Two Sides of the Same Counterfeit Coin

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

These days, my mind keeps going back to that famous panel in Walt Kelly's Pogo in which the immortal punchline is, "Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us." 

   And those of us who railed against the Bush administration and jeered his supporters for employing intellectual gymnastics in excusing everything that wet-brained idiot said and did are guilty, egregiously guilty, of using the same exact dismissive head-shaking tactics. Indeed. We have met the enemy and it is us.

    So-called liberal voters have become the new right wing.

    It took the existential threat of Donald Trump to make a historically unelectable guy like Joe Biden that now we've decided (through the collusion, as usual, of Barack Obama, right wing donors, the establishment Democrat Party, the DNC and the corporate mainstream media) this finally is Joe's time... just as he's noticeably slipping into dementia.

     And the big "D" Velcroed at the end of his name should stand for that- Dementia, not Democrat, because there's nothing even remotely "Democratic" about a guy whose office proudly issued a press releaee in 1995 proclaiming he was the fifth most conservative "Democratic" senator. Now he's trying, not altogether successfully, especially among Bernie Bros, to rebrand himself as a progressive because that's the role expected of him.

     Not that it matters if he fits that role about well as a square peg in a round hold to those most vocally supporting him and his artificial impending nomination extruded through the electoral process like the sausage from Hell. Who cares that he's only now "winning" his first primaries in three presidential campaigns, that everything went to that much-visited Hell, for which we should get frequent sloucher miles, that the exit polls were wildly off in primaries that Biden "won", that Biden, like Trump, the GOP and the Republican-run state supreme court, exhorted voters to physically go to the polls in Wisconsin on April 7th to vote even in the middle of a pandemic (an unforgivable miscalculation that cost three Wisconsinites their lives)?

     Who cares that he, too, has a rape allegation hanging over his hair-plugged head ("Yes, I believed Blasie-Ford but Tara Reade is lying"), that he snarls at and threatens voters just as Trump does and that the Democrat Party's overarching strategy is to literally keep Joe in his basement in Wilmington until after Election Day as if preparing for the most horrifying Bait and Switch of all time?

     Biden, Biden, he's our man, if he can't do it, maybe... Klobuchar can. (Sweaty, uncomfortable fact- Klobuchar was such a weak, unappealing candidate in her own right she couldn't even win eight delegates.)

     Yes, I get it. Donald Trump is horrible. He's the real-life Buzz Windrip of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, a real-life Charles Lindbergh in Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America, the brain-damaged second coming of Adolph Hitler. He's stupid, scientifically illiterate, unbearably immature, hideously vindictive and cares about no one but himself, his cronies and his spawn.

     And you would think the Democrat Party, even if it's unofficially run by Barack Obama, the most Republican Democratic president ever, would seek to nominate a candidate who's the most polar opposite of Donald Trump, somebody, like, say Bernie Sanders.

     Instead, they picked Joe Biden, a rickety right winger about a decade past his shelf life whose biggest selling points were that he was the Vice President to the aforementioned most Republican Democratic president ever and that his name isn't Donald Trump. And that's how low the bar has sunk, ladies and gentlemen, that we're propping up such a man in a process that looks more and more nauseatingly like a cross between Idiocracy and Weekend at Bernie's.

Know Your Biden

Last month, Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept wrote an enlightening article that questioned the "moral and strategic calculus" of voting for Joe Biden. I'd found little to nothing to disagree with my colleague's positions and conclusions except to point out that choosing Biden over Trump and especially over Bernie involves not a moral calculus but an amoral one.

    Trump and Biden are just opposite sides of the same counterfeit coin. And most Americans are simply too stupid and/or stubborn to acknowledge that. And it took an existential threat like Donald Trump these days to make people wave away Biden's virulent, right wing history when a mere charge of plagiarism 32 years ago was more than enough to derail his first run for the White House. 

    Now suddenly, it's more convenient to wave away charges of sexual assault simply because it would hurt your guy. Those who screamed about the war in Iraq are suddenly very comfortable with Biden's vote for it. And we've so completely forgotten what actual statesmanship looks like that Bernie Sanders looks more frightening than Ridley Scott's alien.

    The trouble is, there's so little daylight between Trump and Biden that one can hardly make a viable, and honest, comparison between the two. The sledgehammering of progressive policies for which FDR and JFK were justly renowned has been so complete that actual, nation-altering legislation such as the New Deal, the Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Acts and Medicare are looked at as mere necessary programs for our ancestors and nostalgically and passively viewed through a sepia-tinted lens.

     But Joe Biden had a hideous record on all those issues. Regarding Civil Rights, Biden sought the help of racist Mississippi Senator James Eastland to stop integrated busing. He also wrote the crime bill of which he still brags (and about which he still lies)  that put a half a million black men in prison for nonviolent offenses. And then there was his Hindenburg of an interview on the Breakfast Club in which he said those black voters who don't know whether to vote for him or Trump "ain't black."

    On the health care front, Biden, during a pandemic, still opposes Medicare for All, Bernie's signature proposal and one that still enjoys broad support with the vast majority of Americans, in favor of a more watered-down plan he can't be bothered to roll out and that in all likelihood doesn't exist.

     On the Social Security front, Biden bragged about trying four times over four decades to steal that from us despite the screamingly obvious fact it doesn't add a red cent to the debt or deficit. He was still bragging about working with Paul Ryan about proposed Social Security cuts as recently as 2018 at the Brookings Institute, in which he creepily whispered, "Social Security" into the microphone like the Grim Reaper he is.

     At the end of his disaster of an interview on Friday, Biden challenged, “Take a look at my record, man!"

     Yes, let's. Then let's be honest about what we see.