Election 2020: Ridin' with Biden

Ridin' with Biden: Part Two

By Christopher Sloce
Image by Marc Nozell

Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to Ridin’ with Biden. It’s been a bad week for the big guy, since he got burnt so bad by Kamala Harris at the debate she paid a prisoner exactly five cents to put him out. A lot of what the week has amounted to is an attempt to stop the bleeding since he took one on the chin.

There’s one thing I’m not writing about today: his CNN review where he took pot-shots at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I don’t believe AOC is above criticism by any means, and she’s somebody I think is boiler-plate good with some glaring flaws. That being said, there’s a lot to take in about the slam, and I’ll just give you a general prediction of Presidential reactions. AOC is good real estate if you want to show off your progressive bonafides, even if you don’t generally give a shit. By attacking AOC, Biden opens himself up to more attacks. A smarter politician would look to neutralize her by paying her credence, patting her on the head, and then ratfucking her influence behind the scenes. Not only do you support a Young Woman Showing How America Is Great and Anyone Can Make A Change, you yourself won’t make any changes.

BERNIE SANDERS: Will somehow awkwardly tie it in during a campaign speech that reflects he generally means well but slick he ain’t.

ELIZABETH WARREN: Slick, won’t say anything because it gets her off message.

AMY KLOBUCHAR: Won’t do anything because AOC once made her Negroni wrong and she sentenced the closest intern to the boats for it. 

MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: Will criticize Joe Biden for slamming a young woman and show it proves he’s a denizen of the Black Lodge.

BETO O’ROURKE: He’ll look to see whatever else does first, then play the middle, and remind you he likes Fugazi.

​JOHN DELANEY: too busy drinking a can of spaghetti-o’s.

PETE BUTTGIEG: I have no idea, but it’ll continue to piss me off.

KAMALA HARRIS: The thing I said above? She’ll probably do that. 

EVERYONE ELSE WHO IS RUNNING: Who gives a shit? They’re jobbers that the obnoxious politics stans of twitter will set aflame like effigies to say their candidate beat out the Biggest Democratic Field in history and thus they deserve the crown. We’d be better served having Bozo the Clown dolls sitting on those podiums. 

I’ll have more later, but a good politician reads the room and then bends their will privately. Joe can’t do that. 

Harris V. Biden

Busing remains the tradition that haunts the brains of the running. So let’s check in on how that’s going, and how it plays specifically into the Harris v. Biden war. 

Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s Deputy Campaign Manager, tweeted that “It's disappointing that Senator Harris chose to distort Vice President Biden's position on busing — particularly now that she is tying herself in knots trying not to answer the very question she posed to him!” in response to Kamala saying that busing shouldn’t be federally mandated (more on that in a minute). The repartee from Ian Sams, Kamala Harris’s Press Secretary, was “VP Biden said: “Who the hell do we think we are that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?” He called busing an “asinine concept.” C’mon. Y’all are better than this.”

Not only do we see Kate Bedingfield taking on a sort of Trumpian cadence (disappointing, the exclamation point, the immediate finger of guilt), we also see Ian Sams deploying ‘y’all’ in a Twitterian gambit. Upon a cursory (read: I googled him) look at his twitter, I see he’s also said ‘lit’. I don’t think those are bad words at all, but if you’re the press flak for a candidate who fought a decision by the Supreme Court to release prisoners because California jails were so crowded because you needed the labor, sit your ass down.  I hope this gets people to realize the idea of a ‘progressive prosecutor’ is a bunch of bullshit, but that’d require the white middle class who are vocally liberal to care about anything other than Saturday Night Live and for everyone else to not be tied to a railroad track, hoping the Blue Comet at least spares our heads. 

I’d like to institute a rule here: I’ll call it the Ellen-Dab ruling of 2019. It goes as follows: your appropriation of black culture is fair game to get called out by me, a white guy, if you supported laws and institutions that inadvertently affect black people. It might not be my fight, but because I recognize it as pandering, I’m going to wade into the waters of looking too woke by half in calling you out. This is closely related to the Cardi B rule that I also invented, which is any politician who mentions Cardi B did not support SESTA-FOSTA. 

But I digress. The issue of busing and any numbers that people might throw out at you ignores the resistance to busing and the fact you can’t put facts and figures on justice. And even though I’m no great fan of the state, as long as it exists, it might as well integrate schools. 

Always Read a News Story to the End 

The CEO of Paramount Jim Gianopulos has lined up to help Joe after, like I mentioned last week, he lost the support of Tom McInerney, who’s a long-time Democratic bundler. 

