With the coronavirus spreading and the economy crashing, Donald Trump is said to be desperate for Joe Biden to hurry up and win the nomination over Bernie Sanders.
But he is damned if he does get his wish, and he's damned if he doesn't.
First of all, Biden is so far to the right that he might as well be a Republican himself. Trump, who has vowed to cut Social Security and Medicare, will be hard pressed either to pay grudging homage to Biden's own long crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare, or he will forced to publicly defend FDR's New Deal from Biden's depredations. Neither tactic is likely to make him feel comfortable. Then again, he's always bragged that he thinks the avoidance of hypocrisy is for chumps. And it certainly would not be the first time he attacked an opponent from the fake-left.
A Trump/Biden general election would play out more like the GOP primary which Trump thought he'd avoided as the incumbent president. So unless the campaign devolves into two old reactionaries arm-wrestling or holding push-up contests or trading ornery senile insults on the debate stage, this match-up would be quite the yawn if its only theme is "Corruption V. Corruption." Turnout also likely would be quite low; the youth vote in particular, which has thus far failed to materialize for Bernie in the vast numbers predicted, would effectively be nonexistent in the general.
In Michigan, where some of Bernie's poll numbers lag behind Biden's by more than 20 points on the eve of the primary, Biden has already beaten Trump to the punch in 2016 by endorsing, in a $200,000 paid speech, Republican Fred Upton in his ultimately successful congressional run. The Democratic establishment has studiously avoided confronting this inconvenient fact in its own desperate attempt to construct a millimeter of space between the two right-wing reprobates.
There is no possible way that Trump would ever be able to successfully accuse his fellow racist, sexist, corrupted corporate tool of being a socialist, as he is wont to do with Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the "Opposition." His supporters are not as stupid as they're made out to be by the liberal press. The awful, uncomfortable truth is that Trump and Biden are more alike than they're different.
To achieve the continued enthusiasm and rally turnout of human bodies to which he is accustomed, Trump would much prefer to stick to the tried and true (but false) GOP narrative of the "radical" Democratic Party - to which he himself belonged in the not so distant past.
It's really hard to accuse Joe Biden of being soft on immigration when activist Latinos heckle him at nearly every event for his own cruel deportation record in the Obama administration. Biden was Obama's xenophobic point man in Latin America, strong-arming leaders in Mexico and elsewhere to keep Central American refugees far, far away from the US border.
So unlike the liberal donor class and the liberal punditocracy, Trump appears not to have written off Bernie Sanders quite yet. Unlike Biden, Bernie has an actual moral leg to stand on when he's standing up to Trump.
It could be that, unlike the Democratic establishment, Trump pays some actual serious attention to other polls revealing that Bernie has an even better chance of beating him that Biden does.
Trump's America First Action Super PAC is certainly worried enough, or pretending to be worried enough, to have sent out the following S.O.S. over the weekend:
I'm going to keep this email short and blunt.In other words, despite tweets siding with progressives in accusing the Democrats and the media of slimingBernie, Trump is effectively campaigning for Joe Biden on the very eve of the all-important Michigan primary. Just as Hillary Clinton thought she was cleverly installing Trump in 2016 as the "pied piper" candidate who'd be as easy as pie to beat, so too is Trump going full Machiavellian with the bipartisan red-baiting of Sanders.
We must move quickly before things take a turn for the worse.
Bernie Sanders is building a full-fledged army of socialist grassroots warriors to take down President Trump and Vice President Pence.
It's up to us to put an end to this.
STOP SANDERS - STAND WITH TRUMP!
He wants Biden and he doesn't want Biden. He wants Bernie to be a foil to Biden and he wants to beat Bernie. In other words, he's trying to gaslight everybody into the desired state of confusion. He is the depraved human iteration of Doctor Doolittle's Pushmipullyu. He not only double-talks, he double-talks from every orifice.
I would also quibble a bit with the survival of the "grassroots socialist army" hinging upon Bernie's own electoral fortunes. The movement now has a life of its own and will notfold in the event that Sanders loses the nomination and fulfills his promise ( cringe-worthily reiterated on the Sunday talk shows) that he will campaign for his "good friend" Biden.
