My thoughts on Biden dropping out:
Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career. Barely able to stumble his way through the words on a Teleprompter and not always cognizant of what is happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug. He was their creature – he has been in federal office for 47 years - from start to finish. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was anointed as the candidate in 2024 in a Soviet-style primary campaign. The billionaire class will now anoint someone else. Democratic Party voters are stage props in this political farce. Donald Trump, unlike Kamala Harris or any other apparatchik the billionaire class selects as a presidential candidate, has a genuine and committed base, however fascistic.
In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Vogelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.
Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs. As I write in America, The Farewell Tour, this assault on the working class created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm. Trumpeted by a compliant media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime and law and order. Biden was at the epicenter of this paradigm shift. Those undergoing profound economic and political change were told that their suffering stemmed not from rampant militarism and corporate greed but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal Black youth, “welfare queens” and other alleged social parasites. This opened the door to a faux populism, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith and the return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans. The Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton and Biden, became largely indistinguishable from the establishment Republican Party to which it is now allied.
The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties. The Democrats, tools of Wall Street, gave us Trump, and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020. They look set to give us Trump again. God help us.
One is never sure which of two characteristics is more prominent in the American national character and therefore of the greater significance: naivete or a superiority complex. When for example they say things about our region, our surprise at their ignorance is surpassed only by annoyance at their stupid insolence. The less they know about a matter, the more confidently they speak. They really believe that Europeans are eagerly waiting to hear from them and heed their advice.
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They cannot believe that there are cultural values that are the result of centuries of historical development, which cannot simply be bought. It was no bad joke when, after the war, they bought the ruins of German castles and moved them stone by stone to the USA. They really thought that they had purchased a piece of national history embodied in stone, and were naive enough to think that mocking laughter from Europe was respect for the wealth that enabled them to buy what their own tradition and culture lacked.
We would not say anything if the USA were aware of its intellectual and moral defects and was trying to grow up.
Germany was a diseased society during Weimar with prostitution of all ages and shemale bars. Hitler campaigned exactly against that. How can someone who campaigns against a disease embody the pathologies? It can't, even if Hitler later came to embody different diseases. — Lionino
Ironically, everything that the "grotesque, marginal" Göbbels said about Burgerland 100 years ago still applies today, and the entire planet would agree: — Lionino
The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.
Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs.
What you really got was the transformation of the Democratic party into the Republican party.
But I still think that incumbency is very powerful. — fishfry
I waa a courtroom prosecutor ... I took on perpetrators of all kind: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped-off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type. — VPOTUS Kamala Harris (D-CA)
I don't care how they engineered ("forced" "bullied") POTUS to step aside ("palace coup"?) so long as the outcome is a candidate to replace him who can curb stomp The MAGA Cult Clown to Electoral College defeat in just over a hundred days. — 180 Proof
Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs.
Some are saying the earth is flat. — Echarmion
He's the old one now. Kam at least has put some youth into our political process. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. — fishfry
Just last week: Biden tanking with donors and polls. Trump shot and gets a photo-op. Picks a VP. RNC convention. Elon Musk endorses. One lawsuit thrown out.
Old news. He already peaked, and too early. All downhill from here. Could still pull it off, but what a difference a week makes from the hysterics. — Mikie
Kelly’s credentials begin with his dazzling biography as a combat-tested Navy pilot and NASA astronaut who commanded shuttle missions aboard both the Discovery and Endeavour and traveled more than 20 million miles in space.
He has also turned out to be a supremely skillful politician in a tough state where the Biden-Harris ticket has been running behind. Kelly won a close race in 2020 to fill the unexpired term of John McCain (R) and then turned around to win it again two years later — this time, with a more comfortable five-point margin against a hard-right Republican election conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump.
Border Politics: “When I first got to Washington, it didn’t take me long to realize that there are a lot of Democrats who don’t understand our southern border and a lot of Republicans who just want to talk about it, don’t necessarily want to do anything about it, just want to use it politically,” he told me shortly after his 2022 victory. “So my approach has been — to the extent that we could and can — to make progress on securing it, but also doing it in a way that’s in accordance with our ethics and our values, not to demonize people.” — WaPo
A lot more are calling it a coup than are claiming the earth is flat. What would you call it? — fishfry
The Dems lied for three years to hid Biden's infirmity, then stabbed him in the back. When Nancy Pelosi comes to you and says, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," and a letter is put out that you clearly didn't write, that's a coup. — fishfry
Still no idea who is running the country. — fishfry
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