Let’s talk about reading the news. I think it goes without saying you have a decent handle on my politics, which, we’ll say for posterity’s sake, are the left of the Democratic party’s. However, I have a subscription to one newspaper: The Financial Times. The Pink ‘Un takes the long-view on most things and doesn’t get caught up in meaningless personality politics. Its entire function is, at the end of the day, what will this do to the markets. You can imagine very rarely it talks about Donald Trump tweeting and instead how the tariffs he put on China lead Japan to consider dialing back their commitment to the Paris Accords. 

Everything is propaganda. You may not think it is, but it is. However, most of the mainstream papers don’t print outright falsehoods about figures. What I’d be willing to guess is the party line is best represented in what the headline says. I’m drawing from anecdotal evidence, but to my understanding, when someone once asked Noam Chomsky how he got his news, he told them he read the New York Times until the end of the article. Most newspapers bank on you reading the headline, getting into a lather, and sharing. 

That’s how you’d miss that, sure, the CEO of Paramount is there to help out Joe Biden, but you’d also miss that, earlier in the year, he gave $2,700 dollars to the Kamala Harris campaign and that Governor Andrew Cuomo, who around 58 percent of New Yorkers think he shouldn’t run for a fourth term, is willing to lend his financing network (yes I know, the New York Post is a right wing rag, but it’s linking to a poll by Siena College).

 We talked about fundraising last week as well, and I’d like to go ahead and nail it in a little further: I would be willing to bet if you asked an equal split of average people who voted last Presidential election should elections be publicly funded, I’d imagine the resounding majority would say yes. Donald Trump didn’t win because there was a secret network of Objectivists in the United States, but because it seemed like he would fight politics as usual, whether he would. Joe Biden looks like politics as usual.

As for Jim Gianopulos, hell, you might as well cover your bases. 

JOE, JOE, AND VIDEOTAPE 

If you’re inclined to watch a video of somebody talking out of two sides of their mouth, here’s a video of Joe Biden supporting busing, which was the only thing that got him out of the bed in the morning during the seventies, other than playing croquet at Sen. Alligator Crawdaddy’s [R-LA] converted plantation house. The bill being debated during this video would have severely limited the state’s ability to use courts to use busing to desegregate schools. To battle the possibility it would pass, a filibuster was embarked on by several Northern democrats that would strip anti-busing language from the bill. The filibuster failed and the bill passed. 

Joe Biden was quoted as saying “I don't like filibusters, I have not been supportive of filibusters in my nine years in the Senate, used by either liberals or conservatives.” Witnesses say the moment he realized he disliked filibustering is when he sounded out the word too long. 

The Most Important Thing is to Never Let Joe Biden Talk

Joe Biden’s best strategy for winning this thing is to do a slideshow of a bunch of those intolerable memes where him and Barack Obama rap out “Nothin’ But A G Thang” or whatever, because he cannot talk. 

First up, not chronologically, was this fun little anecdote trotted out at a fundraiser, about how “During his remarks, Biden said five years ago people at a business meeting in the city would have let someone making "fun of a gay waiter" get away with it, prompting people to shout, "Not in Seattle!" per a pool report of the event.” I imagine Joe was probably talking about himself getting thrown out of a Friendly’s, but more importantly he ignored the simple rule that you should never challenge a liberal on their piety. Anything where they might be catapulted back to a pre-woke phase is like waving a cross at a vampire. The Democrat version of “Amazing Grace” would just be “Now I see” shouted until it sounds like Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”. 

But let’s talk about his other big dribbling this weekend: saying that ““We’ve got to recognize that kid wearing a hoodie may very well be a poet laureate, and not a gang banger.” This goes beyond Joe being a dumbass and into the “Lock the SOBS up” Joe of yore before everyone thought an Onion article was real life. 

Doesn’t a gang banger deserve life? Doesn’t a gang banger have a mother? Should we let the police just round them up? When you start peeling just behind the surface of our status quo you find more monstrosity than you’d care to admit; a wall chewed up with carpenter ants. 

I wonder what Kendrick Lamar, who recently received a Pulitzer Prize for Damn. would say. Or even somebody like Freddie Gibbs, whose album Bandana, has been the one album I’ve downloaded in full to my phone in forever. The writing on a song like “Cataracts” combined with the rapping and the sample together makes a song that so clearly evokes a victory after all the mess a life can have. It was rapped by a former Vice Lord. Bandana sits pretty at 87% on Metacritic, meaning a plurality of music critics agree it’s great. 

For most of the white middle class, art is something you build towards and have to earn your right to make by going through the academy and proving your worth instead of a communication of spirit, of triumph and failure, that is a synthesis of experience and technical ability combined to express that experience. No wonder Joe thinks the gang banger and the poet laureate are a twain that can never meet.