Trump was a lying liar and Biden was a hoarse doddering old man who got lost mid sentence.
On MSNBC, Joy Reid pointed out that Americans want their president to be an avatar. They want a commander who looks strong and tough, and we saw that when the populace couldn’t get behind Al Gore (who she credited as being a great mind) who acted more like a policy wank than Bush, who felt more like a (New England) cowboy.
Earlier in the week, I caught a bit of Steve Bannon’s radio show where he railed about how we need to eliminate the deep state – the Praetorian Guard – that indicted Trump and props up Biden. At the time, I wondered who this Praetorian Guard was supposed to have assassinated, who was bribing them, and which combat actions they’d fought in. If nothing else, I think this debate proves there is no deep state/Praetorian Guard because they’d have assassinated Biden last week during his preparation rather than let him get on stage.
Look, in any large enough group, there are going to be some incompetent people and some competent bad actors. We have to vote for the people who will admit to that and get rid of them. The U.S. is going to have to choose between a leader who tries to install good people to run the government and one who intends to install people bent on dismantling the government and giving loyalty to the leader alone. Even IN the debate, Trump asked Biden, “Who did you fire?” – that you have to fire bad people … but this was in reference to firing the General who claimed to have heard Trump call veterans “suckers and losers”. I can’t prove Trump did or didn’t say that, but I do remember Trump skipping the memorial ceremony.
Trump said Charlottesville never happened. I remember it. Trump said Nancy Pelosi admitted responsibility for January 6th. She did not. Trump said the ex-governor of Virginia was not just for late term abortion, but infanticide. He is not. His lies were too numerous to count.
Biden lost track of his thoughts early on and blurted out “We finally beat Medicare.” Trump said, “He did beat Medicare and he beat it to death.” Biden said Trump had sex with a porn star while (uh, uhm stumble) his wife was pregnant. Trump asserted he did not. Biden called Trump a criminal. Trump said Biden would be the criminal when his term was over (not exact words).
It wasn’t good in any direction. It was ugly. Through it, though, Trump maintained his TV-personality persona while Biden generally looked infirm.
Personally, I want a deep state that does things like: build roads, enforce food labeling laws so that the box accurately reflects the food inside, eventually hires enough judges to have a fast turn-around time for family court and the like. It should be really hard to fire them when they are speaking the truth as the understand it and easy to fire them if they are distorting the truth. Alas, I worry that Joy Reid is correct and the U.S. will vote for the guy they think is most like John Wayne.
I’m shocked that the guy who has handlers to make sure he doesn’t wander off had a sub-par debate. /s
These two candidates are there because they’re useful idiots for the billionaire class. Neither of them give a damn about anyone, and it’s probably past time to stop pretending Trump 2.0 isn’t happening and have an exit strategy.
Generally speaking, if the oligarchs don’t think you’ll be useful to them, you don’t make it far enough up in the food chain to be considered a candidate. They don’t play the game of “Maybe this person will do what I tell them once they’re in office,” they play of the game of “Only people I know will do what I say will get onto the ballot.”
Don’t know if that helps you - here in Europe it doesn’t look better. In all countries you can choose between the crazy, the stupid and the as-always. I‘m afraid the politics machine transforms you in one of those or scares away the motivated.
I hear you. A few years back I was rooting for Jeremy Corbin to be Prime Minister and could not understand how the populace didn’t choose him. More than that, I sympathize with people who dislike illegal immigration into their respective countries because, well, I can see how it FEELS like, “We built this country to be good and prosperous, and these folks want what WE built while they never built anything like it for themselves” – but that is a false perception for so many reasons (Was their home a colony or otherwise oppressed? Our ancestors built our countries, but we’re just born to them. Climate change is driving equatorial people to Northen climes – to countries complicit in the climate change that has made their homelands dry and cropless, etc.)
So I don’t have a solution for immigration (which Trump harped on constantly). Fixing the climate might help for the long term, but for the short term it won’t fix that immediate complaint.
I look at U.S. history and I don’t see a strong track record for austerity helping. More the reverse. In The Great Depression, one of the things that seemed to work was letting the government take on debt to give a bunch of people ‘stupid’ jobs so they could put that money into the economy. Of course, that came with stepp progressive tax rates, too. It was much harder to get rich when the highest brackets were up to/over 90% of income. I doubt the current crop of rich people would allow that to happen in the modern world, but I’d vote for it.
We have to vote for the people who will admit to that and get rid of them. The U.S. is going to have to choose between a leader who tries to install good people to run the government and one who intends to install people bent on dismantling the government and giving loyalty to the leader alone.
I largely share your thoughts. I honestly expected Biden to at least be prepared enough to counter the usual Trump tactics of making things up and using strong words to impress his base while deflecting blame or critical questions.
Instead, we got Trump basically having free rein to appear strong with simple (and wrong) answers to complex questions, twisting the truth to support his positions and straight up lying and deflecting when finally confronted with something.
I’m not a big fan of Biden, but IMO he’s the obvious, rational choice out of two candidates way past their prime - if you’re into rationality over the antics of a con artist.
But this isn’t a fair fight, and Biden isn’t the showman Trump managed to be today. Biden was barely audible and mostly on the defensive while appearing weak, Trump was the opposite of that. I can’t imagine any Trump voter switching teams after the debate, but I can image more than a few more emotionally motivated democrats second guessing their choice.
I largely share your thoughts. I honestly expected Biden to at least be prepared enough to counter the usual Trump tactics of making things up and using strong words to impress his base while deflecting blame or critical questions.
