Whenever I am critical of a Democratic candidate for office, many of my fellow progressives scold me for not representing our shared causes. This election cycle is even more delicate because any criticism of the current President is said to embolden the Big Tangerine Twatgoblin who is now a 34-time felon on top of everything else, yet still running a tight race against the incumbent.
Even pointing out the obvious fact that our current President is old earns me the liberal “SHUSH“. The man is 81 years old, will be 82 if he is re-elected and will serve until he 86. If he expires or has to execute the 25th Amendment to step down, he hands the country over to Kamala Harris who has been probably the most unimpressive VP of my lifetime and certainly not a legacy to succeed our President in 2028. At least I hope the Democratic National Committee doesn’t have that in their plans.
But we have a democratic crisis playing out in Washington and must at least acknowledge it if we’re ever going to fix the country. Our Congress is a reality show made up of characters that would not be out of place in a 1990s PARODY of the United States Congress or even the three-ring circus of federal government. But I cannot even say this without people expressing their fear that what I’m saying may convince people to pick the career criminal and pathological liar for a second term over the old man currently there.
Of course, I despise Donald J. Trump. I don’t think 100% of the things he’s accused of are true, but I’m pretty sure that the range is in the mid-90s. He or his family or his companies have been convicted or found liable for defrauding students, veterans, and businesses. He has been found liable for sexual assault. He is under investigation and on trial in so many suits that I cannot keep up with them all. Yet I am to believe that all of that is fiction, a conspiracy to keep down a noble, decent, and CHRISTIAN man in favor of one who is merely a demon wearing the skin of an old man.
But let me be clear. I’m not a Democrat. I am a progressive Independent voter, which is the result of having no voice in the Democratic party even when I checked that box on my registration form. If I get to a voting booth and there is only one choice in the primary, the PARTY has taken my voice from the process. If the process slates my state’s election so late in the process as to eliminate all contenders, my party affiliation is just a mailing address for when the party needs to beg for my money. I say this as one of the few statements I share with my conservative or Republican friends whose vote in Pennsylvania is usually to support whoever was picked for us – because we are told our vote ensures the TRUE America survives another cycle.
Back in 2020, I had no choice but to support Joe Biden. Despite a robust and energetic panel of candidates taking millions of dollars from supporters before the primaries and up to Super Tuesday, those exciting people with big ideas all decided to drop out and throw all that love and support (and money) into Joe Biden’s coronation by the Democratic Party. By the time the Pennsylvania primaries rolled around, there were no choices left. The ballot looked largely the same as the general election would that November. The voters didn’t select Biden. The convention didn’t even select Biden. Biden was the presumptive candidate as soon as the other candidates agrees to stop campaigning. And Biden was the presumptive candidate because he represented the spirit of Barack Obama for whom Biden served as Vice President.
Rather than pick a decent Vice-President himself, Biden chose the tried and true practice of taking out a political insurance policy. Like many Presidents before him, Biden picked someone to add non-white male appeal to his ticket but who also sent a signal to the Republicans that they better hope he serves a full term or they’ll get something “even worse”. It was as we saw with Reagan picking a comparable “weakling” George Bush, George Bush picking dipshit-kicker Dan Quayle, George Bush II picking sociopath and warmonger Dick Cheney, Trump picking Christ’s happy water boy Mike Pence, and fresh newcomer Obama picking old-Washington survivor and possible dementia sufferer Joe Biden. All of those picks reflected the greater fears of the opposing party in the even that someone DARED raise a threat of impeachment. Clinton’s choice of “boring” Al Gore did not prevent his impeachment process and only Trump’s VP was insufficient to save his Presidency from TWO.
Kamala Harris has done very little to distinguish herself as VP, which is better, I guess, than arguing with an elementary school student over the spelling of “Potatoe” or shooting a business partner in the face. Or profiting off two decades of warmongering in the Middle East.
But I can’t say anything against this lack of vision or leadership because someone might think that Kamala Harris is a clear and present danger to our democracy and vote for Donald J. Trump who would accept a big stack of cash to have CLEAR & PRESENT DANGER temp-tattooed to his forehead from a Russian start-up run by Chinese child labor.
I live on a blue island in a sea of red districts. In Pennsylvania, there are pockets of concentrated Democratic support. The rest of the state is conservative. If I drive ten miles in any direction I will meet someone who believes that Trump is the legitimate President of the United States who may even be running a secret government from a secret lair. Any judge or lawyer who might have been installed by a Republican or who has convicted liberals and Democrats is a corrupt force against justice if they do anything but dismiss charges made against Trump. On my blue island, I have to be just as loyal and unrelenting in my support of what Don Henley once wrote of Ronald Reagan but applies to Biden “this tired, old man that we elected King.”
But then, when I say that Joe Biden is not the best the DNC could give us, which I think is a few parsecs away from the legal certainties condemning Trump, I get shit for it.
