Hmm.
K.
So...one side of the ticket for the top federal spots this fall will be a bland corporaDem and a former prosecutor with some problematic issues in her past...while the other is...mmm...(checks notes)...a bloated heap of stupidity and lies whose utter incompetence has killed over 100,000 of the people he was supposed to be helping to care for and...hmm...that’s odd...it says here; “...a jar of heated mayonnaise in human form.”
Decisions, decisions...
Well...okay then, gee, that was easy!
9 comments:
Aye. Easy enough.
Furthermore, Trump's campaign is displaying a lot of sheer incompetence.
Biden is smart enough to stay in his basement and let Trump defeat himself.
However, if Trump fires his current crew and re-hires Steve Bannon,
it could get a lot more competitive.
Wow chief, never thought I'd see you shower Trump/Pence with such praise.
Ael: Here's the thing. Bannon's "genius" was simply to let Trump's racist, idiot, Know-Nothing freak flag fly, knowing that the GOP had assembled a base of reprogrammable meatbags who would vote for whoever let their lunacy and racism out of the box.
That's a done deal now. Trump's got the Klan Vote (and the Jesus Freak Vote and the Gunhumper Vote) locked up already. Bannon wouldn't be able to scare anymore shitpokes out of that thicket.
Plus Trump had the massive structural advantage of 20 years of Hillary-hate ginned up from the time the first Piper Cub landed at Mena Airport. Biden? Meh. He's a boring corporaDem. He just doesn't inspire that sort of hate any more than he inspires excitement.
Mind you...like I said; there's a LOT of these loonies out there, and they vote like sonsofbitches. We could very easily get another four years of Griftopia if a couple of things break wrong.
But at least this time there's no "excuse". We've seen what Making America Great consists of. If We the People vote for it again we deserve everything we're gonna get and get good n' hard.
Leon: The only thing I would shower those two circus geeks with would be what the Russian hookers did to the hotel bed...
Democrats are having Colin Powell address their convention today.
After John Kasich yesterday.
They really aspire to be a 1996 version of the GOP.
I wonder how it will end for them
I THINK the idea is to try and sidle up to the bougies who are frightened of Red Sanders. I wouldn't cross the street to piss on either of the GOP bastards...but Biden has always had a touchingly naive faith in "bipartisanship". Hopefully some of the younger D's like Ilhan and AOC can knock some sense into his head about that.
And...no. Given the platform that Biden's running on, no. The convention gimmicks are just that.
Give it up, man. You're not going to get the Democratic Socialist Party. The Dems are what they are, and right now they're at least sane. This November is really the easiest choice in US electoral history.
The REAL fight needs to come after that. THEN we'll see if there's enough progressiveness in the US to make some real big changes.
Given that a huge amount of them are directly related to capitalism and race?
I'm not optimistic.
I am not optimistic about the Democratic Socialist Party either.
But a return to Obama style "Hope and Change rhetoric and fuck all else" won't cut it.
There is rising anti-elitist anti-corporate sentiment in the land.
If a populist insurgency fails in the Democratic party,
I am afraid of what it might become in the GOP.
Good observations by Ed Burmila here (https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/thomas-frank-people-no-review/):
"Donald Trump sounded faux-populist notes in 2016, but proceeded to govern like the id of the plutocracy when elected. In short, a lot of what gets called populism is not. “Right wing populism,” with its top-down power hierarchy, is the latest incarnation of Father Coughlin or later-period Huey Long demagoguery, while the abundant use of populist language is a marketing strategy for an ideology based solidly in meritocratic deference to elites and experts."
He notes that the problem is that the Democratic PArty doesn't offer a genuine populist alternative, either - and I agree.
What's critical, though, is that the Democrats offer the POSSIBILITY.
The GOP has just become batshit crazy...
Well!
Turns out that Bannon helped at least SOME people become "competitive", at least in the race to con brain-dead Trumpkins and MAGAts out of their wallets: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1306611/download
The prize here, though, is Curt Fucking Schilling. You just KNEW that nasty idiot would turn up involved in some sort of sleazy pyramid scheme, didn't you?
Yep.
"There is rising anti-elitist anti-corporate sentiment in the land."
There's a lot "rising" out here but I see nothing so coherent as "anti-elitist anti-corporate". I see lots of people mad about all sorts of things; mad at Black people, mad at "liberals", mad at eeeevil Chinese commies, mad at the Internet, mad at gunhumpers...and gungrabbers.
I think it has a lot to do with people in general; we're not good at really coherent thought, and we tend to sort of just fanny around squawking about things rather than thinking them through.
So a reliably large proportion of these chucklefucks end up shouting at the clouds, or at Black Lives Matter, or at "liberals" rather than "elites" or corporations. And the plutocrats know that and weaponize these dumbfucks against the sort of people like Warren and Sanders who can actually do some good.
"If a populist insurgency fails in the Democratic party, I am afraid of what it might become in the GOP."
It's already there, and it's become fascism. That, and utter lunacy like QAnon. See my reference to the Burmila piece at The Nation. Here he is on Trump:
"Trump is what the historian Reginald Swing called a “pre-fascist,” the type of crassly self-interested politician who desensitizes people to the language, gesture, and ideology of fascism. The entirety of the conception of Trump as some flavor of populist is based on his ability to focus obsessively on his grievances: He hates The New York Times, just as his supporters do. But his complaints are rooted in the world of Page Six, in the way he perceives his mistreatment at the hands of the intellectual elite."
You're right in this; there HAS to be some sort of break in the constant ratcheting of the cycle of more plutocracy. It has to come from the Left, because the American Right has gone either full-on fascist or bull-goose looney.
"Absent any element of economic populism on the part of Democrats, the hollow populism of Trump appeals to people whose experience is rooted in decades of government failure to meaningfully improve the lives of working people. As little as Americans can afford to suffer four more years of Trump, four years of Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer cooling their heels and explaining why we can’t really change much of anything is as dangerous in the long term. It only delays the inevitable: more phony anti-elitism posing as populism from the right, and further erosion of whatever remains in this political system and government that is worth saving."
But "populist" means just that; it has to be popular. It has to come from the people. You can't "lead" people to it. It has to be from the bottom up, or, inevitably, it leads to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Man on Horseback.
Can Americans of 2020 do that?
We'd better.
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