Can former Vice-President O’Biden defeat Donald Trump in November 2020?  We will see, it appears.   He recently urged voters to go out, wait on long lines and cast votes for him in primaries held during nationwide public closures to slow the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic.   Biden and the DNC want to sew the Biden nomination up and end the debate and disunity among Democrats, plague be damned!   If you’re healthy, Biden idiotically tweeted, you have nothing to fear.   Go out and vote!

We are four months from the Democratic National Convention in July, twice as far from the actual presidential election.   What is the rush to anoint the chosen opponent to Trump without hearing the details of his actual policy positions?   No matter.  Would you rather have Biden or that Hitler-wannabe Trump?   No brainer! Shut this puppy down, say Biden’s surrogates, in the name of uniting to defeat Trump, the People have spoken!  

My fear is that this deeply flawed candidate with a compromising and anti-progressive policy record on many things [1] and a tendency to smoothly peddle untruths [2] will lose to an even more shamelessly proficient lying sack of shit.

This tweet summed up a lot in a few words:

On the other hand, like the oppressive and one-sided contracts we are all required to agree to when using any product or service (thank you, John Roberts), this substandard crap is the best we are fucking entitled to.   Get used to it, because well-paid people who know much better will always decide what is best for us in a corporately controlled democracy.  

That’d said, when the time comes, obviously, we all have to hold our noses and vote to support whichever corporately sponsored candidate runs against Trump.

If Trump winds up beating Biden like a drum next November, or even ekes out a surgical 10,000 vote, Facebook-algorithm-assisted Electoral College mandate, you may begin to think of history differently.   A brutal loop, that, with small variations, plays forever in favor of the most ruthless among us.    

The beauty part?   There is nothing you can do about it, we are told over and over again, except be very afraid and vote for another, less toxic, idiot in hopes of safely returning to politics as usual.

[1]  Biden’s consistent pro-corporate work on bankruptcy, predatory credit card practices, support for the Saudi war in Yemen (world’s current number one humanitarian crisis– but good for American munitions makers and their shareholders), mass incarceration, The Crime Bill, Welfare Reform, taking repeated positions for freezing or cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.  

In addition, as a friend put it nicely, Biden is “dumb as a bag of rocks”.

[2] a short list of recent Biden lies:  his claim to have graduated in the top of his class in law school, 76th out of 85 — pretty close;  his repeated untrue story about being arrested in South Africa while visiting Mandela; his claim during the recent debate with Sanders that he can name all nine of Sanders’s Super PACs– when challenged by Sanders to do so he snorted “come on!” — he tends to laugh off direct, uncomfortable questions with that winning, affable bullshit artist smile of his.

Biden did not run, as I mistakenly wrote a week or two ago, for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, though one delegate loved him so much that a vote was cast for him at the 1984 convention.  In 1988 Biden “inadvertently” plagiarized a very fine speech by a British Labor Party politician (he wished afterwards that he’d simply added the guy’s name before passing off his quotes as his own).   He dropped out after the story broke, but got almost 1% of the delegates at the convention.

The Electable Mr. Biden’s 2008 run (from Wikipedia):

During the campaign, Biden focused on his plan to achieve political success in the Iraq War through a system of federalization. He touted his record in the Senate as the head of several congressional committees and experience in foreign policy. Despite a few notable endorsements, Biden failed to garner significant support in opinion polls, and was marred by controversial comments made while campaigning. He ultimately dropped out of the race on January 3, 2008, after coming in fifth place and capturing less than 1% of the vote in the Iowa caucus.^[4]

Of course, this is not 2008.  This is Germany in the fall of 1932.   Unlike the current president, Mr.Biden has given no indication that if he could, he would become Hitler.  Biden has not openly expressed hatred of any ethnic or religious group.   He is famous for his public affability, in stark contrast to the snarling psychopath who, during a frightening pandemic, is busily tweeting about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Benghazi, and his renewed determination to finally get to the truth about the most dangerous woman in America, outside of Rosie O’Donnell.    

