New Poem: BLUE MAGA HAIKU

 vote blue regardless 

 vote blue you no matter who

 vote blue mindless now

Joe Biden says Oh well, at least I tried if he loses existential battle for democracy

George Stephanopoulos: And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

Joe Biden: I'll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that's what this is about.

Hamilton Nolan on Joe Biden’s latest political life.

Excerpted from THE GUARDIAN:

I am not mad at Joe Biden. He is a type. His type is “The Old Way of Doing Things.” Now that he is in the race, his type is represented. He rounds out the field. Now, Democratic voters truly have the entire buffet of choices, from “True Leftist Insurgent” to “Bland, Winning Young Résumé-Polisher” to “Indistinguishable Ambitious Congresspersons” to “The Same Old Kind of White Guy As Always”.

This is nothing to fear. This is healthy. This is a perfect referendum on where our country is now. Joe Biden, the avatar of the past, believes that he’s well positioned because after the shock of the Trump years, people want to go back to where we were. Wrong. People want to go somewhere new. I fully expect Joe Biden to step out of his campaign headquarters and fall directly into the huge pit that has opened up as America moved tectonically to the left. There is nothing scary about the candidate that represents the political philosophy that produced in the public the deadly cynicism that gave us Donald Trump. This plain fact will never be accepted by the sort of people who believe that Joe Biden is the answer, because accepting it is an indictment of an entire generation of leaders who consider themselves quite successful.

The Republican party has long been a corrupt tool for serving the interests of the rich by lying to the poor; dwelling on their role in bringing us here is like scolding an alligator for biting off your hand after you stuck it in his mouth. The Democrats are the ones who were supposed to save us. It was their failure in this duty that allowed the catastrophes to pile up. They failed to stop the post-Reagan explosion of economic inequality; they failed to stop the militarism that has embroiled us in endless war; they failed to argue for things like healthcare and education as rights rather than purchases; they fed our most vulnerable citizens to an evil machine labeled “criminal justice” in exchange for votes from racists. They earned their turn in power by agreeing not to use that power for the common good. And here we are: incredibly divided, hopelessly unequal, justifiably sick of our broken institutions, and very, very angry.

Good luck on the campaign trail, Joe. You’re about to meet an America that has already left you behind. I’m sorry you’ll have to find out the hard way.

Rebecca Traister on the deficits of Joe Biden.

Excerpt from Rebecca Traister’s article for NEW YORK magazine: https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/joe-biden-isnt-the-answer-for-president-in-2020.html
Biden carries himself with the confidence of a winner, despite not having won, or even come close to winning, either of the previous presidential primaries he’s entered. He is the guy whose self-assured conviction that his authority will protect him from rebuke has always preceded him into any room, whose confident sense of his own entitlement repels potential objection like Gore-Tex repels rain. He is the gaffe-master, the affable fuck-up, and also, oddly, the politician who’s supposed to make us feel safe. He is the amiable, easygoing, handsy-but-harmless guy who’s never going to give you a hard time about your own handsiness or prejudice, who’s gonna make a folksy argument about enacting fundamentally restrictive policies.

For his whole career, Biden’s role has been to comfort the lost, prized, and most fondly imagined Democratic voter, the one who’s like him: that guy in the diner, that guy in Ohio, that guy who’s white and so put off by the changed terms of gendered and racial power in this country that decades ago he fled for the party that was working to roll back the social advancements that had robbed him of his easy hold on power. That guy who believed that the system worked best when it worked for him.

Biden is the Democrats’ answer to the hunger to “make America great again,” dressed up in liberal clothes. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie has in fact argued that Biden’s racial politics have offered a form of Trumpism on the left, a “liberal cover to white backlash.” To that I would add, he has provided liberal cover to anti-feminist backlash, the kind of old-fashioned paternalism of powerful men who don’t take women’s claims to their reproductive, professional, or political autonomy particularly seriously, who walk through the world with a casual assurance that men’s access to and authority over women’s bodies is natural. In an attempt to win back That Guy, Joe Biden has himself, so very often, been That Guy.

Now it seems, That Guy is widely viewed as the best and safest candidate to get us out of this perilous and scary political period. But the irony is that so much of what is terrifying and dangerous about this time — the Trump administration, the ever more aggressive erosion of voting and reproductive rights, the crisis in criminal justice and yawning economic chasm between the rich and everyone else — are in fact problems that can in part be laid at the feet of Joe Biden himself, and the guys we’ve regularly been assured are Democrats’ only answer.

