Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

gius i have an announcement

joe biden sucks

I went looking for information on Emanuel's relationship to Biden's cabinet and the main sources of information I found definitively said Emanuel said he was interested in becoming Secretary of Transportation, followed by a whole bunch of people saying "yeah no" in response.

Based on this, I agree that Joe Biden is indistinguishable from Satan.

Larger context that seems important is that Sic guy starts to sound exactly like a Fox News grandpa if you bring up
Hunter Biden and Milo Z still pushes the “Biden mental decline” narrative which all but the most pathetic dead enders dropped after the numerous debates, town halls speeches etc. So I think there’s probably a degree of cope/embarrassment factoring in for guys that had really bad predictions throughout this whole deal here.

There are folks on this board who I largely agree with politically and with whom I'm sure I could have productive conversations about these issues if only they a) weren't so eager to throw the 'starting points re: the reification of viable progressive policies' baby out with the 'anyone with a whiff of centrism about them is a garbage person who belongs in the garbage' bathwater and b) weren't absolutely terrible at maintaining the focus of an argument.

One likely point of consensus that I'd posit around these parts is that Biden was a thoroughly underwhelming and disappointing dem candidate. Like, I'm pretty sure we can all agree with that.

joe biden is unfortunately not cool enough to be satan

Ehh probably only Biden and Bernie (but it would be closer) could have won though. Head to head polls with Trump indicated as much during the primary. Biden’s team did a good job balancing the Dems very broad coalition and building the blue wall back and not taking the internet’s campaign advice.

Biden is an underwhelming candidate but his campaign, given the circumstances, did not disappoint. I knew he'd win, but still.

since i've had a bite and taken a breath, i'm ready to re-enter the thread as if nothing at all happened and continue on the way as i always have acted, as per this thread's tradition.

fine to say: joe biden sucks
fine: all presidents suck
fine: joe biden supported the development of our modern incarceration program
fine: the future is bleak. something fundamental needs to change. joe biden is not the wave of the future
fine: goddamn joe biden sucks. if you would have told me in 2017 that it would be president joe fucking biden in 2020 i would have choked on my barf later that evening

not fine: joe biden doesn't give a shit about the incarceration system, he doesn't care about whether or not people are happy or not, and now he's putting rahm emmanuel in the cabinet. oh and btw, YOU'RE the one who can't keep their facts straight. if you don't think that's true, name me one time when i did not keep my facts straight....yes...wander off toward the foggy woods...you're not coming out into the clear light now...this fog is where we no longer willing to distinguish between shades of gray...

btw, fun fact: the last time i ever spoke to my mom, she pushed the "joe biden is clearly on a mental decline" angle. i'm not sure what the leftier-than-thou angle is on that one, but the rightwing one is that it's because the evil democrats want kamala harris to be the president by summer 2021. and kamala harris isn't white, so that is a big problem for the right. not sure what the "biden is 1988 ronald reagan" angle on the left is, but probably something really dumb and based on a screenshot from a speech that some dipshit edited

a) weren't so eager to throw the 'starting points re: the reification of viable progressive policies' baby out with the 'anyone with a whiff of centrism about them is a garbage person who belongs in the garbage' bathwater

Viable seems quite loaded here - and do you think Biden only has a whiff of centrism about him?

we're all on a mental decline, really

I do think Joe Biden is on a downward trajectory, mentally speaking. It tends to happen with older folks. I think this because I've seen old interviews and new interviews and from what I've seen he generally appears more lucid in the former. I do not believe this is because the Dems have some deep-seated desire to install Harris.

Sure but people exaggerated in this wishful thinking sort of way during both the primary and the GE like “he can barely speak” or that he has full on Alzheimer's which probably lowered expectations in ways that helped him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/us/politics/biden-haines-national-intelligence.html

Drone program, defended Gina Haspel

biden's team ran a good campaign, or at least they executed and were correct on reading the electorate, they gambled on making gains in the midwest suburbs among college educated voters and did it.

they calculated that keeping their head down and letting trump ruin himself was the right answer and they won on that gamble as well.

obviously it's hard to say whether or not that would have worked during non-covid times. i think not maybe?

but they looked at the landscape they were dealing with and largely won their bets.

and, though partially because the "he's senile" stuff was so prevalent and set low expectations, i think biden - for me - exceeded expectations during the debate and speeches.

i don't necessarily like him any more than hillary and realize there's a certain amount of advantage that he receives being a white male that she does not...however, hillary and her team misread a lot of things in 2016 and biden's team read a lot of things correctly in 2020.

