UPDATE: Joe deserved better
What Democrats are doing to Joe Biden is so wrong, it's hard to comprehend how bad it is.
UPDATE: President Biden has dropped out of the race.
From Friday:
This has been one hell of a day. First, thousands of Microsoft-based computers are bricked or blue-screened because of a screw-up in with an update to best-of-class security software CrowdStrike. If this doesn’t affect you, thank God for His grace on you. For the rest of us who are dealing with server hell, missed flights, or customers left in the lurch, I feel your pain. I feel Joe Biden’s pain too.
Four years ago, the Democratic Party coalesced around Biden, after discarding him in 2016 because Barack Obama made a deal with Hillary Clinton. Not only did Biden deliver the presidency, he also—working closely with Donald Trump, who did heavy lifting in getting Republican voters to stay home in Georgia—delivered the Senate.
President Biden deserved his party’s fealty to him for taking out Trump and keeping him from a second term, never mind with a Republican congress (both houses would likely have remained in GOP hands). When Biden botched our exit from Afghanistan, his party covered for him. When voters complained about high prices, or cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, or Biden’s Build Back Better plan, his party and media darlings covered for him.
Factually, our economy is recovering as well as it can post-COVID, and we’re producing more oil than we ever did, and in fact, more than any country, ever. We haven’t had a giant property bubble, or stock market bubble pop, or experienced the rolling bankruptcies that have upended China’s economy. People are employed, maybe not everyone earning what they want to earn, but there’s a reasonable amount of job security and mobility for those who want or need to change employers.
Yes, there are problems with illegal immigration on our southern border. Yes, there are problems with various cities and states that have right-to-shelter laws (like New York City or Massachusetts). There are problems keeping all these immigrants, who have backlogged filings for refugee status, housed and fed. Our laws don’t permit these people to work, but that’s an issue for Congress, not the president (though Biden has done what he could). Biden decided to work on the border crisis, but it was Republicans who killed those deals, since it helps the GOP to see Biden flounder (and force him to live with his campaign rhetoric).
In reality, Joe Biden has not done a terrible job. I don’t agree fully with his policy on Ukraine, but I also wouldn’t agree with America Firsters who would have handed the whole place to Vladimir Putin on Day One. I agree more with Biden than with the folks who think Putin has some real claim to Ukraine. My disagreement with Biden is that he didn’t do enough up front because he thought Putin would get discouraged, or the Russian people would rise up against him. The war has gone on far too long, and as it has, Ukraine’s potential to really win has declined. It was a mistake.
It’s in the area of politics where Biden has totally failed, and that’s not because of Republicans. The Democrats have screwed him over.
When it behooved them, Democrats in Congress, industry, state and local parties covered for Biden’s age and infirmity. They allowed their president to be cloistered, isolated, and pandered to. They reflexively attacked anyone who brought up the age issue. And then, when it didn’t behoove them, they dumped Biden with the gusto of a mob family fighting over the aging Padrone’s empire.
If you think that’s an extreme metaphor, it’s not. The Democrats are behaving like organized criminals and evil children to a hated scion they can’t wait to bury so they can have his riches.
Joe Biden didn’t have to run for president at age 78, after being put to pasture in 2016. He did it because he wanted to be president (duh!) but also because he believed he could offer a hand in a race that couldn’t be decided by far-left progressives versus centrist independent voters who didn’t like Trump but couldn’t stomach the Squad. Biden filled a middle-ground and did it as well as an old Cold War Democrat could do it. Like him or not, he deserves to get elder statesman status within his party. And I’m not a Democrat saying that!
I know a bit how it feels to want to ride out into the sunset and have that bubble unceremoniously popped. I built a company over about 10 years, and we ended up selling to a large multinational public conglomerate. After two and a half years of working for them, they broke a hard promise (the kind that’s written into closing conditions—as in I wasn’t closing if they did certain things). When they broke this promise, I asked my boss when he wanted my resignation. I had a six month separation agreement and things got touchy at the end. Beyond touchy—I was dismissed to work my final six weeks from home, then told not to come back. I did not get to ride out into the sunset with the employees I hired and mentored. It hurt.
