Written by Caitlin Johnstone; Originally appeared at her blog
The US presidential election is more than 15 months away, and already we’re seeing elitist establishment narrative managers rolling out their long-anticipated “Stop Rebelling and Support Biden, You Insolent Little Shits” campaign. HBO’s Bill Maher spent his “New Rule” monologue segment last night admonishing his audience to abandon any notion of progressive reform and embrace the former vice president instead.
“All the Democrats have to do to win is to come off less crazy than Trump, and of course they’re blowing it, coming across as unserious people who are going to take your money so that migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in America Sucks,” Maher said. “Now do I want Biden to be president? Not really, but Biden’s the only Democrat who beats Trump in Ohio. He’s like non-dairy creamer: nobody loves it, but in a jam it gets the job done.”
“I’m sick of hearing that Democrats need to excite the base; Trump excites the base,” Maher said. “It’s the fatigue, stupid. Let’s make it hard for Donald Trump to play on voters’ fears and let the fatigue win the election for us. We’ll get to the revolution, but remember: put on your oxygen mask before assisting your child.”
Boy, Bill. If that’s not the kind of inspiring rallying cry that can galvanize people against the president, I don’t know what is.
Weirdly, Maher inadvertently explains why his brilliant Biden strategy is doomed to failure earlier on in this exact same segment. Maher praises the Trump economy, saying “It’s hard to beat an incumbent in a good economy; every incumbent since FDR has won if they avoided a recession leading up to the election year.”
“The voters that Democrats need to win, moderates who have Trump fatigue, will vote against a good economy, I think, just to get back to normalcy,” Maher said. “But they won’t trade it away for left-wing extremism. You say you want a revolution, well, you know, you gotta get elected first.”
Maher has all the facts right there in front of him, but because he is a propagandist who is only famous because he knows how to spout pro-establishment lines in an authoritative tone of voice, he manages to interpret them in the dumbest way possible. Yes, on paper the US economy is doing well, but only by the standards used by neoliberal politicians and mass media outlets to determine economic success. In real terms a population that used to be able to support a family on a single income now mostly requires two incomes, and most of them would struggle to pay even a thousand-dollar emergency expense.
Americans have gotten much poorer in terms of real income and income inequality has been exploding, but because both parties have been normalizing this paradigm and deceitfully using stock markets and unemployment rates to measure economic success, Trump is able to say he’s performing amazingly well economically. In terms of real American spending power he’s actually performing abysmally, but Democrats are resistant to saying so because it will mean conceding that the Obama/Biden administration did, too.
The path to beating Trump, then, is obviously not to hope that Americans will “vote against a good economy” for the first time in living memory as Bill Maher suggests, but to address the elephant in the room of growing income and wealth inequality and how more and more Americans have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. If you can offer Americans more in terms of real economic justice instead of crap about the stock exchange that puts bread on nobody’s table, voters will listen. There are some candidates who are campaigning on exactly this platform, and none of them are named Joe Biden.
Joe Biden has a message for the millennial generation: Stop complaining. https://t.co/4qELqr15vU
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) August 3, 2019
Biden’s platform, in contrast, seems more and more to consist of him just telling progressives to shut up and stop whining. Asked on a recent AFSCME forum about his controversial comments in January of last year that he has “no empathy” for young Americans who fear crippling college debt and rising cost of living, The Huffington Post reports that Biden not only stood by his comments, but doubled down on them, saying that if things are bad then the younger generation is to blame for not engaging in the political process.
“Don’t tell me how bad it is, change it,” Biden said. “Change it. Change it. My generation did.”
Biden, like Bill Maher, is inadvertently giving progressives all the information they need. Yes, they should change it. And the very first thing they should change is a political dynamic which elevates warmongering Wall Street cronies like Joe Biden. There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to accept a status quo that insists the only way to beat Trump is to take a Hail Mary gamble on trying to elect a Democrat who’s no better than Trump. They tried that in 2016 and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be able to bully everyone into playing along in 2020.
The former vice president is about one click away from coming right out and saying “Vote for me, because fuck you that’s why.” And elitist establishment narrative managers are already essentially saying it for him.
I see Biden as a moderate version of Hillary. Democrates and USA dont need that. He is too old in mind too.
As European looking at them, I would prefare som third person and Sanders/Waren given some real power as vicepresidents.
