I had said around the time of Ash Wednesday that I told my conservative Catholic uncle that I don’t see the Biden-Trump race as a race between two men to be President. I see it as a race of two men against Entropy, and I told Uncle Joe that Biden was likely to win because Trump is going senile that much more clearly and that much more quickly.
Figures that even as the “liberal” media wants to make this contest more of a horse race than it deserves to be, Joe Biden and the Democrats all decided to help.
Joe Biden’s first 2024 debate against Donald Trump was such a catastrofuck that many insiders in the Democratic Party and political media sphere (same thing) were both implicitly and explicitly calling on him to resign and let Kamala Harris, or anybody, take over. Nancy Pelosi, who is herself real old and has retired from party leadership but not from her Congressional seat, came on “Morning Joe” for MSNBC Thursday to make the case that Joe should reconsider his candidacy. This despite the fact that he has not only repeatedly reaffirmed his case and gone back on campaign tours, other Democrats in Congress have had their own internal debates, and realized that they weren’t going to take Biden out. “On Monday evening, Biden joined a call with Congressional Black Caucus members, his strongest base of support on Capitol Hill, to cement their backing. Late Monday night, a House Democrat who is deeply skeptical of Biden acknowledged to Axios that Democrats were “folding all over the place” and “becoming resigned to Biden holding all the cards here, and us having no real say in the matter.”
Maybe because the polls, which everybody seems to care about despite their recent lack of accuracy, are still showing Trump barely leading, with third-party votes factored in. Real Clear Politics for July 10 shows Trump with a one point lead if Jill Stein, Cornel West and Robert Kennedy Jr. are counted. With just Trump-Biden, it’s a tie. Whereas in the same polling with the hypothetical of Vice President Kamala Harris versus Trump, she leads him by 2. According to Newsweek, “in Georgia, (Biden) has increased his share of the vote by 0.9 percent since the debate, though the Republican Party is still ahead by 3.5 percent.”
The worst you could say was that Biden needed the debate to be a game-changer in his favor, and it did cause him to slip, but not nearly as much as Trump needs to confirm a general election win.
Probably because the main thing going around in social media is quotes from Project 2025, which Trump swears he’d never even heard of and has nothing to do with, this despite the fact that most of the people involved in it or promoting it are at least tangentially associated with his four years in the White House. (It defeats the purpose of the word to call it an ‘Administration’.) Most of the things quoted from it seem like cartoon exaggerations of modern conservatism, which is why you need to actually read the thing to confirm, YES, this really is what these people want to do. Most people don’t quote extensively and in context because the thing is over 900 pages long. But here it is: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
And if you read it, you will see that Project 2025 is just as much a spiteful, empty-headed exercise in right-wing political correctness as you would expect from these people by now.
Pages 51-52: “(National Security Council) staff leads, under the direction of the NSA, should have the discretion to reduce the number of positions that need high-level clearances, and the NSC should be adequately resourced and authorized to adjudicate and hold security clearances internally with investigators who work directly for the NSC and whose sole task is to clear NSC officials. If certain staff are determined not to need high-level clearances, the question becomes whether they should be part of the NSC at all.” Pages 79-80: “An autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms … the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 13957 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. The order was subsequently reversed by President Biden at the demand of the civil service associations and unions. It should be reinstated, but SES (Senior Executive Service) responsibility should come first.” Pages 102-103: “Improve military recruiters’ access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)—the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding … Entrance criteria for military service and specific occupational career fields should be based on the needs of those positions. Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service.” Page 450: “The Secretary (of the Department of Health and Human Services) should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.” Pages 878-879: “The dominant internet platforms have disrupted democratic deliberation, as is evidenced by the Hunter Biden laptop story. They have a propensity to collude with government to advance political goals, as documents unearthed by the Missouri and Louisiana AG suits concerning the COVID response demonstrate. And they play a pivotal role in our economy. … As Judge Frank Easterbrook famously suggested, regulators should look at the cost of error in their judgments. This argument has usually been used to buttress a tentative and hands off approach to antitrust because judicial error in antitrust will persist (Type II error) and continue to damage markets, while failure to take antitrust action (Type I error) will correct itself in the long run as competitors challenge monopolies. However, failing to take antitrust enforcement action (Type I error) includes the possibility of real injury to the structure of important American institutions such as democratic accountability and free speech. If so, a more proactive approach may be warranted.”
That IS what you’re going to get if Trump is elected, especially since a lot of these people did work in his White House and in the text, they frequently refer to the actions that Trump took in office to enact their 2016 Heritage Foundation “mandate.”
All these scaredy-cat Congressional Democrats who are pushing Biden out saw Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell freeze up on camera (not just mumble through a debate, but freeze up) twice, and neither their party nor the Trump Party demanded he leave office. Though Mitch DID promise to leave his leadership post, after this year.
Which leads to another question that nobody is asking the Trumpniks: If you can see what Joe Biden looks like now and he’s only three years older than Trump, what’s your Messiah gonna look like in three years?
As Keith Olbermann put it Tuesday, “the worst outcome of the Biden situation is that there IS no outcome. That we stay here in the middle somewhere wondering if it was just a bad night.”
