Edit: It turns out that a once-in-hundred-years pandemic rocked the world so hard, and Trump fumbled it so badly, that that one factor lead to Biden winning by the narrowest of margins. If just 42,000 people in key states had voted the other way, Biden would have lost. But he didn’t. So the most garbage candidate on the democratic side is now the president of the United States.
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Original post:
Today, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the US democratic primary election for president of the United States. It’s a dark day. So dark that I feel compelled to give context for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up. The amount of corruption and the unevenness of the playfield is truly disgusting.
Joe Biden
But first, Joe Biden. To say Biden is a garbage candidate is putting it really lightly. He is the literal worst possible choice that the democrats had available, checking every box you’d want in order to lose an election. He has no chance against Trump and is the least electable, most risky choice, yet was sold to us on the strength of the exact opposite: that he is somehow the most electable and safest. There’s so much bad to say about him that I’m going to have to just give quick highlights. If you plan to vote for him, you should know these things.
Sexual Assault
Biden has credible allegations of sexual assault against him by Tara Reade, for starters. It’s possible you are not aware of that because, incredibly bizarrely, there has been almost total radio silence across the entire mainstream media about this. The total lack of coverage by established media contrasted with the explosion of talk about it on social media brings into sharp focus just how corrupt the coverage of this election has been. If you think for a single second that similar allegations against Sanders would not have been covered wall-to-wall on every cable news channel, you’re not being honest. It’s obvious and conspicuous the protection Biden is getting. We are not seeing from the media a good-faith effort to inform the public on issues facing the candidates. We’re seeing mainstream media with a specific agenda, and that agenda is helped buy burring this story right now.
If you have heard about the allegations and think they don’t count because Ms. Reade wrote a positive thing about Russia once, I’ll remind you that that does not make sexual assault ok. And if you think that she is a “Russian operative” because of that, I’ll remind you that actual Russian operatives would not write things about Russia that could expose them as being Russian operatives. The point is, her claims are credible, and while I don’t know if they are true, we should believe women in general and take their claims seriously. This isn’t an isolated incident with Biden either. It’s a pattern of being way too handsy for decades and several incidents that go way past the line, including a literal sexual assault.
The sexual assault situation alone, regardless of anything else, should be disqualifying for him.
Mental Decline
Next, Biden’s mental state is clearly in decline. It’s uncomfortable to talk about that because my intent is not to shame him over it or to be mean-spirited about it. It’s obvious though. He is a gaff machine. He kind of always fumbled words, so that alone isn’t the issue at hand. It’s that the severity has drastically increased. Saying the wrong name of the state he’s in during an important campaign speech, mixing up which was his wife and which was his daughter in another. Getting lost in his own points quite often. His handlers know this and have used a “hide the candidate” approach, correctly strategizing that simply allowing him to speak is the worst thing he can do.
A person with his kind of mental decline is not a good choice for President of the United States, to put it lightly. But even if it was somehow “ok,” it will definitely not be ok during the general election. Trump will easily decimate him on this, probably just letting Biden ramble and get lost in a point and jump in with “Joe do you need a break? I know you’re not all there.” Yes, I recognize that’s rich coming from Trump. The point is that Biden’s mental unfitness for this job is going to be a serious issue (and one that NO other democratic candidate had) come time for general election debates.
Biden’s mental state alone, regardless of any other issue, is disqualifying.
Medicare-for-All vs Paying-More-for-People-to-Die
Next, Biden outrageously does not support medicare-for-all (M4A). Outrageous, you ask? Yes. This issue would take multiple articles to fully disentangle, because the nonstop lies about this policy from almost all sides have been truly historic. I’ve never seen a policy so universally lied about, so it’s entirely possible you are simply unaware of what is even going on with it.
