The announcement came through while we were all asleep in Sydney that Joseph R Biden has withdrawn his bid to be the nominee for the Democratic Party and with it, will not contest the 2024 Presidential Election. By default, Kamala Harris will be the Democratic Party's nominee and will probably name Pete Buttigieg as her running mate at the Democratic National Convention.
The Republican Party’s immediate tactic was to say that Biden standing down for reelection invalidates the will of voters; which is despite that not only was there no other serious opponent on the ballot, but in 34 States of the Union, there actually was no-one else on the ballot. I do not know how you invalidate the will of voters by saying that the voters' choice has been taken away when there was no choice to begin with. Of course this does bring into question the whole idea of having a nominee chosen by convention but when you bear in mind that these are private companies, the fact that you have open primaries in the first place is itself buckwild. I can not think of any other private organisation which allows the general public to vote on its internal matters. Also remember, that the open primary system which exists, only came about because of a series of riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.
Still, it was Biden that made the choice to step aside. Nobody else actually pushed him out. Granted that the electorate was becoming either increasingly worried or simply just plain apathetic about Biden running again but trying to cast this as invalidating the will of voters, just ignores reality itself; which is something that Donald Trump is quite adept at.
Joe Biden is right to withdraw, now the oxygen swings back to the Democrats. But I hope Kamala Harris is prepared for the racist, misogynist shit storm heading her way. I hope decent Americans see it for the hate filled desperation that it is.
I have mostly kept my mouth shut about the 2024 Presidential Election because quite frankly what we are looking at is a slow moving track wreck at 3mph; which is kind of the Crash at Crush in Texas, combined with the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio. Whatever happens, parts and pieces are going to fly everywhere, there will be explosions and fire of maybe both a metaphorical and literal sense, and one of four people will be President.
The problem is that the response to Barack Obama becoming President in 2008, was for the Republican Party to drift aimlessly to the right, which is why they ended up appointing a showman and a shyster who will literally say anything to win the vote. As the Global Financial Crisis wrecked its way through the United States' economy in late 2008 to 2009, this meant that the Obama administration essentially fell into the very boring role of being nothing more than administrators; which is excellent if you are the opposition because you can go off on any extreme tangent knowing full well that there is not accountability.
The then response to Donald Trump becoming President in 2016, was for the Democratic Party to flamboyantly dance its way to the functionally libertarian right, which is how they ended up in a place where drivel gibberish identity politics have now taken place of actually doing anything useful for anyone. If you are more concerned with what pronouns are appropriate than actually improving people's lives, then of course you should expect people who are expecting you to do the job of government and watch you failing to do it to jump to the other side where you have a functionally fascist making equally vapid promises, but at least they are promises.
Instead what we have seem is that the 2024 race to the Presidency is this kind of slow motion death march where Joe Biden was being chased by Dodderance while Donald Trump is being chased by Cholesterol. Dodderance & Cholesterol Partners sounds like the worst legal firm in the world and it should do, as Grimaldi Reaper is so bored by this whole thing that he can not be bothered to do the job himself.
The one thing that we can say about Joe Biden is that when/if he does complete first term in office, he can hang a shingle over his door as a fine Catholic, in having successfully outlawed abortion for the Pope. No Pope will be able to have an abortion in the United States. Tick that box off the list. While we are here, the whole waving the word "Abortion" like it is a magic word in American politics, just seems completely bonkers hatstand to me. On hand you have Donald Trump, who has been found in a court to be a rapist and who looks like he has no qualms whatsoever with abortion (and has likely paid for multiple abortions) and he happens to be in the position as the default pro-life candidate. On the other hand you have Joe Biden, who as a Catholic and likely lifelong misogynist, is clearly horrified at the very idea of abortion itself, and he happens to be in the position as the default pro-choice candidate. Meanwhile the electorate runs about like brainless sheep with flamethrowers, running from side to side, and they wonder why their own candidate is so lukewarm on the subject.
If in the meantime before January 2025, Joe Biden dies in office, then Kamala Harris takes over as per the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution anyway. The thing about Kamala Harris as the former Attorney General of California is not that she would be bad at the job but that she would be extremely competent. That might not be a good thing. As Attorney General of California, she had a higher than usual rate of wrongful conviction cases and would then use the technicalities of the law to keep wrongfully convicted people behind bars rather than allow them new trials. As Prosecutor supreme for the State of California, she is proof that the law is actually a Petrie dish upon which you grow cops. In that respect, her level of nerfariousness is not the same of Biden's by virtue of not having racked up the numbers.
I am convinced at this point that given sections of the Republican Party which want to implement Project 2025 and dismantle so much of the apparatus of government in favour of placing it directly into the hand of the Office Of The President, that this Republican Party wants to goosestep its way to the functionally fascist right after being adrift without purpose. Even if Trump becomes president again, we've already seen that he does not formulate policy because he is simply not interested. A Trump/Vance administration where Grimaldi Reaper finally does catch up to Mr Trump, would likely place semi-dictatorial power into the hands of a very isolationist Vance.
On the other hand, cop-brained Kamala Harris as President would have Pete Buttigieg as Veep; the latter whose only job will be to smile and wave and just play dumb while Harris uses the machinery of the State Department to go after the Democrats' own set of targets. Either way, we lose.
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