I am voting Biden and this is why you should too…

Posted by

0

Introduction

I’m going to use headers to make this easier to read and digest, because it’s going to be a long thing. Election 2024 has officially swung into General Election mode as Super Tuesday has made it clear that this will be a rehash of 2020. Nobody wanted this election, but here we are. And here’s my thoughts on the matter.

It’s Trump vs. Biden in 2024…

Nobody wanted this election. But here we are, and the very election we didn’t want has been thrust upon us by the voters of the two major parties. Before we get started, no, it’s not Biden vs. Trump vs. Minor Left Party Candidates vs. Minor Party Right Candidates. I have a whole paper devoted to that. The short version of that paper is by voting for the minor left-wing party candidate, you increase the chances Trump wins while not moving the needle on your minor left-winger. And while this is true on the Right side of the aisle, I’ll encourage that because every minor party right-wing candidate vote increases the chance of Biden in 2025. So, if you don’t want Trump to win, your only feasible vote in the General is Biden. Nothing else will help.

I don’t like Biden…but he’s got my vote…

No. Really, I don’t. He wasn’t my first choice in 2020 (Elizabeth Warren then Bernie Sanders were who I wanted), and his policies aren’t ideal. He’s trying to solve 21st Century problems with 20th Century solutions. He’s enabling a strong-man dictator in Israel while he is ineffective at containing another in Russia. The Democrats as a whole are lousy at messaging, and he’s more lousy than your average Democrat at this part of the job.

The Democrats have a huge problem in refusing to manage the messaging. They always have had a problem with this, and frankly, don’t look to be fixing the problem anytime in the near future.

Biden has a lot of problems, but aging isn’t one of them. Pro-Tip: Biden has been a gaffe machine his entire life. His missteps and wrong words and awkward language isn’t a product of his advancing age. It’s a product of a speech impediment that Biden has fought with his entire life. I think the man is still as sharp in 2024 as he was in 2008 when he started as VP, and while he’s not the best voice for the Democratic Party, he’s the safe choice for people who are not sold on either the Hard Left or the Hard Right.

While aging isn’t a problem I see with this administration, I do see plenty of problems I could point to.

  • Biden may not be losing a step, but he’s still stuck in the past. He advocates for old, tired solutions to modern problems. This is a problem in my book, but it’s one that I can find justification for. People are fundamentally about dollars and cents, and sense, and pie in the sky promises like UBI and universal healthcare and free college turn a lot more people off than they turn people on. Being told that things are changing is something people are afraid of, and you’ll get a whole lot of people who jump to ‘the other guy’ if you put too much change in. Thus Biden has to walk a tightrope between not doing enough for the Left and doing too much for the Centre and Right.
  • Biden’s approach to Israel leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I won’t go to the extremes of saying he’s participating in genocide, but there is definitely room to say he’s looking the other way while Genocide is happening. However, even here, there’s some realpolitik we have to deal with. Russia is looking VERY closely at ways to erode American foreign policy and relationships. Netanyahu is a strongman dictator cut from the same cloth as Putin. If we cut off foreign aid to Israel, I guarantee you Putin will start floating the ‘America has been taken over by Nazis’ canard and be RIGHT there with oil and weapons in hand. And here in America, Right-Wing created and Russia-amplified propaganda will be disseminated far and wide, claiming that Biden gave into the “Jihadest” elements of our congress (Omar and Tlaib). The question you need to ask is: Where can Biden lose more votes: Pro-Palestinian voters, or Pro-Israel voters? I am going to hazard a guess and say Biden looked at the numbers and realised being dropped by the Israel backers was a worse outcome for him politically, especially since Trump is outright catering to Pro-Israel voters.
  • Biden, like Obama before him, doesn’t use the bully pulpit nearly enough. Biden should be hitting Republicans DAILY over the aid bill. He should have come out after the vote failed for the aid funding and border enforcement and repeatedly said that the GOP won’t vote for its own stuff if they think that it somehow helps the Democrats. The Democrats as a whole, and the President in particular, should be screaming from the rafters that the Republicans are working to enshrine hits against not only abortion but contraception and IVF after the Alabama fiasco. He should be singing the praises on the number of jobs he’s created, and the increase of pay, and the reduction of inflation, even as he states that there’s still more work to do. And he should be pulling out all the stops to criticise people like Boebert — the shit with the Beatlejuice concert should have been called out repeatedly, not for her whole ‘get felt up in a family event’ bit, but more generally as ‘the same woman who wants to regulate what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom feels free to subject everyone around her to her impromptu r-rated performance in the middle of a G-Rated event.’ The only reason the Republicans are still in this is because the Democrats are lousy at messaging.
  • Biden is beholden to the moneyed interests far more than I care for. $93 million from Bloomberg Lp in 2020, followed by 61m from Future Forward and 46m from Asana. That’s a lot of money, and Biden, for as much as he’s tried to make things easier for the Middle Class, is still a very pro-capital President. This goes hand in hand with my first complaint about him being stuck in the past, and much like that complaint, is sort of justified by the realities of the United States. We’ll need a groundswell effort to deal with the issues of money in politics, not changing out the President for a guy who will surely make it much worse.