He can’t because he’s 2637361873 years old and can’t think fast enough to have actual replies. The rules of the debate were no notes and no communication with staff so Biden had to rely on what little working brain cells he has left to form responses and recall history. I also wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised to learn both him and Trump have been using stimulants, but only Biden stopped talking them for the debate since there was so much talking about that beforehand.
It was an absolute travesty that there was no fact checking from the completely useless moderators.
I don’t really think one debate decides who people vote for. Plus you have the electoral college. So you were fucked since forever, you just never noticed. But please vote against Trump because you probably don’t get to vote again if he wins, that has a big influence on the world too
We don’t have much control over this, frankly. But if we have any, I say we use it.
My personal attitude is that although I will concede that it is possible for Biden to win, if we don’t want to have to hope for a prayer, the only way things get better is if we all pop the bubble that Biden and his supporters are in that they can just ignore reality and hope for the best.
It has to be so clear to the Democratic party that not only are they likely to lose this election (and obviously with it, democracy), but they’re going to lose their jobs. No one who works in the election industrial complex is going to keep getting invited to cocktail parties and get hired on for whatever Potempkin election follows this one if Trump wins. No LARPing that they’re “the resistance!” in their endless fundraising emails while they enjoy being in the minority FOREVER. Rattle the fucking cage. Make it clear we blame them for this nonsense, and will continue to assign them the blame for choosing to run a failing candidate in a time of crisis because no one wanted to be the one to speak up and suggest doing anything else.
People keep getting mad when I criticize Biden, as if doing so is helping Trump win. My take: NOT doing so is helping Trump win. Protest this guy like our lives depend on him dropping out of the race at the convention. (They might).
Keep it up! In fact, if you get criticized, you can point out that you’d rather have a leader you CAN criticize than one that gets treated like a God-ling. Point out that one of the differences in the generic liberal versus conservative thought is the idea that a leader might be flawed but generally good at leading versus the idea that everyone needs to support the leader (or the cause) no matter what – until their transgressions become too extreme and gets them ostracized. Please. Let’s criticize early and be ready to replace them sooner rather than later.
This is why they should’ve had a primary.
We could’ve watched Biden collapse months ago while figuring out who is actually fit to run a good campaign. Now we’re going to have to go through it the hard way, because they tried to hide from the obvious for about the last 8 months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_National_Convention
The 2024 Democratic National Convention … is scheduled to be held August 19 to 22, 2024, at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois.
I have been saying this since Obama.
In 2020, people believed they were voting for healthcare, defunding the police, emptying the migrant concentration camps, protecting Roe v Wade, etc.
When you fail to do the things that brought people to the polls, and do the things the opposition wants instead, the opposition’s voters still won’t vote for you and your own voters just don’t vote.
Trying to appeal to moderate republicans just lowers your own voter turnout. The republicans will always vote for fascism over diet-fascism.
But no, pointing out these very obvious mechanisms just gets me labeled as an evil conservative Chinese Putin-bot trying to disrupt the election.
dropping out of the race at the convention
The face of the party is infinitely less important than the impact the policies have on people’s lives. It doesn’t matter if it’s Biden or Pete Buttigeig at the front, the dems only shot in hell is to use every power at their disposal short of drone striking Trump and the SCOTUS (maybe) to demonstrate to voters that 1. They want the same thing the voters want (eg, not genocide) and 2. They will actually do those things (no blaming the parliamentarian or norms or some rules you set or fear the SCOTUS might ask you to stop).
It annoys me that we can understand this issue, but yet the people in power just don’t seem to get it? Maybe they just don’t care. It kinda feels like it’s a game to them. Will high-ranking democrats really feel the pain from losing? I feel like people with money always seem to not be burdened nearly as much.
It’s not just the people in power, though. When I look at primaries, where people actually have some hope of affecting outcomes, they consistently vote for the worst people. I mean, it’s hard for normal-ish people to even get to through the party structure to get on the ballot, and then they just get crushed. In 2020, Dems could have had Bernie, Warren, Buttigieg, even Klobuchar, but Biden won pretty handily. That’s on people people.
I lived and worked inside the DC beltway for ten years. They don’t care. The stuff they worry about is so far removed from our everyday lives it doesn’t even register.
We care about stuff like getting to work on time, covering rent, and not yelling “This is all bullshit!” during daily standup. They care about getting a position paper from a lobbyist summarized to read in the car on their way to a meeting (they tend to be one or two hundred papers in length and can serve as general anesthetic) and making sure that some other person on the same committee will vote the way they agreed (“You back my $foo, I’ll back your $bar”).
As a rule, if you have Money you can hire folks that do all of the drudgework for you. For example, a secretary fields all of the requests for meetings, looks at your calendar, comes up with a couple of possible time slots, and negotiates the time and place.
That’s true, but I don’t think they can do that with Biden at the top of the ticket. He’s spoiled goods.
I’m not a Democrat. I left and joined the Green Party. I’m that crazy lefty. But even I can readily concede that I’d like democrats to win, and I think they could with someone like Elizabeth Warren. Or Cory Booker.
I’m not demanding Bernie or AOC or that Ro Khana be the nominee. But don’t act like there aren’t a few Democrats who have credibly taken a stand once or twice in their career for the greater good. They aren’t the majority, but they’re not so rare as you couldn’t find one.
I also want Cornel West, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, etc. I was sold in 2020 that we could move Democrats left. Democrats moved right. I do not want milquetoast neoliberals.
Selling a Democrat is harder in 2024, but I could be convinced to vote for a different Democrat candidate. The outcome is better than fascism.
