Category: Politics

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Yeah, Uncle Joe Biden Is Old

From Greg Fallis:

I had to check with Wikipedia to see how old he is. He's 80. He'll turn 81 in November. That's pretty fucking old. Does it matter? Well, yeah, it kinda does. Does it matter enough to change how I'll vote? Nofuckingway.

Is he in good health? According to his doctors (and at least Uncle Joe has real doctors, not some fluffer in a white lab coat like Comrade Trump), he's "in good physical and mental shape relative to his years." That's…well, not entirely encouraging, but still somewhat comforting. I mean, the guy still rides a bike. That requires lower body strength, balance, hand-eye coordination, responsive reflexes, bilateral coordination, and postural strength. Sure, he's not going to make the Olympic cycling squad, but he can get on a bike and crank out a few miles. That's pretty damned good for an 80-year-old guy.

Okay, he's also fallen on his bike. But let's be honest about that. He fell when he was dismounting; caught his leg on the crossbar. Almost every person who's ever ridden a bicycle with a crossbar has done that. I'm younger than Uncle Joe and I ride a step-through bike because I've done that too often. I'm not as flexible as I used to be.

But the ability to ride (and successfully dismount) a bike doesn't directly translate to running the entire government of the United States. That take a certain amount of mental acuity and political savvy. Uncle Joe probably isn't as sharp as he was when he was Vice President, but he's still as politically savvy. He's accomplished a hell of a lot since he was elected, and he's done it without much drama (and without much public recognition). He's still got great political instincts. He still travels the world and gets stuff done.

But yeah, he's old. And he'll be even older when/if he's re-elected. But so what? It's stupid to compare Uncle Joe against some ideal Democratic candidate. We have to compare him to his opponent. Which is almost certainly going to be Comrade Donald Trump. The guy who thinks he 'aced' a mental acuity examination because he was able to repeat man, woman, person, camera, TV. The guy who needed two hands to drink from a bottle of water. The guy who saluted a North Korean general, wanted to buy Greenland, and thought it might be a good idea to nuke a hurricane.

Since we acknowledge that Uncle Joe is old, let's go ahead and say the 'unthinkable' thing we're all thinking about. What if he gets elected but then goes toes up before the end of his term? That would be bad. But hey, Kamala Harris is perfectly competent to take over. I mean, that's the whole reason to have a Vice-President, isn't it. I'd be happy and feel secure with President Harris running the government.

So yeah, once again, Joe Biden is old, but he's moderately fit and he's very politically astute, plus he's got Kamala insurance in case something unfortunate happens. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a dumbfuck who…oh hell, dumbfuck ought to be enough. Seriously, the Democrats should run adverts saying Vote for the Old Guy; Don't Vote for the Dumbfuck.

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The Supreme Court May Have Just Unwittingly Handed Us A Surprising Gift

From The Palmer Report:

When this weekend's Supreme Court's disgustingly anti-American rulings came down, all I could think of to say at the time was that it was a dark day, and that it would motivate us even more to keep fighting and winning the battles we can win. But now it turns out there may be a remarkably surprising silver lining in all of this.

One of the things that's stood out to me over the past several years is just how incompetent the Republicans and the right wing leaders have become in their villainy. For instance, just seven or eight years ago, House Republicans were savvy enough to craft the kinds of phony scandals and sham hearings that could gain mainstream traction and rally support for their causes. These days House Republicans can't even get anyone to watch their hearings.

Now it turns out the right wing dark money cabal that keeps putting cases in front of the Supreme Court has also gotten rather… shall we say unsavvy with its antics. It turns out one of the cases they put in front of the Supreme Court wasn't even a real case. The woman who won the case claimed that she'd been asked to create a wedding website for a gay man named "Stewart" but it went against her beliefs. Now multiple major news outlets have confirmed that the "Stewart" in question is actually a straight man who never even tried to hire her.

According to established precedent, this should invalidate the entire case, and the Supreme Court's ruling should be nullified. Of course this rogue Supreme Court does just whatever it wants and routinely violates the law, so there's no reason to expect that it'll do the right thing here. But even if this doesn't get rectified, this is a scandal that's going to have legs.

If we're tasked with convincing the general public to get behind expanding the Supreme Court –and with convincing the general public to elect enough Democrats in 2024 to put expansion on the table – what better argument than the fact that the current Supreme Court is so damn corrupt it's issuing extremist rulings in imaginary cases?

This is a corrupt enough scandal that the average person doesn't even need to know or understand what the case was about in order to understand that this Supreme Court is insanely out of control. Clarence Thomas and his psychotic pals literally used a fake case as an excuse to rule against basic civil rights. Even if it turns out they didn't know it was a fake case, their refusal to void their own ruling will mean they don't care that it's a fake case.

I obviously wish the Supreme Court had simply ruled the correct way on this case to begin with, for obvious reasons. There are a lot of people who are going to get screwed out of their basic rights by this psychotic ruling. And I'm still hoping the Supreme Court will do the right thing and invalidate this ruling now that it's been exposed as a fake case – but we know that's not likely to happen.

Instead the only solace we can take here is that these psychopaths on the Supreme Court, and the people pull their strings, got so brazenly greedy that they got sloppy. They took a case all the way to the top without even bothering to make sure it was real. If they'd done their homework, they could have picked some other homophobic bigot's case to get behind instead.

So thanks, assholes, for the gift. Thanks for being so sloppy, so lazy, so stupid in your villainy. Thanks for making it so easy for us to go out and convince mainstream Americans that this Supreme Court majority needs to be obliterated at the ballot box. We're going to use this as part of our messaging when we go out there and win every competitive election up and down the ballot in the upcoming election cycle. We're going to put in the work and we're going to win big. Let's be more determined about this than ever.