I was born during World War II, ten weeks and a few days after D-Day. Which means that next week I will be 79 years old.
In the last few years, I have learned something very valuable about my old age, namely, that I just don’t give a fu*k. I don’t care what anyone says, I don’t care what anyone thinks, I don’t care if anyone likes what I say or not. I just don’t give a fuc*k.
This may sound selfish, but I don’t really care how it sounds because I don’t give a fu*k.
Which happens to be what I like most of all about Joe, because I don’t think he gives a fu*k either.
Don’t get me wrong. He takes being President very seriously and he’s very good at what he does. But I really don’t think he gives a fu*k and I’ll tell you a story about him which backs that judgement up.
I had a brief, one-on-one chat with Joe in 2013, when I was in D.C. for a meeting of the task force which Joe chaired to write a gun-control bill after Sandy Hook. The bill, co-sponsored by Manchin and Toomey, lost. But anyway, my conversation with Joe was basically me listening to a story he told me that went like this:
“The first time I ran for Senate I won, but the vote was very close. I got home at 3 A.M. after they called the race and went to sleep. The next morning the first thing I did was to go to the used car lot where my father was a salesman standing in the parking lot selling cars. He wasn’t there. The owner came out, congratulated me, and said that my father had called in that morning and quit.
Oh shit, I thought to myself, he’s off the wagon and drinking again.
So, I drove to his house and there the old man was sitting on the porch, reading the newspaper, and when I walked up the stairs and said, Dad, why’d you quit? He folded the paper, smiled, and said, ‘No son of mine is going to be a United States Senator with an old man who sells used cars!’”
That was Joe in 2013 and I don’t think he’s changed one bit. He’ll run again because the law says he can, and he’ll win, or he’ll lose but he really won’t give a fu*k.
Now let’s look at the opposition, a shithead named Donald Trump. If we know one thing about Trump, it’s that he gives a fu*k about everything and he makes a point every day of telling the whole world about why he gives a fu*k.
And the only people who really care about whether Trump gives a fu*k about anything is the so-called pundits and experts who make all that noise about Trump on the media networks, websites and blogs which comprise the Fake News.
Because without having something, anything to say about shithead Trump every day, their clicks might go down, the advertising revenues would follow the clicks into the toilet and that would be the end of all those great careers spawned by those digital know-it-alls who aren’t old enough to remember when the Berlin Wall came down.
What was this morning’s big story? That Trump showed up at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday and gave his usual harangue about how the 2020 election was stolen from him. That’s news? That spiel, the same spiel he has been giving for the last three years is news?
Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it. Maybe I’m the one who should be showing everyone the latest pics on my droid as if anyone else sitting around the table with me in the restaurant is really interested in the last time I spent a few minutes watching my lovely grandchildren run around in their back yard.
Meanwhile, to get back to Joe, my point is that he’s not only a pre-internet guy, he’s a modest guy as well. And you can accuse Trump of being lots of things, but modesty isn’t one of them, not at all.
If Joe loses the 2024 election, he’ll go back to Delaware and just become another former President who doesn’t really give a fu*k about what’s going on. Which is why I’m voting for him again because President or no President, he’s just like me.
And by the way, this column should not be taken as a promotion for Mark Manson’s book. Because if nothing else, Manson certainly gives a fu*k about how many book copies he sells.
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