I don’t know who pisses me off more – guys who say they voted for Trump because he’s a ‘good guy’ when they really voted for him because he’s a racist pig, or so-called ‘progressive’ Democrats who believe that Bernie Sanders should have been our candidate in 2016.
Lemme tell you something about that so-called socialist Sanders, okay? Socialism means you’re against private property. It doesn’t mean that you’ll give the kids more time to pay off those student loans they took out to buy some new clothes. If someone wants to send me the copy of any bill that Sanders has ever introduced to abolish private property, I’ll immediately start promoting him for the upcoming Presidential campaign.
In the meantime, call him a liberal, call him whatever you want but don’t call him a socialist, okay? Words have meanings and the word ‘socialist’ means something very specific which used to be an important and beautiful concept first developed by two guys named Engels and Marx, whose importance seems to have diminished in the post-industrial world, if not completely disappeared.
Meanwhile, a good friend this morning sent me an op-ed published yesterday in the Washington Post written by David Ignatius, one of the paper’s in-house blowhards who usually writes about foreign affairs but now is proclaiming that Joe’s the wrong guy for our team in 2024.
Why should Joe step out of the way and let someone else challenge Trump? First of all because he’s too old, and second of all because Kamala’s no goddamn good. The way Ignatius puts it, “Biden’s age isn’t just a Fox News trope; it’s been the subject of dinner-table conversations across America this summer.”
I don’t know where Ignatius eats dinner, but I have sat at a dinner table more than 900 times since Joe was inaugurated in 2021, and I have yet to hear anyone raise the issue of his age. Not only is his age a Fox News/RNC trope, but it’s replaced their other trope about Joe’s ‘dementia’ because that one just didn’t stick.
As for Kamala not developing what Ignatius refers to as ‘traction,’ but I can’t remember the last time that the identity of the Vice President made any difference at all to how people voted for the person who would fill the Number 1 slot. George H. W, Bush had a Vice President named Dan Quayle who couldn’t even win second or third prize in a fourth-grade spelling bee. So what?
Know what is the most important thing going for our man Joe? It’s the fact that he has been involved, one way or another, in five Presidential campaigns. The only person I know who beats that record is Harold Stassen who got his name on some Presidential ballot somewhere 13 different times.
Even though he was running against a guy who had completely fucked up the response to Covid-19, the fact is that in 2020, Joe ran a perfect campaign. He made good use of social media, he had a message which fit the mood and the times, and most of all he wasn’t in the slightest bit intimidated by Trump’s demeanor or nonstop words. Remember how Joe told Trump to ‘shut up’ during their first debate?
I think Joe deserves a second term precisely because if Trump actually heads the red ticket, Joe will kick him in the ass again. And if Trump doesn’t run, I don’t see anything wrong with giving Joe eight years as a reward for scoring his 2020 victory against the orange shithead.
Increasingly, I’m not so sure it really makes any difference whose rear end is in the Resolute Desk chair. Granted, the Presidential campaigns create some job opportunities for everyone who thinks they can go online with something to do or say. The 2020 campaign ended up running just under $15 billion, and that’s not chicken liver even in my book.
But beyond the relatively small economic bump that we get every four years, or having to deal with a once-in-a-century catastrophe like Covid-19, I’m just not sure if we need to sit here and worry about whose finger is on the so-called nuclear trigger, when in fact there are all kinds of people around who must first agree that the trigger should be pulled.
Last month I went over to the nearby Air Force Reserve Base and was given a close look at an F-35. Do you have any idea what an F-35 airplane can do? And people think we should be worried about the nuclear threat from Kim Jong II?
As for people in this country who don’t have what to eat or where to sleep, the poverty rate has always been between 12% and 18%, higher under the Republicans because they don’t like welfare but basically always roughly the same.
I’m going to get in my car right now and drive down to the local Panera in my town where a medium cup of coffee only costs $3.65. That’s 12 ounces of hot water and a few ground-up coffee beans. I’m told the coffee is grown organically in Indonesia, or Honduras, or some other God-forsaken place.
I may splurge and also spend another 4 bucks on a plain croissant and maybe add some butter for an additional fifty cents.
And I should give one rat’s damn about an election which isn’t even going to take place for another 14 months?
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