It turns out that the America First Action Super PAC might be even more of a head-fake than it it appears. They weren't asking for dollars - of which they have hundreds of millions aplenty from various corporations and oligarchs - but for a signature on a petition. AFA's founder, Randy Perkins. heads AshBritt Environmental, a disaster/defense contractor. Perkins has been accused by various public interest groups of skirting the law which forbids federal contractors from contributing to political parties. Other AFA contributors include mega-donor Sheldon Adelson as well as some of the shady characters associated with Rudy Giuliani and "Ukrainegate."
My conclusion? They want to beat Bernie to install Joe Biden to get Hunter Biden to get the ultimate Russiagate Revenge against the Democrats. And I also think Trump is afraid of Bernie and is mentally sending the Democratic bigwigs a dozen roses and a magnum of Dom Perignon by way of cheap secret thanks for orchestrating his victories.
Whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead is nuts.
Correction: whoever said bipartisanship and triangulation are dead forgot to notice that this is a Machiavellian Duopoly, whose oligarchic members must sometimes pretend to hate each other to maintain the increasingly fragile illusion that our elections are free, fair and democratic.
So many head-fakes, so little time.
And this isn't even counting Hillary Clinton's not so stealthy comeback campaign.
9 comments:
Here's some more of the backstory about the powers that be and how they be:
Democrats and Their Media Allies Impugned Biden’s Cognitive Fitness. Now They Feign Outrage.
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/09/it-was-democrats-and-their-media-allies-who-impugned-bidens-cognitive-fitness-yet-now-feign-outrage/
March 9, 2020 ~ by Glenn Greenwald
It’s staggering to see the rush of political wanna-bees in sudden lockstep and chorus to endorse Biden and shore up the establishment.
I’m reminded of an inscription from "The Living Series," by Jenny Holzer, 1989, cut into one of the marble benches in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden by the Walker Art Center:
You can watch people align themselves
When trouble is in the air.
Some prefer to be close to those
at the top and others want to be
close to those at the bottom.
It's a question of who frightens them
more and whom they want to be like.
And these quotes:
"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
~ Frederick Douglass
“Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.”
~ Alexis de Tocqueville, "Recollections on the French Revolution"
Plus two more current pieces:
Intercepted, with Jeremy Scahill: We Need to Talk About Joe —
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/10/we-need-to-talk-about-joe/
March 10, 2020
Forget the Gaffes, What About Biden's Lies?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=JvOjlfRpXHQ&feature=emb_logo
March 9, 2020
The evidence is in: Joe Biden has a habit of making things up. And it’s not just wrong — it could hurt him in a general election contest against Donald Trump. According to The Intercept's Mehdi Hasan, if you think the guy who made up getting arrested in South Africa, who falsely claimed to have marched in the civil rights movement, is the “safe” candidate against Trump, then you’re lying to yourself.
The threat of coronavirus is all that we just don't know yet: how is it transmitted, how deadly is it really, will it just go away if we hide from it for a few weeks?
The threat of Biden is all that we do know. He is Trump (D). There is no hope there for any of the things that are needed by the people who invested so much hope in Bernie. That is a known, not an unknown. Bankruptcy bill, crime bill, Iraq War, bagman for Delaware banks, we've known Biden for 36 years in the Senate, an entitled creature of money and privilege of long standing.
So what are we going to do for 2024? Sanders is too old for that. Warren may be too. So what is next? The hyper-capitalist money that owns the Democratic Party (see the latest Piketty book for 1,000 pages of detail) simply has no options in sight but more of the same.
If there are options out there, our press won't see them. It is flat refusal. See Friedman today in the NYT, declaring that Biden is the "true Scandinavian." Why? Because he says Scandinavia appreciates the true risk takers of capitalism who deserve outsized rewards because they alone "create jobs." It is hard to imagine a more extreme misunderstanding of Scandinavia, or a more sold out paean to hyper-capitalism. And that is where the Democratic Party and its paid in supporters are now.
As a Sanders supporter, I’m not giving up. I’ve invested too much money and time into his campaign.
The next debate - scheduled for Sunday - needs to take place.
Don't count on Timid Bernie to take any swings at his good friend Joe Biden at the 'debate' on Sunday.
If only the sit-down, empty, townhall event could run into 'sundowning' time and Joe would get hopelessly confused and agitated so as to fully reveals his symptoms. If the Bernie team was smart, they'd demand late afternoon/early evening debates but they no longer have any leverage. Also Joe's handlers need to limit his exposure so he could just refuse any more debates under cover of Coronavirus and coast to the finish line.
