ON THE AVENUES: I'm voting for Biden. Otherwise it's Trump's burgeoning fascist GOP death cult.

photo credit

It’s bizarre the way that memories can stay with us for decades, and then we awaken to find it's hard to recall what we had for lunch yesterday.

For instance, I still remember watching a very scary B&W horror flick when I was a little kid, so terrifying that it still resonates decades later.

In one of the pivotal scenes, a scientist is attacked in a cave by his own mutant creation, a gigantic monstrous blood-sucking vampire spider, which drains the man of all his bodily fluids, leaving him shriveled and bleached out, pasty pale, suitable for nothing except empty calories for the carrion flies.

But let’s not dwell on Mike Pence’s deathly pallor in his debate with Kamala Harris on Wednesday.

I hear the fly wants his money back: "Where's the beef?"

---

And so finally the election draws near.

Don’t worry.

I’m not about to climb down from the dizzying heights of the hill upon which I am fully prepared to drink (to die? Seriously? I wouldn’t consider DYING for these amoral, greedy schmucks – and that’s just the NFL owners), this looming height being my deep, pervasive and abiding disgust with America’s fraudulent two-party political duopoly.

As a genuine social democrat trapped in an anti-intellectual milieu filled with progressive poseurs who can’t muster the chutzpah to contest the dimwits on the other side, my hostility to the Democratic Party peaked in early March, when the capitulating centrists pulled every last string, called in all the necessary markers, and vanquished the party’s left wing.

Had I chosen, I might have devoted this column’s weekly inches ever since April to the myriad failures of the Democrats, beginning with our vacuous local party elites here in the New Albanian swampland, then scaling the slimy pole of unprincipled aff/inf/luence until the Democratic National Committee itself came into view, at which point I would be compelled to excuse myself, step away from the laptop, and slip into a Hazmat suit.

Of course, as damning as the indictments capable of being made against the Democrats, the Republicans have devolved spectacularly from merely objectionable into a drain-circling death cult, of which I’ll have more to say in a moment.

In the sense of our hallowed two-party system of spoils, irrespective of which “side” one chooses to inhabit (to squat?), politics today is a dismal, depressing and depraved journey into the very dark heart of human dysfunction.

By extension, this same old song and dance in American idiocy would have remained roughly the same as always in 2020 if not for the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and the pandemic that followed. Literally for once in our lives, there was a new twist in the tale.

One “side” is failing this test far more spectacularly than the other, and they're the ones I'll be voting against.

---

We’ve observed previously that the COVID-19 virus opportunistically targets vulnerable human physiologies. But the extent to which it has done precisely the same in terms of weakened human psychologies and belief systems simply cannot be underestimated.

We’ve seen already thin remaining layers of civility and sensibility stripped away. The science deniers have “enchantingly” multiplied not unlike Pence’s spider-victim-fly diet of pure excrement, waxing orgasmic as they’ve urged old folks to take one for the greater glory of the stock market. The owners of capital meanwhile have used the occasion to double down, while for the rest of us the economy seized up.

Then the deeper ugliness came forward, the accumulated bile, conspiratorial gibberish and raw hatred, much of it borne of generations-long cognitive dissonance, exploding from the ranks of the right-wing’s white know-nothings as Black Lives Matter demonstrations explicated the systemic persistence of racism and absence of social justice.

Through it all, numerous previous unaddressed crises – climate change, health care, income inequality, basic human rights – didn’t exactly disappear.

To be sure, not every Democrat got the pandemic response memo, and even a few Republicans quietly sidestepped their own party’s institutionalized inadequacies, but the primary outcome of the virus’s own truth-revealing capabilities has been the surgical exposure of the GOP’s fundamental(ist) fascination with dying for the “cause.”

And the cause itself? Someone else’s, as it always has been. Mostly the “cause” of bigger money, with a jot or two of apocalyptic religion, wrapped in a flag, although it’s never clear with these retrograde fantasists whether they mean an American or a Confederate flag.

