Manos: The Hands of Joe Biden's Fate

Finally a woman* had the guts to go public with her disgust about being creepily kissed, gripped, nuzzled or otherwise man-handled by scary presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Photos of Creepy Uncle Joe, long lurking on the Internet for viewing by anyone with a hankering for cheesy horror, have suddenly been rediscovered by The Establishment Media to get the benefit of their careful, nuanced analysis. Is Joe just a loving harmless grandpa who is so old-school or clueless that he never learned about boundaries? Or is he really your typical sexist pig, hiding his malevolence beneath a folksy persona, in the vein of Poppy Bush and his own gross "David Cop-a-Feel" habit?

Biden is a combination of sociopathies. He is the typical powerful ruler who plots and passes neoliberal legislation to punish and harm people. Then he further adds to the horror by touching the bodies of women in order to convey his power to them. Manipulative ministrations of this type make many women feel that if they hadn't been sending out those invisible signals of neediness and vulnerability, they would never have attracted the magical male touch in the first place. It's all their fault if they take Biden-style handsiness the wrong way. Failure to accept it in the loving aggressive spirit with which it was intended will only prove their needy ingratitude and chronic hangups. 

As Lucy Flores, the former Nevada legislator who wrote the New York magazine story about her own experience with Biden in 2014. says, her reaction was all about the power that Biden wielded at the time. As to the defense of Biden written by Stephanie Carter, the wife of Obama's former defense secretary, Flores noted - correctly, I think - that this was a completely different scenario. The Carters and the Bidens are long-time friends, and Flores had only met the creepy veepy a couple of times.

It's about power, and even more, it's about class. Flores is not a member of the ruling class, and the Carters and the Bidens are at its very pinnacle. The class aspect of this new Biden media "wokeness" comes through loud and clear in Stephanie Carter's Medium piece.

Her main complaint about again being the center of attention in "That Picture" is that it has spoiled the joy of starting her very own private equity company. (She is a former Deutsche Bank official and partner at ABS Capital, positions that were briefly thought to be potential conflicts of interest given that her husband was in charge of the Pentagon. but which soon were glossed over in the spirit of class solidarity.) Carter writes:

Last night, I received a text from a friend letting me know that picture was once again all over Twitter in connection to Lucy Flores’ personal account of a 2014 encounter with Joe Biden. Let me state upfront that I don’t know her, but I absolutely support her right to speak her truth and she should be, like all women, believed. But her story is not mine. The Joe Biden in my picture is a close friend helping someone get through a big day, for which I will always be grateful. So, as the sole owner of my story, it is high time that I reclaim it — from strangers, Twitter, the pundits and the late-night hosts.

Stephanie Carter wants her friends and colleagues to know that she doesn't know Lucy Flores. Why would she know her? But she condescends to allow Flores to speak "her truth" -- rather than, say, "the truth."

Carter goes on to complain that Joe Biden was simply comforting her because she had just slipped on the ice while visiting Arlington National Cemetery with a contingent of the Pentagon officials who personally had sent a fair portion the buried soldiers to war and were there to honor their "sacrifice." She added that Biden sensed her discomfort at being rudely asked by annoying members of the press about her well-being. They apparently went above their station in doing so. It got so bad that one female reporter from the low-class tabloid New York Post even had the gall to later confront her in her own apartment building to ask about That Picture of Joe nuzzling her and squeezing her shoulders.

Yuck. First, they rudely asked if she was O.K. after her slip and fall, then they asked her about That Picture, and now five years later it's all coming back to haunt her. They're asking her about That Picture all over again. The first round of asks completely ruined the "crowning achievement of my husband's career" and the second round of asks are ruining the high of her own crowning career achievement of "entrepreneurial" high finance.

It is absolutely tragic.

Meanwhile, members of the Biden class collective are snarkily criticizing Flores, who is now out of politics, for daring to sell stuff on the Internet. They are also casting subtle doubt on her story. You see, she used to be a Bernie Sanders supporter. Smarmy CNN personality Jake Tapper snidely wondered whether "politics" is at the heart of her motivation for telling her story.

