Tim Murphy in Mother Jones declared Joe Biden to be one of the “Monsters”—rather than “Heroes”—of 2024, due to Biden’s belief after the 2022 mid-terms that only he could “save” the country, and his subsequent decision not to step down after one term turned out to be a disaster for the country. Democrats and liberal media types followed “the leader” and frustrated efforts to find primary challengers who polls suggested that “anyone” but Biden would defeat Donald Trump. By the time it was realized that people had allowed themselves to be fooled, it was too late.
Biden’s age and mental faculties were an issue even in 2020, but voters then saw him as a man who harkened back to an age of “civility.” But he had a difficult time in explaining his policy decisions in a coherent manner to allow people to believe that there was a “method” to his “madness”—just as MAGAmainiacs believed of Trump. And oh how people “forgot” that back in the day (like 40 years ago) Biden sometimes seemed like an adolescent clown who often “misspoke” on occasion. Years later his reputation was such that even Barack Obama had to “advise” him on occasion not to become an embarrassment to his election chances with his “word play.”
Considered a “moderate” voice during his political career (like we needed anymore of those), I remember seeing him in 1987 on campus at some function to get to know what young voters and potential supporters in the 1988 primary were thinking. I recall that Biden seemed to be exchanging good-natured barbs with students, like it was some sort of “game” of who could lob the best “barb.” Gary Hart was considered the leading Democratic candidate until he had woman trouble and dropped out.
Then it was Biden up next, but then came that plagiarism business that was embarrassing enough for Biden to step aside; the fact that it never came up again is probably testament to the fact that it was “small potatoes” compared to causing a violent insurrection. By the way, I voted for Jesse Jackson in the primary; I suspect that if he were white, that dull Dukakis wouldn’t have had a chance.
As Murphy pointed out, Democrats and their media supporters should have seen the writing on the wall long before Biden’s disastrous debate performance:
Biden only got more and more unpopular, and it was hard to separate the general public anxiety about his advancing age from the general national malaise that was bringing him down. The line from the Democrats was that there was something ageist and unfair about all of this—if you can do the job, you can do the job. That was a bit cynical: Biden’s own aides reportedly thought he could do his job best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and internal rumblings about his stamina dated back to the early months of the administration. The disastrous debate finally put an end to the facade, even if the complaints that this was all a vast media conspiracy persisted in some corners.
But Biden himself is most to blame, for insisting on staying on the shelf long after his “expiration date”:
It would perhaps be more forgivable if it were just denial. But Biden, who positioned himself as the defender of the nation’s “soul,” continued to act as though only he could win the election, when in reality, he was tanking the Democratic brand so severely that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to stage an intervention.
By continuing his conceit and
arrogance when he should have been honest with himself and thought of the
country instead of “saving” his “legacy”—which is now no more than a temporary
rest stop to “rethink” the Trump “legacy,” which many voters troubled
themselves little to do.Voters were bored with the Biden/Harris line about the past; that just came off as self-serving. The needed a new "voice" with a different take on what was wrong with a return to Trump, and how he would make things worse rather than "better."
Murphy goes on that “Biden did more than ease Trump’s path to victory; he was the apotheosis of an entire gerontocracy that brought us to this point.” Of course it was a habit of the Democratic Party to have “old line” members who thought only they could “save” the country from the moral and ethical criminality of the far-right. Of course it is difficult to blame them in this time of political and social narcissism and nihilism, and believe me I was “there” and a lot has changed in the national consciousness; heck, back in the day someone like Taylor Swift would have been considered a selfish bore left grasping for crumbs on the fringes of the music business.
Of course, some people just can’t accept the truth. Where I work there is a tenant in the building that believes that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the end-all, be-all in their world, but the “undefeated” couldn’t “defeat” death even though it was knocking at her door for decades, and as Murphy points out, “she declined to retire when Democrats could still replace her, and likely cemented several decades of right-wing dominance on the Supreme Court.” I think it is just odd how some people throw something into people’s faces when they don’t realize it only landed in their own.
As mentioned, there were polls that asserted that “anyone” but Biden would defeat Trump in this past election, even before that debate; his performance was so “bad,” that it allowed listeners to avoid the fact that the maniac he was debating told a well-practiced lie every time two words came out of his mouth. By the time Biden allowed himself to be “forced out,” there was no time to do anything but to accept Kamala Harris as next in line.
But Harris was too closely tied to Biden to be seen by the “fence-sitters” to be a legitimate alternative to what they saw as “wrong” with the Biden administration, even though that was a matter of opinion; things could have been a lot “worse” as had been predicted by many economists back in 2021. In reality, jobs and profits had grown, but lack of production of consumer goods and Trump’s ongoing tariffs kept prices high in the aftermath of the pandemic lockdowns.
But if people wanted an “alternative” to Biden/Harris, there just wasn’t the opportunity. There was literally months before the election and it was too late to conduct a proper primary. I suspect that if there had been an ad hoc debate and primary vote at the Democratic Convention, there would have been a very good chance that Harris would not have been selected. The Democrats needed a real “populist”—someone who could out-talk Trump with his/her own catchy verbiage, who would point out that Elon Musk and his friends were not their friends.
Musk seems to think he’s running the show, even as he is facing possible legal trouble for his questionable foreign dealings (say, with Putin) despite being given government contracts that expressly prohibit such contacts. Today we see that Musk is towing the billionaire corporate line that it is “OK” to be racist against brown-skinned people doing jobs nobody wants to do (because they have no “use” for them).
