He’s only unpopular because of bots, trolls, and the likes of fox “news”.
And a years-long campaign by Republicans to tap into people’s prejudices against old people. Never mind they’d struggle to name one actual policy position they’d disagree and haven’t bothered to learn of all the things they’d wholeheartedly support if they were just aware of them.
It’s funny how the standard by which we judge Biden is so high, and the standard for Trump is so low. Like… “oh wow, orange man form complete sentence, he’s really killin it” vs “omg Biden stumbled over his words and had one bad night, his candidacy is over”.
Biden had more than “a bad night” the dude looks like he’s aging out of the ability to stay awake for 90 minutes at a time.
You have completely bought into the long GOP build up of a fundamental lie. Congrats I guess.
Edit: The thing that makes the false GOP narrative of Biden being senile and incapable SO effective is that it taps into your own prejudices. None of us really want a senior citizen as president and many younger folks believe older people to be incapable of anything more than watching TV and playing bingo. This is easily disproven but the prejudice remains. So when his horrible debate performance confirms your bias, well… of course you run with it and ignore all other evidence. Never mind that the very next day he did a great and highly energetic campaign rally… never mind that 99% of the time Biden has been on point, articulate and rarely fucked up more than could be explained by a life-long speech impediment. Nope, you all want to believe so much that old people have no business as president (a point with which I agree) that the standard by which you judge them is not a standard you would ever apply to yourself.
Look, this is a terrible situation and the DNC is 100% responsible for fucking this up. Biden should never have sought a second term. But this is our awful reality right now and we have to deal with it in any way -that is available to us - that prevents a Trump 2nd term.
Criticize Biden all you want. But he’s not stepping down and there isn’t a good alternative this late in the game. The DNC fucked up by allowing him to run the first time and then again by not demanding he not seek re-election. Just like they fucked up by fucking over Sanders.
And yet… these are the cards we have and we’re not getting another hand. It sucks.
He fucked up. And the DNC fucked up by allowing him to run a second time (or a first, in my book). But people are human, shockingly. They do fuck up and they do say incoherent things (you’ll understand when you get older, lol) and I’d rather have someone who spews gobblygook once in a while than someone who lies incessantly and spews gobblygook all the time.
Show me an alternative. Show me a viable path forward that ensures a second Trump presidency doesn’t happen. If you haven’t got that then there’s really nothing more to discuss. We’ll all hold our noses and vote for Biden and then raise hell to get a more reasonable candidate in 2028. Because at least then there will be a 2028 election.
Can you help me understand what Biden meant when he shouted “We finally beat Medicare!” I found that confusing.
Have you never once in your life misspoken? Have you ever been in a super stressful situation where you knew you were being judged in every possible way by a large number of people? I confess, I have. And I have screwed up badly a number of times. Forgot what I was saying, said the wrong words… all kinds of things.
Thankfully, I was not judged on my stumbling over my words but by the substance of what I had to say and the totality of my contributions. I prefer to judge others similarly.
Gaslight, deny, deflect. Anything to avoid facing how fucked we are.
I didn’t say were weren’t fucked to some degree of fucked. But I’m also not gonna blow it so out of proportion that I’m paralyzed and do nothing. Or worse, cry and moan and cause others to do nothing. Literally people are taking one fuck up and forgetting everything else. It’s completely buying into the false narrative pushed by the GOP and ignores all the good Biden has done and the fact that 99% of his other speeches and debates have been completely fine. Many people have been… well, played.
The only reasonable course of action at this point is to stop whining, vote for Biden, and then raise hell to demand accountability from the DNC. Make it 100% clear that we will accept nothing less than a stellar candidate in 2028. At that point the danger from Trump will have largely passed and we can move forward.
Newsom is an extremely savvy political operator and will not run for several reasons, but mainly he knows he’s likely up next and needs to play nice with the DNC establishment. He doesn’t need to take chances on a run against a toxic candidate when he can run in 2028 and have a much much easier time. Likely he sees the consequences of a Trump 2nd term and knows the tide will swing dramatically toward a more progressive candidate.
IMO: Harris will never in a million years run against Biden but more importantly, as fucked up as it is, a huge segment of stupid 'Mericans will never vote for a woman. So neither Harris nor Whitmer are viable options at this five-alarm fire stage.
