Tag Archives: 2020 Election

Political Rants

Joe’s Lunch.

China ate Joe Biden’s lunch – that’s one of the many incoherent things Trump said during Tuesday night’s debate. The fact is, though, that Biden kind of ate his own lunch in Cleveland this past week, and it probably didn’t taste all that good. I don’t claim to be an expert on debates … and I don’t think anyone is an expert on whatever that Tuesday night clusterfuck was supposed to be … but Joe left a whole lot on the table in that exchange. Like most mainstream Democrats with their heads stuck in the “I’m not a liberal” nineties, he gave away the store to Trump on a number of points, particularly having to do with police conduct, health care, and so-called law and order.

So, okay, I’m not affiliated with the Biden/Harris campaign, but here are a few suggestions for the team on what Big Joe might say in response to some crazy shit coming from our president:

Health Care – At one point, Trump bragged about killing the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act. That was a great opportunity for Biden to point out exactly how the administration is trying to kill the whole bill in a case that will come before the Supreme Court right after the election. That’s when Joe should look at the camera and say, “Folks, Trump’s using that to get the Supreme Court to strike down all of Obamacare. He’s trying to cancel your health insurance and take away your protections for pre-existing conditions!”

COVID-19 – Trump was happily calling COVID the “China Virus”. Biden’s rejoinder (again, to the television audience) should be, “Look, folks. More than 200,000 people died while he was saying the virus would just go away, or that it was just a hoax. For that reason alone, it should always be referred to as the Trump Virus. He likes to put his name on things, so he should be fine with that!”

Extremism – Trump was accusing Biden of not being in favor of law and order, talking about how dangerous movements like ANTIFA are in his imagination. At that point, Biden should have talked about the posse of heavily armed right-wing thugs that took over the streets of Louisville, KY, in recent days, or the right-wing teen who killed two protesters in Kenosha, WI a few weeks ago. Joe should say something like, “How is it law and order when your followers start intimidating and killing people with semi-automatic weapons? Why do you defend killers and thugs?”

The Environment – As he often does, Trump claims to want “clean air and clean water.” There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, and Biden shouuld be loaded for bear on this. But he should also say to the audience, “Folks, this is how much he cares about clean air and clean water. He appointed a coal industry lobbyist to run the EPA. And as a result, [INSERT FACT HERE]”

Hey, Biden … dig in, man. No charge. (Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?) No, you don’t have to thank me. And there’s plenty more where that came from.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Slow progress.

The election is less than sixty days away, and already I’m sick of thinking about it. More than likely, that’s the predictable result of a news media that is hyper-focused on elections to the point where they literally begin reporting on the next big race before the votes in the current one are even counted. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I think the press likes the horse race aspect of elections – it’s an easy story to report, there are opposing sides, melodrama, jockeying for position, etc. I haven’t done the analysis, but I’m confident that horse-race stories far outnumber more substantive reporting. Whatever the proportion may be, it’s a silly thing to report on, particularly when there are such titanic issues facing the nation and the world, issues that are on the ballot this fall, in some respects.

To be clear, I don’t think electing Joe Biden will be enough to, say, turn the tide back on climate change, or expand affordable health care to everyone, or stop COVID in its tracks. The project of making Joe Number One is more about avoiding bad things than promoting good ones. He still seems married to the concept of employer-provided health care, just as Nancy Pelosi is, and his campaign was positively ecstatic over its endorsement by former Michigan governor Rick Snyder, who condemned a generation of young people in Flint to the depredations of lead poisoning. So yes, we have a lot of hard fights ahead of us, even with a Biden victory. But I think it’s fairly easy to see the writing on the wall this time. Look at the skies over San Francisco. Look at the legions out of work and on the edge of eviction. Look at the kleptocratic travesty that is Wall Street, gorging itself on public dollars like almost never before. This obviously needs to stop, as Trump said, right here and right now.

Still, I feel like the two opposing sides are playing different board games. It kind of amazes me to hear the reporting around Trump’s comments to Bob Woodward, the shock of his admission that he downplayed the virus, etc. Is it shocking? Really? The man’s public statements since the beginning of the year tell you everything you need to know. Did we really need to hear his conversations with Woodward to surmise that he wasn’t taking COVID seriously, or that he wasn’t leveling with the American people? Did we really need that Atlantic article to imagine that Trump would hold uniform military, veterans, or any group of people in utter contempt? While our representatives in the mainstream media project shock and surprise, the Trumpists just continue along their merry way, deconstructing the administrative state stick by stick.

I know the institutional Democratic party wants to make this an election about manners and integrity. But this election, like all elections, is about policy, and we have to drive the distinctions home if we have any hope of getting this loser out of the White House.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Rematch.

Not all politics is local, but a lot of what people actually experience about politics is. I say this as someone who has spent much of my life being represented in city hall, Albany, and Washington by people who do not even remotely reflect my views. Such is the lot of a leftist in upstate New York, right? Still, when it came to some major issues, like acid rain or aid to the Nicaraguan “Contra” terror army, there was some alignment between myself and our longtime Congressmember, Sherwood Boehlert, an old-style Republican who represented our district for about 24 years. Boehlert was perhaps the most liberal member of the GOP caucus in the House towards the end of his tenure, and he was replaced by a Democrat who was almost indistinguishable from him ideologically.

I had come by that point to think of my hometown as Centerville – the town in the middle. And that held true for a short while thereafter – Democrat Michael Arcuri was replaced by Republican Richard Hanna in 2010, and Hanna proved to be a centrist as well, by the standard of his day. A deficit hawk, yes, and a little more circumspect than Boehlert; still, far from the worst in his tea party-driven GOP House caucus, and really about as far to the center as they got. He was primaried from the right by Claudia Tenney back in 2014, I believe, and survived that. I think at the time we all thought that the district was too centrist for someone like Tenney. Of course, two years later, that turned out to be wrong, as Tenney took the Congressional seat in a three-way race between her, a Binghamton-area Democrat, and a tech millionaire Independent who disappeared as soon as he lost.

Claudia got washed out by the Democratic blue wave in 2018, replaced by our current Congressmember Anthony Brindisi, who has restored the seat to being a bastion of centrism. I think he won mainly because Tenney was such a massive embarrassment to the region, earning national media fame as a crackpot Trump worshipper. Trump took a shine to her, campaigned for her in Utica, and boosted her in a number of different ways, as she dutifully supported Trump’s massive tax cut, bogus health care repeal plan, and so on. Well, now Claudia is back, running for her old seat against Brindisi, the GOP footing the bill for ads depicting the current Congressman as a puppet of Pelosi, to the left of AOC, best friend of the radical Joe Biden, etc., etc. Like her mentor Trump, she’s kind of playing the crazy card – not sure it works when you yourself are a crazy-ass mofo. We shall see. Upstate New York, as I’ve said many times, is a bit like Alabama, Confederate battle flags and all.

I’m encouraging people to vote for Brindisi, as lackluster as his stint in Congress has been, just because Claudia is truly a right-wing nut job, spawned in a toxic, stagnant backwater that is very, very familiar to me. Trust me … you don’t want that one back in Congress.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.