I know I should write a post about Biden entering the race…
…but I can’t quite bring myself to do it. (I refer you to this and this.)
Biden’s candidacy fills me with a powerful feeling of weariness as well as repulsion. The weariness is a very similar feeling to one I had during the 2016 campaign when I tried to write about Jeb Bush.
Not that Biden is Jeb Bush. But they engender at least some of the same reaction in me, which is basically: why would anyone want this person to be president?
Of course, if by some strange alchemy Jeb Bush were running against Joe Biden, I’d happily vote for the former over the latter. But still, they give me the same impression of general mediocrity as thinkers and as politicians. I think it’s a sign of the extreme weirdness and leftism of the Democratic field that Biden is the front-runner and might even remain so.
By the way, although Bernie Sanders makes Joe Biden look a tiny bit young (which is quite a feat), Joe Biden makes Trump look positively fresh as a daisy. Sanders is 77 years old now and Biden is 76, whereas Trump is a mere 72. And the election’s not for a year and a half, so they’ll be that much older.
Indeed, why would anyone want Biden as POTUS?
It is partly the Obama syndome: he’s “likable”! Or so we are told.
I recall a speech he made some years ago in which he praised a local politico, asked him to stand and receive applause. But the dude was in a wheelchair, exemplifying Biden’s BS and ignorance.
It is in part the willingness of brain-dead Democrats to constantly edit history, ignoring to deletion Biden’s past actions and opinions. He is actually a quite unlikable man despite his pleasant smile and current rather bland platitudes. Remember his borking Bork?
It’s OK that a Senator from Virginia, Byrd, belonged to the KKK when younger, because he was a Democrat. He was affectionately known as KKK Byrd– affectionately, because the tag had zero negative impact. But my Dem brother the psychiatrist (!) references the KKK and Trump in the same breath and has no preference among the Democrats as long as one will beat Trump.
He does not respond when I ask what Trump actions he finds offensive. He lives in Seattle, and, though white as a sheet, invokes “white supremacy” and the KKK as his anti-Trump motives. But he is a psychiatrist, and so many of them are not firmly tethered to reality.
“Sleepy Joe” (better would be Sleazy Joe, given the level of corruption involving his son and foreign entanglements) began his campaign by lying about Charlottesville, both about the unfortunate events of the day ( the facts concerning which are now hopelessly obscured by endless amounts of MSM propaganda) and about Trump’s reaction to it. This is also the man who, just a months ago, ranted, stupidly and ignorantly, about English jurisprudential culture and the Anglo-American legal tradition.
I too thought of Jeb! when I heard Biden has made it official. My thought regarding other is, “Who are the people donating money to Joe and Jeb!’s campaigns?”
“… so they’ll be that much older.”
And they may not even make it to that finish line before they or their campaigns are finished.
BabylonBee says all that must be said about Biden announcement
https://babylonbee.com/news/nation-touched-by-joe-biden
Jeb Bush had 11 years under his belt as a public executive and a satisfactory career in banking and real estate. From the age of 20 to the age of 62, 70% of his time was spent in the private sector, (IIRC) none of it working for lobbying firms. His one and only run for the Presidency occurred at age 63.
Joe Biden put in four years as an associate at a suburban law firm (after a wretched tour in law school) and has no history in business. He held elected office w/o interruption for 46 years (f/t for 44 of those years). He has no history in any executive position. This will be the third time he’s run for the presidency (and some of us can recall the comical implosion of his first attempt in 1987) and he will be 77 years old on election day. His career is testament to the bad taste of Delaware voters.
I can understand you not having any enthusiasm for Jeb Bush and I can understand you taking exception to stances he’s taken over the years. However, these two are in no way comparable figures.
Art Deco:
As I made quite clear in my post.
Per a 2010 Biden profile in The Atlantic:
For many years, he described the driver of the truck that struck and killed his first wife and their daughter in December 1972 as drunk, which he apparently was not. The tale could hardly be more tragic; why add in a baseless charge? The family of the truck driver has labored to correct the record, but Biden made the reference to drunkenness as recently as 2007, needlessly resurrecting a false and painful accusation.
