Why do you have to ruin this pitch-perfect rant about the election by dissing spiders, Cody? That one line hurt, you know.
The rest, though, is spot on. Biden sucks, but we’ve got to vote for him.
I won’t be able to watch the election returns on 3 November. Because of the electoral college, and the corruption, and the rat-fucking Republicans, and the poisoning of the courts with unqualified evil jerks, I don’t have that much confidence that Trump will be thrown out of office.
Then what? The problem remains, a country that could elect someone like DT could elect any idiot.
How’bout just giving them Hawaii? Then just isolate the place for a generation and see what’s left…
After the apocalypse, Donald Trump will live on as a god. Red tie and
all, apparently.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/world/asia/india-trump-fan-dies.html
He Built a Trump Statue and Worshiped It. Then He Collapsed.
Bussa Krishna, a farmer who called President Trump his god, stopped eating
after Mr. Trump became infected with the coronavirus, his family said.
He died on Sunday.
By Shalini Venugopal Bhagat and Mike Ives
Published Oct. 14, 2020
Hey, isn’t that what they did to Roman emperors?
His best point was about halfway through. There’s a whole generation motivated for change right now, but if Biden fails to follow through, all those thousands of kids hopping on the BLM train might hop off again. If Democrats take the youth vote for granted, then we will be looking at another Trump, or something worse. We need to keep the ball rolling. The fight isn’t over on November 3rd or January 20th. We need to keep pushing to keep the Dems honest. NO MORE EMPTY PROMISES!
Sure, let’s advocate for what we want — but why would we be looking at another Trump if the Democrats continue their play for the centre-right at the presidential level?
If you want change you need to start with local elections. Parties can’t just pop up out of nothing and take the presidency and get anything done.
You might want to look into the history of the Republican party’s origins.
For the last few weeks I’m purposefully buying into all the Biden hype. He’s Uncle Joe! He’s laid back and easy going! He’s warm-hearted and kind! He’s a hard working family man! He’s Obama’s best friend and right-hand man! He’s gonna restore America’s dignity abroad! He’s gonna fight for the working man! He’s gonna put away all the bad cops!
I reserve the right to change my mind microseconds after he’s sworn in…
“How’bout just giving them Hawaii? Then just isolate the place for a generation and see what’s left…”
Hawai’i is far too nice for them.
Let them have GITMO for their very own Sovereign Citizen Galt’s Gulch, with plenty of S&M/torture facilities so that they can weed out the socialist traitors in their midst.
Then, after a year or so, whisper to the Cuban government “not ours any more. have fun”
I have to respectfully disagree. I am an educator of the same approximate age (having taught every grade level, K-12, and at UCLA). I have “idealistic” friends who totally vote (e.g.) Peace and Freedom Party. I understand that. I voted for John Anderson in my first presidential vote. (And I’ve voted a range of candidates since, none Rs).
This country will NOT elect a person outside of the “mainstream.” I think Biden is a “stealth” candidate. He’ll push for many of Bernie’s ideas, but without Bernie’s “baggage” with uber conservative America. We need an amenable candidate for the conservative part of America (which is MOST of the USA including “liberals.”)
We live in a conservative country, with a conservative media (including the “liberal” outlets). Let’s be realistic.
Hey… HEY! What’s wrong with cashews? I always pick them out and eat them first, almonds and pecans are just so everyday…
kome: yes, that’s a good example of what I’m talking about. Lincoln didn’t win out of the blue; he represented the largest party in the House and second-largest in the Senate going into the election, a party that had been formed 6 years previously and was formed from a wing of a previous party.
@6
Maybe not as many people as I thought associate that with Stalin, because I have seen it used without irony on facebook. The fact that Republicans haven’t gone for it suggests as much. (You may remember a brief period in the run-up to Bush’s war that Republicans expected everyone to know who Neville Chamberlain was and thought it was a hilarious punchline.)