The only Democrat I want is Tulsi Gabbard, because she at least addresses the eternal war mindset that has Washington in its grip. And the MSM hate her for it and bash her relentlessly. In the end it matters little who wins though. Republicans have the reputation of being hardliners when it comes to foreign policy. And Europeans LOVE the Democrats because of that. But the only difference is that Democrats pretend to listen before making the exact same decisions. And when Trump does get replaced by a Democrat its not going to be back to the good old days. When Obama came into office Bush’s foreign policy wasn’t rolled back. Everything stayed exactly the same, more war, more drone strikes, more unilateral US behavior. Only Obama, like Democrats always do, played nice towards the Europeans like they mattered. But not. If Biden were to come into office, TTIP is not going to be magically revived, he’s not going to stop pressuring the European NATO countries to spend more on defense, he’s not going to stop the unilateral defense and trade deals that Trump made with individual countries. He’s probably not even going to revive the Iran nuclear deal because what’s the point? The damage has already been done, Iran won’t EVER trust the US again. No, like a good abuser he’s going to maintain the current levels of US abuse on Europe, just like Obama did after Bush, but just a little nicer. And now that abuser has turned nice again the Europeans will settle in their current predicament, just like battered spouses do.
Also I kinda like Trump. Not his foreign policy, I detest that, but I do like how he riles up the politically correct classes and makes them go apeshit. Political correctness is a cancer that is devouring Western society, and if Trump is the cure, or at least a stabilizing agent, then so be it. And since SJW’s are taking over the Democrat party I don’t relish seeing them back in power again. Especially this ‘normalcy first, revolution later approach by Maher. I don’t want any revolution. I want the crazy leftists out of the universities, the media and the companies just as much as I want the Neo-cons out of the foreign policy game.
I agree in most of the upper part. I see Trump as a result for Republicans and Democrats having deroutes. But I cant see, he can change internal as well as external problems.
Historically when empires decline there have always been attempts at reform. Sometimes it breaths new air into the empire, but overall what goes up has to come down. And it remains to be seen that the causes that the reformers are trying to address are the actual problems that are causing the decline to begin with.
The rot in the American empire runs deep and they are too big to be handled by one man when the entire political and media establishment is fighting him tooth and nail. In the case of most empires it takes massive upheaval for a reform movement to take form and succeed. This hasn’t happened yet in the US. We can only hope that this upheaval will not drag the rest of the world with it in its misery.
Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, works for Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoiskii, as a Director of his Burisma energy company. Burisma/Kolomoiskii have a keen interest in the energy potential of the Crimea area. If only Kolomoiskii can prompt the US to force the Issue. Joe Biden has been at the forefront of US policy regarding Ukraine since the coup (where he is seen parading around the Maidan along with CIA Director Brennan); we should keep in mind that his family’s personal fortune is at stake with this Crimea issue. Btw, Kolomoiskii is in hiding from Ukraine authorities in a sympathetic Israel…
he said trump talks about communists, dont talk about it, make it happen? dafuq.. he went full communist then full queer. guy has problems
During the interview conducted by the Jewish ‘Shalom TV’ Biden said, “I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” And he also called comments about Israel’s connection to the war in Iraq “insulting”, explaining that “if tomorrow, peace broke out between Israelis and Palestinians, does anybody think there wouldn’t be a full-blown war in Iraq?”
Personally I’m not a Biden fan, but most of the other Democratic candidates are just plain wacko, except maybe for Tulsi and Sestak.
Trump will win and the oligarchy will march with him right into the abyss. The zionazis will always double down and they control the entire political process so nothing will ever change – the difference with Trump is that he completely exposes the extent of the corruption better than any so called democratic president could. The more the MSM attacks Trump the more they reveal the zionazis universe and the sooner America will wake up. It is not what Trump does or says but rather that he exists – the cruel and hideous face of America looking back from the mirror.
“… the difference with Trump is that he completely exposes the extent of the corruption …”
And that is exactly whats needed before change can begin – force people to face reality and to abandon their MSM-created fantasy world.
“… Democrats … are coming across as unserious people who are going to take your money so that migrants from Honduras can go to college for free and get a major in America Sucks,” Maher said.
Am I going crazy or is Bill Maher now trying to channel President Trump? He should call Maher and say “stop crowding my act!”
TRUMP 2020.if it doesn’t matter who vote for vote for funnest one and swim in smug liberal tears.
Biden looks like a rehashed version of dubya.
Democrats know they will lose presidency anyway, they just desperately hope to extent the agony of their ‘moderate’ statute before their base will vote only for extremist commies and probably will dismember in many little communist parties.
Biden is up to his neck in political corruption and oligarch cronyism in Ukraine. Biden even publicly boasted about getting the former chief prosecutor of Ukraine sacked by making it a formal requirement of an Obama era financial aid package. Why exactly was that prosecutor an issue – he was investigating the Ukrainian gas company that Biden’s son is a ‘management consultant’ for, and receives hundreds of thousands in monthly fees from. So what does that all resemble? A very old story – Biden’s private ‘family business’ rakes in a large monthly cut, and in return Biden leverages his public US political clout to politically protect the Ukrainian business interests of a foreign oligarch, who remains on the run from criminal charges within Ukraine itself, leveled by the now ex-President and competing oligarch Poroshenko! That’s Old Joe’s idea of changing things up – getting nose first into the biggest foreign oligarch trough available.