Some Great Biden Replacement Theories

 It's not whether Joe Biden will run for another term. It's whether he'll outlast the first one. According to Peter Baker of the New York Times, Biden has actually taken to shuffling, as if mumbling, fumbling, and bumbling were not already bad enough.

The Democratic Industrial Complex (DIC) is on a campaign of nudging the old guy out now, and eventually replacing him with younger flesh. Billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and his California counterpart, Gavin Newsom, are the two most prominent names that the establishment media are currently and delicately promoting to the liberal masses for the smooth manufacture of their consent.

Despite Biden often calling his vice president "President Harris" in what appear to be multiple episodes of senile perseveration, the DIC-heads are studiously not promoting Kamala to run in 2024. It turns out that Biden's penchant for tossing word salads is contagious, because Harris herself has developed quite the habit of uttering nonsensical answers to reporters' questions.  The DIC bet in 2020 that she'd attract women and minority voters solely by dint of her exotic identity, but that hasn't  panned out in terms of her actual performance.

It's July, the height of the silly season for idle speculation. If the establishment DIC pundits can engage in the parlor game of which potential political savior can keep them in their careers and in the Loop for just a few years longer (and also delay the Second Coming of Trump), then so can I. Or as my dad used to tease me: "Don't start crying or you'll get a soaken eye!"

I agree that since it is always better to resort to bitter laughter, if only to keep from weeping over the corrupt state of our political system, I will engage in my own idle speculation with two totally dry eyes.

Scenario #!: As I'd predicted when Biden first got the nomination, he will be such an utter failure at presiding that he could very well announce his retirement even before the November midterms in order to avoid blame when taking the whole Democratic slate down with him. The more the establishment gnashes its teeth over him, the lower his approval ratings keep going. The red line for the DIC-heads seemed to be when he became even more disapproved of than Donald Trump! And so the ratings continue to plummet exponentially, with the bad press and the Biden gaffes vying with each other in a sort of pre-horserace horserace. If this goes on much longer, Biden will end up with an approval rating of One Percent - which, given his assurance to his rich donors that "nothing would fundamentally change," seems kind of apt.

To elicit the requisite sympathy for him and to assuage the guilt of the DIC-heads nudging him out, Biden will be diagnosed with some disease; whether it's real or it's fake makes no difference. Or, his handlers might forget for one fateful moment to get the trip wires that Peter Baker was hand-wringing over out of the way of his shuffling, ancient feet. 

Scenario #2: He will resign right after the Great Congressional Shellacking of 2022. Not because he doesn't truly relish the prospect of wheeling and dealing with Mitch McConnell, and accomplishing his lifetime goal of cutting Social Security and Medicare while keeping the endless war money spigot flowing, but because the Republicans are bound to hold hearings on Hunter Biden and his various nepotistic schemes. Biden will do anything to protect his own legacy as well as the family name.

Scenario #3: Okay, so now that Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy  hold off on investigating the Biden clan because he quit, and once Biden finally leaves (unless he pulls a Boris Johnson and stays), and Kamala Harris is sworn in as president, we now have the dilemma of whom she'll pick as her veep. My money is on Liz Cheney, the new anti-Trump heroine of  liberal DICsters like Robert Reich, who is already pushing her for the Democratic ticket. Plus, Mitch McConnell would ensure that Liz is handily confirmed.

Since the prospect of another Vice President Cheney is too nauseating to contemplate any further, here's where the speculation gets really wild. Scenarios could include, but are not limited to:

Due to her sheer, relentless incompetence, Default President Harris is denied the 2024 nomination by her former promoters in the DIC. 

At the last possible moment, the extremely popular Michelle Obama is nominated by acclaim convinced to run in order to prevent another Trump and to save the country from theocratic fascism. She picks Hillary Clinton as her running mate. Because why not. But as soon as she wins the election and is sworn in, Michelle resigns from office, because didn't she keep telling us over and over again how much she truly despises politics?

 By this appropriately serpentine route, Hillary is finally crowned as Leader of the New Old World Order.  Hasn't she told us over and over again that it is her turn?

Ridicule me if you must, but are my speculations any less far-fetched than, say, the vacuous Pete Buttigieg getting nominated and then getting handily defeated by the corpse of Trump, whose sudden death came too late to remove his name from the ballot?

