I was gonna post this in a thread about how the media treated Trump, but it got deleted for some reason, and I’m kinda proud of this rant, so I’ll post it here.
Trump has gotten more than his fair shake from the media. Simply by virtue of being the republican nominee, the media has had to forsake any reasonable reporting for the sake of “balance”, wherein they act like there’s actually any reasonable debate to be had. When Trump said “Aleppo has been taken” and then followed it up with his insane word salad screed about Mosul and ISIS, if the media in this country was reasonable, Chris Wallace would have turned off the mic and given him the Billy Madison speech. You know which one. Because it fits. Perfectly. And because simple “wrong” really doesn’t do just fine.
I think that one canadian newspaper that questioned if we would still have this response if Trump was a literal 9-year-old, instead of a 9-year-old who happens to be 70, got it right. This isn’t normal. This isn’t acceptable. We should not be treating this like an ordinary election between two ordinary people, we should see it for what it is: a disturbing mockery wherein a qualified candidate has to face up against a person who is so fundamentally ill-suited for the job that we should all be flogging ourselves that we let it get this far. And yet, here we still go, with CNN interviewing people from the Trump campaign as if there’s anything to be gained there. The major TV networks still haven’t come out and said what should be blatantly obvious: “It is not partisan to oppose the most unqualified, unsuitable presidential candidate since at least World War I; we will no longer be covering him as a real candidate.”
The media has been more fair to Trump than it has any business being, and in doing so, they’ve shifted the overton window in an unacceptably, harmful manner. They’ve made this kind of shit acceptable in public discourse. They should be ashamed. We should be ashamed. A sex offender, a pathological liar, a racist and misogynist bully… All of these things should be highly questionable and would have ended a president’s run at any time in the last decade. But for fuck’s sake, being this completely clueless should just be a nail in the coffin. It’s like showing up to an interview for the position of head coder at a company, having no portfolio, and saying that C++ has a garbage collector, and that that automatically deletes unwanted functions. You shouldn’t get the job. You should be thrown out on your ass.
And further, you state in your interview that you know way more than the head coders in the company, that they are a bunch of losers, and you could teach them a thing or two. Then you look for the token ring that must have fallen out and rolled under a desk.
12th Grope-ee comes forward. Former Miss Finland. Trump grabbed her ass before a photo-shoot.
Of course, he’ll just lie about this as well.
The man is a pig.
And you know how to fix bugs, but you can’t tell anyone. Bugs have ears, and they hide when you look for them. They hide when they know you’re coming. Donald Knuth would be spinning in his grave, spinning faster than one of those fancy new memory drums IBM has these days, they’re great, you can interleave opcodes, spinning in his grave if he knew that we hadn’t obfuscated all our Perl so the bugs couldn’t read it and figure out we were coming.
Also, you type big-league code. You use patterns. You have the best patterns, especially the Visitor pattern. You hit the keys so hard even your assembly code is strongly-typed.
I don’t see this happening. For his entire career, Biden didn’t have a boss. Then for the first time eight years ago, he had to answer to someone besides his constituents. That was probably a bit of an adjustment for him. I can’t see him, at 73, now wanting to learn how to work with a whole new boss-- a boss he quite often didn’t see eye to eye with when she was SoS. And now she wants to put him into her old job? So she can potentially micromanage him? And tell him to do things he’s not down with? Not gonna happen.
I find it strange, too, that this story is hitting the media before anyone from the Hillary team has apparently even talked to Biden about it.
Apparently, they’ve gone the “leak it to the media” route. I suspect this is probably just a tactic to use Biden’s popularity to drum up votes/enthusiasm. And anyways, Veep to SoS doesn’t seem like a step up, or even a lateral move to me.
True. Although Veep to unemployed is a much larger step downwards. Biden is, to his great credit, not rich and will probably want to keep generating income at least for awhile.
It’s more like Veep to Retired Veep, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. Plus I’m sure several DC or Delaware area universities would be happy to have him on their faculty. There just seem to be much better options for him at this point than to serve as Hillary’s SoS. Dude’s 73, didn’t really get along with Hillary when they served on Obama’s cabinet together, and SoS is a high-stress, high-travel job.
I saw a story, from when he was running for president, that his senate retirement package would pay more than his senate job. Basically he could earn more from being retired than from working.