Under M4A, you have no premiums, no deductibles, no co-pays, and no point-of-care costs of any kind. The mainstream media has done its very best to hide this very basic fact from you. Ok so it would be “free.” Surely there are big catches. Like you wouldn’t get to choose your doctor, and it can’t really be free I mean what about ambulance rides, what about cancer treatment? You would be able to choose your doctor much more freely than now, in fact. Any doctor you currently visit, you could still visit, then in addition to that ALL other doctors become “in-network”. So you would have vastly more choice. Ambulance is covered, cancer treatment, dental, vision, practically everything. It is far superior coverage to anything you could possibly have right now.
Even if you believe you currently have “good medical coverage”, it’s not as good as that. Even if, somehow, “everything” were covered by your current insurance, you still have a for-profit insurance company who could simply deny your claim on a life-saving treatment you needed, at any time, if they felt like it “wasn’t worth it.” But not with M4A.
Also, tens of thousands of Americans die every year as a result of not having medical coverage. And TENS OF MILLIONS of Americans have no health insurance. This is horribly immoral, and we’re the only developed country in the world (if we can even be called that) that simply lets people die when they can’t pay. We also pay massively more for care than any of those countries. Something like twice as much per capita yet still are far behind the rest of the world.
So sure, M4A is objectively vastly superior in the coverage (covers everything, not subject to whims of a for-profit company to deny you treatment) and it’s free of any premiums, copays, deductibles, and point-of-care costs. And it involves reasonable drug prices rather than insane ones. But it must be paid for somehow, and we can’t afford it. Actually, it SAVES TWO TRILLION DOLLARS over 10 years. The leeches and vultures of our disgusting system have siphoned off so much money (from multi-levels of bureaucracy, from being able to massively raise prices, from lobbyist changing the laws to make it a disgusting amount of profiteering) that we’d actually save money by just giving everyone healthcare.
ANY candidate who opposed medicare-for-all is saying that tens of thousands of people dying every year from preventable things is fine with them, even though letting them die will cost trillions more, because they really really really want their donors to continue profiteering off those deaths. It’s disgusting and outrageous. I personally can’t imagine ever voting for any candidate ever again for the rest of my life who so openly advocates deaths as these “centrists” who oppose medicare-for-all.
Joe Biden opposes medicare-for-all. Why? He has ties in the form of major campaign advisors who were lobbyists for the healthcare insurance industry. Outrageous corruption and a callous disregard for human life. Joe Biden recently shockingly went so far as to say that if he were president and somehow, against all odds, the senate passed medicare-for-all, that he would VETO it. Similar to what a cartoon villain would do.
Also factor this in: despite a historic level of lies and propaganda from monied interests specifically designed to deceive you about medicare for all, the MAJORITY of the country is still in favor of it. Before the global pandemic of the corona virus—before that!—it was the #1 issue to democratic voters with something like 80-84% approval. And 55%-60% nationwide if I remember correctly. So it’s not a centrist stance to say we should pay trillions of dollars needlessly to have tens of thousands of people die in our current system. Actually, the centrist stance is M4A and Biden has a fringe stance that is deeply unpopular.
Joe Biden’s opposition to medicare-for-all is, by itself, absolutely disqualifying, disgusting, and morally monstrous.
Lying About Civil Rights Activism
Next, Joe Biden has shocking history of lying. Yes, I’m aware that Trump is likely a literal pathological liar. Let’s not use whataboutism here. Trump being bad is a separate issue and right now, we’re examining why Joe Biden is a garbage candidate.
Over 30 years ago, Biden lied repeatedly about his civil rights record. He lied about which specific black leaders he met with, which churches he went to in his activism efforts. He lied about going to Selma, and so on. Then in 1987, called out on these lies, he admitted that these things were not true. He admitted then that he had not actually done any activism at all, hadn’t gone to those places or met with those people at that point in his life, but that his time as a lifeguard in a predominantly black neighborhood had given him perspective on the movement. I’m sure it did. But that’s not a reason to lie about it.