I will not use it. It’s always gonna be Stalin to me. The Onion’s satirical “Diamond Joe” probably helped Biden, though.
How about giving Hawaii back to the Hawaiian people instead.
oddie:
Unscramble the omelette? Too late.
I would have guessed almonds are cheaper than cashews.
I watched long enough just to make sure I had context. I think it’s safe to say that even if you like spiders, especially if you like spiders, you would have to agree that being smashed in the face with a gourd full of them is not going to be any good for either you or the spiders.
@#3, Ray Ceeya:
And, uh, how precisely do you propose to “pressure” Joe Biden? He says at least that he won’t be running for office again (and he’s certainly old enough to die in office rendering the question moot) so you can’t threaten not to vote for him, his history shows that he has no significant ethic or moral qualms to speak of when it comes to screwing over the poor, women, black people, gay people, or pretty much anybody else in favor of the rich, and his judgement is incredibly bad. I’m really honestly interested what kind of leverage you people who talk about this idea think you have, because to me it looks very much like the right wing guaranteed that they win the election unless a third party pulls out a win the minute Biden got the nomination.
Vicar, this should be garlic to you:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bidens-election-will-end-national-nightmare-20/2020/07/28/f9c01df0-d0f7-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html
Yeah that George Will. Ancient aliens abducted him and replaced him with an interdimensional lizard shilling for the anti-Trump Deep State.
Ray @3: “We need to keep pushing to keep the Dems honest. NO MORE EMPTY PROMISES!”
Vicar, The @16: “@#3, Ray Ceeya:
And, uh, how precisely do you propose to “pressure” Joe Biden?”
(Not a speck of honesty)
@16 By the same reasoning, there would have been a lot more leverage over Hillary Clinton, which is why I thought the obvious strategy once she was the nominee was to elect her and pressure her. I agree it will be less effective for Biden. If the alternative is Donald Trump, there is still no contest. What alternative do you propose?
@#17, hemidactylus:
So, uh, George Will, who is notoriously wrong about just about everything, thinks Biden is going to be a big improvement. What next, a similar article by Bill Kristol?
@#19, PaulBC:
Howie Hawkins. Our two major parties have proven themselves entirely unfit to govern over the last 40-odd years; one is blatantly evil, the other pretends to resist them while empowering them. Get rid of them both, right now. If it’s too late to do that, that’s your fault (or, at least, the fault of people like you), not mine.
And, incidentally, I notice that you aren’t answering my question: how are you going to put any pressure on Biden? Do you have any concrete suggestions? And when are you going to organize said pressure, given that Biden is going to start his backstabbing immediately? If you aren’t planning to resist him — because he’s spent his entire career helping Republicans and lying about it, and that isn’t going to change now — from the very first day, then you’re useless to any thinking person.
(I’m betting the first stab in the backs of the base will be an announcement, certainly made before the new Congress is sworn in and begins work, that any plan to prize the Supreme Court out of the hands of the right wing are off the table, because that is entirely consonant with both Biden’s history and Pelosi’s. Biden is already out there pushing “unity”, which as Obama demonstrated means “I intend to let the Republicans determine policy even though the voters just kicked them out of the government on purpose because it makes my job easier to have an excuse to do nothing my 1% donors don’t want me to”.)
I know I said that I wouldn’t respond to this dishonest asshole but this right here:
“Get rid of them both, right now. If it’s too late to do that, that’s your fault (or, at least, the fault of people like you), not mine.”
Perfect example on why the left is filled with failure.
One last and final time. You pressure him the same way our enemies do to their elected politicians. With voting. And not for useless third parties, but for one of the two. The Tea Party, Evangelicals, and now the alt-Right are all at one point a radical minority party that took over one of the main parties and became the new establishment. So there is already precedent on getting this done.