The Republican death cult is the inevitable outcome of five decades spent busily espousing and later gleefully implementing neoliberal, survival-of-the-fittest economic orthodoxy, as abetted by hypocritical end-times Christian theocrats, and washed down with enough white supremacist Kool-Aid to float a fleet of oil tankers.

We should hardly be surprised at this acceptance of death as inevitable. For years, conservatives have responded to gun violence with angry renunciations of any links to gun proliferation or lax gun control laws, offering instead “thoughts and prayers.” The one exception where Republicans express outrage is over the “death” of fetal cells inside women’s bodies—indicating that the fight is less about “murder,” as the anti-abortionists like to call it, than it is about controlling women’s bodies. By and large, the nation’s right-wing factions have for years wanted us to accept mass deaths and preventable mortality as a price for our “freedom.” They expect the same during a pandemic.

But the Republican death cult truly pole-vaulted over the tipping point, and left Democrats in the dust, when BLM became part of our daily discourse, illustrating that James Baldwin’s words ring more presciently than ever before:

When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.

Structural racism, white fragility, white supremacy – all of it tied neatly together over a period of four centuries.

---

As malicious and looney-bin ludicrous as Donald Trump most surely remains on an everyday basis, allow me to remind you for perhaps the last time that he’s merely a symptom, and symbolic of the rotting disease within.

Trump’s a salesman with only one product, himself, and one true skill, which is enabling the truly dangerous fascists to worship him as an “answer” and purchase the snake oil.

Bullshit.

If it makes sense to you, as it does to me, that to be white is to be racist by nurture, and if whites as yet are the majority in America, if inexorably declining in terms of raw numbers compared to non-whites – and if whites overwhelmingly support Trump in 2020, as in 2016, then logically, Trump is the fruition of American history to the present time, not an aberration at all.

And, if American history since the Reagan era has been an exercise in unfettered capital accumulation by wealthy elites, enabled by neoliberal economic policies on BOTH sides of the duopoly’s aisles, but as always the very heart of the Republican Party’s preference for oligarchies and extractive, robber baron capitalism as its worst, then once again, Trump is a culmination of sorts.

Guns, money and Jesus; that a majority of white “Christians” find it expedient to indulge the worst demons of their nature with respect to racial and cultural distractions merely suggests that Abraham Lincoln’s conception of “better” angels was wishful thinking at best.

Trump’s siren call is for whites to reaffirm their superiority, the supremacist snowflakes having been shaken to the core by the Obama presidency. If lots and lots of us, up and down the spectrum, can make a blood sacrifice of death via COVID, that’s just icing on their cow pies.

---

Yes, I dislike the DNC, the Democratic Party’s hawkish warmongers, its centrist "liberal" cowardice, the neoliberal economic gutting, and the sheer volume of hypocrisy existing on the left side of the aisle.

Why, then, am I voting for Biden and Harris?

Because of the GOP’s death cult.

Because there comes a time when triage is paramount, and the bleeding must be stopped.

Because while there is no guarantee matters will improve with Biden, there is no chance of improvement with Trump, only further degradation.

Electing Biden and the Democrats won't resolve the fundamental problem of why 60+ million Americans have alchemized a narcissistic con man into a deity, and come together to fluff his personality cult.

(The short answer involves racism/caste, a misplaced sense of powerlessness, and no more comprehensive an education than an ordinary house fly.)

It will, however, remove at least one blithering buffoon from the daily news cycle, so maybe...just maybe...we can convince 10% of the 60 million that the issues go far beyond the charlatan-in-chief, who is little more than a figurehead for self-deception.

Personally, up ticket, it will be all Democrats for me. Locally, in spite of the GOP’s ethical chasm, a precious few Republicans will nonetheless receive my vote. One is an incumbent who’s right for the job. Another is a protest vote against the prevailing NAHS student council nepotocracy.

The third is Greg Roution, a man I've never once met. He’s a Republican running for coroner against Anthony Oxendine, a funereal circus-master who once tried to sneak a crematorium through the back door into my neighborhood and became all doofus petulant when his bluff was called. 