You are probably thinking, so what if he lied 30 years ago? Fair enough, people change, but how about this? Starting last year he began repeating the same lies from back then, dozens of times at dozens of speaking engagements. The height of his latest lies were when he outrageously claimed to have been arrested in South Africa when he was trying to visit Nelson Mandela, an event that did not happen. He then compounded this lie by saying later on, Mandela visited congress and thanked Biden for trying to visit him in prison, in the previous lie. The size of these lies is staggering. The lack of coverage on it in mainstream media is very telling too. This is straight up stolen valor that diminishes the work actual activists have done.
The outrageous lies Biden has told incessantly about his civil rights record are, by themselves, disqualifying.
Miscellaneous Other Disqualifiers
Honestly I could go on a long time. I’ve given at least a few broad strokes. Sexual assault allegations, mental decline, fringe and immoral and impractical stance on healthcare—during a global pandemic, and insane lies about civil rights. How about a few more quick bullet points:
Biden was the single strongest driving force behind making 94% of the Bush era tax cuts for the rich become permanent.
Everything about Anita Hill.
Biden has blood on his hands from his Iraq war votes, then lied about his support of the war later.
Biden voted to let states overturn Roe v. Wade and said that decision (which allows abortions) “goes too far.”
These things make Biden unfit to lead, but more to the point right now, they make him amazingly weak as a candidate. He has an overwhelming number of disqualifying weaknesses, and he no actual policies that generate enthusiasm. He is not a inspiring on climate change. He is not inspiring on gun reform or worker’s rights. He is anti-inspiring on the #1 issue facing voters right now of healthcare. The thing that probably should be the #1 issue is that money in politics has deeply corrupted the system into one of legalized bribery. He is overtly for this corruption though, both using it and arguing in favor of it.
I don’t know how else to tell you this: he can’t win. None of this is news. He was always the least electable candidate and still is. Why, then, is he the nominee at all? To say “because that’s who the voters chose” is itself a deception. That’s not a fair characterization of what happened.
Why Did This Happen?
In my opinion, there are three main reasons this disastrously bad loser of a candidate appears to have won the nomination. I will tell you the reasons, and I think this makes a whole lot of difference in who is at fault here. When the loser loses, be careful who you blame. It’s really easy to blame the wrong people, which then would actually be doing work on behalf of the true guilty parties.
1) The Media.
The mainstream media (CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPO, etc) have always had an establishment bias and hated progressives. But the masks really came off this time around. Months and months of non-stop negative coverage of Sanders, in bad faith, with no real basis, was beyond anything it had done before. WaPo doing 16 separate hit pieces on Sanders in the span of 16 hours. MSNBC manufacturing “news” segments simply to smear him such as “body language experts” saying Sanders moved in a mean way during a speech once, Chris Matthews saying no one should vote for Sanders because the real metric should be who would help you on the side of the road if you had trouble and he says Biden definitely would but Sanders wouldn’t. There’s way too much to cover here. It was insanely biased wall-to-wall smears while claiming to be neutral and unbiased.
These smears were almost all on things unrelated to policy (with the exception of medicare-for-all, which was just lied about) because there is no good way to attack Sanders on policy. His policies are actually super basic, standard in the rest of the world, and incredibly popular with American voters when you poll them issue-by-issue. So the non-stop media attacks had to be on manufactured things like the false narrative of “Bernie Bros” (note: same narrative we now know Hillary Clinton’s campaign planted in numerous press outlets in 2016).
The establishment democrats, donors, and elites in media were acting to keep their “good thing” going. Sanders plan to end corruption in the DNC, end corporate donations to candidates (which are bribes), put and to the whole scam of high paid consultants who leech off the system, and worst of all, to tax the rich fairly…absolutely terrified these people. All these elites just happened, coincidentally, to act maximally against the candidate who would tax them while propping up any establishment candidate who could maintain the status quo. So much for “news” coverage.
I can’t emphasize enough how extreme this stuff was. Sanders historic wins in the early primaries were downplayed universally by the mainstream media. Biden’s wins were trumpeted to build as much momentum as possible by the mainstream media. This stuff had a huge effect on older voters, who really ended up controlling the outcome. About 70% of voters over 45 years old favored Biden in this last set of primary elections while about 70% of those under 45 favored Sanders (but the youth vote didn’t show up in nearly big enough numbers). It was social media vs the outrageous bias of establishment media, and this time, establishment media won, using over-the-top propaganda. Imagine if there had been even remotely fair coverage. Instead, a huge number of Americans were told over and over and over and over again by cable news that Biden was safe and electable (another way to avoid talking about his deeply unpopular policies) while Sanders is “radical” and bad in every possible way.