Bernie Sanders almost won the presidential nominee twice and unlike the Tea Party he didn’t have a billionaire donor, and a massive push to primary congress. We almost got Sanders the ticket without these. Imagine what would happen if we had accomplished one of these (preferably the massive wave to primary congress). He would have definitely been the nominee. But we didn’t do that. And instead of showing Democrats that we mean business we instead focused our efforts on acting as another branch of dishonest propaganda which aided the Right wing. Because your actions aid the Right wing and your clearly projecting here when you accuse Biden of doing that. We all remember when you admitted to supporting Donald Trump in some dumb left wing version of “owning the libs”. Was that better for changing the status quo instead of helping elect a democrat with the most progressive agenda thus far on the ticket back to back and forcing the country to shift to the left instead of the right with Trump? I don’t think so.
Because whether you like it or not, it is your fault. And its mine. And most of us in here. And the left in general. There are deep flaws in how we view the system. Deep flaws in how we view ourselves. We use anti-establishmentarianism in the same way libertarians use the concept of freedom. A good thing, but used as a foundation to build dumb, flawed, self defeating strategies and arguments. A lot of the time, like the libertarians and their concept of freedom, its mostly virtue signaling. A lot of us don’t care about changing the status quo. We just like the look. Its punk, the fake kind. But of course I’m repeating myself. Not like you are going to address my points. They never do.
No more from me with this guy. I hope I can stick it this time.
@#21, logicalcat:
You are a delusional lunatic with masochistic tendencies.
Bill Clinton admitted during his recent funeral speech for John Lewis that Sanders was deliberately kept from winning the nomination by the DNC and Democratic power brokers. The fix was in to exactly the degree that some people alleged all along, and they’ve come out and admitted it now that it’s too late; if you still think there’s anything honest about the DNC or that it is actually possible for a left-leaning candidate to win the Democratic nomination, you deny reality as thorougly as any QAnon believer. The party exists only to keep people like you from voting for somebody who might actually make a difference, and since you apparently have the intelligence of stunned gnat, they are able to achieve tremendous success.
So, in whatever far-off world your microscopic brain inhabits, it wasn’t enabling the right wing when Biden:
• Was further to the right than Reagan on drugs and crime, and caused the Reagan administration to move rightward
• Said it was a problem that women could have complete control of their own bodies, and consistently enabled anti-abortion strategies of the right wing
• Sabotaged resistance to the nomination of Clarence Thomas, arguably the furthest-right person currently on the Supreme Court (apparently specifically with overturning Roe v Wade in mind, according to his friends at the time)
• Permitted police union representatives to write most of his 1994 crime bill, which basically caused the situation in which police feel they can kill with impunity, and thought that it was funny
• Bragged that he wrote the bill the PATRIOT Act was based on, and voted for the act itself
• Voted for the establishment of DHS and ICE
• Sponsored a bankruptcy bill essentially written by the banks which was so terrible it actually created Elizabeth Warren’s Congressional career — and, incidentally, changed the student loan debt load from an economic problem to a ticking time bomb by preventing student loan debt from being discharged in bankruptcy. (Incidentally, his son Hunter got a very well-paying job with MBNA for which he was extremely dubiously qualified around that time.)
• Voted for the Iraq War and said, as late as 2012, that the war was such a great thing that he would have voted for it even if he had known Bush was lying
• Learned so little from the Iraq War that he was a proponent of the Libyan war and helped tell the lies on which that war was based
• Was the person in the Obama administration who wrote a passionate defense of separating detained immigrant children from their parents, on the occasion when the court system told them they could not do that, after all
• Mused out loud, roughly four weeks before announcing his candidacy, that he should run to stop people talking about enacting a wealth tax — which happened directly upon his declaration of candidacy.