“I want him to change his behavior I want him to acknowledge that it was wrong,” she said, “And I want this to be a bigger discussion about how there is no political accountability structure within our political space, either for instances in which women feel that there was inappropriate behavior, or more serious allegations of sexual assault.”

“We are not protected in politics,” she said. “And frankly, on a much larger scale, we also need to have a conversation about powerful men feeling that they have the right to invade a woman’s space whenever they like. This really is about women feeling like we have agency. If we don’t want you to touch us, then don’t touch us.”

Biden himself has been incommunicado, save for a few written statements pleading that it has never been his intention to intimidate women while nobly acknowledging that his female critics could have a different perspective. The actual attacks on Biden's critics as the only way to defend him are being done by his paid spokespeople and Democratic Party colleagues. The rich and the powerful always have paid spokespeople and colleagues to do their dirty work for them.

Biden should absolutely run for president if he still has the nerve to throw his hat in the ring for one of his many underlings to pick up and dust off for him. And he should absolutely be confronted over his sordid history of incarcerating black people via the infamous Crime Bill which he personally wrote, his treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation debacle, his support of the Iraq War, his championship of the Glass-Steagall repeal that set the stage for the 2008 financial collapse, his poor record on women's reproductive rights, his bankruptcy reform legislation that condemned mainly women to lifetimes of penury and debt to the usurious credit card companies that helped fund Biden's career.... the list goes on and on.

This campaign season is already so crazy that we should probably welcome Biden's hammy hands and cheese to give the class war a little levity for a change. Just when think you can't take any more of Perpetual Campaign Cinema, Joe's hands have been added to the script, and people are suddenly finding they just can't get enough of possibly the worst movie ever made. It's so bad, it's good. 

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't think that Biden's hands should be disqualified from running, as long as they remain firmly attached to his straight arms. Anything to keep the poor and the uninsured from remembering that Medicare For All will never, ever come to be under her interminable binge-watch.

And as Biden's gatekeeper, Bill "Torgo" Russo, reminds us, the horrific images of Biden's hands come from a Cottage of Lies guarded by right-wing trolls located deep within the Forest of the Dark Internet. There is nothing cheesier than those redundant manipulated hands of fate. The movie trailer gets it right: there is no way out.

* Update, 4/3: A total of four women have now come forward to complain about Biden. One of them is a sexual assault survivor who says that when then-V.P. Biden sat next to her at a conference for sexual assault survivors, he rested his hand on her thigh. She was 19 years old. His behavior can no longer be excused as mere cluelessness or friendliness. But just to give him the benefit of the doubt, let's assume that he is, in fact, merely clueless or insensitive. These are not qualities we should tolerate in a president, particularly a president whose job entails interacting and negotiating with women leaders, both foreign and domestic. I have changed my mind. Biden should not run. The fact that some prominent liberals have come to his defense is just as disgusting as his behavior, in my view. Their implicit argument is that because some women have welcomed his touching, there must be something wrong with those who do not. Contrary to the motto for Biden's campaign against college campus sexual assault -- "It's On Us"(men) -- the real message remains "It's On Them" (women).  

The photos of a President Biden nuzzling and stroking women will send the message to boys and men all over the world that such behavior is not only O.K. it is desirable -- just as Trump's hateful rhetoric gives tacit permission to people act out their darkest fantasies.

Some defenders of Biden say he is a saint compared to Trump, who boasted that he can grab women by the pussy and get away with it. To date, there are no photos of Trump grabbing any woman's body part. Although there have been allegations of physical assault, his preferred method of degrading women is with his big fat mouth rather than with his hands. There are many degrees of bad behavior, none of which should be tolerated, particularly if they are tolerated in the big-dollar interests of either of our two deeply corrupt political parties.

Commentariat Central: Post-Kavanaugh Blues

As long as the New York Times keeps ignoring the war-mongering Atlantic Council's advice to shut down reader commentary, I'll keep shoving my two cents into their digital piggy bank of views, which they euphemize as "sharing our thoughts."

It seems like only yesterday that the liberal press was editorializing against Brett Kavanaugh, and it seems like only today that we're being advised to put all those bad memories of rape and corruption and mendacity behind us and redirect our energies toward the vaunted Blue Wave, and support corporate Democrats.

