Life, as John Fitzgerald Kennedy once mused, is unfair. And since the moment he horrifically oversold that point with splattered skull fragments on a limousine trunk, life seems to grow more unfair with every passing presidency. As someone who has spent two score and seven years paying close attention to the dishonest ways elected officials More
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Photograph Source: U.S. House Speaker – Public Domain
Life, as John Fitzgerald Kennedy once mused, is unfair. And since the moment he horrifically oversold that point with splattered skull fragments on a limousine trunk, life seems to grow more unfair with every passing presidency.
As someone who has spent two score and seven years paying close attention to the dishonest ways elected officials and their media enablers seek to define the daily reality, both foreign and domestic, of U.S. politics, I’ve grown accustomed to feeling a particular emotion – rage. Rage at presidents. Rage at policies. Rage at justifications for policies. Rage at analyses seeking to justify justifications.
My life would certainly feel fairer if I were Aaron Sorkin. Pocketing millions writing political dialogue no homo sapien speaks, pening New York Times Op-eds suggesting Democrats nominate Mitt Romney, and in what I’m sure JFK would join me in finding most unfair of all, sleeping with Paulina Porizkova. Yet I still believe rage and a watchful eye may prove far more useful tools in analyzing the coming election than any Sorkin-style gooey ebullience over coconut tree memes.
To recap.
Trump got shot. Biden communicatively disintegrated beyond audible comprehension. Netanyahu oozed evil in the well of the House. No matter. The political machine ground on, demanding sympathy for the privileged and indifference toward the savagely butchered. The machine has rules. Obscenity is decency. Economic barbarism is complexity. Wanton slaughter is self defense.
The powers that be usually manage to get away with this level of simplification for a simple reason: voters have lives. For everyday people,kitchen table issues do not center around why Big Tech billionaires want Kamala Harris to fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. They center around the amount of cereal left in the box and the identity of the sticky shit spilled near the laptop.
But while I do not begrudge anyone for swooning over Kamala’s vibes, I would caution that the devil is always in the donors. Especially for a Democratic Party which, to paraphrase the French philosopher Denis Diderot, will never be sincere until the last Clinton pollster is strangled with the entrails of the last Obama podcaster.
I am old enough to remember 2 weeks ago. That was when every MSNBC host and pundit and strategist and politician/lobbyist on their air was savagely berating anyone who even suggested that Biden should not be the nominee. Now of course those very same people are literally weeping at Joe’s selflessness. At how a man who’d spent a lifetime punching down at the powerless and screwing over anyone who’d ever smoked a joint, sought an abortion, or owned a credit card could summon the personal courage to walk away from his most overtly barbaric endeavor… gunrunner for a genocide.
Make no mistake. Had there been even one internal White House poll showing Biden with a chance to win, rather than give up power he would’ve lashed himself to the Resolute Desk and lived till November in his own filth. As it is, he might still be found wandering pantless in the Rose Garden one moonlit autumn night, angrily muttering to the spectre of Strom Thurmond how that “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean” had shivved him.
Yes. The fingerprints of Barack Obama, the Democrats’ Great-Sayer-Of-Words, are all over the dagger in Joe’s back. Biden’s vanity certainly didn’t help him. Whatever work he had done on his face made him look not youthful but ghoulish. On camera he came off as a desiccated undertaker, leaning into the lens to invade a working class viewer’s personal space with whispered boasts of booming stock markets and lowered deficits. But it was Obama who cleared the field for him in ‘20 and Obama who took him out in ‘24.
Now the question becomes what do Obama and the Democratic moneyed interests feel they can get away with? They have run elections based on platitudes and attitudes since 2008. Do they truly believe it will work this time? Not that it matters economically to a political cartel imbued with generational wealth capable not only of withstanding a Trump Restoration but profiting from it.
And yet, if the Democratic Party ever wanted to win the presidency by articulating positions on issues that matter to majorities, 2024 might be the moment to try. A sanely ever expanding FDR-style safety net devoid of Clintons-Obama-Biden-style triangulation and apologetics could be a winning thing. Republicans are not just beatable but crushable. All it would take is for the Democratic Party to have explainable policies and a willingness to explain them.
But have you ever asked yourself why only Republicans have a Project 2025? Why only they seek to bend every aspect of the executive branch to their will? Can anyone even tell me what the Democrats’ will is? For Obamaites, the future is always too important to jeopardize tomorrow. Theirs would be a Project 2095. With programs means tested and phased-in over the next 70 years. All meticulously designed to be espoused rather than implemented. All centered on the endlessly faulty assumption that Republicans, deep down, are ethical. And all structured to crumble at the slightest obstruction from the next wave of sensible centrists.
By the time you read this Harris may have chosen her VP. If it were me I would double down on women. I would buy a Harris/Whitmer ticket and take the ride. Walz is fine. As for Shapiro, I live in Pennsylvania and I voted for him for governor. But the last thing Democrats need is a candidate who views any support of Palestinians as Hamas-adjacent. And the last thing the country needs is one more Israel apologist in high office. The next time Benjamin Netanyahu walks to the podium I’d like the presiding officer to be brandishing leg irons, not a well turned phrase.
Then again. I’m full of rage and a convention is coming up. I’m sure nothing there will upset me.
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