Photo by Scott Walsh
The world’s attention has been, rightly, focused on Palestine for the last several weeks. Certainly, this writer’s attention has been mainly fixed on the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the additional, escalated violence against the Palestinian people in the West Bank. But he has not completely lost sight of another approaching travesty, not on the level of genocide, but certainly related to it.
The United States is slowly lumbering towards its quadrennial performance of democracy theatre, the one in which the citizens generally have a choice between a corporate-and-lobby-owned Republican and a corporate-and-lobby-owned Democrat. Third Party candidates, many of whom have platforms that make far more sense than those of the Republicans or Democrats, are intentionally marginalized in order to allow those already in power to remain there. Yes, a president might lose an election, so his power may be lost but, basically, it’s a situation of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’. And the current frontrunner and likely Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, has indicated that loss of the White House doesn’t necessarily mean loss of power. Most of the members of the Republican Congress, both in the Senate and the House of Representatives, live in fear of his wrath, and act accordingly, to the detriment of the U.S. populace that none of them seem to care about anyway.
So in a country with about 332 million people, it appears that someone, somewhere, believes that the best the country has to offer in 2024 is the current, elderly, doddering president, Joe (‘Genocide Joe’) Biden and the former, elderly, doddering president, Donald Trump. They are forever making headlines, and oh, what pearls of wisdom they have recently exclaimed!
In July of this year, when speaking before the National Safer Communities Summit in Connecticut, Biden closed his remarks about gun control with this comment: “God save the queen, man.”
This was puzzling for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, his speech, the reason he was there, the audience, etc. had nothing whatsoever to do with any queen. Could he have been referring to Queen Elizabeth, who had died ten months earlier? Was there some other queen he might have been referring to and, if so, why? His spokespeople scrambled for an excuse, any excuse, but were unable to creatively think of one that made sense to anyone.
Trump, however, could hardly criticize him for this, since his own ‘errors’ in speech are legion. In talking about Hungary’s President Viktor Orban, he “said that the media asked Orbán, ‘What would you advise President Obama?’ Trump went on to claim that Orbán said Obama should ‘immediately resign, and they should replace him with President Trump.’” And this is not the first or only time that he has referred to Obama as if he were president today.
Need the puzzled reader be reminded that Obama left office in January of 2017, when Trump was inaugurated? Perhaps it is not the reader, but Trump, that needs such a reminder.
Trump also called Orban the leader of Turkey, and said that Biden would lead the country into World War II (no, that isn’t a typo; he said with Biden as president, we risked being pulled into World War 2); confused Jeb and George Bush and denied giving Dr. Anthony Fauci a commendation. And can we possibly forget his suggestion of injecting disinfectant into people to cure or prevent COVID?
Oh, these are doozies, but Biden is hardly a paragon of intellectual acuity himself. In June of this year, he said, “We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean.” In September, at a fundraising event, he was asked why he decided to run for president in 2020. He cited Trump’s response to a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and then, a few minutes after, repeated the story almost verbatim.
Also in September, when appearing before the United Nations General Assembly, he stated that the U.S. should work with China on “accelerating the climate crisis….”
Anyone can misspeak occasionally. This writer knows a man who, when talking about a eulogy he delivered, mistakenly said the word ‘urology’ instead of ‘eulogy’. In most cases, one just keeps on with what one was saying. However, this writer’s friend who made that mistake was not at the time, never was and never will be president of the United States.
Biden is 80 years old; Trump is 77. Is it not time for the (much) older generation to step aside? The average age in the U.S. is 38.9 years. Trump and Biden are double that age. Surely, somewhere in the United States, two people can be found who aren’t past the normal retirement age and who would possibly be interested in being president.
And, to return to the title of this essay, what is the real difference between Biden and Trump? Both are Zionists, supporting genocide. Both, despite Biden’s campaign promises, are most content for U.S. citizens to live in a repressive police state. Neither is beholden to the will of the voters; lobbyists are the people who have the most influence over policy. Both are willing to spend billions on apartheid Israel, as some U.S. citizens can’t drink the water that flows from their taps, go into life-long debt to get an education and pay through the nose for medical care (yes, the Affordable Care Act provided many people with insurance coverage, but millions upon millions still lack it).
This writer, although living in Canada for nearly twenty years, maintains his U.S. citizenship. He will, as he has done for the past two presidential elections, seek a third-party candidate to vote for. Such a candidate, he knows, has no chance of winning; he or she may not even be listed on the ballot in every state. But with the dismal choices offered up by the two major parties, he would much rather vote for someone he can believe in, rather than the lesser of two evils. Although one may be ‘lesser’, they are both evil.
So this is what the U.S. and the world can expect in the White House from January 2025 to January 2029: some rich, out-of-touch, doddering old man unless that man doesn’t last four years. Then, if Biden is elected, the country will be stuck with Kamala Harris, and who knows what bizarre clown will run with Trump. That vice president would then become president.
It is not a pretty picture, but it is the one that the country and the world face.
The post Twiddle-Dum and Twiddle-Dee: Senior Edition appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