But it is “racist” to be against the other brown-skinned people brought in cheap by corporate billionaires to do the jobs the “natives” do want to do, but are considered too “stupid” to do, but in reality because of caste and cultural prejudices. This story 2 tells us that Google's "AI" is imputed with information on poverty in India by people who don't want you to know that much of the country. Theses images help define what "shit-hole" actually looks like because of these prejudices (this being Calcutta, the "black hole" of India):
Outside of possibly Haiti, no place in Latin America looks like that.
I admit that in Seattle, downtown and the SODO district look like they have seen better times, and that is true. Book, video and music stores no longer exist there; even the Elliot Bay Book Store moved out of Pioneer Square. The Amazon Effect is partly (maybe mostly) to blame, but as the Seattle Times pointed out, in the city where there are a lot of “tech” jobs—or rather telephone answering and data entry jobs—that constitutes almost a third of the office jobs in the city that are now “homework” jobs, the highest percentage in the country among “large cities.” “Stay at home” office workers are increasingly refusing calls to come back to the "office," the kind of thing that would get most people fired. From what I can see, even of those who “technically” are listed as “back to the office,” only a small percentage work for more than a day or two a week.
So what that means is that the lack of foot traffic by people with money is causing the downtown businesses to falter. If there were more people to shop, you wouldn’t even notice the bums and vagrants all that much, and the police would actually make an appearance once in a while. What I see in the front of the building I work in is drug-abuse out in the open—last week some guy keeled over on the sidewalk from an overdose, and probably would have been just ignored until he died had the security guard not called 9-1-1 just to get him out of the way.
And of course there are people with mental health issues or are just hanging around looking to fight someone to take out their frustrations on; I heard some yelling outside and looked out a window and saw some guying kicking someone laid out on the street, and the “victim” decided to he hadn’t had enough of that and followed the kicker to the next block, where he was laid out flat again.
Where are the police these days? “Back in the day,” it wasn’t in “Chinatown,” the sight of the worst mass shooting in Seattle’s history, the 1983 Wah Mee Massacre where 13 people were killed in an illegal gambling house. Police didn’t hang around there much because everything happened in “secret,” including Asian gang activity. Of course the community was in denial about the criminal element there, and was upset by all the media publicity about it.
But today the “Chinese” are mostly gone, and the International District is now called “Little Saigon” where the residents complain loudly enough about those “other” people that the SPD spend most of their time there doing occasional “round-ups” while elsewhere, as mentioned, illegal activity mostly occurs out in the open, which police are quite willing to allow, because people always need something to complain about.
But in a “liberal” city like Seattle, you count your blessings and feel “guilty” that you got a job even if it is below your education level. I’ve been living here for 34 years and have never been out of work for more than 2 weeks; when all looks the bleakest, temp agencies will take anyone who walks in the door to send to some place that the last people they sent there didn’t want to work.
Thus I myself have little sympathy for the people who don’t seem to have anything else to do but hangout even into the wee hours of the morning making a nuisance or spectacle of themselves. This is not Biden’s or even “liberals’” fault; cities are where all the “public assistance” and stairwells is located for people who have allowed “bad times” to become an addictive habit.
So I won’t blame Biden for half the stuff that is wrong with this country, more like one percent; he didn’t create this broken down immigration system that since 1965 was one stupid policy based on racism that made the next stupid policy even less of a “fix.” Naturally, nobody stops to think that if you stop kicking the dog, maybe it won’t keep biting you back; racists tell you the “fix” is to kick the dog out of the house and don’t let it back in.
But it is still out there, waiting to get back in. The dog, of course, was only allowed in to begin with to kick around because someone needs to vent their frustrations on something that has little to nothing to do with their problems and is not supposed to fight back; as such, if mass deportation is the “answer” to all the “problems” in the country, some people may still stupidly wonder why they don’t see all these lower prices or crime going down that Trump promised them.
Thus if Biden can’t be blamed for stupid policies of the past, on his way out the door he has done some foolish things, like sign that Social Security Fairness Act, which should only have tweaked previous laws in regard to people who did not work long enough in government jobs to earn full-time retirement benefits, not to allow people who have such retirement benefits to be allowed SS benefits that they never paid into that will harm people who not only did, but some of their own tax money paid for those retirement pensions. Now, they will only see SS go insolvent quicker, and they get less money while the recipients of “fairness” still have their guaranteed government pensions.
Biden also deserves a swift kick out the door for suggesting that Democrats need to be more “bi-partisan” with Republicans the next time out. What does that mean? You mean like the “bipartisanship” that Bill Clinton practiced, as I discussed three posts ago, to cave-in to the far-right agenda? Or that practiced by Trump’s White House “transition” team, which is being suggested resembles a cat-fight between whoever has access to the litter box first?
Or that of Kyrsten Sinema, whose idea of “bipartisanship” was riding on the coattails of Senate Democratic bills that a few Republicans who deigned to defy Trump supported? Or is it the exposure for her potential legal troubles 1 for showing she has some of that Republican in her by misusing campaign cash for “lavish” expenses? Instead of taking those expensive globetrots, maybe she should have hung around D.C. to cast a vote once in a while instead of acting like a pouty child? Oh wait—that one time she did show-up to vote was on the orders of her corporate paymasters who wanted her to vote against the pro-labor NLRB candidate.
I guess it really doesn’t matter much anymore, since the inevitable future is upon us, one that should have been left in the past. Biden did provide us one useful final “service,” albeit one he was obligated by law to do, which was to hang the flag at half-mast for 30 days following the death of former president Jimmy Carter. Despite Trump’s complaints, it is supposed to hang so least through inauguration day—as an “unintentional” reminder of what is to come.