It’s not one mistake. It’s four years of obvious decline being put on stage where people have a harder time covering it up.
He’s an old man. Congrats on figuring that out.
As I can attest, older people in general are a little bumbly but that’s not a predictor of mental acuity or ability. It’s certainly not an indicator of dementia on it’s own.
I’ve watched many of his speeches, press conferences, etc. and I see little to no evidence of cognitive decline. What I do see is people buying into that narrative because, like all good propaganda, it taps right into their preexisting biases.
I can be out and not fear for my life. I can even marry. My partner now only rarely gets “gook” or “chink” yelled at them.
99.8% of the time when this stuff comes out of folks it’s because they are white and heterosexual and usually male.
For people secure in their white, hetero-normative privilege it’s understandable that they only care about things that affect them… and there isn’t all that much that affects them directly. But the truth is this is a VERY different world here in the US than when I was growing up. It’s now a world that despite the noise from the MAGA crowd I can exist comfortably and securely as opposed to having to hide in a closet.
Whenever I have this discussion with folks who aren’t gay or trans or BIPOC, it never occurs to them that there is a difference. Universally it turns out that since they aren’t affected by these huge cultural shifts, they also don’t look at the changes that make life easier for other groups. The simple fact that federal workers now have a $15 minimum wage means that a number of my peers now are not starving working for public lands agencies. That a number of labor laws have been enacted (including recently the non-compete thing) that makes discrimination against protected groups doesn’t affect people like you because you are not typically discriminated against. In some cases the pandemic relief for you folks was just a nice bonus to spend on luxuries, not groceries. The grants for schools didn’t matter because if you have kids they go to nice schools already.
I’m not going to argue with you - it’s impossible. But please understand that your incredibly narrow view of the world is not shared by those who have experienced this seismic shift over the last 2-3 decades.
Nice. I can’t even see your goal posts any more. You went from “there has been NO progress” to “well there has only been progress that matters to you”. Despite the fact that I literally pointed out instances where things have gotten better for many groups of people.
Edit: to not be cryptic, my hope was that you’d answer similarly… obviously. To me the issue is not the age difference in and of itself but how or if the relationship came to be because of the age difference and the issues of power and control that might imply regardless of the gender identity of the older person. Obviously, older men do typically have disproportionate power but not always.
And it was pointed out here that this guy did meet here when she was still in high school, so most likely very much a case of grooming.
But just in general I really take exception to the assumption that just because there is an age differential it’s a given that there is a power differential. Even though I agree broadly with what you say, these types of assumptions smack of morality police to me.
but everyone’s making up rules about what’s acceptable.
The hypocrisy for me is that folks want to dictate what is “morally acceptable” while objecting to other people’s wanting to dictate what is “morally acceptable”. In this case, and it all too common with Republicans generally, he did apparently groom her from a young age. But we can make a judgement based on that fact, not the fact of the age differential.
Give me a fucking break. Hillary was not a shit candidate. She’s arguably the most qualified candidate in recent elections, probably more so than Obama. And I don’t say that as someone who agrees with most of her policies but as someone who respects her intelligence and experience. She would have made an excellent president.
Leaving aside our broken system, she lost because she is a woman and a lot of people can’t stand that.
Or you know, maybe people staying home because they can’t support a genocide, the death of the nation or the comedy option of a dude who cheated on his wife so hard, while on heroin, as worms died in his brain of mercury poisoning…
I’m glad you have such a privileged life that you can afford to make such choices. Good for you! But many of us are not in that position and are really counting on not having an authoritarian regime hell bent on erasing us.
I have some bad news for you. It’s called “reality”.
So while you stamp you petulantly stamp your feet waiting for that big sweeping and most importantly instantaneous change to which you feel you are entitled, whole categories of people face an existential threat. It’s not all about you.
I do think they will be worse under turnip but I also believe that if we elect him, we absolutely deserve what’s coming.
I take it you are oblivious to the contradiction here?
Do you seriously not understand the implications of a Trump presidency for women, queer folk, transgender folk and minorities? The environment? Years of at least some progress on progressive policies? The minimum wage? Social Security? Democracy itself?
We don’t even have to speculate - they’ve literally told us what they are going to do.
this same argument has been made in every election of my life. I agree, and I’m sorry this this stupid country has it out for all minorities but I no longer have faith that scribbling in a little circle every 4 years is the medicine we need.