 I've been reading that Pritzker might be the least-bad alternative to Biden and the rest, because he is at least a "pragmatic progressive" who pushed through a poverty-level $15 minimum wage for the Illinois proles.  Bernie Sanders's prediction that Joe Biden would be the reincarnation of FDR didn't work out so well, did it? But Pritzker is so rich that he could probably even force Joe Manchin to finally retire and spend more time with his coal. He is so rich he might even reduce Mitch McConnell into a state of helpless pseudo-humanity. Maybe Pritzker could even be a traitor to his whole class, just like FDR was, and thereby save both capitalism and dynastic wealth from themselves.

As always, I am very interested in hearing the thoughts and prayers and scenarios of readers. Be as far-fetched and silly as you like. Or, if that doesn't suit, you can always adopt the mantra of Kamala Harris, and opt for Smart, Sensible and Serious.

Trump Fears Bernie, Not Biden

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.
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!

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.

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.

Plutocratic Panic Is Palpable

They're triple-peeing themselves, and I don't mean in the way that neoliberals have been selling the odious acronym PPP for the past 40 years. Since the "public- private partnerships" which socialize all the costs and privatize all the profits have been duly exposed as scams literally condemning Americans to premature deaths, the plutocratic perps are now resorting to bald-faced lies.

The Paper of Record is only too happy to help. With only seven Democrats on the latest debate stage, Bernie Sanders actually threatened to get noticed and take away precious speaking time from low-polling "moderate" Amy Klobuchar and billionaire Tom Steyer. The Anti-Bernie campaign will thus begin in earnest.

The New York Times' role in destroying Sanders for a second time is beginning with some blatant monkeying-around with public opinion through use of an online marketing tool aptly called SurveyMonkey.

"When Offered Options, Democratic Voters Prefer a Moderate Path" is the since-changed headline of a piece by Ben Casselman, who writes

Only one in four Democratic voters says they would favr eliminating private health insurance and replacing it with a government-run plan — the centerpiece of the “Medicare for all” proposals put forward by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. And only one in three favors making public college tuition free for all Americans regardless of income, another idea shared by the two leading progressives in the race.Those results, from a survey conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey, are striking because past polls, including those from The Times, have shown broad-based support for progressive ideas among Democrats. Last month, 81 percent of Democrats said they approved of Medicare for all; in July, 82 percent said they supported making public colleges free for all.

A SurveyMonkey "research scientist" feebly explains away the glaring inconsistency that these same Democratic respondents trust Bernie Sanders more than any other candidate to "handle health care" by claiming that you can be very fond of a politician without ever agreeing with his or her policies. 

Casselman himself sought out other regular folk until he found a few willing to echo corporate Democratic and insurance industry talking points. They agree with Medicare For All in principle, but don't think the time is right to make a change. A political party's fortunes are more important than people's health.

 Meanwhile, the methodology of the survey is iffy at best, with SurveyMonkey explaining:

This SurveyMonkey online poll was conducted December 2 through 8, 2019 among a national sample of 4,093 adults. Respondents for this survey were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Data were weighted for age, race, sex, education, and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States.

Who did the selecting? Did they cherry-pick among the two million people to find the "moderate" public opinion with which the ruling class so desperately wants to gaslight the public?

Although the Wikipedia entry for SurveyMonkey has been flagged due to suspicions that it is nothing but a paid advertisement and thereby in violation of the site's terms of use, it does contain several disturbing facts, such as the firm's Wall Street and private equity financing and leadership. Another massive infusion of oligarchic cash boosted its market share price by a whopping 60 percent just in the last year. Its board of directors includes the billionaire widow, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, of its first leader. To add the necessary sheen of  gender and racial diversity, tennis star Serena Williams was recently added to the roster of super-capitalists invested in carefully measuring,if not outright creating or even falsifying, public opinion. Not for nothing does the board also include Facebook alumnus David Ebersman, who now runs Lyra Health, a "frictionless" technocratic mental health service provider to the disgruntled and oppressed workers of America.

Employers naturally have a stake in this as they want their employees to stay health, (sic) but the goal is to offer a sort of safe space where users can benefit from years of growth in pattern matching and data to help them figure out where to start. The company said it has raised $45 million in a new financing round including Tenaya Capital, Glynn Capital Partners, Crown Ventures, and Casdin Capital. Existing investors that include Greylock Partners, Venrock, and Providence Ventures also participated in the funding round.

 As one satisfied customer gushed in a testimonial on the Lyra website, getting mental health treatment from private equity is just like getting an upgrade to business class!

