted the other day.
Joe Biden kicked up a fuss the other day by saying something...un-smart. (Ex-tree! Ex-tree! Read allaboutit!) He suggested that the current president* is a historical one-off and that, once we are rid of him and have fumigated the White House thoroughly, the normal routine of governing the country will resume and everybody can have drinks with each other at the end of the day. If there is one issue that desperately needs litigating in the Democratic Party's primary process it is this:
Resolved: this presidency* is the logical outcome of 40 years of modern conservatism and its effect on the Republican Party. If it wasn't this guy, it would've been somebody else.
It is pointless for any Democratic candidate to run for any office without acknowledging this fact. We've been banging this tin drum around the shebeen here since it opened, but not enough people have embraced the truth of it. (An aside: I really like some of my Never Trump brethren, but they should go back to their own party and clean out the stables. During an election year, and especially during the Democratic primaries, as far as I'm concerned, they all can take a seat.) The problem is the party, and what it's become.
It is just one of the many things that is wrong with Joe Biden and, to tell you the truth, Barack Obama than that they yearned for a normalized status quo of the kind that has been in place their entire careers in public office. I disagree with Pierce that . . . I'll use his description of the guys Joe Biden wants to have drinks with . . .
A party that embraced Ronald Reagan was always going to produce a Donald Trump.
The party is the problem, because of what it's become—a vehicle for bigotry, religious fanaticism, rigged elections, retrograde social policies, renegade plutocracy, staggering wealth inequality, scientific ignorance, reflexive stupidity, violent populism, white supremacy, and a view of the American electorate that is all switch and no bait. (Did I miss anything?)
Three times since 1981, the Republicans have produced a president who basically embodied all of these things, just to varying degrees. Ronald Reagan played fast and loose with the truth; is that business about trees causing air pollution really any nuttier than whatever it was that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago tweeted at 5 a.m. this morning? George W. Bush launched a war on false pretenses and made this a nation that tortures people and is proud of it. Is that any better than what's going on at the border now? The question isn't how the Republicans produced this particular disaster of a president*. The question is what took them so long.
Correctly, Charles Pierce points out the part that Democrats like Biden and, though he doesn't say it I will, even more so Barack Obama, have played in aiding the Republicans in all of their florid corruption, corruption to the point of saturation and superfluidity.
I disagree with his timeline in producing that accommodation with corporate fascism and the part that Democrats or, more to the point, secular liberals have played in that. The production of Reagan was, as with Trump primarily a product of the American media freed by the Supreme Court to lie us into, first Nixon, and only then Reagan - our first 100% media created president*. But his conclusion as to why the last thing Democrats need is another idiot who will seek some accomodation with these fucking fascists is spot on.
There was always less to Joe Biden than met the TV camera, his leadership of the putrid Senate Judiciary Committee couldn't hide that fact even from television, though the media only picked up on that retrospectively, two decades and more after the fact. Barack Obama choosing him as his VP only increased my skepticism that the golden-boy, Obama had what was needed to take the disaster of Bush II and use it to destroy Republican fascism.
It's one of the few things other than his relative youth that gives me pause about Pete Buttigieg that I'm afraid he might share some of that underestimate of the total depravity of the current Republican Party, Obama's futile gesture of "bipartisanship" that wasted so much of the opportunity that Democrats and Independent voters gave him in 2008 has made me allergic to Democrats who say things in that line.
Joe Biden is down with the Tulsi Gabbards of the ridiculously huge Democratic pack in what they will do for Democrats if they are elected. I don't think Biden will be elected, I think the media and the push-pollsters are pushing him because they know Trump would likely get in when Biden, as he always does, says or does something stupid. If, by some miracle Biden beats Trump, he will screw the Democratic base and he'll do it in the most annoying way. Biden's alleged appeal to conservative white men is largely a media myth, it certainly didn't attract them in large numbers to support Obama. Biden's political strategy is based on the seriously flawed assumption that real liberals will vote for him because they have to so he will never, ever put himself at risk in promoting our interests. He buys into his mythical concept of a "blue collar middle-aged white man" and that that is the constituency that he will service as much as he did the financial industry he represented in his entire Congressional career.
Obama's greatest political legacy would seem to be that his personal success led to a huge resurgence of racism in the United States. If he didn't know that's how the Republican-fascists were going to use his race, he was the biggest idiot in the country. He certainly should have learned that as they had been doing that from even before he took the office, he should have known that was what they'd make of him. He should have known it before he took the oath the first time, I doubt that he'd act as if he did if HE won in 2020. That backlash has destroyed almost everything that he can lay any claim to. The one thing that remains, for now, the remnants of the ACA as crippled by the Roberts court, was actually something he wanted to throw the towel in after the 2010 backlash election. I will never stop pointing out that it was Nancy Pelosi who forced Obama and Harry Reid into passing it. He was mighty unwilling to spend his political capital in making it something far more unassailable, putting the screws to the quisling Joe Lieberman and quisling Democrats instead of pissing away his captal going for the votes of Collins and Snowe. Biden - who was allegedly there to rally his fellow Democratic and Democratic In Name Only Senators - sure as hell didn't press them hard enough to matter much.
