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

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 ...

I love it when ppl confidently speculate

― it bangs for thee (Simon H.), Tuesday, November 24, 2020 1:57 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

welcome to [x] ilx politics thread

Just because things aren’t surprising doesn’t mean they aren’t terrible.

Biden barely hit par with POC and did not ultimately turn many of the old whites who turned out for him in the primary.

Pointing to Clyburn and Obama’s pressure before Super Tuesday to stop Bernie or media coverage of both Bernie and Warren isn’t about denying reality, those are structural issues any progressive will have to overcome even if they’re not old and white.

xp: Under Trump, drone strikes are markedly up in Somalia, but they've declined considerably in Pakistan (peak in 2010), Yemen (peak in 2012) and Afghanistan (2016). Can't locate good info on Syria (UK's peak, under US coordination, was Nov'15 to Sep'17).

I think a good case can be made that both Obama and Trump are much more averse to US casualties that W, and the main difference is that Obama still saw a US role in the rest of the world, and CIA drones and SOCOM detachments permitted US power, while Trump didn't give the slightest damn about international power politics or non-Israel/Gulf state allies. Drones were used, but in much lower numbers.

^ permitted US power projection at low political cost

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more-than-bush-and-obama-combined-2020-10%3famp

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 am going to be honest and say that I don't know enough about some of the points against Biden that have been made in this thread. But most of them have to do with things he's said or done in the past, and I guess I'm not really interested in litigating it?

One of the things I find hopeful about Biden is that he's changed a lot over the course of his political career. It's been said that he always tries to position himself within the center of the party, even as the party has moved in various directions. That meant that he took some awful positions in the '90s and '00s, when the Democratic Party was stuck in its Third Way mode. But he may have the opportunity to be more progressive now. Probably not as progressive as anyone here would like, but still.

Rather than writing him off as worthless because of legislation he sponsored 30 years ago, and viewing every action he takes through this historical lens, I'd prefer to be open-minded and let my criticism of him derive from the decisions he makes in the current moment and their real consequences.

I think it would have been tipping the scales or meaningful pressure if Obama endorsed Biden before Super Tuesday instead of after.

Robert Wright has been grading Biden's foreign policy candidates for "progressive realism". Biden's picks are all pretty "blobby", as in the DC foreign policy blob, as with Obama's. So if you didn't like Obama's application of the military/IC, you probably won't like Biden's, either.

Biden barely hit par with POC and did not ultimately turn many of the old whites who turned out for him in the primary.

Somehow or other Biden recently managed to get 80 million votes, despite being a not-good candidate running a not-good campaign promising nothing people were excited about. Maybe we should probe this inexplicable mystery more deeply.

We'll be studying the Dems' approach to treating Hispanics as a bloc obsessed with immigration and eliminating caudillos and Trump's appeal to latent machismo in POC for a while, yeah. It's possible Biden, even given the Dems' problems with Hispanics in south Texas and Miami-Dade County, would've done even better had not Donald J. Trump been the nominee.

At the moment I've started getting involved in reconstructing this shitty Florida party.

those are structural issues any progressive will have to overcome even if they’re not old and white.

Wait, so you're saying underdogs are underdogs for a reason? Challenging entrenched interests is hard? Do tell.

If you're going to go into that fight knowing that, then you have to have an actual strategy to win. Or you can just keep losing over and over and blaming the system. Which I promise you is not as much fun as winning.

I should note that my inclination to give Biden the benefit of the doubt probably has to do with my desire to ~believe in something~ and ~have hope for the future~. Perhaps that's misplaced, but whatever.

That would be a stronger point in Biden’s favor if Trump hadn’t gotten the second most votes in history with 240k dead and economic devastation?

Many xps about Biden’s 80 million.

There’s plenty of things other than Joe Biden to believe in! For example, I have hope for the future based on things like the ceaseless efforts of the people who pushed Seattle’s city council into cutting the police department’s 2021 budget by something close to 20%, with more likely still to come. I don’t need to think Joe Biden is good to have shreds of hope that I’d rather be alive than dead in four years.

One of the things I find hopeful about Biden is that he's changed a lot over the course of his political career. It's been said that he always tries to position himself within the center of the party, even as the party has moved in various directions.

It’s been said by who? Biden was a leader and routinely staked out positions pulling the party to the right - on law and order, the drug war, busing, deregulation, bankruptcy “reform,” natsec/spying, on down the list. He ran for President multiple times - you don’t do that by being a leaf in the wind following the party as it goes.

Frack Em in the Leg Biden isn’t exactly Mr. Hopey Changey

You say you don’t want to focus on his history, but what do you have to tell you about him as a politician except for five decades of actions?

It’s been said by who?

For one: Evan Osnos, who just wrote a biography of Biden.