Why progressives will always be subordinate in the Democratic Party.

Someone in media/film writing I follow on Twitter retweeted the following statement from a person I'll not name here.  It's the perfect summary of the centrist, big donation-dependent wing of the Democratic Party (who think they've become a little more liberal because Tom Perez, who talks a good game about the party's future and unity, was elected DNC head over Keith Ellison) and the contempt they still hold for the more progressive (i.e. Bernie Sanders supporting) membership.

Democrats are your friend who'll die single, waiting for a person too perfect to exist.

Republicans are the guy who fucks whoever is there.

Jim Newell on the Democratic Party leading resistance from behind

From an article on Slate.com: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2017/02/the_democrats_are_leading_the_resistance_from_behind.html


Millions of people marched against Donald Trump the day after he was inaugurated. Republican members of Congress can’t hold town halls without being set upon by protesters hassling them about their agenda or the blind eye they turn to Trump. Resistance groups are gathering massive support online; the ACLU will never want for money again; the courts have blocked Trump’s order restricting travel into the United States. As Republicans put the Affordable Care Act on the chopping block, regular people are mustering a moral language for defending it that Democratic politicians have been loath to employ. Constituents have a powerful ability to find the right defense for something dear to them when someone is trying to take that thing away. Maybe the job of Democrats at the top isn’t to draw up a message in a focus group. Maybe it’s to follow those people on the ground expressing it already.

Michael Moore on Democrats and why 2016 was lost.

From a recent VARIETY cover story, excerpt found on the Hollywood Elsewhere site:
Variety: “Did the Russian hack of the DNC play a decisive role in swinging the election to Trump?”
Michael Moore: We need an investigation into the hacking, but the Democrats should not be thinking that they lost because of the Russians. The Democrats lost because of the Democrats. It’s the second time now in 16 years where the Democrats won [the popular vote] but lost. That is so revolting that the old guard of the Democratic Party should all resign. They let us down, the majority, now twice. I’m done with it. I’m going to help lead the charge to take over the Democratic Party.

My Hillary Clinton wishlist.

After some thought, I've decided to be (with reservations) supportive of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic presidential campaign (the U.S. can ill-afford to be ruled by the Trump/Pence/Ryan troika) .  I'm not going to castigate people who are still unwilling to support her (since they received plenty of vitriol during the primaries), but--having cast a primary vote for Bernie Sanders--I believe the seeds of future progressivism in the Democratic Party need to grow instead of being yanked in a moment of fury.  There needs to be more "democracy" in the party if it wants to be a viable alternative to Republicanism in the 2018 midterms, 2020 election, etc.

Now, onto the Hillary wishlist:

1. Please stop regarding Bernie Sanders supporters and Occupy Wall Street as irritants who bang on limousine doors during a leisurely ride through Manhattan.   Take them seriously and erect a firewall between yourself and Goldman Sachs/JP Morgan Chase/hedge funds, etc.  Government regulations to prevent Wall Street abuse of/stealing from the nonwealthy--not a bad thing at all.

2. Ensure that future government e-mails are on a much more secure government server so no further controversy over personal servers plagues yourself or others in your White House.

3. Put more distance between your forthcoming administration and your husband's past one.  It's not the 90s anymore and Dick Morris-esque triangulation and draconian welfare policies/mass incarceration/private prison support are hurtful, to say the least.

4. With regards to foreign policy, regime change causes more terrorism than it prevents--whether it's the Left's "Smart Power" or the Right's "they'll greet us as liberators" neocon values.

The morning after the 2014 Midterms.

Boldly stating what most progressives/liberals/sort-of-left-of-centers don't want to hear:
It made no difference whether or not the Democrats held onto the Senate.
The President is a mild, Wall Street loving, confrontation-averse centrist who capitulates to the Right instead of governing in the fashion of Great Society era LBJ (omitting Vietnam from this assessment).
As Bill Richardson mentioned last night, expect more Executive Orders in terms of policy implementation.
And, perhaps, the ultimate Obama capitulation is on the way: approving the Keystone XL pipeline.
And, also, more Endless War to be passed onto the next occupant of the Oval Office.
Finally, expect to hear the words "We don't have the votes" even more often.

P.S.: A special mention of those Democrats (Allison Lundergan Grimes in particular) who couldn't and wouldn't stand up for the positive policy changes that actually occurred during the previous six years (namely health care).