For God's Sake, Joe: Just Do it.
Hand if Off
2024.07.21
Well, my stress level is back up to 9 or so.
Naively, I think at this moment, I have thought, Joe would announce his withdrawal from candidacy this morning. And … he still may. But I’m less sanguine about the possibility of that happening, because he seems to be dug more deeply in. And I’m assuming that if he were actually going to check out, we would be hearing rumbling about a major announcement, or something to that effect. I mean, that’s the way these things always happen, right?
Or … maybe not. Off the top of my head at this moment, I can think of one, but only one occasion, when a major announcement from a President was kept entirely secret until the Chief himself delivered the stunning news. And that was …
… LBJ delivering the news that he would not seek or accept the nomination of the Democratic Party.
Maybe the singularity of that very unusual surprise nurtures my hope that Joe could do the same thing.
He certainly needs to, because the Dems are a bucket of despair at this moment, with apparently the Black Caucus and, judging from the anecdata that I receive from browsing through comments on the dozens of Biden/Harris fund-raising memes on FB right now, a bunch of Old People, mostly Old Ladies,” are continuing to hang with Biden, offering him florid (and well-deserved) praise for his service to the nation, and naïve counsel to the rather homogenous group of readers, that ‘by sticking together we can win!’
So … of course we can’t. The nation is euphoric like a crowd at a Manichaean WWF prize match event, with the larger and more vocal of the two crowds supporting the bad guys, the evil guys who cheat and are consumed with ugly in-your-face ego. And the other side – our side – is subdued and shaken, without confidence, and without an able advocate in the ring, like a Popeye being pummeled by Bluto, and not a can of spinach in sight. Nor any hope of any spinach being available before the mail-in votes start going out in mid-September.
It's a desperate situation … and for any hope of survival we must get another wrestler into the ring. One committed to the same agenda, but with a sharp and solid speaking voice, and an agile mind that can hit back with cutting remarks to point out that late Septuagenarian Trump’s disabilities are even more grave, if somewhat less noticeable, than those of the frail Octogenarian Biden.
Anyway … I had hopes that today might be the day that Pelosi and Schumer and Obama and the other movers and shakers had the opportunity to force Biden to actually look at the wall to see the panoramic writing there, saying “You Can’t Win.” And that not long afterward he would come on the screen with little fanfare, and announce that he was endorsing Kamala. Or that he wasn’t endorsing Kamala, but was backing away from the race. Whatever. But that he would he would unchain the party and let us make a last-ditch effort to mount a defense, and an offense, again the greatest danger that has ever faced this country.
That would be the patriotic and good thing to do at this point. And it would be the sane thing to do for an old man who wants to ensure that he retains some amount of good will in the remainder of his declining years.
My optimism that Joe would bow out, however, dissipated last night when I scanned articles about the Trump/Vance rally in Michigan … to a packed arena. Trump goaded Biden at the event, in a way that I believe makes it harder for Biden to let go.
At the event, according to Politico, Trump “repeatedly referred to Biden on Saturday as ‘stupid,’ and Harris as ‘crazy.’” NPR, meanwhile, quotes Trump taunting Biden with charges that he is being supplanted by a “coup.”
“Trump, at Saturday’s rally, polled the crowd on who they’d like to see as his opponent, with cheers for Biden and loud boos when Trump asked about Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump and his team have tried to cast Democrats’ efforts to replace Biden as a “coup,” in what appears to be part of a larger effort to try to distract from Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election after he refused to accept the results and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by his supporters.
“At this very moment, Democrat Party bosses are frantically trying to overthrow the results of their own party’s primaries to dump Crooked Joe Biden from the ballot,” he said. “As you’re seeing, the Democratic Party is not the party of democracy. They’re really the enemies of Democracy.”
This fills me with dread, because Joe’s historical response to this kind of barb has been a flash of anger and what sound like embarrassingly juvenile offers to go out behind the barn. My impression is that aggravating comments like this really do get under his skin. I think that’s exactly their purpose, unfortunately, and that Biden’s ego very well might get in the way of appropriate decision-making.
So … I am filled with fear. I do not think we can win with Joe … in part because he’s not up to the job, and in part because there is no solidarity within the party.
Again, I wish like hell the Democratic Party and its “elites” had insisted on a meaningful primary, because it’s not like Joe’s age snuck up on us. And even by last fall, it was clear that he was a very old 81.
But maybe he’ll swallow his pride, and make the right choice for America, and for the world. We’ll see. Hopefully very soon.
But right now, a very nervous and fearful 9 on the stress scale.