The Biden Train kept a-rollin’, all night long. As DNC frontrunner (cough) Sen. Joe Biden was defending the rank-ass “legacy” of his ex-boss and forgetting what he was saying halfway through his answers on the “debate” stage this week, the featured body part malfunction was the Senator’s dentures, which slipped out on the air at the worst possible moment — which is to say, pretty much every moment, from all accounts.
Continue reading "The Teeth of Biden (Make Sure The Kids Hear Words)" »
At Wednesday night’s Democratic Party Climate Debate candidate Joe Biden, while outlining his climate policy and declaring his opposition to a fracking ban, suffered a subconjunctival hemorrhage in his left eye, causing it to fill up with blood. More than a few folks on Twitter considered this a sign, given the former VP’s coziness with the fossil fuel industry.
The Eye of Biden the Terrible few could endure. pic.twitter.com/sTI6EM0Ld6
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) September 5, 2019
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“We do best when the middle class is doing well.”
–Barack Obama, Presidential Debate 10.03.2012
So, I’m seeing a lot of footage of Obama rallies on TV lately showing us lots of raving Dembots waving signs reading “Middle Class First”.
Now, on the surface, this sounds really nice and progressive populist and all, until you stop and think of how Obama bailed out the banks and Wall Street and left the foreclosed and unemployed hanging out to dry, and when you think about how the Presidential candidates of both wings of the Party pandered to the middle class while totally ignoring the working class and the poor. In fact, at my count, at last Wednesday night’s “debate”, I heard the phrase “middle class” spoken at least fifteen times in the first half hour — until I had to stop watching because my eyes were glazing and my brain was dribbling out of my ears.
To be honest, I’m actually becoming really annoyed at the amount of fawning and gushing and pandering directed at the Middle Class™ by politicians at the media, even as they display indifference — or, in some cases, flat-out hostility — towards the working class, the poor, and the formerly middle-class who’ve fallen into poverty owing to extended unemployment or foreclosure.
Let’s also not forget that generally, the Middle Class™ is where all the narrow-mindedness, conformity, materialism and selfishness live.They consume the most resources and complain the most about taxes while demanding the best of everything — roads, schools, public services — while joining in the villification of the poor and identifying with the rich, even as the rich continue to screw them royally.
So, perhaps a more accurate slogan for the Obama campaign might be “Middle Class First, And Throw The Poor A Bone If There’s Any Left”.
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Ah, Y2K… a simpler, happier time. Nothing important having to do with computers or networks crashed, failed, collapsed, imploded or fell over. We still didn’t have our flying cars yet, but we were still wired to the teeth on the solidarity high from A16. Of course, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to bitch about not having our flying cars yet, as it was fast approaching time to decide how we were going to organize around the Presidential “Election” circus, and the attendant party conventions. This being DC, we spent a lot of time spotlighting Statehood organizing and the “debates”.
Every Presidential “election” year, the Commission On Presidential Debates, a totally bipartisan outfit, convenes to decide, in an entirely bipartisan fashion, how to prevent anybody other than Republicans and Democrats from appearing in the nationally televised “debates”. This, of course, was also the first year in many that the Democrats were facing any kind of serious challenge from the Left — and by “the Left”, I don’t mean “candy-assed phony ‘Pwogwessives’ who vote Democratic, mail checks to NPR and read Mother Jones while they’re taking a dump”; by that, I mean the goddamned Left, from the outside, in the form of Ralph Nader and the Green Party USA, who actually were close to polling numbers high enough to qualify for Federal matching funds and automatic ballot access in the next “election” year. Needless to say, most of the Democratic Party’s most vigorous campaigning wasn’t against the GOP, but against the Left — basically, against its own base — for daring to decide they had a choice, and that they didn’t need the Democrats’ permission to take action, and to call the Democratic leadership to account for their abandonment of core values, its failure to defend working people and, basically, being such a worthless, no-account, dive-artist outfit while still attempting to put up a shabby, weak, Liberal/Progressive facade. It was the year the Democratic Party finally revealed what it was really all about by doing everything it could to keep off the ballot and out of the “debates” a party whose platform would’ve been raised proudly by the Democratic Party themselves in, say, the early ’70s.
This poster advertised a series of protests held in downtown DC, at the headquarters of the Commission on Presidential Debates, calling out the Democrats for their hypocrisy and cowardice, and calling out the CPD for rigging the rules in favor of rich, well-connected establishment politicians, and for allowing corporate influence in the form of Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship of the telecasts. This was also the year where you couldn’t turn on your TV set without at least once seeing that goddamn’ “Whazzuuuuuuup!” commercial at least ten times. Still, it was silly enough to hold my attention for more than ten seconds, and my friends and I were already using it as a form of ironic, absurdist greeting, so when I let my mind wander a bit and started riffing on the whole Presidential Debate/Whazzuuuuuup idea, it didn’t take long to start asking myself what influence Anheuser-Busch’s sponsorship will take. Would they be allowed to hang their logo onstage, like those old quiz shows from the ’50s? Would A-B be allowed final say on the questions…and have us reduced to an hour a night for three nights of Gush and Bore standing there going “Whazzuuuuuuuup?” This, while not the most likely, proved to be the more entertaining vision.
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