In his latest column, Paul Krugman describes the trauma of Christine Blasey Ford as being of "of secondary concern" within the big picture of looming Republican authoritarianism and Trumpist brownshirts. His colleague Charles Blow sarcastically tells readers to "rue the day and rend your garments" like hormonal lunatics, because Kavanaugh should suddenly be the least of your enemies. "Liberals get so high-minded, they lose sight of the ground war," he chides, referring to the looming midterms.

And about those loudmouthed protesting women beating on the doors of the Supreme Court:

On one level this would provide relief and release for a pent-up demand by most Americans to be heard and to calm some of the chaos. But, catharsis is an emotional response and an emotional remedy.

Hear that, ladies? Charles Blow says it's time to stop emoting and follow the sage advice of Charles Pierce, scribe of Esquire, "the magazine for men", and get to work fighting the racist Constitutional originalists by organizing a brand new constitutional convention which will require the permission of only two-thirds of our divided states.

First, my response to Blow (much inspired by my current reading of "Black Reconstruction In America" by the great socialist W.E.B. Du Bois):

If the Kavanaugh Caper proves anything, it's that the white men of the GOP are pining not so much for the Founders as they are for the oligarchic slave-owning planting class of the antebellum South.

Here's looking at you, Mitch McConnell.

This isn't a new civil war, as some pundits claim. The old civil war never ended. It's been going on with varying intensity more than 150 years. Donald Trump just ushered in one of its greatest revivals yet, abandoning the smarmy dog whistle for a bullhorn.The GOP has likewise stripped itself bare, flaunting its racism and sexism in an orgy of shamelessness.

That's not to say we should therefore put our blind faith in the Democratic Party, some of whose leaders are already urging us to "move on" for the sake of our sacred institutions, as they abandon any idea of impeaching Kavanaugh. That would be too, too unseemly. All you "purists" must realize that if the Dems pull this stunt, the GOP will only get their revenge down the road. And anyway, as the Times just reported, Wall Street is putting its corrupt money on the Democrats this year.

The media coverage of Trump's "victory" this week has also been downright disgusting. How quickly the pain of Dr. Blasey Ford and countless other women has been forgotten in the group-think coverage of horse race politics.

Co-opting, dividing and conquering regular people is how the ruling class racketeers roll. Don't fall for it. Vote, and then keep afflicting the comfortable.

And in response to a critical reader who thought I was unfairly sliming Trump voters as one bigoted monolithic voting bloc:

To clarify: I'm talking about the white male leadership of the GOP, not white male voters who vote Republican. Trump has displayed his own racism and sexism in countless ways, both verbally and operationally - his Access Hollywood remarks, describing Mexicans as rapists, his attempted dismantling of social safety programs, and of course his notorious birther campaign.

He co-opts the white working class male just as the oligarchic planters did during slavery. Poor whites fought the Civil War for the rich and were the hired overseers of slaves and bounty hunters of slaves so that the rich could bask in their own laziness while producing absolutely nothing. They deflected their own bad qualities on their enslaved work force and propagandized to the poor whites that with a little hard work, they too could aspire to the owner class. Likewise, Trump pretends to be on their side because after all, they have their white masculinity in common.

 Slavery ended, but the propaganda has proved more or less successful ever since. This is what I mean by divide and conquer. Our rulers would hate for the white working class and the black and brown working class to get together in solidarity against the modern day oligarchy.

Trump won because neither the white nor the black working class in rust belt states turned out for Hillary Clinton. Many who'd voted for Obama picked Trump. It's wrong to call all Trump voters racist and sexist. Plenty are just plain fed up and desperate.

As far as Krugman's standard diatribe against Trump and the Republicans' "paranoid style of politics" and incipient authoritarian rule is concerned, I do admit that I let my feminist anger get the better of me, and as a result, did not get many recommendations for this response:

 How quickly liberal men are calling the seating of Kavanaugh "of secondary concern" or "time to move on." That's a pretty callous response to the millions of women whose own pain at the hands of predators was rendered newly raw by the testimony of Dr. Blasey Ford and others with the courage to speak out. Now that Kavanaugh's in, we're lectured that too many angry women might be spawning a backlash and endangering the so-called Blue Wave of the midterms. It's disgusting.