The thing is, 75% of Joe Biden still has a lot more to offer intellectually than 100% of Josh Hawley or 300% of Tommy Tuberville if he somehow got the Flowers for Algernon treatment

God imagine your diary entries as you realized you were slowly, inexorably turning back into Tommy Tuberville

The only words I've heard Joe Biden speak aloud all year are "The BBC? I'm Irish!", I'm pretty sure.

I like that drones are back in discourse again after four years where the Trump admin greatly accelerated the number of strikes and eliminated the system of accountability under Obama’s admin. Tbf Bernie said he would have continued the drone program. I know I know “he was a compromise”.

Trump did it so it’s okay?

Do you actually think people who criticized Obama’s admin for killing teenage American citizens with drones were cool with Trump doing it?

What's the significance that they would just rather continue criticising Obama throughout, iyo

Why is that their sweet spot?

Because they get their smugs poking at the not-left-enough, they give no more of a fuck than anyone else aside from that

We should drone-murder all these strawmen imo

Trump is self-evidently horrible, Obama is still beloved by many ostensible allies. This is not rocket science.

Or drone science, even.

There is an ever-diminishing hope/expectation that criticism of Democrats can effect change. No such hope (or mechanism to do so) exists for Republicans.

(Add in that substantive political criticism of Trump was subsumed to Russiagate and that this entire line depends on the fantasy that opposition to American imperialism and the forever war stopped under Trump.)

What I think is sort of disingenuous about the strident tone of the "Biden sucks" stuff here in particular is that, like, we all know it. I mean look at the title of this thread started so long ago that a child born that day is now in high school. We all knew it when he ran in 2008, when he became vice president, when he decided to run this time around, when he managed to get the nomination (because the candidates most of us liked better weren't as it happens good enough politicians to win the primaries). We know he's a corporate centrist who has supported a long list of objectionable programs and policies, and we knew very well what kinds of people he was going to name to his Cabinet. I have not gone back and read this entire thread, but I imagine it does not include very many complimentary things expressed by the ILX massive about Joe Biden over the past 15 years. So I'm not even sure who the "I told you so" tone is supposed to be aimed at.

But if this is what you want to spend your time doing, have at it. I don't personally think Biden's Cabinet matters very much, because a.) I don't think the Democrats are going to get the Senate, so nothing much will happen for the next two years; b.) there's a pretty good chance the GOP gerrymanders its way to House control in '22, which means that not only will nothing happen but Biden and Harris and Hillary just for fun will all end up impeached or in jail; and c.) this little period we're in now is just a respite, a breather, and I'm not going to waste the breather giving a shit what Rahm Emanual is doing. Progressive activists would be doing a lot better to focus on finding and supporting candidates they like at local and state levels, and then in '24, than settling into some endless bitch-about-Biden mode.

we can do both!

Criticism is a broad aul word but I wouldn't meself say it covers something that both performer and listener are yawning during

I think it’s odd that Trump doing it way more in his first year than O’s entire admin and even eliminating the system of that informed people of casualties shouldn’t be reduced to a broad equivalency.

*casualties is reduced to

we can do both!

Uh-huh. The Bernie campaign this year didn't give me a lot of confidence in that, but we'll see.

fwiw the only place I've read much about Trump & his massive escalation of the drone program is The Intercept, which many ilxors dismiss as not credible

“Trump was worse” is just a deflection of Obama doing a bad thing - why are you compelled to do that?

If you don’t think Obama was in the wrong - why not say that and defend the drone program (and its architects who are entering the Biden admin) on its merits instead of pointing to Trump?

fwiw the only place I've read much about Trump & his massive escalation of the drone program is The Intercept, which many ilxors dismiss as not credible

It really was massively underreported.

