Current Affairs Joe Biden POTUS #46
- Thread starter Ruairi77
- Start date
- Status
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
I didn't think he said that many words during his entire presidency.
There's always this factoid - not sure if true
As vice president, Coolidge and his vivacious wife Grace were invited to quite a few parties, where the legend of "Silent Cal" was born. It is from this time that most of the jokes and anecdotes involving Coolidge originate, such as Coolidge being "silent in five languages". Although Coolidge was known to be a skilled and effective public speaker, in private he was a man of few words and was commonly referred to as "Silent Cal". An apocryphal story has it that a person seated next to him at a dinner said to him, "I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you." He replied, "You lose."
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
It's not, but it's a good story. It is true that, as vice-president, he only broke his silence in Cabinet meetings to reply to questions addressed to him.
No, I am not "happy with either Biden or Trump" - I clearly don't want Trump in the White House, would prefer he be in the Big House. But your statement that "anyone who is not Biden or Trump must be an improvement" is silly. There are plenty that would be worse than Biden, and they are making their case - Desantis, Ramaswamy, etc.
For this election, it needs to be Biden to be sure it's not Trump.
Why is anything said against biden met with thought processes like this, having to prove it against other politicians but over in the trump thread , similar statements can be made without having to show similar? I understand feelings between the two are completely different but nobody is asking for this posting negatively about trump but they are about biden which is a complete bias attitude within the forum and not a fair balance of discussion. I have no interest in either person but I did find it interesting that completely different attitudes are found in two threads essentially about politicians.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
But who do you think should be President of the worlds biggest power ?……
yep, still pete for prez 24
Two questions is how I am choosing to interpret this:
(1) For who should be amongst the current crop of declared and undeclared candidates, it should be Biden. If he serves two years and hands over to Kamala Harris, I'm fine with that, we can fight that battle for 2028.
(2) For who should be President amongst the whole of the USA? There are many capable people who ran in the 2020 election who could do well - some of my prefs were Pete B, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris - outside of that circle of folks there are too many to mention.
But it cannot be Trump in 2024. Or Desatan. Or any of the current crop of GOP types who are focused on restricting rights, pulling back rights, acting as if America was at its best in the 1950s or the 1850s.
There is so much of a future for our country, if we, as a citizenry, can pull our act together and look towards a future that actually begins to reflect our ideals.
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
Probably three big items:
- Trump's long history with the American court system proves he's a huge liar, which can be verified with evidence in public records.
- Trump screwed a whole bunch of ordinary working stiffs in the '90s with the Taj bankruptcy, and has a long history of doing exactly that on other construction projects with his contractors, but promotes himself as a champion of the working class. This is also all 100% verifiable.
- It is well documented that he used to call up the New York Post and tell them a bunch of lies under a fake name to get published on Page Six.
The result is that the media publishes a lot of clickbait stories where they fact check Trump (and that's never pretty), because the media gets paid on clicks. People read Trump stories, so everyone who ever interacts with non-right-wing media knows them all. In general, what those stories (correctly) show is that Trump outright lies far more frequently than most politicians, who usually distort and spin truth. Data don't lie, so the conclusion is accepted fact.
Many African-Americans feel much the same way about Biden, due to his opposition to school busing early in his career and the crime bill. Many of them think he's a hypocrite on race, which he probably is. The animosity with women isn't as great for some reason, which is probably because he merely presided over Arlen Specter's hatchet job on Anita Hill. Neither group is well-represented on a Premier League team's forum, so those items don't come up.
This can only happen once the cancer that is Trumpism is eradicated. Given current polling within the GOP, we are far, far away from that.
And DeSantis subscribes to Trumpism as well. It's going to be worse before it gets better, I'm afraid
So many do subscribe to this - a view that somehow, magically, a "strong leader" can just make things better - "like they were in the old days" - in our current political vocabulary we say Trumpism, but its really Fascism that is being described and longed for by so many. "They" don't want to think, they want to be told that someone else is to blame for their woes, that someone else is the cause of their problems, and that this strong leader can just fix things for them.
That is truly the fight we are in.
(Some scholars say there are cycles to the history of countries - Strauss and Howe described such in Generations, A History of America's Future - they described secular and spiritual crises, generally alternating at predictable intervals - there are, I think, plenty of weaknesses in their arguments, but our current times would certainly seem to fit one of the secular crises they described.)
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
This one really is a "both sides" problem.
Back when Congress worked, most of the arguments were about regulation, how to spend the taxes we raise, and how we divide the tax burden. It's possible to compromise on these things, because the issue space is a lot bigger. You can do the things that lead to major deals - issue linkages (ie: tie 2+ bills together), pork barrel carveouts for holdouts, wording changes, line item amendments - because those options to balance the scale and canvas for votes exist. You could do that with abortion before Dobbs, but now you can't. If it's possible to make it illegal, that's a 0/1 approach.
That's more or less the last thirty years of the bargaining side of conflict theory in a nutshell, and how the shift from voting pocketbooks to voting social issues led to gridlock. Corporate America absolutely loves this. It lets them walk off with all the money in any new issue spaces, because Congress can't regulate them. If they can control the courts, they get the whole enchilada.
It's like how Ukraine and Russia could work with the US to dismantle nuclear weapons, after they haggled out how much Ukraine got paid off and who paid how much, but then have a war once Russia decides Crimea is Russia. It only takes one side to start the war, but the left picks most of the fights on social issues. The right usually starts out with what it wants on those, with behavioral changes driven by technological change being the most obvious exception.
There's a lot to unpack. Much of the left is no longer interested in Ted Kennedy-style gradualism. I would argue that the Warren Court is the original sin there. That taught the right to use the courts to undo both those outcomes and legislation they don't like, in much the same way that Hillary taught Putin how to screw us using social media via the Arab Spring. The realignment of the Christian vote (the Catholics were on the left before contraception and abortion) then threw gasoline on that fire, and eliminated the influence of the libertarians that once kept the Christian right in line when it comes to legislating social issues.
Reagan and Ted Kennedy were once icons. Reagan's quote about "half a loaf is better than none at all," and Kennedy's "Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good," lead to regular order and governance. Competing for likes on social media and clicks in electronic media, which lead to fundraising dollars, leads to chaos. Both sides need to wake up, and vote for the deeply unsexy, nerdy policy wonks like Jim Cooper and Mike DeWine who believe in the governance thing.
I asked some of my, generally older, female friends about this in 2020 primaries as Anita Hill and Biden’s general behavior re women seemed far more of a hurdle for me than it was for them.
Part of it was who he was running against “anyone is better than Trump” and they really wanted a Democrat to win, part was his age/human weathervane abilites “it was different then, don’t think he’d do the same now”, part was his personal story “he really seems a nice guy who got on great with Obama, he clearly loves Jill and its so sad about his first wife”.
Motivated reasoning can be pretty powerful and all of us are vulnerable to it tbh.
Toffee_Loaf
Player Valuation: £1m
Seriously? Biden is like the Wizard of Oz. He's the candidate (and the President), but he likely has zero influence. We see this constantly with him saying something outlandish (in error) and then his White House staff countermanding the President and walking it back. They are that confident that doing this isn't an issue for them, but you try countermanding your boss and see what happens to you ... Biden and the Presidency is entirely controlled by figures behind the curtain that nobody sees or knows about and that have zero accountability - is that democratic?
- Status