After Biden finally showed the nation this evening that all the popular talk about his "senility" was not just baseless insults, I think back to the moment in the 2020 Democratic Debate when candidate Julian Castro asked Biden "Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?" and was dogpiled immediately by the liberal mediasphere, accusing him of rudeness and ageism.
I think this kind of "how dare you?" outrage to snuff out earnest and founded criticisms can be a dependable political tool, and of course you don't want to encourage the masses to delight in cruelty on a regular basis, but I think behind closed doors every political faction needs a space to soberly and mercilessly assess incoming criticisms/insults that are gaining popular traction, however harsh, unfounded or even bigoted they are.
If the attacks are based on lies, you workshop resonant ways to get the populace to believe something else. If they are based on some truth, you work around it or hide the shit out of it. But the Biden team has clearly been operating in that purgatory where they aren't all on the same page about the premise of Biden's infirmity, and therefore cannot develop a unified strategy to mitigate this liability. His staffers make a show of attacking journalists who insinuate Biden is not all there, but yet let Biden do a long debate where his impairment couldn't be more obvious.
I think brutal self-honesty that sometimes even borders on cruel has a place in every movement. It steels you against far more ruthless attacks from your outgroup. The Dems were able to shame Julian Castro out of mocking Biden's age by going "how dare you!" and able to shame us on the left telling Biden to "draw a clock" by dismissing us as ungrateful youth, but these strategies simply don't work in any general election, they have no purchase the eyes of the voter who has no affiliation, and impart no shame upon the merciless outgroup hoping for another guy to win.
Without the core Biden team daring to even broach the "old man" criticisms amongst themselves, spewing the same line that he's "sharp as a tack" to both the press and each other, and putting out "ironic" jokes mocking how ridiculous the idea of Joe being on uppers is, but also treating that accusation as ridiculous off-screen, well, that kind of toxic positivity will have you sleepwalking into historic loss and humiliation.
Comparing 2020 Biden to 2016 Biden was already night and day. Liberals tried to construct a fantasy world where his obvious mental decline was a "stutter".
Always remember: liberals are lying cowards.
Agree, and even more damning; Biden doesn't have a successor of any kind. He didn't step down when he became infirm, nor did anyone in the organization stage a coup when it became clear he was no longer fit. This should never have happened. An organized party should have mechanisms specifically to prevent this.
Some Dems I know are already scolding people who were never going to vote for Trump. Not reckoning with what happened, not organizing, not even screaming in anger that they've been betrayed. Scolding. Fucking cultists.
Its so hilarious that Kamala is right there. A perfectly average competent opportunist who toes the line and checks all the boxes but one time she said she supported single-payer so we don't sit with her anymore.
I think Neera Tanden is the only person on the continent who ever liked her. She's got the charisma of a brick
Not only is Kamala sauceless but a ton of black people under 40 do not consider her black
Her charisma really isn't that bad. She's just a boring speaker. If any DC elites liked or trusted her they'd throw her in asap regardless of her charisma.
He was already very different and dementia-ie in 2020. If there were such an apparatus it would have stopped him from running in the first place.
More damning, not only was there no such apparatus, there was a flock of never-Bernie liberal lanyards that hated milquetoast socdemmery so much that they propped up this fading segregationist grandpa.
Kids in the Midwestern DPR or whatever in 2090 reading in school about how the Old American Empire (may it rest in piss) had a ruling party that pushed onstage as its president a senile old man who shit himself in front of a studio audience after months of denying his condition, giggling to eachother
Oh honey. There won’t be a midwestern dpr. The country just needs to be nuked and made uninhabitable. That’s the only just thing that can and will happen.
The thing is, press decided to get pitchforks out. They easily could have spun this into trump ridiculous shit about 4th trimester abortions or whatever the fuck. They came ready, with pre written opinion pieces (kristoff), so this is part preplanned theater to shovel something (maybe it was in case he looks bad swing that way, in case he doesn’t that way).
Left won’t get that kindness ever
Weaponizing ageism isn't political correctness. I mean political correctness/woke aren't even real ideologies. Similarly energy as tankie. Doesn't actually mean anything, but is used by reactionaries to mean the thing they feel they're not allowed to say even though they say it around all their other reactionaries.
But weaponizing identity as means to push forward neoliberalism is tactic used by them around every identity. And it's gross and I fucking hate it all the time.
I was more referring to the out of sight, out of mind approach to intra party criticism of Biden's mental acuity, which manifested in a concerted effort to attack Castro for inappropriate ageism even though there was a kernel of truth to what he said.
Disaster what do yinz mean? Finally a lib endorsed by border patrol to stop the hoard
Understandable