Biden's idiotic recently resurfaced 2015 statement about liking Dick Cheney, the king pin of Republican fascism is only the tip of the iceberg that could surface, Biden is gifted at saying extremely stupid things, especially when he's trying to give an appearance of Senatorial politeness and courtesy and comity. We don't need that crap, it's what made Barack Obama a failed president who, like the previous failed Democratic president, managed to get elected to two terms. If Obama had been the president he had promised he would be, there would be no Trump, there would likely have been no 2010 disaster which we are still living through.
Hillary Clinton had my support in both 2008 and 2016 because I was pretty sure she'd learned something from her husband's wasted presidency and she wouldn't have been the Republicans' punching bag without striking back. In 2008 one of my major misgivings about Obama was his lack of experience, the other was how Republicans said they found him someone they could work with. The last thing we need is Joe Biden's kissing up to Republicans, which has been his practice since he was in the Senate and letting scum like Orin Hatch and Arlen Specter trash Anita Hill to put the pathological anti-black racist Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. I would hope that we see a lot more of that real Joe Biden before it's too late when the idiotic Iowa caucuses happen. Fucking caucuses, we can't even manage to get rid of that anti-democratic 19th century atrocity! The best thing Biden could do is knock out Sanders and then fail himself, leaving the way for the possibility of a modern Democrat to win, one who will reflect who the party is. And I don't mean any of the white men who are running though some of them are certainly better than Biden,
Pete Buttigieg might be a great president someday, when he's got a bit more experience and understands that his success will depend on a majority constructed of Black Women and Men, Latinos, Women in general, even genuinely liberal white men, the real and dependable Democratic voters and the kind of Independent voters who will vote with us. Appealing for cross overs from the imaginary stock figure of Joe Six-Pack might get someone the nomination, it might even fuel an aspirational West Wing archetype like Obama into winning the election. But trying to do business with Hitler has never been a good strategy for avoiding disaster. We can't afford one who will yearn for CNN to call him a "bipartisan" president. If he wants to be that he should run for the Bipartisan Party's nomination.
* Given that, and my skepticism that even a Charles Pierce will face the fact that it is the indulgence given to his profession by the high priests in black robes that has gotten us where we are today, I think that even his excellent piece, so right but yet so wrong because it doesn't go to the root of the problem, will not get us there.
The problem is that the Federalist fascists and their fellow rent boys of billionaires are smart enough to profit from that free-press absolutist idiocy, rulings that profited, mostly, the corporate media and its owners. It is the media that created both Reagan and Trump.
I'm done with "Joe Six-Pack. Raw Story ran an article about die-hard Trump supporters who like him because they think Trump is punching people in the face (the idea that a coward like Trump would even speak harshly to someone not in his employ is laughable). And NPR ran a story about farmers still supporting Trump despite the fact his tariffs are driving them to bankruptcy.
ReplyDeleteThe "salt of the earth" have some real idiots in their ranks. Nothing new there, but giving them authority in the electorate is too damned much. They really don't speak for anyone but their own blinkered idiocy.
"Reflexive stupidity and violent ignorance" is no way to run a country.
And since the primaries don't start until next year, we're a long way from deciding who's already won. I don't think Biden will sustain the interest of the younger voters who will be turning out next spring.
I heard that NPR piece. I wondered if they had approached people who had seen through Trump but didn't choose to put them on the radio because they didn't fit their desired narrative. I think that a lot of, especially, TV and radio "journalism" is geared to finding what will fit the desired narrative. NPR couldn't possibly be so good at finding those kinds of idiots, missing the large numbers of those who don't fit their theme by chance.
DeleteI think it was back in the Reagan administration that I figured out the role that sheer laziness plays in so much of "journalism" especially the crap that replaced actual researching and reporting of fact as the "free press" regime took hold.
I really think Biden's candidacy would be about as huge a disaster as a Sanders candidacy, though I think Sanders is more likely to repeat the same lefty wet dream disaster that McGovern's was - if not worse, I've seen Sanders, he's no George McGovern who had the intelligence to note what a mistake his candidacy was for the left. Biden might do better than Mondale did, but not by much. He's the Democratic past, and by that I don't mean back when Democrats regularly controlled the Congress and sometimes won the presidency. He's the Democrats in the wilderness past, not even the Clinton-Obama past.