Could Joe be suffering from CTE from his college football days? Oh wait, he lied about that too. Well then it must be from all those rough and tumble high school games, the brain aneurysms and surgeries, and the Botoxicity.
One thing is clear. Sheepdog Bernie has no leverage. It's bad enough he pledged at the beginning to support the eventual nominee without holding out for concessions on our behalf. Now it's clear the Bernie flock isn't sufficient to use as a bargaining chip. As Hillary once said, they'd just appeal to and gain from Republicans to offset the loss of BernieBros. Joe has already stated he'd be open to naming a Republican VP. Biden/Romney?
I'm still waiting for the catastrophes of Coronavirus and Hillary to hit.
From a Guardian article today:
Sanders "made no public comments on Tuesday, ceding the stage to his rival.
Biden used the opportunity to extend an olive branch to Sanders and his supporters: 'There’s a place in our campaign for each of you.'"
Notice what they said (and didn't say): not "a place in our administration", not "a place in our ideology", not "a place in our policies". (Not that any of that could be counted on to really mean much. But that might have been a hint of a genuine olive branch). Rather, "a place in our campaign..."
Screw that. Soon, I'll be changing the party on my voter registration, away from Democrat, for the first time in my life. Haven't decided what I'll do for the general election. Considered staying home, but for president I'll probably cast a protest vote for a third-party candidate, if any are on my state ballot. As for the rest of my ballot, I'm angry enough at how the Democratic Party put the "fix" in, mistreated Sanders (and others such as Gabbard), and how it changed the rules to favor Bloomberg, that I might just vote third-party for all offices on the ballot.
Annie,
much of what you say is no doubt true. but i don’t need sanders to swing at biden in sunday’s debate.
biden is so out of it at this point that sanders could serve him nothing but softballs and biden’s overall demeanor would still make the argument that biden is unfit.
You are right that Sanders should not have conceded early to eventually support the nominee for the sake of negotiation. Without that promise, however, i think his campaign might not have gotten off the ground.
Who knows?
As someone who considered campaigning for Warren, I have to say I’m disgusted by her refusal to endorse Sanders. I agree with Naomi Klein - Warren doesn’t owe Sanders anything, but she at least owes the issues she fought for a decent hearing.
I just want to add that I found this paragraph in a january 4 response to your blog,
“Whatever happens, we oldies need to keep the light burning so that some day, when the smoke clears, the youth can remember the cause and take up the torch once again.”
I gotta say it does appear from the most recent primaries that it’s the youth who are carrying the torch - the baby boomer and silent generation have turned out *overall* to be more conservative than their parents.
I myself have been to a few DSA meetings here on the West Coast and frankly Incould barely keep up with all the outreach projects the young members had embarked on, from organizing for environmental justice in Hunters Point to brake-light clinics in low-income neighborhoods.
Maybe we oldies can learn something from them. The most important thing is to keep the channels of communication open amongst all the generations.
The putrid punditry now clamors to end the debates, and the contemptible Carville brays: “Let's shut this puppy down.”
Joe Biden cannot withstand scrutiny, for Bernie Sanders would deftly, though delicately, soundly handle him in a debate.
So “Uncle Joe” will be kept on a close leash by the Democratic Party elites.
Although upon nomination, Trump will eviscerate Biden.
But of course the plutocracy doesn’t care, for either way they make out like bandits.
It’s the fundamental change that Sanders champions, which we desperately need, that they so selfishly fear.
If we were in the 70s, or even the 80s, we could take some solace in believing that someday the political pendulum will eventually swing back to correct how we’ve gone astray.
But now we are facing an unprecedented, catastrophic, global ecological crisis, which if not averted immediately will alter for ill all of civilization and our dear Mother Earth as we have been nurtured by her. This is so profound, that to our peril, even most of those who are aware cannot grasp what counter actions this demands.
The world cannot and will not wait until 2024 for redress.
"So foul a sky clears not without a storm."
~ Shakespeare, KING JOHN, IV.ii.108
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
~ Frederick Douglass
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
~ John F. Kennedy
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
~ John Adams
From St. Luke, to Tolstoy, to Gandhi, to Malcolm X, to Martin Luther King, Jr., and so now to us, we must answer this:
"What then must we do?"
Post a Comment