Once again. I’m glad you have the luxury of having this attitude. Because clearly the progress we’ve made doesn’t in any way affect you. Congrats.
If Trump gets elected and people like me are hunted down as devients, nobody can get safe abortions and thousands of transgender kids are denied the care they need… oh, and we end up at war with China while Israel does whatever it wants and the Ukraine is wiped off the map… I’ll be sure to congratulate you on your “making a difference”.
What galls me is not that you feel that voting makes no difference. I think that’s juvenile and so provably false but it’s a feeling I can at least empathize with. From a narrow uninformed perspective in a limited time frame, yeah, I suppose “progress” is so slow it may not appear to be happening.
No, what pisses me off is that you don’t listen to the people actually affected by this. This is so typically white male: ignoring any other input but your own because hey, problem? what problem? What solution? Doesn’t affect me!
Here you literally have at least one person who will be, unlike you, very much affected by another Republican administration and all the justices that get appointed as a result. This person is saying to you that this one simple thing you can do - which costs you nothing - will help them out. This person is saying that actually it matters to them and makes a difference to them, their family and their friends.
But you are so secure in your privilege that you choose to say “nope, you are wrong, I’m right… nothing I can do here”. Not even a “hmmm, maybe I should look into this more and ask others”.
Bill Pruitt, a former producer for The Apprentice whose NDA just expired after 20 years, writes in Slate that Donald Trump used the n-word during the production of the show — and there are tapes of him doing it.
alt-textIt blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang). Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via...
Voting for the democrats isn’t saving lives though.
How do you prove or disprove this?
If the democrats won’t step in to stop them then we don’t have a reason to vote for them anymore
Do you not understand how our system of government works? Or do you just want some sort of left-leaning fascism? Admittedly, Bernie would make a great benevolent dictator… but that’s exactly the kind of thing that bites you in the ass eventually.
The entire idea that this is some child’s game is the problem
It’s precisely that you can’t wrap your head around the fact that this is NOT a child’s game where you get to personally pick - for everyone else - the one issue that matters to you this week that is the problem.
The pure fucking irony of you saying that when everything I just suggested is based in existing law and precedent.
LOL. You are clearly ignorant of the practical implications of such things and more generally of how politics works in real terms.
Every action a president takes either gains or loses political capital. The president does not operate in a vacuum… indeed our entire system of government is designed to have checks and balances and specifically to keep the authority of a president confined.
I must say, you have such an incredibly simplistic view of this… it’s quite stunning. You literally sound like a MAGAt, begging for authoritarian control.
Okay, Biden isn’t popular. But his policies sure are. (www.washingtonpost.com)
President Biden’s policy agenda is incredibly popular, much more popular than his opponent’s. But Biden the man? Not so much....
Stay Mad, Tankies (lemmy.world)
Well played Lower Decks (lemmy.world)
A Majority of Voters Backing Biden Are Mostly Motivated by Stopping Trump — Poll (truthout.org)
Yup (lemmy.world)
Child steals the show on House floor making faces as Rep rails against Trump case (www.independent.co.uk)
Bombshell Report Reveals Team Trump Is Rewarding Key Trial Witnesses (newrepublic.com)
A new report shows witnesses who testify at Donald Trump’s criminal trials are receiving some very nice financial perks....
'Old and decrepit' Trump rant exposed him as 'a shadow of what he was four years ago' (www.rawstory.com)
President Joe Biden calls on LGBTQ+ community ‘to wave their flags of pride high’ this June (www.advocate.com)
Biden camp warns Trump could still get re-elected with ‘unhinged campaign of revenge’ (www.independent.co.uk)
For 20 Years, I Couldn’t Say What Donald Trump Did on the Set of The Apprentice. Now I Can. (slate.com)
Bill Pruitt, a former producer for The Apprentice whose NDA just expired after 20 years, writes in Slate that Donald Trump used the n-word during the production of the show — and there are tapes of him doing it.
📄 rule (sh.itjust.works)
alt-textIt blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang). Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via...
Trump told donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests, deport demonstrators | Speaking to wealthy donors behind closed doors, he said that he supports Israel’s right to continue “its war on terror. (wapo.st)