Posted on The Chiseler, May 27, 2020. — J.R.
As a lark, Daniel Riccuito sent friends and colleagues his angry screed on Joe Biden. Jonathan Rosenbaum brought him up short with a surprisingly reasoned, and typically eloquent. response.
DR: Please name the most recent Democratic nominee for president who was even more repellant than Joe Biden. I’m speaking wholistically, taking into account Biden’s political record, his rhetoric, his documented public groping of women and girls – all of it. I’ll start by answering that nobody comes to mind. And, without immediately avoiding a direct answer by uttering “BUT… Donald J. Trump!”, please confront the facts as they pertain to Biden himself. On an objective basis, he is the most anti-Choice nominee since Roe became law (Gore is a close second, though his progressive shift was sharp and consistent, not so Mr. Biden’s). The infamous Crime Bill flowed directly from the successful launch of mass incarceration which Biden, moving to Reagan’s political right, started in the 1980s. Ok, I’ll stop loading up the question and ask again: Who the fuck (in recent decades) was worse than this schmuck? I lied. A few more words: Bill Clinton is my idea of the worst US President in history on the basis of NAFTA alone, which fundamentally altered capitalism and made unions largely irrelevant – not to mention whatever broken shards of representative democracy were extant pre-NAFTA. Still, I claim that what we didn’t yet know about Clinton at the time of his nomination made him less repellant than the incarnation of Joe Biden who now stands before us. PS-I’m a lousy pollster.
JR: For me, Joe Lieberman may be more repellent than either Biden (who always makes me think of a Gershwin tune: “I’m Biden my time…”) or Bill Clinton, but that doesn’t make Clueless Joe any sort of gift to the public. Today I just received a hypocritical questionnaire from the Trump team about “illegal aliens” voting illegally that is really just a request for money, and in this respect it’s almost identical to the similarly insulting “questionnaires” sent to me daily or more often than daily from the Democratic Party that are also just requests for money, always checking off on my behalf whether I’m willing to hand over moolah and thus proving that they’re not really interested in my opinions at all. In the case of the Trump questionnaire, I actually went to the trouble of telling them that I believe illegal aliens should be able to vote and am about to mail this to them, minus any money. But saying this much necessarily ignores the fact that I regard Trump as the true illegal alien who shouldn’t be allowed to vote–unlike Latinos who sneak across the southern border, whose risk-taking already should qualify them existentially as true-blue citizens.
The Democratic Party’s rejection of Sanders, Warren, and all the people like me who supported them (a considerable portion of the population) only proves that they ultimately share the same sports metaphors as the Trump team, not to mention the same Roy Rogers/Gene Autry/Star Wars/playpen metaphysics about the “good guys” versus “bad guys” that John McCain took seriously as a grownup, whereas for me anybody who thinks in those infantile terms is already a dangerous imbecile. So as long as the Democratic Party keeps breaking its back to prove it can be just as simple-minded and just as venal as Trump, it seems to be begging sizable portions of the electorate not to vote for anyone, which clearly would be a mistake. But surely allowing us to have a more reasonable choice would be a big improvement.