the brandon swansong
assessing some deeper questions.
as we enter week 4 of the post debate debacle (yes, it’s really only been three weeks, pretty amazing no?) there have seemed to be a lot of moving parts in the swamp donkey civil unrest and perhaps they have finally fallen into a pattern.
the battle lines were increasingly drawn and havoc had been cried. the equus asini of war had been let slip.
it got so ugly that something had to give. and finally, it did.
this had to happen. biden had the dems in utter disarray.
it was an untenable situation.
the donks got trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. but seriously, how else could this end? i have no idea if this is a real proverb, but it should be:
pretending that brainwiped brandon has been remotely compos mentis for the last 4 years now came with a terrible price.
even the left finally woke up to “we have no idea who is running the country.” there has not been a full cabinet meeting in nearly a year. every day kamala went without calling one on an emergency basis to invoke the 25th amendment just made this worse and her more culpable. but she was never going to do it.
sure, she might have become president and heir apparent, but she would not survive the convention if she did. they’d have axed her. she needed the nod from joe.
now she gets the endorsement and fails upward again by doing what she has always done: playing the loyal soldier.
and there was really no other choice. only she could get joe’s campaign funds.
meanwhile, half the democratic party just watched the trump assassination cum fist pump and now wants ZERO to do with this election. gavin has imploded, california is a mess, and no way he’s publicly crowing about signing a “schools over parents” bill for child gender if he’s running. that’s death in the heartland, south, and pretty much every swing state. who else would even try to step into what looks increasingly like a wood chipper? who would even be so foolish as to try to be so shrill on the “trump is an existential threat to democracy/america?
some desperate trial balloons were floated but seemed filled with lead.
but the DC donkorma just could not have any more of this.
so the party closed ranks.
every serious dem had stepped back, there was no longer any real fight for succession. there was no prize to grab, so better to line up behind an unserious candidate and lose than destroy your whole machine. joe and the clintons are backing her. be interesting to see what pelosi does. kamala has been failing upward by seeming harmless her whole career. this will be her apogee and her swan song.
but the joe could not go on.
his mind has melted, his body failed.
his friends have left him.
this was his last, least humiliating hope and the last hope of a party to avoid tearing itself apart.
this jar has SO many interesting bugs in it.
the fight from being shaken would (and may still be) be one for the ages.
and the DNC leadership is rightly terrified of that.
but this really highlights the trap the dems got themselves into.
they lied for years about joe being OK.
they brought this on themselves and denied it as long as they could.
then they flipped.
they publicly called out biden as senile. that is not a bell one can un-ring. it’s burning your ships. you cannot say that and then pivot back to support after the convention. it’s full pot commitment.
for biden to get the nom would be to gut the party and show its fabulous, ostentatious corruption and dishonesty.
“we stand with president puddinhead” is a terrible look and every day he remains in the white house or hiding in delaware with alleged covid (interesting choice to be there in a small, controlled environment instead of the scrutiny of the white house) just makes it worse.
“who is running this fricking country?” cannot help but be the question. it’s not one team donkey wants answered.
this is the climb down compromise.
it’s bad for them, but options were severely constrained. their best do not want to step into a potentially career ending suicide mission. their worst will grab at the ring but lose in a general election. no one had the name recognition or the cash.
so lose with what protects the system. sacrifice a career that had no further promise. jettison the module to save the space station.
kamala is likely to rapidly show us about “what can never be, unburdened by any electability or sense,” but how else could this ball bounce?
team donkey was cornered.
and you can only take fakery so far.
had joe refused to go (and he was trying), it would have been scorched earth and likely mental health and corruption show trials. hunter would wind up in gitmo.
to save any vestiges of face and honor remaining, his party would have needed to line up squarely against him. even being silent and sitting this one out would not suffice. it would have been seen as tacit support and party power over country and decency. it would foreground the very “attack on democracy” they so love to level as accusation for what could be worse than a sham puppet of a candidate controlled by who knows who?
there seems to be a mechanism by which they could have given him the nom, then given him the hook for being “disabled.” it’s a thermonuclear choice and a terrifying precedent, but extreme times make for extreme measures. perhaps fancy nancy et al made it clear that this and “jail for the fam and death to your legacy” is what was coming.
DNC futures looked like the video below. brazen brandon has been piling them all up in front of the train since day one. years of covering for him have left an awful lot of people naked as the water has gone out.
truly BO seems to have had a point: “never underestimate joe’s ability to f*ck things up.”
president puppetshow is bitter, angry, and while there may be some appearance of the wheel spinning, the hamster is long dead. he has felt disrespected by the party his whole career and this is just a capstone. he did not want to work with them. i suspect he’d have burned the world before eating this kind of crow. his comments on leaked calls about “name a better president in US history than me! name one!” speak to motive and delusion.
i suspect he’s not going out willingly.
i suspect there was serious arm twisting and threat here to legacy and to the ongoing protection of his family from lawfare and prosecution.
i suspect they got to his family and showed them what was in store for them if they did not take away grandpa’s keys.
it’s hard not to see this whole tawdry affair as a serious crisis for america as a constitutional republic. we’ve been flirting with it for years. our system is, to many extents, an honor system meant to be inhabited by honorable people. when it is not, this is what you get.
it makes me wonder if the deeper lessons here can be internalized (by both sides):
if the result of an election can be framed as “existential threat to democracy/the republic/america/the american way of life” then what does that tell us about the office being contested?
nothing should have that power. no person, position, or tribe. the US presidency has become horrifically imperial and the federalist nature of our system destroyed by the 17th amendment.
the federal bureaucracy/technocracy has become as vast as it is corrupt and as corrupt as it is vast. it’s an accelerating failure loop that inevitably leads to a monstrosity of grift and power players outside any intended constitutional enumeration of authority.
if these people really fear the things they claim, then ALL of them should be unified in saying “afuera!” and tearing it all down.
it’s not the people, it’s the office.
it is not biden or trump or kamala that america cannot survive, it is the nature of the modern presidency and executive branch that poses the clear and present danger and it is that office that we must pull down.
in that respect, braindead brandon may be just the leader we need: the perfect exemplar of how irretrievably broken and shameful our once august republic has become. so bring on the breakage. let’s drag it all out into the light until we can see the whole noxious carcass of leviathan that has so wrapped itself around the roots of our liberty.
it has become more than self evident that this government has become destructive to the ends of we the people. it cannot be fixed, it must be excised.
whole agencies: gone.
whole prerogatives: rolled back and repudiated.
at long last, we have been getting some help from the courts here.
it’s time to lean in and push it all off the table, to strive once more for a state that protects our striving rather than seeking to shackle us to its own.
rights, not regulation.
the freedom to pursue happiness, not the obligation to kowtow to some contrived notion of the collective weal.
because this too we hold to be self evident:
and we’re tired of pretending it’s not.
It's really awesome to see Democrats complain about the hand they've been dealt when they literally went through the deck and took the cards they wanted. I think if Harris ends up being the nominee, that will be as close to a white flag as we see in the 2024 election. Who else is going to want to jump on that grenade? Hillary? (The Clintons just endorsed Harris, so that looks unlikely.)
The other issue the Democrats have is that they're tied to the same crappy policies that Joe was tied to -- open borders, trillions in spending, men in women's sports, abortion until birth, etc.
I think it's possible that they have to run Harris because she's the only one with access to the campaign funds—assuming that fact is true. It's always about the money.
She'll probably lose, but can always claim to be the first black woman to be a presidential candidate, thus making history. Democrats seem to be really impressed by firsts.