So let's pivot again to Trump, Trump and nothing but the Trump and ignore the fact that he is but the symptom of the equally noxious neoliberal style of politics which been devouring labor rights and the social safety net for going on half a century now.

Authoritarianism is already here. Just witness the recent "no debate needed" bipartisan appropriation by a near-unanimous Senate of nearly a trillion more dollars to the dreaded Trump regime to wage endless war.

  Look at Joe Biden, the current front-runner for the presidency. A "New Democrat," he impoverished millions of women in the 90s with his bankruptcy reform legislation and helped send millions of men to prison in the misguided war on drugs, which was really a war on black drug users. He will never prevail against Trump, who knows where all the bodies are buried... because they either aided his fraudulent rise to riches, or they turned a blind eye to it.

That's Trump's fascistic appeal. He pretends to eat his own, and his base feels replete.

Here's how a fellow reader named "Gerry" cut me down to size by erecting a straw-woman:

I think you paint with a too broad brush when you condemn liberal men as aiders and abettors of the Republican supporters of Trump. I don't hear any of my male liberal friends saying that the seating of Kavanaugh is of secondary concern and that it is time to move on. We are doing what we can to regain control of the House by volunteering and contributing. We are supporters of the Mueller investigation.
You sound mixed up to me. What are your politics?

My reply to "Gerry" --

 Um...Paul Krugman used the words "of secondary concern" right here in this column. He sounds like too many other liberal male pundits I've been reading and listening to these several days.

As far as my sounding "mixed up" is concerned, that his exactly how how Brett Kavanaugh and others described Dr. Blasey Ford. They also demanded to know what her politics are.

There has been much attempted gaslighting of women by both liberal and conservative men. The liberals concern-troll it by calling us emotional and confused, while the conservatives come right out and pronounce us nuts and liars.

But according to you, it's all good as long as Dems support Mueller and give money to candidates.

I rest my case.

The proscribing of the "narrative" to one's required membership in either right wing of the duopoly serves to stifle dissent. Liberalism is not the same thing as leftism, despite the ridiculous claims of Republicans who accuse the centrist business-friendly leaders of the Democratic Party of being Marxists. Thinking outside the corporate partisan box simply does not compute. The establishment media have done their job, and done it well.
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Meanwhile, David Brooks, who is now practically indistinguishable from his liberal right-wing Times colleagues in their obsessive loathing for the lone corpus of Donald Trump, is back from book leave and has wisely completely ignored the Kavanaugh Caper and the midterm elections. 

Instead, he's shilling for another for-profit venture which involves corporations getting into community organizing by funding programs which use poor (mainly black) children as data banks. He desperately describes it as "A Really Good Thing That's Happening in America."

Visiting one South Carolina center called the "Spartanburg Academic Movement," or SAM, Brooks gushes:

SAM organizes the community of Spartanburg around a common project. Then it creates an informal authority structure that transcends public-sector/private-sector lines, that rallies cops and churches, the grass roots and the grass tops. Members put data in the center and use it as a tool not for competition but for collaboration. Like the best social service organizations, it is high on empathy and high on engineering. It is local, participatory and comprehensive.

SAM is not a lone case. Spartanburg is one of 70 communities around the country that use what is called the StriveTogether method. StriveTogether began in Cincinnati just over a decade ago. A few leaders were trying to improve education in the city and thinking of starting another program. But a Procter & Gamble executive observed, “We’re program-rich, but system-poor.” In other words, Cincinnati had plenty of programs. What it lacked was an effective system to coordinate them.

Yep, you guessed it. This is the same market-based neoliberal approach to government and social services that helped produce Donald Trump, and turned the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and the Republican Party into Insanity Central. Just the mention of P & G should set off alarm bells. It is what's called an oligopoly, a consolidated corporate behemoth which has cornered the market on most of the items you see on your grocery store shelves, with its garish plethora of brand names offering a false "choice" to consumers. 

That's the noxious genius of neoliberalism itself it just keeps rebranding itself. Life itself is just one great big advertisement.