We don’t question our option, I think, because the DNC is holding our progressive views hostage. Their cartel is one of only 2 real options in this republic of 350 million people and so if I hope to see any progress in protecting or progressing the rights of the oppressed and the liberty of people to live free of the tyranny of the armed or from legislated morality and religion, I have to put up with this shit. And since local elections come down to who shows up, the guy with the “D” in the box has to be the vote even if he’s the dumbest paste-eater ever to graduate with a 0.912 GPA from Derp High School. And if he’s ever accused of so much as arguing with a little league referee at a pee-wee football game, I have to argue with conservatives that he’s not a communist cult leader with ties to Middle-Eastern goat rapists.
Is Joe Biden a nice guy? Maybe. Never met him. Is he a good President? For one living in a binary system where the your cartel loyalty either makes you a saint or a scumbag, he’s doing pretty good on top of the pile. Does he deserve to be impeached? I don’t see the evidence regardless of how loud the MAGAverse cries to make it happen. Does he deserve to be re-elected? So long as the GOP’s best option for what they believe to be the “true America” is this ancient creep who defies all the values they pretend to embrace with their entire souls — FUCK YES.
So why is Trump so fucking close to him in every god-damned poll?
Because the cartels have corralled us into colors and stripped us of any intelligent discourse about what makes a good leader or about what is best for ALL Americans rather than just the half believed to be the “real” America.
Like any group of immature and emotionally compromised children, our leaders in government insist that they not only be RIGHT but that those who have different ideas must also be WRONG, dead wrong, anti-American, and against the laws of God Almighty. The Wrong are inhuman and undeserving of mercy, grace, or understanding. Fuck the Wrong. They are not America. They want you, your babies and all puppies dead, even if it is because they support something like funding for public transportation in poor American cities or recognition of rights for those suffering from a lack of legal protections against discrimination.
The election really isn’t about Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It’s about half the country wanting to go back to a world they liked, a world that was better and easier for them to live in – that mythical “simpler time” where everyone knew their place in the land of the “free”. These people have been told that Joe Biden is the leader of an army carrying out the destruction of their past and the writing of a history that calls them and their loved ones evil and enemies of liberty. It’s about the other half wanting to take the entire country forward to a utopia of lofty ideas that cost a lot of money and will force everyone to adapt or die in this new world order that looks great on paper and is practically sound in SOME parts, but is a bag of great ideas generated by a party that can never seem to agree on what is possible and what is best left to the next generation to built toward.
There’s no third party option to point out that this allegedly free nation with 350 million souls cannot be fairly represented by two cartels with no overlapping values. Even love of country is contingent upon which cartel you join because the other cartel is decidedly NOT the real America. Just ask them. Oh, they’ll say they want to “reach across the aisle” but that’s not really true, especially in the House of Representatives where World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be in charge of picking each session of rivalries and storylines.
And the 24 hour news cycle plays a major role in highlighting the worst of this. Political camera whores know that sound bites get airtime and their pro wrestling promos play out on the House and Senate floors and during press conferences and interviews so the replay will end up on as many platforms as possible. Maybe the cause at the center of these clips gets a boost, but it is usually the conflict that we remember or the one-liner that sticks with the scandal. But there’s a reason C-SPAN remains the punchline of every joke about TV channels people don’t watch because its boring. Governance is boring. Throwing shit and shade are not. Stupid is media gold and its abundance makes it easy to fill time on the talk show circuit. Biden tripping up stairs is a solid three minutes on Kimmel. Maggie Greene’s latest rant is good for ten minutes of Colbert’s monologue and a million next-day views on YouTube. The Saga of Kitara Rivache carried comedy, news, and news-comedy for months with the kind of glee generated by the best Royal Rumbles of the WWF’s prime in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the world continued to smolder with real, unresolved issues that did not play well to late night comedy.
Despite all this bullshit, I’m in the wrong when I say, “Hey, it’s really sad that this is the BEST the party of progressive ideas can do for us. I don’t expect every cycle to produce the next Barack Obama, but there have to be standards higher than someone who carries the scent of a better President.”
And as an independent voter, I see this as a failure of existential scale. We let one of two parties put the country in a position where someone as horrible and demonstrably bad as Donald Trump remain a viable candidate and the other offer up someone so uninspiring that he fails to do what Ronald Reagan did to Walter Mondale in 1984 which was (as Dennis Miller quipped) stomp him like a NARC at a biker rally. And Mondale was a decent guy by most accounts. How we got from this…
…to this…
…given the leaders involved represents an existential crisis of American politics.
History will look back on how we chose to embrace or reject this type of amateur leadership by the words immortalized in social media. Historians and scholars will use A.I. to scour the archives of our accounts to determine how hard we fought for our democracy. The next great civilization will put a lot of effort into pinpointing the precise moment when we gave up our control of this great American Experiment. It will look for language that shows when and how we abandoned responsibility for self-governance for the compliance with the two giant machines that have slowly taken away our control and forced us to hate not only an opposing party branded on an broad idea of what American must be, but against those huddled together in our own camp who are not loyal enough to deny the obvious flaws and problems this very system perpetuates. We tolerate the incompetence and embrace the spectacle. We love the bread and circus aired around the clock to us and have lost, it seems, the power to say – but what is good for ALL Americans?
But if my calling Biden’s age a concern or his performance as President mediocre makes it more likely that the Criminal King of Mar a Lago wins? Well, then this Great Experiment may already be ready to fail.
THEunJAYdedBOOK 
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