Mind you, there are things I like about Biden. He got a lid on COVID, then on Inflation, and has managed to navigate some seriously choppy international waters in regards to Russia and China and everything that Russia’s invasion has brought on. But this should make it clear that Biden isn’t ‘my guy’. He’s just a guy, and in another time, I might have been convinced to sit the election out, like I sat out Bush vs. Gore.

Trump is Worse

The problem is that Biden is the best choice we have in this country right now for President. While I’ll get into the reason Biden’s the only choice down below, all I can say is that the goal is to ensure Trump never gets into office, because he’s a horrible man who will hurt people I care about and he’s a buffoon who will run this country into the ground with his bull-headed stupidity. The only thing worse than a dictator is an idiotic dictator, and Trump is the most idiotic dictator I’ve ever seen idiotically dictate anything.

As of the writing of this article, Trump has launched into General Election mode. He’s already threatening doom if he doesn’t win, saying “there will be a bloodbath for the country” in the event he loses the general. He says he will “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live live vermin within the confines of our country,” that he will require ‘civil service tests to demonstrate understanding of our constitutional-limited government including due process, equal protection, free speech, religious liberty, federalism, and Fourth Amendment rights (where he calls out the lawsuits against his retention of classified documents), and a whole host of other frankly unamerican pronouncements by Trump.

Four short years ago, Trump came up with the bright idea of somehow injecting light or bleach into the human body. I know there are weaselly fact checks that say Trump DIDN’T say to inject bleach, so I provide the quotes in question:

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.”

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-coronavirus-press-conference-transcript-april-23#:~:text=A%20question%20that,powerful.%20Steve%2C%20please.

Here’s just a short list of his ‘accomplishments’:

  • The economy lost 2.9 million jobs, increasing unemployment rate by 1.6 ppoints to 6.3%
  • The trade deficit was the highest since 2008, and went up 40.5% from 2016.
  • The national debt increased from 14.4t to 21.6t USD, a 7.2t increase.
  • 3 million more people were uninsured in 2020 compared to 2016.

We can remember also the following things:

I could literally go on and on and on about Trump’s admin’s literally hostile approach to civil rights, ranging from one’s right to not get poisoned by megacorps through attacks on transgender and gay people in this country, and of course their treatment of people who protested for minority rights. If I were a man of faith, I’d probably be really irate over how the bible was treated, as well, from the holding the bible upside down during a photo-op through selling bibles for $60, too.

Well, what about {Insert Third Party Candidate Here}? Why vote the lesser of two evils?

There’s a reality in the United States of America right now, and that’s that if you’re a minor party candidate, either you are working to get into the political machinery of the major party closest to you, or you’re on the outside looking in. Whenever you see someone telling you ‘don’t vote for the major party candidate’, you should hear that as ‘vote for this minor party candidate so that the major party closest to your position loses and you get governed by the opposing major party.’ How does that work?

Let’s pretend for a moment that we’re picking Class President at USA High School. There are 100 classmates picking between two candidates. Candidate 1 has 51 votes. He’s a nerd and a geek, but he’s affable to most people and actually has a good raporte with the student body. Not everyone in his vote block is on his side, though, because he’s slightly autistic and definitely nerdy, and a decent fraction of people are voting for him because of Candidate 2. Candidate 2 is a cheerleader, a popular but bratty girl who belittles everyone nerdy at the school. She’s got most of the Jocks and Cheerleaders on her side, as well as all the dumb kids who hate nerds. Her numbers girl, one of the few smart people on her side, tells her if the election happened today, she’d lose 51 to 49 and the nerd becomes class president.