Now I know my little pity party story is nothing compared to being in a political party your whole adult life, working in the Senate, helping other Democrats get elected, working with Barack Obama for eight years as the invisible vice president, only to get passed over for the torch. I know it’s nothing when the party threw Joe on its shoulders after Hillary Clinton—a terrible candidate by any measure—failed, and called on Joe Biden to beat Trump in the midst of a pandemic that consumed 100% of the media time.
And at the end, when Biden has been used up, instead of working with him over the past four years, the Democrats let him twist in the wind, while they reaped whatever rewards came down from his work. They let Biden isolate. They failed to hold him accountable when he didn’t have cabinet meetings. They failed to come alongside him when he wasn’t having press conferences. They failed to plan for succession and give Biden the good statesman treatment. They committed elder abuse, and family abuse and corrupt, black-hearted ambition upon him.
By all that’s good and holy, Democrats should be forced to compete the 2024 race with Joe Biden at the top of their ticket. Biden should rage against the dying of his light and make his party drag through this election, and if he loses, they lose with him. But that’s not going to happen. Biden can’t run without his party behind him, and they’re not behind him. His donors have shoved him off a cliff. They’ve shunted him aside, and they are forcing him to become a lame duck for six months while they cannibalize him alive.
I could not be more disgusted with Democrats than I am. Whatever they do, if voters feel half the disgust I feel for the party of buzzards and vultures hiding behind their self-righteous, corrupt official titles, then Donald Trump will win in a landslide. Not that I’m voting for Trump, but plenty of other people are, and my vote will not to go the Democrats who dumped Biden when he deserves to be treated like a human being.
Hell, I will write in “Joe Biden” on my ballot before I vote for whoever ends up on the ballot. Joe deserves better. Any effort the Democrats make to rehabilitate his image after they’ve trampled him underfoot will be disingenuous coprophagia. I truly wish them the worst, politically speaking.
Again, I am not fan of Joe Biden. I am a great fan of being human to people and treating them with respect. The whole reason so much of the country is disgusted with our choice this November is because Trump is disrespectful of just about everyone and every institution. Now the Democrats have made themselves into a party of a thousand Trumps. Excuse me while I vomit.
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After beating Trump in 2020, Joe dropping out is the next greatest thing he's done for the future of this country.
Thank you, Joseph Biden.
Sorry Steve, but this may well be your worst column; EVER. Arguing humanity by dragging Joe along to get his ass kicked might just be the dumbest thing i have heard. That would be elder abuse which i have a better than working knowledge on from my years working with senior coalitions on that very topic.
The man has done yeoman's work. He won a race he would not have won without the Pandemic. The problem was the party trusted him and his people to be up front about where he was/is. They hid it and those who could didn't have the heart to question it. Shame on them. Trust goes both ways.
The debate showed us all who and where he is. I've seen and read all the arguments; he stutters, he had a cold, he was tired from overseas travel, he was overloaded with data. They are endless and the most objective comments following the debate were he has to come out and put it to bed. I couldn't have agreed more and when he did step out he was still a shell of his former self.
Imagine your argument this way; the greatest boxer from my era was easily Cassius Clay or better known as Muhammad Ali. He retired and lived in AZ. Around 2000 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. His condition worsened though he lived to 2016 (by then pretty much a vegetable). Would you even begin to suggest in 2005 he should step in the ring with Mike Tyson?
It would be insanity, you know it, i know and the whole damned world knows it. Your argument, and the one i have made repeatedly, is to let him step away with dignity and grace that should be shown such a statesman. The party elders owe him that and until they just shit-can him like you were, any other speculation is just that; speculation.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and attribute your orneriness to the software mess...but that will probably get you even more angry. Oh well; Kumbaya is over-rated.