David Brooks does not, of course, go there. Instead he is so excited about the continuing privatization of public spaces and the corporate enslavement of human lives that 

Frankly, I don’t need studies about outcomes to believe that these collective impact approaches are exciting and potentially revolutionary. Trust is built and the social fabric is repaired when people form local relationships around shared tasks. Building working relationships across a community is an intrinsically good thing. You do enough intrinsically good things and lives will be improved in ways you can never plan or predict. This is where our national renewal will come from.

My published response:

 While sounding warm and fuzzy, the gathering of data on children "from cradle to career" does have sort of an ominous Brave New World ring to it.

Who becomes the eventual recipients of all this valuable and intrusive data? Facebook, Amazon, the NSA, for-profit testing companies, anti teacher union PACs, or any corporate entity prepared to pay money for it?

This sounds suspiciously like another iteration of the increasingly discredited for-profit charter school movement which has sought to supersede good government education policy and the expenditure of public money on children.

So rather than unquestioningly celebrate the efforts of philanthrocapitalists and corporations seeking to burnish their public images with these kinds of slick "community" programs that purport to "measure" pupil progress, our free and fair press should dig deeper and do their journalistic duty: follow the money.

Rather than simply concentrate on kids "from cradle to career", America must start concentrating.on all its people from cradle to  grave. We already have some of the worst education and health outcomes in the civilized world.

A pivot to government in the public rather than private interest would include Medicare for All, debt-free college, a guaranteed federal jobs program... in other words, a rebooting of the New Deal for the 21st century.

If the wealthy investment class really wants to help poor children, let them stop bribing our politicians and start paying their fair share of taxes.

Bill Kills

Last night while you were watching a bizarre Superbowl commercial featuring an ultrasound fetus seizing up at the sound of Daddy crunching Doritos, First Dude Wannabe Bill Clinton went full Quentin Tarantino with a bizarre verbal seizure of his own.

Dressed nattily and folksily in a Buffalo plaid shirt, the aging ex-prez outed himself as a pathetic troller of Internet trolls who are (shock!) bashing Wifey based solely upon her XX chromosomes. Of course, the way the New York Times headline described his puerile hissy fit, it was a lot more intellectual: "Bill Clinton Launches Stinging Attack on Bernie Sanders." 

But Bill's tirade against Sanders -- as well as against the supporters whom Hillary hopes to seduce should she win the nomination -- was more like a flailing sledgehammer than the skilled jabs of a boxer or polemicist. 

He told the sad but unverifiable tale of an anonymous "female progressive blogger" who has been personally injured in comments boards by those ubiquitous and largely nonexistent Bernie Bros. He ridiculed Sanders for voting for the Wall Street-friendly Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton himself immediately signed after passive-aggressively sneaking it, at the last minute, into an 11,000-page lame duck omnibus monstrosity. Few legislators had a chance to notice it, let alone study it. Clinton now fails to mention why he signed it instead of vetoing it.

Clinton also went into high dudgeon because it appears that Bernie once slipped up and not only attended a DNC fundraiser, he had the gall to breathe the same air as the lobbyists in attendance. And on and on. If this is the best oppo research that the crack Clinton team can come up with, then Bernie is a shoo-in for both the nomination and the general.

It's almost as though Bill Clinton wants to put his wife's campaign out of its misery by killing it as quickly as possible. Or then again, maybe the whole idea is to deliberately make himself look like such an asshole that people will vote for Hillary out of pity. The anti-Bernie New York Times, for some odd reason, even described his appearance as "poignant." The reporter seemed to half-realize midway through dutifully transcribing Bill's unhinged remarks how truly bizarre they were.

Red-baiting has been proven ineffective. So has the ridiculous shaming of female voters by feminist "icons" Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem.

 Bill Clinton infamously co-opted the Reagan Revolution and turned the Democratic Party to the right by announcing during his first campaign that "the era of big government is over."

And now Bernie Sanders is proving through his own first campaign that the era of corrupt, Clinton-style identity politics is over. 

Trickle-down feminism of the type being espoused by multimillionaires Hillary Clinton, Albright and Steinem is as much a sham as trickle-down economics. Women living on the brink of financial collapse are not up for vicariously enjoying Hillary Clinton's shattering of any glass ceiling.

 We are all too aware of the falling, deadly shards that she has already left in her wake.