2) The DNC.
Members of the DNC were FAR more afraid of Sanders than Trump, and for good reason. If Trump wins, their jobs will remain similar, and so will their gravy train. Sanders, on the other hand, made it clear he will end their corruption. He would reshape the party on day 1 of being the nominee by banning corporate donations and it would also be necessary (really really necessary) to outright fire most of them and replace them with people who aren’t part of that corruption. Their very jobs depended on opposing Sanders and wow did it show.
The DNC has a charter with a pledge of impartiality, which is an absolute joke. We know—for a fact—that they massively violated their own charter in 2016. Leaked e-mails from Wikileaks show that Debbie Wasserman Schultz (head of the DNC at the time) intentionally gave Hillary Clinton the debate questions ahead of time, but not Sanders. They show that she intentionally scheduled the low number of debates and their times in order to favor Hillary Clinton as much as possible. I think it was something like 94% of the money that flowed through the DNC at the time actually went through Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Not to the campaign, but she acted as a clearinghouse for DNC money in general. That means that downballot candidates across the country, who need DNC money to support their campaigns, were actually beholden to Clinton in that situation. An insane situation and advantage. The super-delegate system is also insane, and exists only as a thumb-on-scales cheat the subvert the will of the voters, and DNC used it maximally to undermine Sanders and favor Clinton.
Oh and by the way, in 2016, Debbie Wasserman Schultz transitioned from head of the DNC directly to being on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, just to rub it in our faces how much of a farce the “impartiality” clause of the DNC’s charter really was. They have no interest in picking the candidate the people want.
Back to super delegates, the DNC has less insane super delegate rules now, so it now puts the thumb-on-scales less than before with that particular mechanism (why do it at all??). But more to the point, you don’t have to wonder if the DNC massively favored Biden and stacked the deck absurdly much to prop him up. They did it overtly this time. They openly discussed how the hell they can band together and stop Sanders once he was doing well. There was a massive coordinated effort on the part of the DNC, going against their own charter, to torpedo a candidate that the people wanted because it would be bad for their donor class and for their own jobs.
THIS move is the main reason for the democrats losing in 2016. Do not go blaming someone who stayed home when given a choice between Clinton (a deeply flawed candidate and one of the most unpopular in history) and Trump (uh, same). Instead, the blame should go on the corruption of the DNC with an assist from the mainstream media that CREATED that situation.
We’re now in the exact same situation with the exact same bad actors (mainstream media and DNC) causing it again. In an actual fair contest, Sanders would be the nominee. Instead, they made it as unfair as they possibly could to prop up a candidate who will lose, who has numerous disqualifying flaws, and who no one is excited about. The idea that voters will turn out for Biden is laughable. And when they don’t, don’t blame them. Eye on the ball: the DNC is at fault. Mainstream media is at fault.
3) Election fraud.
Regarding voting machines, it's difficult to reach any conclusion other than enormous election fraud via voter machines flipping votes when you look at this data. The point being if you try hard to explain this on-the-level, I literally don't know how you can.
What it’s saying is that in every county where there’s no accountability in votes, no way to verify the votes are legit with a paper trail, Biden won by a lot more than exit polls would predict. In every county where there is a real trail to verify votes, Biden didn’t come out way ahead of expectations, and Sanders did a bit better than expected. Further, that the magnitude and frequency of this is so huge as to make basically impossible to be chance. SOMETHING is going on. And further, that if you try to come up with non-corrupt explanations to tie it to some underlying correlation, the only things people can come up with would have run the other way, not the way that favors Biden massively.
