Seven Reasons to Support Joe Biden for President

Seven Reasons to Support Joe Biden for President

1. Uncle Joe knows corporations. He made a career in the Senate out of representing Delaware, a small state in which half the corporations in America have their headquarters for some reason. 

2. Joe is the greatest. In the 1970s, Joe successfully pushed through legislation against busing that denied equal education to minority children trapped in underfunded school districts. Sen. Edward Brooke called Joe's bill “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”

3. Joe is tough on black crime, And he knows how to compromise. In 1984, Uncle Joe Biden and Strom Thurmond slushed through a bill that abolished parole for federal prisoners. The same pair of senators next passed a bill that set a mandated 5-year term for anyone convicted of possessing a tiny piece of crack, creating the famous disparity in sentencing between “white drugs” and “black drugs.”

4. Joe is not afraid of the ladies. In 1974 Uncle Joe revealed that Roe v. Wade “went too far” and “I don’t think a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” Later he fathered “the Biden Amendment,” which banned the use of foreign aid for abortion research. 

5. Joe builds character. Representing, as he did, a banker-run state, Uncle Joe has served by passing a long series of laws denying students the protection of bankruptcy laws. Joe is the reason students today cannot escape their huge debts and must accept lifelong poverty like responsible adults.

6. Joe can admit a mistake. When it came time to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act (an act that fended off big recessions), Joe Biden was right there, helping free the banks of Delaware to gamble with great success, until 2008 when something went wrong (with my pension, incidentally). Joe has said he regrets this vote!  God bless him!

7. Joe is a job creator. According the New York Times, the Biden Cancer Initiative spent 75% of its money on salaries and other forms of compensation. Its president took home little more than a half million dollars one year. 

At the moment, Democratic voters are looking for major changes, and Joe Biden leads in the polls. At first glance, Joe’s record of compromise may strike people as squalid, but he'd be better than Trump, right? 

Steel yourself.      

Reading the Polls

If you watch political panels talking on TV, you see a lot of contradictions. Sunday morning I saw a panel say that polls showed that two-thirds of the Democrats favor centrist candidates and only one-third favor leftists. Then the same people said that polls showed between 80% and 90% of Democrats support the issues the leftist candidates are running on. And then they showed a poll from Iowa in which Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, representing the two sides, were virtually tied, and the runners-up were mostly from the left. All of which adds up to nothing.

Neanderthal Genes

I watch history professors on television, and last week I joined friends at a talk by Prof. Chris O'Sullivan. 

American history professors sometimes calm us, because they've studied the lives of the many venal or incompetent Presidents we've had in the past. Historians bring perspective to the age of President Spanklyn Trumpington Borderline.

America survived Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon. But many have forgotten Nixon, who, with Henry Kissinger,  prolonged the war in Vietnam for four years, killing hundreds of thousands of people for no purpose at all other than to ensure Nixon's re-election. As O'Sullivan put it, Nixon did not plan to run for re-election as "the man who lost Vietnam." But once he had won re-election, peace was no problem. 

We've already forgotten the second Bush, who started a moron's war against the wrong country and destroyed most of the Near East. And as for Andrew Johnson, who the hell was he?

As for the Near East, science now says that most of our dwindling Neanderthal genes come from encounters there, not in Italy after all. I might still resent an old pamphlet by Professor Wisdom I once read, in which Wisdom claimed that the Irish were Neanderthals, except that it turns out that Neanderthal genes might be a good thing to have after all. 

A Family of Individuals

Apparently the nation finds it difficult to track the family and friends of Individual-1. This descriptive list of several major Washington players was compiled for the Secret Service.

Individual -2  Code Name: Vapid Under-Nada Blondie. Low hung fruit. Clear favorite of Individual-1 despite cheeks smoothed by claymation.

Individual-3  Code Name: Gold Digger Dullard III,  formerly  the Impaler or Spanker-in-Charge. No education. Speaks five languages, none well. 

Individual-4  Code Name: No Shoulders Pencil-Neck Crook-In-Law. Dislikes Chris Christie and other forms of width.

Individual-5  Code Name: Lindsay Armband Whiteface of  My-ladyfear. His positions revolve like a wind vane on Denali.