It’s been said by who?

https://prospect.org/politics/biden-debate-i-am-democratic-party/

Instead, over his long career he moved as the party moved, always adjusting to position himself in its center. He began his time in the Senate opposing busing and favoring restrictions on abortion. When under Bill Clinton the party eagerly tried to portray itself as “tough on crime,” he led the charge. But over the years, as the party became more liberal and more ideologically consistent, he grew more liberal as well.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-pandemic-has-pushed-biden-to-the-left-how-far-will-he-go/

that took me literally 5 seconds

Like I hope Joe Biden abolishes ICE, cancels all government-backed student debt, and cancels all oil exploration permits by executive order on day 1, but I also hope I get a 40% raise at work next year, am cured of my chronic health conditions, and win a free toaster from a contest I don’t have to enter.

There doesn't appear to be a transcript of Evan Osnos's podcast conversation with Ezra Klein, but here are some of the bullet points on the episode summary:

*Why the Joe Biden who entered the Senate in 1980 is such a radically different person than the Joe Biden who ran for president in 2020

*Biden’s ideological flexibility, and the theory of politics that drives it

*The differences between Biden’s three presidential campaigns — and what they reveal about how he’s grown

*Why Biden is “the perfect weathervane for where the center of the Democratic Party is”

i also hope we'll have a world to live in in 50 years, feels good to put my faith in joe, the guy who has been at the vanguard of, or drifted along with, or whatever, the democratic party line for the last 50 years. definitely seems like a hopeful trajectory.

Beats some of the alternatives.

go fuck yourself spotify choad

Me?

yes

Why?

because you don't have anything valuable to say or think and you're dead weight.

Aimless, perhaps you didn't realize that a lot of people were motivated by voting against Trump.

Rather than writing him off as worthless because of legislation he sponsored 30 years ago, and viewing every action he takes through this historical lens, I'd prefer to be open-minded and let my criticism of him derive from the decisions he makes in the current moment and their real consequences.

― jaymc, Tuesday, November 24, 2020 1:15 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Jaymc, unless he orders all people rotting in the carceral system since 1994 to be freed, this is a non-starter for anyone who calls themselves a leftist with a straight face. Unless he finds a way to fire the 17,000 cops that were added as a result of the 1994 bill, your proposition is a non-starter. And that's just two things I can think of off the top of my head.

Because history has consequences, Biden's actions in the past have dire consequences for the present-- ie, the legalized, state-sanctioned slavery that is built into the carceral system.

So please spare me the 'judge him by his current actions' crap-- there are many hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been ruined because of this racist fuck's hard-on for "tough on crime" bullshit.

xp I'm sorry you feel that way, map.

(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)

you're right. i am a complete fucking mess right now, and that's probably clear. it's probably clear when someone mentions their mom 4 times within an hour on the joe biden thread. right after this meltdown, i proceeded to create two other meltdowns irl. so that's obviously me, not you all. i'm sorry for being antagonistic, for dumping a dozen posts in a row without listening or caring about the responses (something that people have confronted me about multiple times this month, unrelated to ilx or internet), and also for conflating disagreement with being dumb. i don't think anyone here is dumb, except for my mom (#5).

however, since i'm still in the meltdown afterglow, i'd like to point out that i would fucking shit my pants if any of the people i was yelling at today would, just for once, admit they were wrong on anything at all, rather than dodging everything by asking questions that don't have answers. and i will note that this kind of behavior is very common among people with rightwing brainworms. the first step toward brainworms is not being able to tell yourself that you're wrong. the second step is to find someone else who is the same way, and to make a pact to never be wrong, together. so perhaps it's not that strange that conflate the two - i am absolutely exhausted with "debating" with people who will never, ever, ever EVER admit they're wrong about anything, and will bend time and space itself in order to avoid doing so. it's one of the the things that makes me really mad these days.

in conclusion, i have mommy issues, and also death to all white christians

signed, a centrist

that took me literally 5 seconds

The question wasn’t “has this ever been said,” it was “who said it.”

ie is this said now in order to excuse and explain Biden’s past to make him more palatable to contemporary liberals. Which... seems to be the case. That Waksman piece is devoid of specifics and 538 is talking about how COVID pushed him left.

He “led the charge” on law and order - how is one just following the crowd and leading the charge? He didn’t give up his support for the Hyde Amendment until 2019.

Most of this supposed leftward movement appears to have come in the last 18 months as he decided to run for President. As I listed above, he wasn’t staking out the center of the party in the era when Mondale is the nominee and Biden is helping craft the crack/powder distinction.

xp I'm sorry you feel that way, map.

― jaymc, Tuesday, November 24, 2020 9:47 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm sorry i have to skip around your posts! sad all around