• Told his supporters to vote in person in the primaries more than a week after the CDC was telling everybody to stay home if at all possible
• Still, even now, when the number of jobs lost in the last year is in the tens of millions and there is an epidemic raging, thinks we should restore the ACA (so that healthcare is tied to employment) rather than fighting for single-payer — and has confirmed twice on live TV that he will veto single-payer if it gets through Congress
• Thinks that the Green New Deal (which is, again, the minimum which has to be done if we’re going to stop climate change) is too expensive and wants to do less than that
• Says that the solution to police brutality is to give the police more funds, and tell them to aim for limbs when they shoot protestors
• Thinks anarchists — who have been helping organize and protect BLM protests — should be arrested en masse, but not Nazis or white supremacists
Biden is a lying right-wing weasel who wants everybody to die of climate change by 2050 so that a couple of dozen already-rich people can make billions of dollars they don’t need and wouldn’t miss. The Democratic Party is a machine for making sure that any attempt to prevent this is quietly strangled. You are a fool who can’t see that even when they flat-out admit it.
But go ahead, keep telling people like me that it’s our fault things are going wrong when your right-wing masters are laughing out loud at how easy it is to sabotage things to benefit the rich. That will certainly get us to turn out to vote for your ridiculous liar of a candidate.
Vicar, The: Granting all your claims arguendo, he’s still (as the featured video notes) the only possible alternative to another Trump term.
As always, I note what you cannot dispute: every vote for Biden counters one vote for Trump, and therefore advocating to not vote for Biden is essentially giving Trump a +1 vote on the net result, thus improving the odds of his re-election.
You are, unequivocally and indisputably, advocating for a Trump victory.
—
If it were just you who is affected, fine. But it ain’t. So, shitty of you.
(Shitty and predictable, actually)
@The Vicar — Dude, please seek professional help, your obsession is unhealthy.
One thing you have to give to The Vicar is that they have come up with a creative way of being a Trump supporter on here without getting banned.
I’ll say this for Biden: he is, in all probability, the better of the two (‘alleged’ – but, c’mon) rapists on offer.
Now when Democrats ask how someone could vote for a man who is a sexual predator, they’ll know the answer.
PS I hope you’ve all seen the creepy Joe Biden videos? Reminds me of seeing Jimmy Savile on UK television back in the day (non-Brits: he was later revealed to be one of the most prolific sexual offenders ever).
What to do: Primaries!
Any candidate – senate, house of representatives and the state and municipal ones- if they are ‘Republican lite’ you primary the hell out of them!
-If your congressman/woman is too scared to upset his corporate donors to expand the supreme court, you burn the fucker down in the primaries.
And salt the earth where he was standing.
And if he is still nominated, the option of not voting is still there, at least for the more war-mongering , billionaire-pandering bastards. If a candidate goes full-on Dubya , a (D) behind the name should not be a bulletproof vest.
Bantustan solution! Give them the parts of the coasts that will be flooded because of climate change (which they deny).
As they are forced out by the sea, we take them on as low-paid immigrant labor. And since the determining factor was the height of the water column, the name for the New Order is obvious: apart-height.
@10
Do you consider House and Senate elections to be local elections? I don’t. Also, the party only existed for 6 years before it won the presidency. That’s kind of a big deal. And they started out positioning themselves as the most progressive party of that era. People flock to progressivism because, scary phrases like “green new deal” and “universal healthcare” notwithstanding, the ideals are things that people resonate with. People support progressives on the national-level when they are actually given the opportunity to do so; the problem is that it is rare that they are given that opportunity. The rhetoric of “3rd parties should start at the local level first” is just another way for the moneyed class to dismiss the idea that us plebs should have anything else to our electoral politics besides a right-wing party and an increasingly conspiracy-minded death cult party.
That’s plain dishonest. I don’t know whether Biden is a rapist. You don’t know whether Biden is a rapist. No-one knows whether he’s a rapist other than Biden, and anyone he’s actually raped. And the comparison with Savile is ludicrous. The biography I have of him is entitled In Plain Sight. There were multiple accusations of rape or serious sexual assault againast him, at least two police investigations, and his victims were in the thousands, ranging from young girls and boys to old people in hospital and corpses. Do you really think that if Biden had behaved similarly – or even in the way Trump clearly has – his political enemies would not have found his victims and persuaded at least some of them to go public?