While I can’t definitely say there’s election fraud, it sure looks bad. And the “joke” here is that who do you even accuse? In other words, “who benefits?” Biden’s camp does, of course. But that doesn’t mean they did it. The republicans would benefit hugely, putting up the literal weakest possible candidate in the general election against their man. Putin would also benefit. Russian hackers trying to sew discord could hardly do better than making the weakest candidate win the democratic primary so that Trump can keep doing constant crazy things. Sadly, the DNC is the most likely entity to have flipped the votes on those particular voting machines. But I don’t know.
The End Game
There was definitely a massive effort to subvert the fair election process here by the DNC and the media. Possibly election fraud. But put yourselves in the shoes of the DNC and think of the end game. Clearly their most important goal, above all else, was get rid of Sanders (NOT to beat Trump, that’s a distant second for them). But once they accomplish that...surely they know Biden will just lose?
One possibility is they are incredible incompetent idiots and that’s the end. Yeah, he’ll lose, the end.
Another possibility is the plan all along was put in a vice president running mate who somehow massively changes the game enough that a win is possible. Maybe.
A third possibility, and the one that seems most likely to me, is that from day 1 of this sham, it was always clear to them Biden was unable to win the general election. The “electability” thing was a disingenuous scam. The real end game is to crush Sanders, then at the actual convention, say that, surprise, Biden’s health is declining so we’ll need to pick someone else. Then they will pick someone else, ANY non-Sanders person they can find, and whoever it is has a better chance of beating Trump than the Biden. Is that person Cuomo? Is it Michelle Obama? Is it Bloomberg? Is it the ultimate insane bad play of Hillary Clinton? I don’t know. But I have to think these people are not so stupid as actually plan to run Biden.
Conclusion
Biden is going to get really low turnout, and that’s the fault of the terrible entities that put us in this situation. It’s THEIR fault. Fixing this in the far future will come from taking THEIR power away. Fixing this is not telling some random female voter who couldn’t stomach voting for yet another sexual assaulter that it’s HER fault. Fixing it is not telling some dude who says if your’e not for medicare-for-all in a pandemic, then he can’t vote for your basically murderous healthcare stance. Fixing this is not about shaming voters. This is an extreme situation where media and the DNC bent over backwards to do what effectively screws us all. Hold THEM accountable.
Let’s try to build up alternative media who is outside of the incredible bias shown by the mainstream media. Support The Young Turks. They are completely clear what their personal opinions are, unlike every cable news host who claims to be neutral (then goes all in on propaganda). They provide very good and informative news coverage. They call out good and bad moves on a case by case basis, regardless of “which side” did the moves. They constantly show clips of insanely biased coverage from Fox news AND from so-called left-leaning mainsteam news. They are not “the Fox news of the left.” They are the opposite. They are good good faith actors in world of bad faith coverage.
They are also the biggest such alternative organization so they are our best hope at pushing back on this problem with the media. We should want them to grow and the power of cable news to wane. Growing any other such news organization (similar to TYT) that’s a real challenger would also be great. Right now though, TYT is the is the main actually challenger in play, and they’re doing good.
Here’s a link to be a TYT member. Yeah that’s an affiliate link, but it’s not about that. Sign up without that link if you even barely doubt my motives or sincerity. Or watch their coverage for free, they offer a lot of it, just a lot more for members.
Regarding reducing the power of the DNC, your best bet is to support the candidacy of any Justice Democrats you can. They are a group who pledges not to take corporate PAC money so they can actually represent the people instead of donors. Several of them are already in congress right now (AOC and The Squad for example). If they had greater numbers, they could steer the ship away from corruption.
And no matter how popular any given policy is (for example, federal background checks on guns poll at like 90-94% approval yet can’t even get a vote in the senate), nothing will happen until the money-in-politics problem is solved. It deeply corrupts everything to the point that government serves lobbyists and donors (in that case, the NRA) rather than the people. If you want to do something about that beyond supporting Justice Democrats, look into Wolf PAC.
Should you vote for Biden? I sure wouldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t. The fatal shot has already been fired, and I care more about holding the actual guilty to account.