That's all, folks. Go out and vote, vote against the death cult's vulgarians, and don't forget:

 ---

October 1: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to the last will and testament of NA Confidential. 

September 24: ON THE AVENUES: Magic and loss. 

September 17: ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

September 10: ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents.

Fire Donald Trump: "We have no illusions about Biden, but we need him to win."

There are times when it's necessary to stop the bleeding first, then determine what's to occur next. This triage scenario is peak 2020. 

I may, or may not, return to this depressing topic in this week's ON THE AVENUES. It's an article in the works for almost two months, with the lightning speed of daily news cycles rendering moot every effort at topicality.  

But I'm not sure it's necessary to know any more than we do already. Electing Biden won't resolve the fundamental problem of why 60+ million Americans have alchemized a narcissistic con man into a deity, and come together to fluff his personality cult. 

(Short answer: racism/casteism and a misplaced sense of powerlessness.)

It will, however, remove at least one blithering idiot from the daily news cycle, so maybe...just maybe...we can convince 10% of the 60 million that the issues go far beyond the charlatan-in-chief, who is little more than a figurehead.   

Fire Donald Trump: We have no illusions about Biden, but we need him to win, at The Nation

 ... Voting Trump out of office will not in itself heal the terrible wounds inflicted on our body politic over the past four years. But it is the absolutely necessary first step. That means voting for Joe Biden—through early voting wherever possible or by absentee or in-person voting when necessary.

We have no illusions about Biden, who—as we reported here last November—removed bankruptcy protections from student loans, helped write the bill that barred states from capping interest rates on interstate banking, and spent a career in the Senate carrying water for Delaware’s credit card industry. The idea that Biden is some kind of sleeper agent for socialism is a cruel joke, as is the claim that he is a closet radical.

The Democratic primaries did include some candidates and ideas that truly are radical. Bernie Sanders—The Nation’s preferred candidate—articulated a vision of Medicare for All and an America where health and education and economic security are human rights. Elizabeth Warren opposed Biden’s favors for the banks and ran on a platform of taking on the monopolist millionaires and robber baron billionaires who have rigged our economy. Yet both of them are voting for Biden.

So are Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Jesse Jackson ...

Hold On, I'm Comin'.

It's where my head is heading.

We have the ability to have those fights on offense under a Biden presidency while we are likely to be almost entirely on defense under a second Trump adfarm-near-me/">ministration.

It's a sensible plan, seeing as for a lefty like me, there is nothing whatever to recommend Biden apart from who he is not. Honesty is good policy in such an instance.

A Militant Union’s Strategic Case for Joe Biden, by John Nichols (The Nation)

Instead of portraying Biden as “a savior,” the United Electrical union argues for beating Trump and then pressuring the Democrats.

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, an 84-year-old independent union with a history of prioritizing working-class solidarity over party politics, has come to the conclusion that the best strategy is to level with the 35,000 workers it represents in manufacturing industries and public- and private-sector jobs.

UE is not feigning enthusiasm for Biden. Instead, in a stark assessment of the race issued just before the traditional Labor Day pivot into the fall campaign, the union’s general executive board acknowledged that “working people deserve a government, and a president, who will stand up for them against the corporate onslaught of the past several decades. Under both Republican and Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministrations, greedy corporations have destroyed good jobs, attacked our unions and devastated our communities. We have to be honest that the 2020 elections will not deliver that president.”

Unions often go overboard when it comes to talking up Democratic nominees. But UE officials are taking a different tack as they communicate with workers in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“We are clear that Biden is no savior, and will likely seek to implement the same kind of corporate-friendly policies as previous Democratic presidents Obama and Clinton,” admits the union statement. But, it adds, there is also clarity about something else: “The working class cannot afford four more years of Trump.”

That’s not a typical union endorsement. In fact, says UE general president Carl Rosen, “We do not consider this to be an endorsement of Joe Biden by UE but instead that it is a strategic recommendation to our members and to working people in general that they vote for Biden to remove Donald Trump from office.”

