Joe Biden seems to have finally abandoned his Dark Brandon persona. On Wednesday, he debuted as the hapless Maxwell Smart vs the Dark Forces.
He told the electorate that the only thing we have to fear is Chaos itself. Or in the worst case scenario, KAOS, which ranks right up there with the Armageddon SOS that he gave to some rich donors awhile back.
Would you believe that the most dastardly villain in all of American history has never been criminally charged for instigating a riot in the Capitol nearly two years ago? Nor has he been charged with any number of other crimes related to his attempted overturning of the 2020 election results. Because having Donald Trump rotting in a Club Fed somewhere instead of freely spinning his dark sticky web all over the World Order would rob the Democrats of their whole reason for existing. Without a hit show with which to titillate and scare the voters in the audience, they might even be forced to address some their own political malpractice. The relentless bipartisan robbing and exploitation of the poor to reward the rich is what created their Trump monster in the first place.
They don't want to touch the financial plights of the electorate with a ten-foot pole. They want people to forget about their rent being too damned high, and eggs costing $4 or $5 or $6 a dozen. With our very Democracy at stake, and KAOS knocking at the door, shelter and food should be the least of our worries. And why waste time fretting about catching COVID for the third or fourth time, with hundreds of Americans still dying from it every single day, when the much more lethal plague of Election Denialism is sweeping the country?
Biden apparently had no other choice but to ignore the poor and the struggling. Logically enough, he thus began his appeal for votes by bemoaning the recent shocking attack on an uber-wealthy member of the political aristocracy:
Good evening, everyone.
Just a few days ago, a little before 2:30 a.m. in the morning, a man smashed the back windows and broke into the home of the speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest-ranking official in America. He carried in his backpack zip ties, duct tape, rope and a hammer.
As he told the police, he had come looking for Nancy Pelosi to take her hostage, to interrogate her, to threaten to break her kneecaps. But she wasn’t there. Her husband, my friend Paul Pelosi, was home alone. The assailant tried to take Paul hostage. He woke him up, and he wanted to tie him up. The assailant ended up using a hammer to smash Paul’s skull. Thankfully, by the grace of God, Paul survived.
Biden evokes an image of Paul as an aging Macaulay Culkin, home all alone, forgotten and abandoned. Or at least that's the impression I got from his intro. I'd previously been thinking of Paul Pelosi as a latter-day Louis XVI, who in the alternate history version, is cruelly abandoned by Marie Antoinette to the mob at the very height of the French Revolution. What with Our Democracy supposedly in so much danger, the reported lack of security at the Pelosi manse is especially baffling. Then again, the Democratic Party also has been bankrolling extreme right-wingers in the midterms, under the weird theory that they're so nuts they could not possibly win against a centrist establishment Dem. Until, of course, they do.
OK, so now that Biden has completely convinced the peasants to be sympathetic to the person commonly - or should I say royally - described as being "second in line to the presidency", he will now convince them to be secondarily sympathetic with the various low-level, local election officials and other courtiers whose secondary lives also have been threatened by The Mob. It was an appeal to a more virtuous form of unthinking patriotism, or robotic nationalism:
My fellow Americans, we’re facing a defining moment, an inflection point. We must with one overwhelming unified voice speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America. Whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans. No place, period. No place ever.
Biden did not go so far as to order federal troops to guard these threatened polling places, or to request that the United Nations send in monitors to validate the balloting and counting, as is done in other, less exceptional banana republics. Rather, he wants powerless regular people to "stand up" for the carefully selected elite candidates in both establishment parties and to protect the feckless Democrats by electing even more feckless Democrats.
Standing up for ourselves? That can wait for another time, I reckon.
Biden hinted that despite the looming political apocalypse, he will indeed work with the far-right authoritarian Republicans and wannabe dictators after the elections:
I know there’s a lot at stake in these midterm elections, from our economy, to the safety of our streets, to our personal freedoms, to the future of health care and Social Security, Medicare. It’s all important. But we’ll have our differences, we’ll have our difference of opinion. And that’s what it’s supposed to be.
Ominous, because as someone who has called for cutting Social Security and Medicare for his entire half-century as an elected official, Biden intimates he'll be just as willing to wheel and deal with the GOP over "reforms" as he ever was - just as previous modern Democratic presidents have done when they've conveniently lost their congressional majorities in mid-term elections. "And that's what its supposed to be" could be interpreted as Biden's staunch devotion to bipartisan neoliberal tradition.
What is KAOS today will be magically transformed right back to Control tomorrow.
Your own everyday trials and tribulations will have to wait until all the theatrical plutocratic infighting, presented for the horrified entertainment of the public, is over and done with. And then its on to the next cliff-hanging episode in which they will have to punish you in order to save you.
