I posted a meme around here a little while back that basically said:
“Biden is not my second, third or even seventh choice for president but Trump is my 243,000,000th choice.”
This bears repeating:
I don’t think so, but we’ll see.
Sadly, I don’t think anyone is or could. Not this cycle. Nor anytime soon. I fear we’ve entered a somewhat dysfunctional age where literally the best we can hope for is bland and boring.
It’s always relative, so…yes? In context hemorrhoids beat rectal cancer.
Reade apparently has testified in a number of court cases in which she has presented herself as an expert on domestic violence. Now the university where she claims to have gotten her degree says there is no record of her, and defense lawyers in Monterey County are asking for their clients’ cases to be reheard. Reade claims the reason why Antioch University has no record of her is because she completed it as part of a “protected program” after fleeing domestic abuse. The University disputes this.
Lawyers Scrutinize Tara Reade’s Expert Testimony in Domestic Violence Cases?
She is a total fraud.
The reason people refused to learn the lesson is that, until recently, the voters rejected Bernie’s revolution. That’s not on Biden. That’s not on the Democratic party. It’s not even on Bernie Sanders. Sanders proposed a bold reform plan, and in a sense, I appreciate his honesty. But the voters just weren’t sold. If you want to blame voters for not recognizing what’s really ailing the country and for not understanding how we need to embrace a more socialist form of capitalism (I happen to agree with you and Bernie here), that’s one thing. I think that’s fair. I wish we would reject modern American cut-throat capitalism as well. But voters aren’t all in – or at least they weren’t until 12 weeks ago. Maybe now, 10-12 weeks into a pandemic, it’s different - I don’t know.
Biden has his shortcomings - I won’t disagree. As I posted on another thread, this election has similarities to the 1932 election in which Herbert Hoover was an incumbent. Hoover lost because he had 3 years to unfuck the economy and his policies just made things progressively worse. I don’t know if Trump has had enough time to alienate voters. But to my point, I think FDR won because of three factors:
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FDR had a brand name (the Roosevelt name), which was important because in times of crisis, people tend to look not just for radical change but ‘change they can believe in’. And Biden’s name and political history as a sort of steady hand is an asset, IMO. You may not see it that way but that’s partly why he defeated Sanders and the entire field of challengers.
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FDR was optimistic. People want acknowledgment of their suffering, but they also are naturally attracted to someone who says “Look, things are going to be alright. We’re gonna be okay.” It just has to be believable. FDR was an incredibly positive and optimistic person (one reason why someone like me would be a disaster in that office, lol). This is where I’m not sure about Biden. I think Biden is basically an optimistic person but it’s a matter of how he projects himself. In all fairness, he’s hamstrung by the pandemic ‘distancing’. But he’s also hamstrung by his apparent lack of comfort on digital platforms.
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FDR didn’t want a violent revolution, but offered an unapologetically bold set of reforms. The New Deal wasn’t the end of capitalism, but it was definitely a new definition of it, and it redefined the government’s relationship with people. It was ballsy because even during those times, not everyone was sold on the idea that the federal government’s role was to employ people. And remember that the federal government in many people’s eyes had made matters worse under Hoover. FDR offered a bold vision of the future. He put people in money’s pockets, but he did it in a way that was compatible with our sense of work ethic - critics be damned.
This is probably Biden’s biggest question mark. He will have to be bolder than he was during the campaign. He will have to adjust to the new reality. He won’t get away with just trashing Trump. He will have to co-opt some of the ideas from the hard left from people like Sanders and Warren.
If Biden can check all three points in the eyes of voters, I think he has a 2/3 chance of winning. If he checks 2 boxes, it’s 50/50. If he remains stuck at just 1, then I think it’s less than 50 percent.
Because this country is culturally complicated, and it was founded with a complex set of values. 2008 was a kind of political revolution, not in terms of policy but in terms of political culture. But revolutions almost always have counter-revolutions, people who fight back aggressively against change. And 2016 was that counter revolution. And they’re fighting now, and will continue to fight, ruthlessly to defend their counter revolution.
I think those first five or six paragraphs are the most cogent analysis I’ve seen from you, asahi, but unless I’m being whooshed, I think you transposed some words in the phrase I bolded…
If that story is true, itis a gift for Biden. An attack like this with such poor credibility tends to undermine any other criticisms about Biden’s personal behavior and undercuts the (somewhat legitimate) complaints about his overly familiar physical contact. It is as if all of Hillary Clinton’s mission emails were revealed to just be animated GIFs of cats standing on their hind legs and waving their paws.
Stranger
Couldn’t even read a summary, hunh? Yet alone click a link.
You are the very mirror image of what you pretend to think rational Americans are. When evaluating a slur, the political side of the sluree is all that matters: R good, D bad is all the “nuance” you can handle.
Oy, the dangers of posting before finishing my first cup of coffee. Sometimes I think I post better when drunk.
I will never live that one down. Evar.:o
She’s got a serious issue with the truth and all these twisted bizarre stories get weirder and weirder. If she didn’t get her undergraduate degree, then perhaps the law degree might get revoked.
And, instead of figuring out what happened with the undergrad degree, she invents some bizarre protected program?
I found out at the last second I didn’t earn my degree. Don’t even remember all the details, my advisor got too creative and was overruled by a dean. Was something about counting a class twice: once for general studies and once towards my major. A minor pain, had to take one summer class for 6 weeks to complete the degree. Install had a lease and no clue what I wanted to do post graduation anyway.
Appears to me that my supposition that serious and thorough investigation was good and WOULD HELP Biden, if he’s not guilty, was correct, at least based on the information published so far. Isn’t investigation great? Next time there’s an accusation, hopefully all my fellow Democrats will join me in urging and advocating for serious and thorough investigations.
Right, let’s have more investigations into emails, too, while we’re at it.
And … BENGHAZI!!!
No thanks, just the sexual assault and rape allegations.
I think the point might’ve been that excessive investigations on flimsy bases can be used ipso facto by unscrupulous actors to build up the illusion of wrongdoing by the accused, even if there’s no “there” there. (cf: Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1992 through 2016).
In this particular case, I agree with iiandyiii that the investigations surrounding Ms. Reade’s allegations were appropriate and necessary and were also, while not “probative” in the language of Reade’s ex-lawyer, at least sufficient to relegate the charge into the “believable in the general sense but not credible in the specific” file.