Of course, we could do worse than Biden (Trump).   We also deserve better (any one of several of the other Democratic candidates).  The time will come, because the scales are heavily weighted in favor of corporate interests, whose voices speak infinitely louder than everybody else’s combined, when we will have to hold our noses and vote for this seemingly pleasant chap who has also authored and supported some hateful laws and policies (Crime Bill,  Welfare Reform, War in Iraq, et al).   That time is not yet.   At the very least, Biden needs to be pushed as far as possible from his smiling cooperation with former segregationists, his draconian positions toward poor people, his generally vague policy positions, his inability to apologize for something as grotesque as his part, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in allowing Anita Hill to be publicly humiliated and her testimony dismissed.

To me, Biden’s inability to apologize for not protecting Hill during the Clarence Thomas “high tech lynching” is the single most despicable thing about this affable, smiling man whose best friend was the coolest black dude to ever inhabit the White House.   Joe’s ready to challenge critics to fist fights, as he did last week while campaigning in a factory when someone questioned his commitment to the sacred Second Amendment.  Saying to Hill “I wish there was more I could have done”– when he was chairman of the committee whose members did their best to publicly humiliate and discredit the woman who came forward to testify about her sexual harassment at the hands of the Black Klansman, merits a swift shot in the kisser.

Of course, most politicians are self-aggrandizing scumbags, many are outright psychopaths, no question.   Still.   We deserve better than this guy, though, obviously, even he is way, way better than this unredeemed sicko we have there now.  When the time comes hopefully two out of three Americans will hold their noses and click Biden, rather than the immature, churlish man who has made America so great, for the chosen few, these last few years.  If Biden wins by 15,000,000 votes, it will make a statement.   Even if Trump’s quants once again game the Electoral College, this time by a total of say 8,000 votes in three key states (as opposed to his whopping 78,000 vote Electoral College mandate in 2016).   

Remember, boys and girls, there was a very good reason the final say of who will be the president was left to the wealthiest citizens.  Left up to the majority, the right of the richest to employ slave labor might have been in trouble decades before the Civil War!

Some tropes never go out of style.  If, for example, you in any way criticize the corrupt excesses of the largely unregulated “Free Market” and the political culture that enables them, most often you will be shouted down as a Communist, a Red, an apologist for the mass murders of Mao, Stalin, a defender of a failed ideology, an Un-American who hates our freedom.    It is an idiotically un-nuanced counter-attack to legitimate criticism of a power structure that openly favors the liberty of a few super-privileged individuals over the best interests, or even mere survival, of the vast majority of the earth’s population.   

You would think that an attack so simplistic, stupid and one-sided would simply stop working over time.  You’d be wrong to think that.   Some tropes never go out of style.   Check out Mike Bloomberg, a hideous modern-day avatar of the Eternal Jew of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example.    As despots have proved over and over, if an argument is made continually in the mass media, spoken by everyone, even some dissenters, and repeated in endless variations, the argument itself need not be particularly coherent to find itself on everyone’s lips.

The argument, for example, that Bernie Sanders could never be elected in America because he represents a vicious and failed extremist ideology that America finally defeated once and for all,  is advanced in sometimes subtle ways.

Here’s a nice one two punch from yesterday’s New York Times, often cited as the even-handed journal of record:

So, we can see now, reading the thoughtful, nuanced, authoritative account in the NY Times,  that really only desperate people, America’s biggest losers, cling to the appeal of this Democratic Socialist and his promises to continue fighting for greater justice for all.   Most reasonably successful people, of course, (and it goes without saying) will have a more nuanced view of what’s really  important in the upcoming existential battle to unseat President Caligula.   They all know that “moderation” is the only way to defeat an “immoderate” presdient.   

As for Sanders’ call for paid health care as a human right for all Americans (including those hopeless desperados who are his loyal base) ?  The New York Times has that one covered too — won’t happen, forget about it, losers:

The great Jeremy Scahill lays out, with great clarity, how Red Baiting works and how it’s being used against the Sanders campaign, here   in less than ten minutes.   Very much worth taking in.

I would weep for my country, but I’m too busy creating new dance grooves on my tenor ukulele and channeling the spirit of the martyred saint of the fucking First Amendment ,Mr. Lenny Bruce…