She knows she’s not going to swing any of those 51 voters to her side, but she also knows the nerds are easily manipulated and not every one of those 51 people really like the nerd. So she convinces her numbers girl to run as an alternative to the Nerdy guy. If she can convince at least THREE people to change their vote from nerdy guy to nerdy gal, then Cheerleader Girl can win 49/48/3. And while this wouldn’t work at USA High if the administration put in Ranked Choice Voting, they want to make the kids experience an election like the types in 1980s America, so they used FPTP instead, and Cheerleader Girl wins the election.

And so it is with the USA, with much higher stakes than USA High. At least Cheerleader Girl was just going to appoint her friends as VIPs. Trump plans on doing that AND dismantling the democracy so nobody will ever beat him again. And third parties are the way he’s going to win.

And while I’m happy to let that foster on the Right, on the Left, the only way to ensure we don’t get Trump is to vote Biden.

But we can even look deeper on this.

Why not Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.?

RFK Jr. is far from an ideal candidate. I’d rate him somewhere between Biden and Trump. Ignoring Trump for the moment, let’s have a look at Kennedy’s stance on various things.

Vaccines

RFK Jr. is notorius for not only his stance on vaccines, but also his two-facedness around vaccines. Back in 2005, Robert wrote a missive for Salon.com and Rolling Stones about his belief that vaccines cause autism. Remember, before the Trumpers got on board the anti-vax train, that train was painted blue and filled to the brim with liberals who insisted that vaccines got you sick to keep Big Medicine nice and fat. The articles from Rolling Stones and Salon were since removed due to the huge inaccuracies present in those articles, but RFK Jr. never stopped believing. However, when it started becoming politically inconvenient for him, he backtracked on this stance and falsely claimed he never said not to take vaccines. This alone disqualifies him in my book for POTUS, but there’s more!

“Weaponisation” of government…

We all saw the events of 6 January 2021, on live TV in some cases. A swarm of conservatives, stirred up by Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him, surged their way into the Congressional building and attempted to take politicians hostage. They were threatening to murder their own VP because he refused to actually steal the election on Trump’s behalf. As of January of this year, over 1200 people have been arrested and over 700 have been found guilty. But last year, RFK Jr. went to bat for the Republicans and suggested that these charges were bogus and politically motivated. While I’ll agree with him that these people didn’t get the sentences they deserved, I’ll say it went the other way and too many of them have gotten off easily. However, Kennedy has thrown his weight and his name behind the GOP’s accusation that the government is being weaponised against the Republicans, with little to no proof of sead weaponisation. What was supposed to be a meeting about social media companies working with government turned into a discussion about COVID being gengineered, more drivel on Hunter Biden’s Laptop, and, of course, anti-vax conspiracy theories. Much like the Republicans he supports with this nonsense, he’s claiming that the Big Bad Evil Media companies are stopping him from ‘bringing the truth out’.

Why not Jill Stein?

There are several reasons I won’t pick Jill Stein either.

Her Ties with Russia

Anyone who gets legitimised by RT has three strikes in my book. You don’t go to a nation you later claim is just as overly militant as the nation you’re criticising and allow them to use you as propaganda. That picture of her sitting next to Putin should be played far and wide. She also echos Russian propaganda, specifically about NATO and Russia’s justification of invading Ukraine.

Conspiracy Theories

Stein is a veritable font of conspiracy theories. Like any good conspiracy theory, her theories are based in a kernel of truth, such as the idea that unemployment is being underreported and is actually worse than the reported number, and dials them up to 11, such as making the claim Unemployment is really in the double digits. And many of her conspiracies are really really close to Trump’s.

We’ve been down this road before…

Go have a look at the election of 2016. Note that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were decided by fewer votes than those cast for Jill Stein. Had those Stein voters used their heads and not their hearts on election day, Trump wouldn’t have been able to appoint his three Justices (instead, Clinton would have had that), and we might have never see Roe v Wade fall.

Conclusion

I’m asking you to hold your nose yet again and vote the Lesser Evil. Cthulhu is just going to have to wait this year because he’s not the most evil in 2024, like he wasn’t in 2016 or 2020. Trump’s got the Great Cthulhu beat in that metric. This year, I’m asking you to vote your conscience in the Primaries and in your local races, especially if you have RCV like Maine and Alaska do, but use your brain and vote tactically in the Presidential election. Any vote besides Joe Bien for the General Election risks us experiencing ‘I am your vengeance’ and Project 2025 next year.

Leave a comment