It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday.

In an article this long, it's hard to find a pull that summarizes the gist, but I've chosen a single sentence. It's a long read, and worth the extra minutes.

‘The President Was Not Encouraging’: What Obama Really Thought About Biden, by Alex Thompson (Politico)

Behind the friendship was a more complicated relationship, which now drives the former vice president to prove his partner wrong.

Biden aides acknowledge that Obama didn’t do nearly as much for Biden in 2020 as he did for Clinton in 2016.

Joe Hill.

When the Kamala Harris announcement was made last week, one of the first tweets I saw (Twitter being my de facto news feed) was from Bernie Sanders, in support.

My view is that after we elect Biden, what we’re going to do is everything that we possibly can to move his adfarm-near-me/">ministration in a progressive direction. Biden has told me, and I would not say it if he hadn’t made the same statement publicly, that he intends to be the most progressive president since FDR. That’s a noble ambition, and our job is to hold him to that goal. I think millions of people are prepared to do that.

This week or next, maybe I'll be able to finish a particularly vexing, ongoing ON THE AVENUES column draft, in which I've been trying to sort through the arguments and counter-arguments running through my brain with respect to my choices in this year's presidential election.

I'm not there yet. But you can see where I'm headed.

Bernie Sanders on How He’ll Rally Progressives Tonight, by John Nichols (The Nation)

In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the Vermont senator says backing Biden/Harris is the start of their work, not the finish.

JOHN NICHOLS: When you were campaigning for president, you spoke quite frequently about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights.” It was part of your effort to frame the 2020 election around fundamental issues and the need for structural change. Obviously, you didn’t know at the time that Covid and mass unemployment, and a rising demand for racial justice, would heighten the sense of urgency. But even before the crisis unfolded, you saw a need for a politics that was focused on transformative change.

BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is imperative that we not only deal with all of the injustices and inequalities that exist in our society today, which of course have been made worse by the pandemic and the economic meltdown, but it is also imperative that we start, in the 21st century, to rethink our value systems.

What Roosevelt did in his State of the Union speech in 1944 was really quite extraordinary. For whatever reason—we were in the middle of a war then and, of course, he died a year later; the media was not particularly sympathetic—what he said back in 1944 has been largely forgotten. But what he said was extraordinarily profound and revolutionary.

What he said is that, yes, our country has political freedom. We have a Constitution. We have a Bill of Rights. We have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc., and that’s all great. But what we have to do is go beyond just political rights and into economic rights.

In other words, it’s not good enough that you just have the constitutional right to vote (that’s good!), to protest (that’s great!), to assemble (that’s wonderful!), and freedom of religion (great!).

What we have got to be talking about, Roosevelt said in 1944, is that economic rights are human rights, and that means you are entitled, as an American, to decent housing, to decent health care, to a decent job, to a decent retirement. Economic rights are human rights, and you’re not going to be a really free person unless we guarantee those rights. That was an extraordinarily profound statement!

What I tried to do in the 2020 campaign is talk about Roosevelt’s 1944 speech and how we make it relevant to the year 2020 ...

Thomas Frank: "I came here to understand the Biden mystique, not to bury it."

How can self-styled progressives overlook Joe Biden's long legislative career of anti-progressive measures?

Because his name isn't "Donald Trump," and of course the usual left-wing delusion that leads to all genuine precepts being thrown away so the common threat can be met head-on, and then unceremoniously appeased owing to neoliberal donor cash.

The author Frank is no fan of Biden, but he gives it the good old (non)college try.

What's behind Joe Biden's mystique?, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

It was once a no-brainer among DC pundits that, in an electoral match-up between a friendly centrist and a bitter polarization-machine like Donald Trump, the guy who was closer to the middle would automatically win. And in the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, that conventional wisdom would seem to have found its man: he stands on behalf of no great causes, just a return to the consensus days of yore.