Didn't Trump stop releasing the numbers?

(because the candidates most of us liked better weren't as it happens good enough politicians to win the primaries)

*hits head on desk*

So I'm not even sure who the "I told you so" tone is supposed to be aimed at.

Well, we actually have several Biden defenders here these days?

But this like another line that’s used here, “leftier than thou.” I’ve yet to see anyone actually yell at a liberal here for being a liberal. Criticism of Democrats or Joe Biden from the left, though, is taken as a personal affront and attack for some reason.

The drone program is bad imo but the unmanned vs manned aircraft distinction is considerably less important than a debate of the value of fighting those wars and what getting troops out of those places entails. What happens if we leave? What is the best of all the bad options we have? etc

*hits head on desk*

lol you don't think Bernie and Warren lost because they weren't good enough politicians? I'm sorry, was the election stolen from them, too? Those mail-in votes, just can't trust 'em huh?

But sure, keep blaming the DNC or whatever.

Can we actually retitle this "The Biden Sucks Thread"? Maybe that would encourage more wide-ranging discussion to migrate to other Biden threads. Sic points out that there are 11 Biden threads in the archives, but this is the only one that's gotten any significant traction in the past two years, because people view it as a default.

― jaymc, Wednesday, November 25, 2020 4:50 AM (one hour ago)

I think that's a great idea, tbh.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Wednesday, November 25, 2020 4:51 AM (one hour ago)

Strong disagree on this. It's almost universally a bad idea to change thread titles when they then remove the context in which the discussion started and people posted for its early days, months, and decade. This one is a funny title that expresses its intentions cleverly and well. (I hope that the title is not amongst the regrets Tad now has about tt!). The specific premise of the jokey title, that Joe Biden is a politician of above-average cravenness who would prove himself to be especially beholden to corporate interests that run against those of the populace, if elevated to a stage of greater responsibility, is exactly the same purpose for which it's being used today. There's no value to be added by making the title crasser.

Point taken. We need to open another Biden/Harris thread asap. Then this thread can serve its highest purpose of letting the same six or seven people bitch about Biden's awfulness to one another. If they try to infect the new thread with endlessly repeating how much Biden sucks we can say, "take it to the 'Biden sucks' thread; we're having a different discussion here."

― The Solace of Fortitude (Aimless), Wednesday, November 25, 2020 4:56 AM (one hour ago)

Those same six or seven people have politely used the 'Biden sucks' thread as a quarantine space to vent about Joe Biden sucking all year. They have been met by three or four people repeatedly, tediously going on and on and on at them about how it's upsetting or dangerous or injurious to notice ways in which Joe Biden sucks, as if by reading sourced journalism or viewing footage of Biden speaking, the observers have somehow created the sucky things that Biden does, and says, and has his proxies leak.

There are many other Biden threads which people who want to talk about Biden being great in have consistently chosen not to talk about Biden being great. The "sorry guys but i think biden is a pimp" thread is even free from the fear of Morbs objecting now, but nobody is rushing to celebrate Biden's pimpitude!

But nobody who talks about Biden sucking in this thread has ever raised any objection at all to people talking about Biden being great in this thread. Nobody who talks about Biden sucking in this thread has ever said, to people talking about Biden being great itt, "take it to the 'Biden rules' thread; we're having a different discussion here."

If you want to talk about Joe Biden in this thread, Aimless, you're very welcome to do so. Instead, you talk over and over and over about how you have disdain for people talking about Joe Biden in a Joe Biden thread. Nobody tells you you're wrong for doing so. Fuck on, sweet Ringo!

glad he gaffed his way to pushing Obama to support gay marriage again tbh

― Patriotic Goiter (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, November 25, 2020 1:21 AM (five hours ago)

Nobody has any objection to, or criticism of, Alfred raising one specific positive of Biden: that he changed his opinion that gay people should not have high-level government positions because they are "a security risk," that he changed from voting against domestic partnership protections, and to bar immigration to poz ppl, and for DADT, and for a Section 28 amendment, and for the DOMA. I 100% think it's a good thing that after 29 years in public office, he switched from opposing gay marriage to supporting it*. It's a fucking great thing that he said "trans rights" the week before the 2012 election! Hooray!