Spoiler, Keith: You’re going to keep wondering until he dies. Because when you’re that old and you have that obvious an episode, wondering if Biden is going to have another such episode is like wondering whether Trump is going to do something stupid and criminal.
But that goes back to the question of why everybody is so panicky at the idea that Joe Biden might have to leave office before 2025 or would die or have to retire before 2028.
It seems from my perspective that just as unwritten institutions like the filibuster are intended to prevent legislative action rather than facilitate it, the choice of Vice President seems intended to forestall a succession rather than prepare for one.
I am reminded of an Eddie Murphy routine he did about the prospect of a Black Vice President. (Years before Barack Obama, obviously.) “The President could ride through Dallas, all day, all night, with the top down. There would BE no shooting.”
That might seem racist in regard to Kamala Harris, but y’all remember Trump’s first impeachment? When all the good little Trumpniks in Congress and the Senate screamed and wailed that Democrats were trying to overturn an election? Well, they couldn’t have, because a guilty verdict on behalf of the Senate would have only acknowledged the obvious. And secondly, if a president is impeached and removed, that doesn’t invalidate the people’s vote, because his ticket running mate, the Vice President, immediately takes over, just as Ford took over from Nixon when he resigned. And you remember how everybody in the Trump Party acted like Mike Pence being President would be the worst thing in the world, worse than Adam Lambert becoming Secretary of Defense and changing all our military uniforms to mauve? That it was a fate to be avoided at all costs, certainly including what little moral credibility they had left?
That seems to be the Democrat position with regard to Harris. There already is a succession in place if anything happens to this current president either this year or in his second term. And yet Democrats are scared to death of acknowledging it.
And yet all these people who are clucking about Biden’s performance had no problem supporting him in his primaries, which were a usual exercise in an incumbent running unopposed, and everybody knew even at the time that the best case scenario is that Biden serves one more term, actually acknowledges the concept of Constitutional limits on his term (unlike Trump) and turns leadership over to Harris. That was the best-case scenario in any event. The worst that could happen is that Biden has a health issue before the end of this year, or before the end of 2028, and Harris has to take over, and everybody already knew that was the worst-case scenario, and in that event, the Administration (and Biden’s campaign funding) would continue. And yet the Democratic political-media complex wants to have a problem with that now.
News media are going to keep hammering on Biden’s debate as though exposing Trump’s embarrassing conduct for more than eight years has really hurt his support, and yet when people actually give their opinions, Biden at least fares no worse than he did. The social media feedback, contrary to CNN and MSDNC, is on the lines of, “Fuck the media, Joe had one bad night at a debate nobody watched, he’s still better than Trump on balance, I’m voting Biden.”
In fact, when I say I would vote for Joe Biden if he was in a coma, I am quite serious. Mainly because Joe Biden in a coma wouldn’t cause as much damage to the country as Donald Trump on Trump’s best day. And from my center-right perspective, Joe Biden in a coma wouldn’t cause as much damage to the country as BIDEN on his worst day.
Because while there are several Biden policies I disagree with, like his inflationary “Bidenomics”, he isn’t trying to destroy the country. Trump is. You know how the United Kingdom is the United Kingdom and not “Windsor”? Because the UK is an actual conservative country and it holds to traditions of nationhood that precede the current dynasty. Whereas Saudi Arabia is called that because the Wahhabi fundamentalist House of Saud took over the majority of the peninsula including the Two Holy Cities and decided to run it not simply as a hereditary kingdom but as their personal possession. That’s what Trump wants to do to America if he wins. And that’s the BEST case scenario.
The worst case scenario is Project 2025.
That is the “choice” you have, kids, because the “third” party candidates are unfeasible, not just in the sense that no one will vote for them, but because Robert Kennedy claimed to have a worm in his brain, the Libertarian Party got taken over by people who think Lyndon LaRouche was too liberal, and the Green Party is led by Jill Stein, who, like former Trump official Michael Flynn, actually is a Russian asset.
So your “realistic” choices are, Donald Trump: A corpulent swine that somehow learned to walk on two trotters, wear a business suit and make almost human-like whinnies and oinks that some interpret as speech. A pathological criminal who has been convicted of 34 counts of fraud, and, lest the media forget, sexual assault.
Or, Joe Biden. Who really is too old for the job of president. Or frankly any other job besides Walmart exit greeter. And yet, he’s doing it. And our economy is recovering from COVID. We have reaffirmed our international alliances, which are more important than ever thanks to threats from Vladmir Putin and Xi Jinping (y’know, Trump’s friends). And we got through four years without the president threatening to leave NATO, without Hunter Biden getting appointed Minister Without Portfolio in the White House outside congressional approval, and without the president starting another nationwide pandemic because he didn’t want to admit it was happening. And four years ago, Joe Biden ran against other Democrats for president because he knew he was the only candidate with the resume, the name recognition, and (unlike the Clintons) the reputation for normalcy to counter Trump. And Biden beat them, then he beat Trump.
As inadequate as Biden in particular and Democrats in general are, Biden can easily step over the limbo bar of Trump’s behavior, and that means every other Democrat can too. And yet, Democrats themselves seem to think that’s not enough.
But as Gary Johnson said, some day the Sun will swallow the Earth. And lately, I take great comfort in that thought.