The flaw in this viewpoint is that the consensus days of yore were a dreadful time. What bipartisan centrism meant, in Biden’s heyday, was deliberate, state-sponsored cruelty on a scale so vast it is difficult to comprehend. It meant baked-in racial discrimination. It meant imprisoning enormous numbers of our fellow citizens for using drugs – especially crack cocaine, whose users (disproportionately African American) were singled out for horrendously harsh retribution. It meant three-strikes laws. Mandatory minimum sentencing. Unlimited funding for police departments. A boom in prison construction. And, as it pleased Joe Biden to say on the worst of these occasions, “the truth is, every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress – every minor crime bill – has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, on that bill.”

Biden has tried half-heartedly to walk back the decades he spent transforming America into a penal state. He may succeed in persuading voters to forgive him. But he’s not going to win because the old centrist strategy has worked and Republicans are fatally outmaneuvered by his clever triangulations. These days even the Charles Koch Institute is to the left of where Biden was back in the crackdown era.

You can say something similar about Biden’s famous rapport with the working class: it is badly compromised by his actual political record ...

So, how does Biden do it?

 ... Catering to society’s well-educated winners is no way to run a party of the left: Biden seems to be one of the few mainstream Democrats to have grasped this. He recalled in the interview being told by a Hillary Clinton operative in 2016 that he “had to make a distinction between progressive values and working-class values”.

“I said I’ve never found a distinction,” Biden claimed he replied. “Never found them hard to sell.” He told the Times about white working-class enthusiasm for gender wage equality and some other issues, and then he took this shot at the very heart of modern-day liberalism: “We treat them like they’re stupid. They know they’re in trouble, and nobody’s talking to them. Nobody’s talking to them. That’s what we used to do. That was our base.”

It is a point in Biden’s favor that he understands this problem. But is he the man to resolve it?

Will it work?

Frank concludes: "My own hope – and it is merely a hope at this point – is that somewhere in the soul of that tongue-tied, old-school Delaware pol flickers the forgotten core value of the Democratic party: solidarity."

"Progressives don’t trust Biden. They trust history. History proves Biden isn’t one of them."

The 1117 E. Spring Street Neighborhood Association tallies two Indiana primary votes for Bernie Sanders -- and against the prevailing inanity of the local DemoDisneyDixiecrats.

If Trump Wins Again, Don’t Blame Progressives, by Ted Rall (CounterPunch)

The corporate conservatives who control the Democratic Party are suffering from cheaters’ remorse.

The DNC and their media allies (NPR, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Vox, etc.) subverted the will of primary voters, undermining initial frontrunner Bernie Sanders in order to install the worst candidate of the 20 centrists in the campaign.

Now the power brokers are worried that the befuddled Biden, whom they touted as the Most Electable Against Donald Trump, will lose to him. Rather than take responsibility for their idiocy and force Biden to pull out of a race for which he is obviously physically and mentally unprepared, the corporatist sellouts are preemptively blaming the progressives who warned them about this exact scenario.

Sorry, right wingers. Biden is on you. You made him the presumptive nominee. If Trump wins again, it’s your fault.

Just as it was last time ...

Sow's ears, silk purses, and devising a way to make Joe Biden palatable.

I might be able to get drunk enough to vote for Biden, but caution is merited, because if I begin drinking too soon, it won't be easy staying drunk enough to vote for Biden.

I Literally Wrote the Case Against Joe Biden. But I’ve Got Some Free Advice for Him, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Pundits are panicking about whether the Left will help Joe Biden defeat Trump. The former vice president probably doesn't want it, but here's some advice for him from the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

For at least the last two years, the Left has been imploring the Democratic Party and its loyal voters not to choose Joe Biden as their nominee. I even wrote an entire book about it. The argument against Biden is well known and easy to find, and I’m not going to bother repeating it here.