* my personal position is that straight marriage is a poisonous institution that has damaged the structure of society, served to immiserate women as a class, and bent the course of capital, and thus should have been abolished instead of gay marriage being legislated. I acknowledge the latter as a compromise toward the common good. See? It's easy!

I can't think of anyone itt shouting at anyone who has raised other specific positives of Biden simply for doing so, either, but it's plausible that some posters read tabes or comalph's rhetorical style as more personally directed.

Seems to me that the dumb idiots itt are making judgments based on specific things Biden is doing while the smart sensible people are getting furious at the addendum “and is therefore no better than Donald trump” that they just made up in their imaginations

― Gab B. Nebsit (wins), Wednesday, November 25, 2020 5:22 AM (one hour ago)

This is the most confounding thing about the nay-naysayers itt. If somebody posts about thinking something Biden does or says being shitty, and the naynays think it's great, why not post about how it's good actually? I honestly don't understand this approach at all.

(NB XP XP THIS WHOLE POST IS XPOSTED BY AN HOUR, WB KARL)

(I get that KM's meltdown today is because he's - erroneously imo* - pattern-matching to his family's refusal to engage on substance. But he's matching to a refusal that he is just imagining will happen, and declining to provide substance on those grounds. Given his current family stress, this is more than understandable - but the "will not communicate" rhetoric is still coming from him! <3 <3, hugs to you Z)
*(okay, maybe milo would move a goalpost or three if in a frustrated mood at the time of reading)

But sure, keep blaming the DNC or whatever.

take this divisive rhetoric to the Liz Woulda Won thread imo

sic you missed this incredibly fierce take-down of yourself, from "Big" Don Abernathy:

Larger context that seems important is that Sic guy starts to sound exactly like a Fox News grandpa if you bring up
Hunter Biden and Milo Z still pushes the “Biden mental decline” narrative which all but the most pathetic dead enders dropped after the numerous debates, town halls speeches etc. So I think there’s probably a degree of cope/embarrassment factoring in for guys that had really bad predictions throughout this whole deal here.

― “Big” Don Abernathy, Tuesday, November 24, 2020 7:45 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think Liz would have won, even though she was my fave. After seeing the election results, I also don't think Bernie would have won. Earlier in the year, I thought it didn't matter a whole lot who the Democrats nominated, because I overestimated the strength of the anyone-but-Trump vote. As it happens, I think Biden probably was the best candidate for the general election.

The refusal of the left-progressive wing (of ILX, and the nation) to engage in any introspection about why exactly not enough actual live voters voted for their candidates — to blame it all on external forces of one kind or another, and not on, say, a lack of coherent strategy and a lot of magical thinking — is not going to help win the next election.

Glad The Nation published this when they thought Biden was DOA. Wild guess that it would not get printed in 2021.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/biden-delaware-way-graft/tnamp/

Have any Berniebros or Lizlads even mentioned them in these threads recently? Bernie’s 900 years old and probably won’t even run for re-election to the Senate.

I don't think Liz would have won, even though she was my fave. After seeing the election results, I also don't think Bernie would have won. Earlier in the year, I thought it didn't matter a whole lot who the Democrats nominated, because I overestimated the strength of the anyone-but-Trump vote. As it happens, I think Biden probably was the best candidate for the general election.

I agree with every word of this. And now that Biden is president-elect, I am going to root for him to succeed.

I love it when ppl confidently speculate about the outcomes of hypothetical elections when we're not even finished figuring out why everyone voted the way they did in the one that just happened.

If there’s one thing that is always useful it’s counterfactual scenarios

xpost

Well yeah, that's my point. Understanding why progressive campaigns didn't work, didn't attract enough voters to win, would be useful. Much more useful than worrying about Biden's utterly unsurprising Cabinet.

But also more work and not as many opportunities for moral superiority, so ...