The Elites of Non-Elitism Are Dogpiling Joe Biden

Hey, there's a new soap opera being written daily in the corporate media, and there's a growing cast of players to act out their unconvincing roles as democracy-cherishing, elder-protecting patriots.  

There's Michael Moore, whose overriding concern is to protect democracy and the aged, going so far as to imply that the Biden campaign is engaged in elder abuse: 

If I have to be the only one to stand up for Joe Biden here, to protect him from the cruelest form of elder abuse I’ve ever been forced to watch, well then that’s what I’ll do,” Moore said. “He was in epic distress that Thursday night. Every cognitive default in his mind seemed to be shutting down. If this had been someone that you truly cared about, loved, embraced … what would you have done? 

Apparently, it never dawned on Michael that even the aged and decrepit have the right to make choices, at least until their protectors convince them they're no longer able to. Does he think that someone took Joe's apple sauce away from him on debate night and pushed him out onstage? 

I have a lot of respect for Michael Moore, but this is of the weakest most patronizing steamy pile variety of rationalizations for relieving someone of his rights under the Constitution that Michael, otherwise, cherishes.  Would Michael really be the dutiful and protective son, willing to involuntarily retire Dad from the world's most important job that he's proven to be the best at since Lyndon Johnson, and shove him in the old folks home regardless of what Dad has to say on the matter?

And then there's Rob Reiner, who says "it's time to stop fucking around . . . it's time for Joe Biden to step down." Rob Reiner, one of Hollywood's most famous large "D" Democrats, whose concern for preserving our democracy goes so far, obviously, as to force out the Democratic candidate who collected 87 percent of the democratic votes cast in all the Democratic primaries.  

That's 14,000,000 people who participated in the only democratic process we have for selecting a candidate.  Should Biden desert those folks who chose him in order to satisfy the Rob Reiners of the world, who would preserve democracy by simply ignoring how it works.  Maybe Reiner should take Joe's advice and put his favored candidate forward at the upcoming convention, rather than sitting in the balcony making a lot of noise and throwing spitballs.  Who the fuck does he think he is?

 

MSNBC 07 08 2024 on Biden's Call Today to Morning Joe

Who's Worse, ABC Anal-ists or Sanjay Gupta?

Even before the Biden ABC interview aired yesterday, renowned TV doctor, Sanjay Gupta, had already slow-moed Biden's debate performance and come up with his own diagnosis and prescription based on what he saw from his living room easy chair: a thorough neurological and cognitive screening for the President.  Did Sanjay confer with anyone before he put in his orders with the White House and the rest of the world?  Maybe he sought confirmation from some other famous neurosurgeon--maybe Ben Carson?

With thousands of hours of tape available to him for review at CNN, has Dr. Gupta ever prescribed a thorough neurological, cognitive, and most importantly--psychiatric--workup on the lying gangster clown, Donald Trump?  Of course not.  But then Gupta and the other media jackals know that their howling and gnawing can never affect the Trump Party faithful who proved years ago that they are steadfastly immune to media yowling? 

But Gupta and the other sour-faced talking heads from ABC do know that they can get the soft-shelled Democratic hysterics inside the beltway to listen and begin to quake at all of their snapping and yammering about Joe Biden.  Yesterday ABC didn't even go to the all-important commercial following the Biden interview before its assembled panel of naysayers (so low on the totem poll that they had to work on the 4th of July weekend) leapt into their bad-mouthing rhetorical vortex. 

The adult in the room, Lawrence O'Donell reminded us the other night that in July of 1988 Michael Dukakis was ahead in the polls by 17 point. In November, he was beaten by Poppy Bush by 8.

Unedited: ProPublica Interviews President Biden, September 2023

Posted here for the weepers, hand wringers, and pearl clutchers:

Recommending: Time to End Tax Breaks for Charter Schools and The Ultra-Rich

“The same day he revealed Cardona as his education nominee, it was announced Biden rehired Reed as deputy chief of staff, despite pre-emptive protest from progressives…” — Jake Jacobs

Educator and writer Jake Jacobs has written an excellent essay that not only explores some of Joe Biden's more questionable appointees, but also curates all of the highly profitable school privatization schemes that the billionaire class have built into their charter heist laws and programs. The piece is entitled Time to End Tax Breaks for Charter Schools and The Ultra-Rich.

Of note is how the essay describes many of TOP👮‍♀️COP Kamala Harris' connections to various techbros, all of whom profit mightily at the public expense. Hope you find the essay as useful as I did.

https://nyarteacher.medium.com/time-to-end-tax-breaks-for-charter-schools-and-the-ultra-rich-8fe7eda0a41d

Mr. Krugman, Stick to Economics

Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize in Economics, but he is as dumb as the rest of us about politics--even though his status would never allow him to admit as much. 

The morning after Super Tuesday, he offers this analysis on Twitter:

Of course, it's Bernie's fault that he lost. We know it has nothing to do with the former and current DNC kingpins pulling every lever of power and influence to scare the scared people into voting for Biden. If Bernie were just a little more "magnanimous," rather than uppity and honest--he would have had a chance on Super Tuesday. 