Individual-213  Code Name:  Boiled Skull Grinning Mayor or, simply, Bozo. Constitutes proof of life after death.

LOYAL

We have a long history of accusing certain ethnic and racial groups of being disloyal to the nation and loyal instead to a foreign country or institution. 

I remember when an Irish-American Catholic could not be elected President. No way.  Catholics were considered potentially disloyal--they allegedly took orders from the Pope. (My grandmother had a more tolerant American Catholic view of the Pope. She used to say that what a priest don't know, won't hurt him, especially about contraception.) 

The election of JFK, a Catholic, was an astounding event (now forgotten). President Obama,  accused by scum of not being a citizen, provided an even bigger change in 2008. 

The Small Dark Man

I'm a member of the Chaucer Boys, a bicycle club for descendents of Geoffrey Chaucer, who once wrote that time and tide wait for no man. All of that sentence is true.

It was raining on Sunday, so some club members decided to walk rather than bike. We headed out in light rain toward Haku, a restaurant where people eat with wooden sticks. We walked about two blocks, passing a mission where homeless people get free meals.There we were joined by a small dark man. He walked along with us for a while.

Apparently the small man got up that morning and developed a plan for Sunday. His plan was to find three old strangers on foot in light rain and join them.

The four of us (now) walked the five blocks to Haku and entered the restaurant side by side. A tall Asian led four of us to a table. The small dark man immediately sat down with us, but my brother told him no. The small man got back up. My brother, also a descendent of Chaucer, is the sort of traveler who sleeps on the floors of peasant huts; perhaps he had seen problems like this develop before. 

I remained standing, thinking I should attempt to talk to the man. I asked him what he wanted, but he didn't respond to English or Spanish. He made a few sounds I didn't understand. Then he abruptly left, and I took my seat and ordered a bento box. When we left the restaurant we looked around for him, prepared to give him a few dollars, but he was nowhere in sight. 

It was like a short story by Herman Melville but pointless.

Deconstruction

I seldom use the term "deconstruction," because it reminds me of its place of origin, a moated castle of impulse-driven epistemological terrorism. But the term rhymes with Reconstruction, the historical era most like what we are now experiencing.

Andrew Johnson remains a contender for America's worst President. He was Trumpish. He tried to stop Reconstruction, which was what we call our attempt to rebuild the nation after the Civil War. Johnson tried to deconstruct. Congress attempted to integrate the newly-free people of color as full voting citizens. President Johnson said no. 

With Trump we have another half-man attempting to turn back the clock on our already shaky race relations, health programs, social support efforts, peace treaties, climate problems, justice system, gender issues, etc.  Trump wants, in his mindless way, to deconstruct anything positive his little fingers can probe.  

We impeached Andrew Johnson and elected Grant (who crushed the original KKK), and we can do the same to Pres. Spanklyn T. Borderline and the degenerate family he rode in on. It's time for a change.

Trump's Gulags

You're familiar with the HHS program that takes charge of the children Trump has separated from their parents at the border. 

When I first heard of the Trump gulags, my reaction was that a large, confined group of unprotected children would attract a cluster of pedophiles as guards. I had no facts to base this guess on, just common sense    

Today I heard a report that HSS personnel and others have averaged more than 1,000 sexual attacks on the confiscated children per year, starting in  2014. That's before Trump was elected.

How Much Can You Tolerate?

I see two key political questions now,  one for each party.

For Republicans the question is: "How much criminal behavior can you tolerate?" To date the answer is that professional Republicans can absorb with a grin any Trump crime, Constitutional violation or betrayal of Republican principles. That flabbiness cost them control of the House of Representatives. At the moment they seem willing to lose the Senate and the next Presidential election, rather than irritate their shrinking racist base. But is there a limit to what they will put up with? 

The extinction of the Republican party--already beginning in California--is one natural limit. But is there a limit short of extinction, where the party leadership stops eating clay and survives?

For Democrats the question is: "Can the Corporate Democrats, who run the party, accept independents and the New Deal types like AOC and Bernie Sanders and unite the 70% of voters who demand health care, climate control, equal rights and a safety net?" 

What I see at the moment is Wall Street Democrats gearing up for war with independents and the progressive half of their own party. So far they do not intend to share the political power that has made them rich. But that may change.

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