I’d love to believe that, but if it were true, Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination. He was leading (although not with a majority of the votes) after the first few primaries, many thought he was going to win, people (registered Democrats, at least, who one might expect to be more progressive than the average American) had a clear opportunity to give him the nomination. They didn’t.
@22
If so, how does that make Sanders a viable candidate? You knew the “fix was in” all along and you were right. Great. You are so smart and so sophisticated compared to gullible ol’ me. What were you planning to do about it that would have made Sanders the actual nominee? Anything? Or just scream “DWS is a big lying meanie!”
I would have happily voted for either Clinton or Sanders in 2016. By the time the convention was over and even Sanders was endorsing Clinton, when Noam Chomksy stated it would be better to elect Clinton than Trump, and Michael Moore was warning that Clinton’s election was not in the bag, that would have been a great time to stop forwarding every random smear against Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schultz that came through your facebook feed.
And I don’t mean “you” Vicar because I have no idea what you do, but this is the behavior I saw from Sanders supporters. It was not the only reason she lost. She made her own mistakes, was widely despised (after a well-funded 20 year smear campaign), and Comey’s idiotic announcement probably sealed the deal in the states close enough to swing the electoral vote. And she convincingly won the “election” as one is normally understood.
Republicans would laugh their collective asses off to know that people on the left are having a vigorous “debate” on whether Joe Biden is a “rapist.” No, it’s not just about “my team winning”, but if my side loses consistently they don’t get any role in government. How exactly is that supposed to advance my interests?
@20
That’s the important question, right? Whose fault is it? It’s good to see you going straight to the things that matter. (sarcasm, if it was not clear)
One problem with all this discussion about Biden is that it’s a top-down viewpoint. Not to mention lazy.
The Tea party didn’t get where they are by just trying to get an alt-right president. They started at the local level — county boards, school boards, and went up from there, and it took, what, 20-30 years? Unless progressives are prepared to put that kind of persistent time and effort at every level into changing things, nothing will change. I’m sure it’s fun to have bull sessions about What They Should Do, but if you’re not willing to do the long, hard, boring, and at times discouraging work to change things, you’ll be making the same complaints 20 years from now.
Here in New York, we managed via primaries to replace the Republican-leaning Democrats in the state senate with somewhat more progressive candidates, and a bunch of measures went through that the “Repub-rocrats” had been holding up for years, including GENDA. We replaced a right-leaning democrat with AOC. My district is replacing Nita Lowey with a more progressive candidate. It may take a decade or two, but with luck, progressives will have enough actual power to force the DNC to shift its allegiances.
Are we talking about the same thing? It took months from Rick Santelli’s temper tantrum about people who aren’t rich getting mortgage relief to something called the “Tea Party” coalescing into consciousness. … Then a few more months after that to attract old white people in scooters with signs that said “Government hands off my Medicare” and for groups to go scream outside Democratic legislators’ offices and scare the crap out of them (hopefully that doesn’t work quite so well now) and finally take over congress and state legislators in time to gerrymander after the 2010 census. After which it morphed from being a “small government” movement to being a catch all for everyone who simply hated everything about the 21st century, but most of all that it was not all about white people anymore.
This was quick work and it was not organic or grass-roots. It was well funded and created from top down.
Now it’s true that the GOP has played a long game of local elections, and it’s also true that the Tea Party benefited enormously from this kind of planning. But 11 years later just seems a bit soon to rewrite history beyond all recognition.
The ‘Creepy Biden’ videos clearly show him behaving very inappropriately with children (the source of my Savile comparison: if you look as creepy as Savile, it ain’t good) and there is a credible allegation of very serious sexual assault from Tara Reade.