Unfortunately, Biden is now indisputably the Democratic nominee, and will be facing Donald Trump in the general election. As inadequate as Biden and the conservatives who are propping him up are to handle this moment in history, no one reading this wants to see a second Trump term. But despite what polling currently shows, it is far from assured Biden will deliver even that result, and he is entering the race in a weaker position than Clinton this time in 2016, after she had already weathered months of criticism and press scrutiny — the kind to which Biden has so far not been treated.

Already, some members of the liberal pundit-sphere are calling for a moratorium on criticism of Biden. Besides being a repugnant idea for any journalist, this is not sustainable: though liberal news outlets might view their top priority for the next seven months as getting Biden into the White House at all costs, there’s no guarantee mainstream news outlets will see their jobs this way, and they will almost certainly start applying serious scrutiny to Biden again now that Bernie Sanders is out of the race.

So as someone who literally wrote the book on why Biden would not be a great nominee or president, let me give the Democratic Party and Biden’s campaign some free advice ...

"It may still be unclear which Democrat is best positioned to beat Donald Trump, but we know one thing: The answer is not Joe Biden."

"Biden and his backers need to face the facts. It may still be unclear which Democrat is best positioned to beat Donald Trump, but we know one thing: The answer is not Joe Biden."

You can also spare me the centrist Pete Buttigieg platform, which strikes me as capitulation from top to bottom. But that's another discussion for another time.

Joe Biden: An Anti-Endorsement at The Nation

His long record of poor judgment and cozying up to bankers makes him the wrong candidate to take on Donald Trump.

In recent weeks we at The Nation, like many other progressives, have come under increasing pressure to choose between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. We’re going to resist that pressure to endorse—for now. Not just because we find much to admire in both candidates’ programs and in the way both have conducted their campaigns (especially their rejection of corporate cash and wealthy funders in favor of small donors) but also because we continue to believe the presence of both candidates on the ballot widens the left lane in our politics, exposing the broadest possible public to Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and measures to rein in corporate power.

We also believe vigorous public debate is the best way for the strongest progressive platform to reach and be embraced by a majority of voters. Progressives may not agree with centrist Democrats like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, but engaging with and answering their criticisms now is essential—not merely to win in 2020 but also to build public pressure on a Congress whose members have proved reluctant to defy their corporate benefactors.

Yet that very debate has been stifled by the continuing candidacy of a man whose chief rationale for running—that he alone can defeat Donald Trump—has become increasingly threadbare. Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden offers the promise of picking up where the Obama administration left off: a restoration of business as usual for the K Street lobbyists and Wall Street speculators whose prosperity the 2008 financial crisis did little to disturb. Indeed, as Joseph N. DiStefano reports in this issue, the man posing as “middle-class Joe” has built his career and his family’s wealth on an eagerness to serve not the many Americans crushed by credit card debt but the very banks whose hands are around their throats.

The candidate who insists Medicare for All is too expensive for Americans is also the candidate who, like Clinton, endorsed NAFTA, China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership—all of which have savaged US manufacturing and workers. Clinton’s record cost her the industrial heartland (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan) and, with it, the election ...

Progress, indeed: "An organic effort by black millennials and Gen Z-ers to influence older family members against Mr. Biden."

The parody site still appears first.

Meanwhile the enduring mystery in New Albany pertains to the ruling Democratic Party's failure over a period of decades to empower the African-American community. There has been lots of platitudes and a few higher ranking political patronage positions, but no real commitment.

Would the situation improve under a Republican administration? Maybe, maybe not, although it couldn't possibly be any more cynical than it is now. After all, when we refer to them as the DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party, reality comes perilously close to negating the satire. 

Young Black Voters to Their Biden-Supporting Parents: ‘Is This Your King?’ by Astead W. Herndon (New York Times)

An organic effort by black millennials and Gen Z-ers to influence older family members against Mr. Biden may be important in the Democratic primary.

... But if (Biden) is to be overtaken by one of his more progressive rivals, the most powerful tool against him may not be opposition research or negative advertisements. Instead, it may be an organic effort by younger black voters — concerned about Mr. Biden’s age and more moderate ideology — to sway their older family members.