Judging from some other results of the New York Times-commissioned survey revealing there are millions more "moderates" than even they thought, I wonder whether SurveyMonkey picked some of the respondents from among the happy workplace clients of Lyra. Survey Monkey certainly appears to have picked and chosen its respondents from among the financially comfortable minority rather than from the precarious majority. More than a third of respondents reported being better off financially than they were a year ago, with another 41 percent thinking that they'll be even better off next year. Half the respondents think that the United States will be doing just fine in the next five years. More than a third are so flush with disposable income that they think that now is the perfect time to buy major household items.

 Even more preposterously, more than half proclaim themselves to be extremely concerned about the government budget deficit while a third are "somewhat" concerned about it, resulting in a shocking 80 percent of allegedly typical Americans worried about the deficit while life actually is pretty good for them, personally.

So my money is on the panicked plutocratic cherry-picking rather than on life being a big fat bowl of luscious cherries for concerned liberals having the time, the computers, the internet connections and probably lots of mind-altering drugs to fill out online SurveyMonkey questionnaires commissioned by the New York Times.

Of course, I could be nothing but a conspiracy theorist whose brain has been infiltrated by Putin. I am probably in dire need of some frictionless psychotherapy from the private equity shrinks at Lyra and SurveyMonkey, which are striving mightily to get the huddled masses to see the error of their radical life-sustaining thought processes.

Resistance (as opposed to approved #Resistance, Inc.) may be futile, but I think I'll give it a try anyway. I hope that millions of my fellow immoderates will join me in the new decade.

Spellbound In America: Dali Meets Hitchock

Griftopolis

Why isn't this getting more play?

The leader of the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with regulating the way political money is raised and spent, says she has largely given up hope of reining in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending.

“The likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim,” Ann M. Ravel, the chairwoman, said in an interview. “I never want to give up, but I’m not under any illusions. People think the F.E.C. is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional.”

Politicians like Jeb Bush and Martin O'Malley are raising money without even formally declaring their candidacies, as required by quaint federal election law. "Everybody does it" is the new legalized way of bribery, as the billions changing hands becomes the main story and the measure of a candidate's worth. The corruption is not only complete, it has become a badge of honor among thieves. Gone are the good old days of bag-men and midnight meetings in hotel rooms and, heaven forbid, undercover FBI agents wiring provocateurs for sound in hopes of catching crooked pols in the act.

Wild West, meet The Sopranos.

For all intents and purposes, our country's electoral regulatory watchdog is not only muzzled, it's been effectively euthanized after a valiant 40-year run.  Four decades ago, during Watergate, the nation still had the capacity to be shocked. It searched its soul and saw that it was rotten. The rot has continued to eat away at democracy until it can no longer be said to exist.

Nixon's C.R.E.E.P. (Committee to Re-elect the President) and its sleazy slush fund sound so quaint nowadays. Nixon, were he running today, could expect to garner glowing headlines for his fund-raising prowess. The multibillion-dollar Clinton and Bush machines make him look like St. Francis of Assisi.

Congress might as well make it official and cut off the feeding and funding of the moribund F.E.C. Or they might use the neoliberal method of reanimation and simply privatize it. Coors Light could complain to a corporate electoral tribunal if it was being undercut by Schlitz in the "who'd you rather have a beer with?" billionaire sweepstakes. 

Don't laugh. After all, presidential debates have been privatized and controlled by corporate sponsors for years. The rules clearly state that if the oligarchy doesn't buy a candidate a minimum 15% share of the votes in rigged national polls, then that candidate can be barred from participating. It happened to Dennis Kucinich in 2008. It happened to Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2012. Not only was she barred, she was taken to a secret police prison and shackled for the duration of the "free and open" discussion.

As Christopher Hitchens wrote, "the polling business gives the patricians an idea what the mob is thinking, and of how that thinking might be changed, or shall we say ‘shaped.’ It is the essential weapon in the mastery of populism by the elite. It also allows for ‘fine calibration’ and for capsules of ‘message’ to be prescribed for various constituencies.”

Also -- forget about the United Nations coming in to monitor our free and fair elections. If the outside world tried that trick, and called the One Indispensable Nation out on its perfidy, the American griftopoly would simply cut off their funding too, before evicting them from the Income Disparity Capital of the World.

Meanwhile, an antidote to insanity: