I skipped the State of the Union for what feels like the 26th consecutive year, and am no worse off for having done so. To all accounts, though, Uncle Joe delivered the goods in a setting where everyone was primed to expect Weekend At Biden’s. Followed by a former Machine SGA president from the University of Alabama delivering the breathy baby voice horror stories of any Sunday night Baptist service. Between the two, we have begun the 2024 campaign in earnest: the first collision between reality and Cable News Make Believe, with democracy itself at stake.
Because there’s no hiding it anymore. No pretending there’s some kind of miracle get out of rematch free card, no matter how much CNN and the New York Times want to wish it into existence. Donald Trump will be representing the GOP for the third straight election in a world where his record of venality and incompetence has been festooned with multiple criminal charges in three separate jurisdictions, half a billion dollars in civil liability, and four more years of delusion and conspiracy theory that looks far more like dementia and decompensation than anything Biden has ever exhibited. And in most polls, he’s running neck and neck with the President.
And to make matters worse, the rigged judiciary is breaking things his way – the case that should be the end of him is in limbo with a judge he himself appointed, somehow, and he is being transparently protected, and the system shrugs. But then, when it took Merrick Garland two years for his pudding brain to cough up “maybe we should be investigating a a coup attempt,” it’s hardly surprising.
For some reason, we decided that investigating and prosecuting someone who was running for office was inherently a political act, without considering that in doing so, we basically grant criminal immunity to anyone running for office. And the instant someone worries about the implications for potential political violence, the terrorists have won. The most successful practitioners of terrorism in America have always, always been the racist right, from the Klan to the Birmingham bombers to Tim McVeigh to the January 6 insurrectionists. Yet we cannot devote one percent of the energy of post-September 11 to pushing back against a coup attempt by an anti-democratic mob.
I don’t know. Every Democratic win seems to just make the Enemy more intractable and the political press more supine. Things that would have been career-ending twenty years ago are blithely ignored now. Consequences are for people who aren’t rich or white enough. And even if Biden clocked 40 states and 370 electoral votes and 55% of the popular vote, does anyone think for a second that Republicans would shake their heads and say “well we got beat” rather than start back in on denying reality and threatening lives if they don’t get what they want?
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, age 81…you have less than eight months to save the world. And even then, it still won’t be saved for good.