We Can’t Abide Biden
My brother and I were original contributors to The Huffington Post. It was an era when a writer could blog some thoughts and, based on the number of responses from readers, spend an entire day directly ahead of Norman Mailer atop that paperless page.
Those days (and Norman) are long gone. In today’s rigidly manicured media landscape of intentional point-missing it is easy to feel as if one’s words aren’t sculpting a microscopic shrub of a difference, and to grow despondent amid the endless vistas of inessential inanity.
But the fallout from the CNN Debate has given me an I-Told-You-So opportunity I am far too immodest not to seize. This piece was published by CounterPunch on December 1st! exploring what might happen should Biden insist on living. And unlike Joe’s poll numbers, it still holds up.
Events are moving rapidly now, but I hope you’ll join me in reveling in the chaos and vituperation which a completely foreseeable political situation has produced within the Democratic Party.
To refer to Biden’s debate performance as “a bad night” is the moral equivalent of describing what happened when JFK’s motorcade made the turn onto Dealey Plaza as “a traffic snafu”. A presidency imploded in front of viewers eyes, splattering fragments of the rationale for Joe to continue his quest all over a nation’s consciousness.
Biden faced three consistent problems when attempting to articulate his case: He couldn’t open his mouth, make sentences come out of it, or fully close it.
What’s more, from a purely political perspective Trump’s performance was excellent. He lied continually and effortlessly and forcefully while completely ignoring any question he didn’t want to answer. He even managed to appear benevolent when viciously snarled at by his opponent over some affront to Biden Family honor.
True to form, the excuses now being tossed around for Joe’s performance by Team Biden and its assorted Cable News and governmental lickspittles are enough to make an impartial observer pick up Occam’s Razor and slit their own throat with it.
He had a cold. He was overprepared. He was on the wrong side of the stage for a favorable camera angle. The debate should’ve started at noon because he’s at his best from 10 to 4. Aides put makeup over his natural suntan making him look pallid. And my personal favorite – everything is ok because he was coherent THE NEXT DAY!
The truth is Joe Biden is not merely old but sporadically incapacitated to a previously unacknowledged degree. What he and Dr. Jill (between fashion shoots) are demanding isn’t four more years but the right for him to die in office. And getting either of them to acknowledge that reality will be as complicated and emotionally fraught as asking your elderly parent to sign over the house for a dollar.
As should be clear, I am not one of those writing more in sorrow than anger at the pressing need for the President not to let the door hit him in his self-reverential ass. I truly believe that Joe Biden, who spent a political lifetime humiliating the powerless, deserves to go out as humiliatingly as possible.
In 2020, Biden sold himself to the electorate as a bridge. Yet what his re-election campaign has proven itself to be is as ill-conceived and hastily erected as his pier. And if I had the power I’d cast him adrift on a wave-battered shard of that shambolic Gazan edifice. Let him cling to a palette of rancid flour and spend his last moments on earth from the perspective of a Palestinian parent. Let him watch shrapnel from American bombs slice his loved ones to ribbons before his eyes. Let him struggle and scream over the bloated corpses of his grandchildren til the weight of the depravity he’s willingly enabled sucks him down to richly deserved oblivion.
Yet my personal views aside, can anyone tell me how this gets better for anyone? I’m not talking about the Blue-No-Matter-Who loyalists who probably still feel all will be well once The Mueller Report comes out. I’m talking about young people and Blacks and Latinos who voted for Biden in ‘20 little realizing how much power they were bestowing on the House Parliamentarian.
And let’s say donors somehow become reassured enough to keep the money flowing. Has anyone glanced at a calendar for July 24? On that day Benjamin Netanyahu struts to the dais before a joint session of Congress. Do the Democrats have any idea how they’re going to handle that? Will Kamala Harris be sitting there smiling? Will she at least applaud theatrically and maybe rip a few bits of paper? What of Jeffries and Schumer? Will AIPAC allow them not to cheer?
Of course, if President Bernard Sanders was wrapping up his second term of office none of this would be a reality. But then avoiding any possibility of a Progressive reality has been the literal essence of the Democratic Party these last years.
Yet are the leaders of that Party really going to attempt to save democracy by disallowing an open convention? If they manage to pull that off then I guess Biden was right about the United States Of America…there really is nothing we can’t do.
The post We Can’t Abide Biden appeared first on CounterPunch.org.