this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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To everyone who has downvoted me both here and on Reddit for saying "I think Biden is too old to run in 2024", I have two things to say: the first of them is "I hope you take advantage of this opportunity to wake up to your own biases", and the second one is "Fuck you".
You have been eating up every single tought-terminating cliche put in circulation by the elites of your party and parroting it online not just when it did serve your ideology or your electoral success, but also when it was just a cover for incompetent fools looking over their own asses and the hierarchies they form a part of. Many tried to warn you that just because 90% of every Conservative talking point was cooked in a meth lab by a blind monkey doesn't mean you should also close your ears when they said that the sky was blue or that Biden is old. Yes, Trump is old too, yes, THEY were arguing in bad faith, but you still were morons for refusing to even consider that it might have been a problem.
I don't have the misfortune of living in the US, but even as someone who just cares for the general stability of the world, I hope you can get the fuck out of this mess, if nothing else because contemporary Democrats don't collaborate with Latin American golpists noawadays, and because Republicans are a walking menace for green energy transition, but for the love of everything that is holy PLEASE LEARN SOMETHING from yesterday's disaster.
Biden went to the 2020 primaries under the premise that he would be a single-term president, specifically to kick Trump out, and it was immediately used as a hammer against internal critics. Once president, his policies couldn't be criticized in any way (not even in a constructive one), because it was "ammo for the republicans", or else "but he's doing good things too!" (never mind that the positive Biden policies, positive as they were, were always patchworks, and never structural reforms); once the time for primaries was getting closer, the mantra became "saying that Biden is too old is a Republican talking point", and "you can't run primaries in a party with a sitting president". And perhaps there was well intentioned people who took all of these ideas at face value and believed in them, but they always refused to see the subtext: "do not question the official Democrat party line", regardless of its blind spots and conflicts of interest.
Well, what are you going to do now that the official party line has crushed all opposition year after year and the Democrats have suddenly discovered themselves in front of the abyss, sacrificing all possible alternatives for the sake of electoral success when even the people most ideologically aligned with the Old Guard are scared? Are you going to continue justify all the bad decisions that took you to this place, or are you going to analyze what the hell is wrong with the party to start reforming it immediately after the elections? I understand not wanting to have an open-air debate immediately before the presidential elections, but if you guys refuse to work it out right next, I'm just going to assume that the USA is just going to be a fascist country by 2033.
Also, when Marianne Williamson tried to challenge Biden for the Democrat nomination, the white house press secretary openly mocked her in a white house press conference.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm1-Ef8Lxns
(My favourite thing about this clip is that the press secretary has obviously been coached to mock Marianne Williamson for having a crystal ball, but she doesn't know what a crystal ball is and confuses it with a magic 8-ball.)
My impression is that Biden said he would step aside in the hope that a viable alternative would present itself. It did not. It was also hoped that a Trump loss might push the GOP away from him and off the path of pure fascism. It did not. I think he ran more because he didn't want fascists in power than because he wanted the power himself.
I was under the impression that he was supposed to be handing off the role to Kamala, which was meant to be a shift towards a young(er) leader, woman and person of color that they hoped would check enough boxes for younger voters to make them think she was an actual progressive. That plan seems to have been nixed once they realized she has so little appeal across the board, she could probably lose a popularity contest to any number of infectious diseases, and Kamala 2024 got scrubbed.
They potentially could have found other viable alternatives, but they would have represented an actual shift in party leadership rather than bowing down to the party orthodoxy, so the DNC would never actually support them.
What they really want is another candidate like Obama that is charismatic and can talk in a way that convinces voters who don't feel represented by the current Democratic party to say, "This is the candidate who can deliver on reshaping the party in line with my views," while having no intentions of meaningfully deviating from the party line. I think the experience with Obama is still fresh enough in the minds of these voters that they are on guard against the same sort of deception a second time.
Do you really think there is no alternative? Isn't it more a matter of making place for an alternative, and then it will turn up?
My God man we still have at least 4 viable alternatives from the 2020 primaries. If we'd held real primaries we could have avoided this easily.
People need a reality check on Biden's senility. Some of us saw it earlier than others who continued to live in a silo. I am willing to vote for Joe but I also knew he's a liability with no strength versus Trump under these circumstances.
And we both had options and have options right now. Convention is 8 weeks away. Democrats can still jump ship and I can think of 6 alternative, younger, more charismatic candidates to win this stupid fucking popularity contest with ease.
People need a reality check on their reality checks. Biden has been living with a stutter since he was young - it has nothing to do with age or senility. Those high-pressure, fast-paced debates just aren't a good platform to measure people up unless they're a showman. I feel confident in my own opinions, but I still freeze up in fast-paced debates where I can't look things up.
Haha this is some serious copium bullshit. Stutters don't cause you to jump from abortion to immigration stories mid-sentence.
And if you want proof of that, go watch VP Biden debate Paul Ryan. After you do that, re-watch last night and tell me that's his stutter.
Biden isn't a new inexperienced politician. People like you have been telling me that Biden's experience should prepare him to have debates like this, which should ve even easier when lacking an audience. Shit it wasn't even as good as his 2020 debates.
Shit, the 2020 debate against Trump is available and it's Day and Night.
We could have told him it was time to retire. Instead we gaslit an octogenarian into thinking he had to give up his retirement.
It's been a group project. You get the same grade as the rest of us.
The voters could have made it clear in the primary.
There was the blank option. It was even demonstrated.
It happened in Michigan. So it was always possible. And you don't vote for nobody, primaries include all offices going to election. You just leave one box blank. That's all.
Looking back at this thread I could probably have been more clear from the start though too. It's an emotional topic for sure.
Statistically both these men should be dead. Biden beat Reagan as oldest president. Trump would be second oldest president behind Biden and beating Reagan if he won, with Trump already being older than Reagan when he left office.
This is ridiculous. They belong on an iceberg but there aren’t any left.
Stealing that last bit!
There's nothing we can fucking do about it at that level of government. The party caucuses make it very difficult to decide who our presidential candidate should be. Remember how Bernie tried running back in 2016 and the entire DNC conspired against him in favor of their insider Hillary? Trump managed to win the nomination because he understands he can make the Republican base eat shit off his hand and have them demand more, even with the RNC doing everything they could to avoid him. Let's face it, the average American is a confused, exploited, poorly educated bigot who would latch on to any hateful speech to blame harmless parts of the population for their problems. There are even highly educated people who believe in his nonsense because they want to pay fewer taxes.
Between regulatory and judicial capture by major corporations, our future isn't gonna be a bright one any time soon. Project 2025 will also cause irreversible damage to all sectors of the government in which only Republican party loyalists can work. We're getting really close to how Germany was in the mid 1930s.