John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS
"Joe Biden formally enters Democratic field for 2020 presidential race"
Oh, can't you just feel the excitement?
If he were the candidate, we'd watch two Pentagon-adoring old men slugging it out. Two who never have a bad word to say about all the killing and maiming and creating desperate refugees.
And they both embrace CIA dirty operations. Biden was the one who convinced Obama to start America's industrial-scale extrajudicial killing program in which someone's name is put on a "kill list" by an anonymous CIA thug, and the person listed is afterwards incinerated by a missile controlled by another CIA thug playing real-life computer games in a secret basement or warehouse.
The regard for rule of law is just touching. As is the humanity.
Smiles mean nothing. Biden has a big one, but then that is almost characteristic of psychopaths. Obama, who bombed everyday somewhere for eight solid years and undoubtedly killed hundreds of thousands, has a boyishly charming one.
And two such genuinely sleazy individuals to boot, Biden and Trump. Although I do think Trump clearly leads in that quality.
By the way, it would be the first time that two men who have had hair transplants ran against each other (Biden got a new front hairline a couple of decades ago).
American politics really is about that meaningful.
Just a further word on sleaze.
Biden has a pretty sleazy record., including, when he was VP, going over to Ukraine to tell the government what to do and to seek concessions benefitting his son's finances.
Trump's entire career, of course, features sleaze, from working overtime to avoid paying taxes and cheating the folks who bought into many of his projects to cheating on his wife.
Class, all the way, that's the way they do things in America.
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Further information for those who think Biden's a nice, harmless old guy.
Two items from his voting record.
He supported legislation for an amendment that would allow the individual states to overturn Roe vs Wade on abortion.
He supported legislation that was regarded by the NRA as having saved peoples' gun rights.
I also watched the hearing over charges by law clerk Anita Hill against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991. Biden presided because he was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Biden’s handling of the hearing was dreadful, and I’ve since had a low opinion of him.
Anita Hill was a credible, calm, and well-spoken witness. But under Biden, she was put through ugly and embarrassing questioning. Anita Hill was treated as wrong-doer rather than as witness against one, nominee Clarence Thomas. It was Joe Biden rushing to save the Washington establishment from embarrassment over a poor Supreme Court nomination.
He ain't quite what a lot of people think he is.
Just as with Obama, big smiles can be so deceptive.
Biden’s exploitation, in his opening campaign advertising film, of the sad events at Charlottesville, Virginia, setting himself up pretentiously as doing “battle for the soul of this nation,” (in light of Trump’s widely criticized “moral equivalence” between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists) would be hard enough to accept on its own.
But Biden never so much as had the decency to ask the mother of the woman, Heather Heyer, killed at Charlottesville, whether it would be okay to use the event in his political advertising. That’s classic Joe Biden sleaze, with the same level of decency displayed as in his Anita Hill hearings.
But things go much farther than that in Biden’s “nation’s soul” stuff, far enough for those who understand to make them want to puke.
As Vice President, Biden was America’s imperial emissary for the dirty dealings in Ukraine. He takes credit for telling Yanukovych, the country’s recently democratically-elected President, to walk away after all the street demonstrations and violence, violence orchestrated and paid for covertly by America.
That very much included America’s support for Ukraine’s ugly Azov Battalion – an absolutely neo-Nazi outfit with swastika-like armbands and torchlight parades and hate-filled speeches - which threatened the elected government. There are photos of Biden with a big smile on his face shaking hands with neo-Nazi leader, Oleh Tyahnybok.
So much for Joe Biden and “America’s soul” – just empty words uttered with mock sincerity. About as meaningful as a Hillary Clinton photo-op of her eating some fried chicken with a group of black people at a local joint. She actually did that.
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Response to a comment about Trump:
Trump is indeed a man of "no class." I couldn't agree more. It’s almost an understatement.
But do you call it "class" for America to have bombed its way through the Middle East over the last fifteen years, killing a good two million people and creating armies of desperate refugees? Overthrowing democratic governments? Running an extrajudicial killing operation on an industrial scale?
In some bizarre fashion, Trump is an almost perfect President for America today, a perfect symbol - crass, dishonest, violent, and brutally proud of all of it.