And yet--if there was ever a time that honesty, brutal as it might sound, was required to address the imminence of climate catastrophe and mass extinctions, it is now. That is why the Biden victory yesterday is so utterly sad. Not because he won't beat Trump if nominated--any of the candidates would beat Trump--but because he will beat Trump and have nothing to offer to activate a solution to environmental calamity. 

Biden's mirroring of Wall Street's necrophilous environmental policy will be catastrophic because it will ignore any remaining opening for action that we have during this decade.

If elected, Biden will leave us, then, with no option but to turn the movement that Bernie spawned in the U.S into the most massive guerilla operation of environmental death resistance that has not yet been imagined. 

One outcome is certain; those who persist in the killing will not fare well, regardless of political label.

Joe Biden's Lies and Unacknowledged Contribution to Resegregation

Joe Biden has said that "there are a lot of people who would say it [busing] hasn’t been the best remedy to integrate schools."  The people who say that, of course, are, like Joe Biden, opposed to busing, for whatever reason.  In the end, the reason does not matter because the documented racist result is the same, regardless of intent or motivation.

Whether Joe and the "lot of people" are correct in their claim that busing is an ineffective way to desegregate schools remains debatable, but the issue of busing presents us with at least one incontrovertible truth: those who have opposed busing have made significant contributions to the resegregation of schools.  That would include Joe Biden and anyone else whose intentions could be suspect or as pure as the driven snow.  The manifestations of racism are determined by policy talk and implementation, not by intentions.  We all know what the road to hell is paved with.

Richard Nixon, who was president when Joe Biden got started on the national political stage, knew that opposition to busing was an effective way to appeal to racists, both Southern and Northern, who were enraged by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiatives.  Anti-busing was an important piece of Nixon's "Southern Strategy," with Nixon going so far as to instruct his Attorney General, John Mitchell, to send him only Supreme Court candidates who were opposed to school busing.

Nixon got his conservative majority on the Court, which immediately went to work in 1974 dismantling, by a 5-4 vote, a busing plan in Detroit (Milliken v. Bradley) that was based on one in Charlotte, NC (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education) that had been tested and found constitutional by the Supreme Court just a couple of years before.

First elected to the U. S. Senate in 1972, Joe Biden was watching all this unfold and making his own political calculations at the time.  Even if his heart might have been somewhere else, in the end Biden's words and deeds followed Richard Nixon and the racism he inspired:

Joe Biden, the youthful and telegenic senator from Delaware, also played an important role in this history. According to historian Matthew F. Delmont in his indispensable book "Why Busing Failed," Biden labeled busing a "bankrupt concept" that defied "common sense" and would go on to sponsor anti-busing amendments in the Senate. Biden faced the dilemma of Northern liberals of the era who generally supported national civil rights legislation, yet found themselves on unstable ground when these issues struck closer to home. Biden chose, like many of his political contemporaries, to be on the wrong side of history. In 1974, the year after Biden came to the Senate, the Supreme Court -- in Milliken v. Bradley -- struck down a busing plan in Detroit, saying it was "wholly impermissible" to bus white children who lived in the suburbs into inner-city schools to integrate schools. 

As a result of the Milliken decision, the white rush to the suburbs picked up steam, and school desegregation efforts in subsequent years were further neutralized by court decisions and legislative efforts, like the stringent Senate bill introduced in 1975 by Jesse Helms and supported by Joe Biden.

The chart below is an update from data gathered by Gary Orfield.

In a detailed analysis of busing's effectiveness (spoiler alert--it works), Nikole Hannah-Jones shows that Biden lied about his role in the anti-busing wave of the 70s and 80s:

After Mr. Nixon’s win in 1968, white Democrats were trying to hold on to their white voters. Mr. Biden favored busing for integration when he ran for election in 1972, but changed his mind seemingly because of a Delaware school desegregation case that was working its way through the courts. In his autobiography, Mr. Biden recalled his confrontation with a crowd of white constituents teetering on the brink of violence over the issue. 

Mr. Biden flipped. Between 1975 and 1982, he teamed up with ardent segregationists in Congress, including Mr. Eastland, to support no fewer than five antibusing measures. Despite Mr. Biden’s recent claims that he only opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education, the bills tried to curtail the ability of federal courts to order busing and even to limit busing in places where courts had already ordered it.

 Lying is a big issue, but the bigger issue here is Biden's ignorance or disregard for the devastating effects that the demise of busing has had in terms of efforts to achieve integrated schools.  Biden's decades of opposition to busing helped to lead us to where we are today, with the resegregation of urban schools, in particular, now almost complete.  

Even during the 8 years of Obama-Biden, they did nothing to stop or slow this resegregation trend in the years just before Trump.  In fact, their support for the even-more-intensely segregated charter schools skyrocketed during the Obama years and led to the further debasement of public education. After looking like a fool at the recent debate and spending a few days on defense, now Joe has moved to a cautious offensive position, declaring just today that "I don't have to atone."   Maybe not, Joe, but you do have to acknowledge reality.  Or maybe not.