Joe Biden: "Cynical contempt for social-justice values."

As it stands, I'm still with Bernie Sanders for 2020, although Elizabeth Warren might do in a pinch. Joe Biden? Nope.

When Joe Biden Collaborated With Segregationists, by Jonathan Kozol (The Nation)

The candidate’s years as an anti-busing crusader cannot be forgotten—or readily forgiven.

Advocates for children and civil rights who have not yet given up entirely on the struggle to break down the walls of racial isolation in our public schools may want to take a good hard look at Joe Biden’s shameful record on school segregation. Despite his recent effort to allay concerns about that record, it cannot be expunged or easily forgiven.

Biden has made no apologies for his willingness to rip apart the final remnants of the legacy of Brown at a seminal moment in our nation’s history. As The Washington Post candidly surmised, his “decision to stand by his views on the issue illustrates what some of his supporters think would be his advantage in the 2020 field: his ability to appeal beyond his Democratic base to some white working-class voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.” This may seem smart strategy to some. But it reeks of cynical contempt for social-justice values, even if his strategists attempt to dress it up as nothing more than shrewd consensus building.

Like other careful centrists, Biden threads the needle on the subject of diversity by saying that he favors it in principle, even in the face of his decades-long resistance to letting children climb onto a bus in order to achieve it. This is simply doublespeak. In a nation where residential segregation and unabated patterns of redlining have guaranteed the seemingly eternal sequestration of black and Hispanic children in poorly funded schools within their communities, Biden’s many years of strident opposition to letting children ride the good old yellow bus represent a throwback to the age of Plessy v. Ferguson ...

Just say "no" to Joe Biden.

"We’re going to be told that candidates offering real change, like Sanders and Warren, are too progressive for America. That they’re not “electable”. We’re going to be told that we should repeat the mistakes of 2016 all over again."

That's about the size of it.

Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won't end well this time either, by Arwa Mahdawi (The Guardian)

His is the vaguest and most centrist of battle cries: let’s go back to, you know, ‘all those good things’

... Biden’s answer to Trump isn’t systemic change that will make America a more equitable place. He’s not offering progressive policies like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. His is the vaguest and most centrist of battle cries: let’s go back to, you know, “all those good things”. Let’s go back to a time where racism was a little more polite and white people could pretend America was a post-racial society. Let’s fight for the soul of America by pretending that Trump is the problem, not just a symptom of the problem. Let’s pretend that Charlottesville was a direct result of Trump – an aberration – and not a product of a racism that has always existed in America. Let’s rewind the clock a few years to when everything was just fine and dandy.

What’s really frustrating about Biden is the fact that, even though he is another version of Clinton, and seems to be getting set to run a carbon copy of Clinton’s campaign, we’re going to be told ad nauseam that he’s our best bet at beating Trump. We’re going to be told that he’s the only Democrat that can win the white working class over – forget the fact that Sanders is currently the candidate best connecting with that demographic, gaining cheers and enthusiasm at a Fox town hall with his vision for universal healthcare. We’re going to be told that candidates offering real change, like Sanders and Warren, are too progressive for America. That they’re not “electable”. We’re going to be told that we should repeat the mistakes of 2016 all over again. We’re going to be told that it will work out this time.

"Biden is the biggest threat to a progressive presidential nominee and #MeToo-ing him won’t keep him out of the White House."

Just say no.

Joe Biden Isn't the Answer, by Rebecca Traister (New York)

... Now it seems, That Guy is widely viewed as the best and safest candidate to get us out of this perilous and scary political period. But the irony is that so much of what is terrifying and dangerous about this time — the Trump administration, the ever more aggressive erosion of voting and reproductive rights, the crisis in criminal justice and yawning economic chasm between the rich and everyone else — are in fact problems that can in part be laid at the feet of Joe Biden himself, and the guys we’ve regularly been assured are Democrats’ only answer ...

I'll be cutting straight to the chase on this one, although you're encouraged to click through and read the entire essay.

