09-03-2022, 01:52 PM
(09-03-2022, 07:31 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: "Is President Biden too old and dated"
Yes, and tbh, he was a weak puppet long before becoming so. Even Neil Howe openly referred to him as a "lame duck president".
He has the same strengths, which are mental. He is coherent in speech as he approaches eighty. He recognizes the validity of expressions of personal hardship and cares about people in trouble who have done nothing to get themselves there. His core values have not changed.
His biggest political weakness is one that generational theory could predict: that he has practically no generational constituency of like-minded people in the same age group. The Silent generation is mostly extinct. To be sure, Silent men have generally melded some masculine characteristics of GI's and Boomers. Boomers have at their best vision, principle, and erudition, which Biden has. Biden exemplifies GI rationality and communitarianism. Judgmentalism is no better than its objective, and the MAGA crowd has shown its inappropriateness. Somebody needs to call the MAGA cult and its leader out, and Biden has been cautious in finding the moment.
Remember the greatest contribution that I have associated to the Silent in American culture: comedy. To be effective as a comedian one needs timing at the moment, and when that goes one can no longer be effective as a comedian on stage or screen. Biden is no comedian, but he does have the political timing down. The ex-President was caught with in of the worst scenarios for a criminal defense -- top-secret documents. Having them out of place is itself criminal culpability, and the only imaginable defense for such is that they were planted. The surprise to most of us is that anyone could still excuse Trump for this. One might not presume criminal guilt about a suspicious fire or even a dead body, but classified documents out of place is prima facie violation of the law.
Biden has been careful to wait until law enforcement has a nearly open-and-shut case with nothing but the juridical question of when the case will be heard in a court of law or when there will be a plea bargain. Criminal consequences for Trump's misdeeds with classified documents are severe.
Quote:"with all his shortcomings, even though he is also Slow Joe"
If it were me calling him stupid, you would be justified in viewing that as a partisan cliche, but since these are your words...yeah, not being retarded is kind of a necessary starting point to being a Grey Champion.
Slow... or cautious? For a considerable time one had nothing but the hope that the MAGA cult would erode due to the decline of its increasingly-elderly constituency in numbers and the aging and bad habits (elderly bad habits do not mellow with time, but they can and often kill those with the habits -- smoking, alcoholic liver disease, obesity, lack of exercise, poor diet, and failure to handle diabetes well) or that its intellectual and moral failures would make it an object of ridicule as is the norm with any fad that has outlasted its original appeal. To be sure, fads such as Strauss waltzes and Art Deco do not fade in attractiveness, but that recognizes them as mainstream and timelessness. MAGA appeals strictly to one cult, and that cult is old. It has practically no youth appeal due to its anti-rationalism and absurdity. So it was with fascism, another political fad.
Quote:In the mean time, I will concede that a lot of conservatives misrepresented this speech (ex: "he called half of Americans enemies of democracy!" when he clearly said "the majority of Republicans are not MAGA Republicans"). Yes, the Darth Sideous-esque lighting had me bursting with laughter at the start, but the speech itself was relatively undramatic. Granted, his actions are creepy, privacy-invading and blatantly globalist, but the speech itself wasn't particularly alarming, certainly not warranting the "he sounds just like HITLER!" screeching I've grown so tired of hearing every 5 seconds about whoever is in power at the time. Still, he seemed more like 70-80% there tonight rather than his usual 40%, and, for once, seemed to have some semblance of a personality, so that was a nice improvement.
The red lighting is the apparent norm for Independence Hall at night for accentuating the red brick façade. Biden knows Philadelphia well, and he chose to use it as a backdrop. He knew what sort of crowd would appear in Philly at night -- one intolerant of the MAGA cult. That cult had tried to nullify the vote from Philadelphia.
The MAGA cult is accustomed to hearing deprecatory attacks on anyone either opposed to or outside it, and to see those not fully inside the cult and loyal to its political agenda grossly disloyal. On the other hand, Biden made clear that the speech was not about his own glorification. He left room for people to abandon the cult and return to the sort of normality that we used to consider essential to politics in which nobody gets everything that he wants, all results are workable compromises, and everyone ends up with something precious. What is essential gets achieved (let us say, some gun legislation that restricts gun ownership to people with valid uses such as sport hunting).
It is not enough for Donald Trump to leave the political scene. Cults such as L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology and Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church have clearly outlasted their founders without going mainstream. This said, I have never known of anyone killing or being killed on behalf of Scientology (people go broke and never solve their problems) or the Unification Church. MAGA has shown some proclivity for violence and for the abuse of patriotic symbolism in that violence (I'm guessing that the schmuck who used a Marine Corps flag as a weapon against law enforcement got a longer term for the use of a Marine Corps flag for that vile purpose. It is reasonable to assume that the Marine Corps deprecated that abuse of non-partisan, apolitical symbolism).
People with a blanket disdain for law enforcement are themselves suspect. We have law and order, lest the rule of law and the civil liberties thus possible, be void. Black Lives Matters has a limited (and legitimate!) set of complaints about law enforcement in violent discrimination against blacks -- but it seems not to complain when someone gets busted for hijacking its protests with behavior such as looting, assault, or property damage. Black Lives Matters is close to the mainstream because nobody can justify police brutality against someone who has done nothing to provoke brutality (technically, if the cops pull a gun on someone who pull a gun on a police officer and kill the person who would kill the cop, such is brutal. That is self-defense, and for self-defense to be effective it must often be as brutal as criminal violence).
Quote:What I liked the most though was that he unapologetically said that we are the greatest nation in the world. For once, he had the balls to say something genuinely controversial, even if the majority of people knew it was true just a few decades ago. Credit where credit is due, this gets a small nod of respect.
Biden picked his location well. Independence Hall was where our unlikely nation formally declared independence, and where it hammered out a workable Constitution. It may not be so much a place of government activity as a symbol, but it is excellent. It has a military honor guard at night. The location that Biden chose is perfect.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.