Art Deco, thanks for clearing the record on Jeb. He was not my first choice as a candidate, but he is an accomplished man and a proven executive. Before he put his name in the Presidential sweepstakes, he was an admired Governor. I don’t know why he should even be mentioned in any discussion of Biden.
Every time I read that Biden is likable, or decent, I respond, “based on what evidence?”. I know of none. Lee Merrick cites the episode that I often use to reclama such comments. He does have an impressively phony smile featuring his store bought teeth. There is nothing else.
The idea of Biden as a serious Presidential candidate is simply a travesty.
“Social justice warriors are going to utterly maul Joe Biden”
https://nypost.com/2019/04/25/social-justice-warriors-are-going-to-utterly-maul-joe-biden/
A writer who actually gets the current leftist identity politics.
I continue to see the 2020 election as the Republicans to lose and barring totally ‘wild card events’ the pubs can only lose if they refuse to fund hard hitting PAC ads. Dems have provided so much political ‘ammo’ that, if the GOPe wishes it, it will be a modern example of “shooting fish in a barrel”…
So, if the GOP places revenge upon Trump over preserving the country, we will know exactly where the responsibility lies. Should any of these dem wackjobs get in, all bets will be off.
Has anyone else noticed a certain weakness having crept into Biden’s eyes recently? There used to be a a youthful sparkle there, a playful, bright-eyedness that has disappeared over the last couple of years. To me, his eyes now look vacant, weak, even dead. Not his fault, of course, but something has happened to him physiologically, maybe just age getting the better of him.
Carl,
His son Beau died in 2015.
Jeb was a good guy, but a low energy good guy.
Biden should called the slightly creepy VP, but Trump’s named him as Sleepy Joe, a far worse guy.
Low energy Jeb – Sleepy Joe.
The first primary votes won’t even be cast until next year.
We’ll all be exhausted by then with all the Dems, all terrible. Maybe they call for Michelle at the Convention, when there is none clearly in the lead, and they all look like they’d lose to Trump.
Molly: Yes, the death of a child is definitely among the worst of the slings and arrows in life and that could well account for it.
Lazy, groping Uncle Joe is toast. He checks no hard left boxes, and the hard left, crazy as it is, will determine the dnc nominee in 2020. Bring it on.
As the cartoon says, Biden has lots of hands on experience.
A hack politician, right out of “Guys and Dolls.”
I always loved how Biden has presented himself as just an ordinary guy, “Lunch box Joe,” a “man of the people,” one evidence of this the fact that he supposedly took AMTRAK’s ACELA back to his home in Delaware each evening.
In one article he claims he’s done 8,200 round trips (at what another article below estimates as a cost of about $225 per round trip. If you do the math, the total cost to the taxpayers of his little train rides was somewhere around $1,845,000 dollars) ***
The story below, though, says that quite frequently Biden made his commute back home using Air Force One or Two, at a huge cost.*
Funny thing, too, is that the presumably “humble” home he returns to each evening is a $2 million dollar, almost 7,000 square foot house that is situated in a 4 plus acre waterfront compound. **
Of note, in 2017 Biden bought a second home, a “vacation home,” in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
* https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3983722/Dems-carping-expense-Melania-staying-New-York-Barron-remain-school-Joe-Biden-s-costly-trips-commuting-D-C-home-Wilmington.html
** See https://www.nationalreview.com/the-campaign-spot/joe-biden-spent-his-fortune-amtrak-tickets-jim-geraghty/
** https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/joe-bidens-house/view/google/
*** https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/biden-train-ride-trnd/index.html
“…Sleepy…”
Touchy-feely, indeed…
…but, um, not so “sleepy”…. Not by any means:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-27/ukraine-tapped-obama-admin-hurt-trump-help-clinton-and-protect-bidens