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Joe Biden Joins Crowded Primaries
Today we learned that this dude is again running for president.
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In his campaign launch video Joe Biden waxes about the "core values of America" but makes zero political proposals. He claims:
Our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake. That's why today I'm announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.
The last time Joe Biden attempted to run, he claimed that he was motivated by his son Beau's dying wish for him to become president. Biden 'leaked' that 'dying wish' himself and the details of the 'dying wish' story changed over time.
There are now 20 Democrats running in the primaries for the 2020 presidential election. Only a few of them have the potential to beat Trump.
Biden is not one of them. His biggest strength is that his well known. It is also his biggest weakness. Biden is beholden to Wall Street, supported the Iraq war resolution (vid) and the Ukrainian fascists. His speeches are full of platitudes and balderdash. Biden has no new political program. His sole point is get rid of President Trump.
There are number of 'new' Obama like Democrats running, Robert Francis O'Rourke, aka Beto, and Pete Buttigieg of whom we are warned. Another type are the known 'centrists' – Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar. There are also a number of nonames with no chances to win. Most of them fall into the centrist/bipartisan category.
Unfortunately the Democrats handed Trump the gift of Russiagate. For more than two years they fought him on those grounds. They lost the fight when the Mueller investigation absolved Trump. The false accusations against him will become a major campaign issue. Trump will use the issue to enrage his base. He will say that it was unjust to accuse him of being a Russian stooge. Many people will agree with him if only on that point.
The fight against Trump can not be won in the center. Turnout will be the key factor. Without strong progressive positions the turnout in the general election for any Democratic candidate will be too low to win.
Three candidates fit that corner.
Elizabeth Warren has good progressive ideas. Unfortunately her personality is as likable as Hillary Clinton's. She does not connect emotionally and is difficult to sell.
Bernie Sanders may well have the best chance to beat Trump on domestic policies. But he is no progressive on foreign policy issues.
Tulsi Gabbard has the best overall program but the media ignore her and the Democratic Party establishment is strongly against her. She has no chance to win the primaries.
A Sanders/Gabbard ticket in the general election is one I probably could support. Would it be strong enough to beat Trump?
Oh, can’t you just feel the excitement?
If he were the candidate, we’d watch two Pentagon-adoring old men slugging it out. Two who never have a bad word to say about all the killing and maiming and creating desperate refugees.
And they both embrace CIA dirty operations. Biden was the one who convinced Obama to start America’s industrial-scale extrajudicial killing program in which someone’s name is put on a “kill list” by an anonymous CIA thug, and the person listed is afterwards incinerated by a missile controlled by another CIA thug playing real-life computer games in a secret basement or warehouse.
The regard for rule of law is just touching. As is the humanity.
Smiles mean nothing. Biden has a big one, but then that is almost characteristic of psychopaths. Obama, who bombed everyday somewhere for eight solid years and undoubtedly killed hundreds of thousands, has a boyishly charming one.
And two such genuinely sleazy individuals to boot, Biden and Trump. Although I do think Trump clearly leads in that quality.
By the way, it would be the first time that two men who have had hair transplants ran against each other (Biden got a new front hairline a couple of decades ago).
American politics really is about that meaningful.
Just a further word on sleaze.
Biden has a pretty sleazy record., including, when he was VP, going over to Ukraine to tell the government what to do and to seek concessions benefitting his son’s finances.
Trump’s entire career, of course, features sleaze, from working overtime to avoid paying taxes and cheating the folks who bought into many of his projects to cheating on his wife.
Class, all the way, that’s the way they do things in America.
Further information for those who think Biden’s a nice, harmless old guy.
Two items from his voting record.
He supported legislation for an amendment that would allow the individual states to overturn Roe vs Wade on abortion.
He supported legislation that was regarded by the NRA as having saved peoples’ gun rights.
I also watched the hearing over charges by law clerk Anita Hill against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991. Biden presided because he was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Biden’s handling of the hearing was dreadful, and I’ve since had a low opinion of him.
Anita Hill was a credible, calm, and well-spoken witness. But under Biden, she was put through ugly and embarrassing questioning. Anita Hill was treated as wrong-doer rather than as witness against one, nominee Clarence Thomas. It was Joe Biden rushing to save the Washington establishment from embarrassment over a poor Supreme Court nomination.
He ain’t quite what a lot of people think he is.
Just as with Obama, big smiles can be so deceptive.
Trump is indeed man of “no class.”
But do we call it “class” for America to have bombed its way through the Middle East over the last fifteen years, killing a good two million people and creating armies of desperate refugees? Overthrowing democratic governments? Running an extrajudicial killing operation on an industrial scale?
In some bizarre fashion, Trump is an almost perfect President for America, a perfect symbol of its violence and crassness, and proud of it.
Tulsi Gabbard is most appealing American politician to come along in a long time.
Not extreme enough in social/economic matters to be rejected automatically by the bulk of Americans, who are, in fact, very conservative and tradition-bound. Yet offering serious thoughts and efforts about peace.
And the courage to have actually done so basic a thing as talk to people in “the West’s” deliberately created hell of Syria.
And she even comes “packaged” as a veteran.
She would be hard to dream up. The more predictable political challenger types in America are represented by Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, both about as inauthentic as true liberals as it comes. Bone-marrow establishment, both of them.
But her chance of having any impact on the ferocious face of war America displays to the world literally is zero.
The size and resources of America’s war party are almost beyond comprehension.
Were by some miracle she to become the candidate of the Democratic Party, either of two destinies would await her.
First, the Obama destiny, where a sometimes sandal-wearing young man bravely eschews the de rigueur American flag lapel pin during his campaign but ends up bombing people for every day of his eight years and indeed ends up adopting the dumb American flag lapel pin.
Or, second, the Kennedy destiny where a man who genuinely did threaten aspects of the American death machine left a fair part of his head splattered across a street in Dallas.
Anything else is just fantasy.
These are very powerful and devious people running the show in America. Anyone with her views on their wars would quickly be made to feel as embattled and threatened as President Maduro.
They’ll let someone like Gabbard speak for a while to reinforce the happy notion that America is somehow something that it’s not. After all, that’s what the press busies itself doing twenty-four hours a day.
But to actually take power and use it for peace? That’s like expecting a miracle. And I have it on good authority that miracles never extend beyond the confines of a sweet childish imagination.
Warren is a phony.
Truly among the worst, and America produces so many of them. After all, it is the native land of P. T. Barnum.
Posted by: JOHN CHUCKMAN | Apr 26 2019 22:35 utc | 164
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