Voting record. Policies. Platforms.

You know, all those realities behind the bright, shiny objects.

Choosing Battles, by Amber A’Lee Frost (The Baffler)

Joe Biden and the limits of #MeToo in campaign politics

 ... If leftists want someone to the left of Biden in the White House, they have to stop relying on dead-end culture war tactics that only appeal to a small minority of middle-class liberal voters. Joe Biden could win, and we have to be honest about the fact that he has a lot going for him. The nostalgic halo of the Obama years appeals to the people who just want things to go back to “normal,” which maybe wasn’t great, but didn’t appear to be mired in instability and weekly crises. For the vast majority of women, his 1994 Violence Against Women Act wasn’t a short-sighted and overly punitive contribution to the prison industrial complex, but a defense of women against domestic abuse. It enjoyed massive bipartisan support, particularly from women and feminist groups, who often see prison and policing as the only solutions to male-on-female violence. More importantly though, people like Joe Biden—women like Joe Biden—and that is because he is very likeable.

This isn’t even entirely a generational gap. A lot of younger liberals like him as well. To this day, progressive comedy stalwarts The Onion appear to find him adorable, despite his “kids these days” attitude towards the financial struggles of young people. But here’s what voters likely won’t find adorable:

• His attempts to cut social security and Medicare in order to work with Republicans
• His support for free trade deals like NAFTA, which savage the American working class, undercut the unions, and exploit labor abroad (read up on NAFTA if you have to, and don’t assume everyone knows the implications of trade deals)
• His big-money, union-busting corporate donors like executives from Comcast and health insurance companies
• His woefully right-wing history on health care, and latest attempts to weasel his way out of committing to Medicare for All
• His vote on the Iraq War
• His support for a bankruptcy bill that absolutely crushed working families
• He spent a significant part of his early career fighting school desegregation and busing
• His role in mass incarceration

These are the talking points that working-class voters will respond to. Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. is just another blue-blooded, dynastic elite with a career full of cruel and idiotic politics and a record of favoring the ultra-wealthy and punishing the poor. Rather than emphasizing the fact that a seventy-six-year-old man from Scranton, Pennsylvania doesn’t have the same physical boundaries as professional managerial-class millennials in New York and D.C., leftists should take a break from the feminist culture wars and go after his voting record. Biden is the biggest threat to a progressive presidential nominee and #MeToo-ing him won’t keep him out of the White House. If you don’t believe me, just look who’s in it now.

I'm holding out for the Michael Dukakis edition.

They're proliferating like rabbits on my Facebook page.

The problem? It isn't exactly an enticing comparison, at least from Bill's standpoint. Uncle Joe is a bit less objectionable. Is it to late for him to run for president?

Look -- there's another one.

If Bayh wins, can Mr. Dickey go to Washington?

"VP Debate 2012: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America."

Joe Biden's attitude was off-putting? Really? Rather like the entirety of the Republican platform?

VP Debate 2012: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America, by Charles P. Pierce ("The Politics Blog" at Esquire)

There is a deeply held Beltway myth of Paul Ryan, Man of Big Ideas, and it dies hard. But, if there is a just god in the universe, on Thursday night, it died a bloody death, was hurled into a pit, doused with quicklime, buried without ceremony, and the ground above it salted and strewn with garlic so that it never rises again.

and

Moreover, the battering that Biden gave Ryan brought something into sharp relief that the Republican party has been fudging ever since Romney put the zombie-eyed granny-starver on the ticket — that, for his entire political career up to that point, on critical economic issues, Paul Ryan was an extremist even by the standards of the modern Republican party, which are considerably high indeed.

and

His blithe dismissal of any demand that he be specific about where he and his running mate are planning to take the country generally, was so positively terrifying that it calls into question Romney's judgment for putting this unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at all. Joe Biden laughed at him? Of course, he did. The only other option was to hand him a participation ribbon and take him to Burger King for lunch.

Yes, it's true. I have wordsmith love for Charles P. Pierce.