There are a number of other sexual assault and ‘creepy’ allegations, so there’s plenty that is already public.
https://www.businessinsider.com/joe-biden-allegations-women-2020-campaign-2019-6?r=US&IR=T
@35 Selected videos can be very misleading. Nearly everyone looks creepy at some times. I also bet if you took extensive video at an extended family gathering, you’d find your share of creepy uncles, who may or may not be child molesters, but assume inappropriate levels of intimacy (or just look like it in the recording).
Sen. Frist (2005) believed he could contradict Terri Shavo’s diagnosis of persistent vegetative state by watching a video. CT and EEG said otherwise. Which are you going to believe?
I also agree that the GOP has almost certainly thrown enough resources into finding credible evidence of anything against Biden, that we’d have more than edited videos by now if there was anything.
@mistershelden 35
I don’t believe the stuff about Biden and children to be Qanon noise that obscures Trump’s record on physical boundaries. No one, including you, has been able to do more than say it’s a thing.
I’ve seen and been shown plenty of examples of Biden’s serial sexual harassment with adults and by all means critisize that. But the political weaponization of child abuse is something I have to deal with now. Both taking child abuse seriously and revealing people using child abuse politically is tricky. Since Trump is a worse negative here I’m putting pressure on people to show me the creepy behavior with children, and if they can’t…
Damn it.
First sentence should read “I believe the stuff about Biden and children to be Qanon noise”. I restructured the sentence and forgot that bit.
I remember voting for Anderson. Didn’t make a difference.
If it is any consolation, Trump is indeed the worse of two evils, and I find this case credible, which was dropped because the complainant did not have enough money to pay court costs. (Trump at Epstein’s place with a 13y.o. girl)
trigger warning – it is grim reading
https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/06/23/donald-trump-rape-lawsuit/
The case was brought again and then dropped because of ‘threats to her life’.
@mistershelden 40
To be completely up front there are serious issues worth commenting on, I choose to focus on getting people to be specific about these connections because it counteracts the “pedo joe” level garbage and I want society to practice describing the social violations.
I did see the behavior in the article, Biden has a problem sexualizing 12-13 year-old girls. It’s enabling rape culture at the minimum. People need to get specific and press people to get specific. Are we serious about the problem or not? It shouldn’t be difficult to condemn everyone involved. I limit myself to occasionally poking at people on this issue given the proximity to the election.
For those not in the know who might be reading, Vicar has a bad habit of making claims about Biden that are either outright lies or deliberate misinterpretation. If it wasnt too obvious with that gish gallop.
What are the facts? The facts are that Biden works together with Sanders and AOC and seems willing to compromise. The facts are that we cannot rely on standing by and waiting for democrats to magicaly change their pre established views when there is no imcentive to do so. We have to get involved in state and local elections. Sanders almost won the nomimee with the left barely even trying. Imagone of we did actually try. The party is ripe and malleable and if we are too slack on this the lincoln project republicans will mold the party to their will. Because right wingers know how the party system actually works while a lot ofnus clearly do not.
The fact is that Biden has a bad history of doing things we dont like. Ive never denied that, but just lile LBJ passing civil rights reform despite being racist as fuck, people can change, or pressured to change.
The fact is that allowing republicans to win especially with Trump at the helm will do irreparable harm not just to leftism but the country as a whole. The fact is that we shouldnt have had him win the presidency but he did and a lot of it is our fault.
The fact is the left have a problem with self reflection and use democrat bashing as a way to ignore faults within ourselves and our party.
None of these have been disputed. Each one has a real history prescedent behind it. We cant let the accelerationists or the purity left win and control the narrative. Because dping so led to two far right politicians, Trump and Bush, run rampant.
The fact is there is only one choice, democratic nominee Biden. A third party vote or abstaining your vote is defacto vote for Trump, because that vote could have gone to assist in his defeat.
This isnt hard but like I said earlier antiestablishmentarian is quasi religious among some of the left like the concept of freedom or the freearket is to libertarians.
On the morning of November fourth I will look at what election results there are and marvel at those who voted for Kanye West.
This nation will continue, but hope is a pleasure I can no longer realize or imagine.