Rejoice, For the 2028 Presidential Campaign Is About to Begin!

What more is there to say?  I don't think it's just my advancing age that has made this election cycle seem worse than its predecessors.  If so much weren't at stake, it could have been entertaining: the progressive deterioration of Biden and Trump on live television, the antics of party and personal loyalists as reality kept throwing banana peels in the path of their dreams, the incompetence of most of the Beltway news media, the fecklessness of administration spokespeople trying to defend the indefensible, and so on and on.  Watching State Department spokesperson Matt Miller smirk helplessly as he runs interference for Israeli atrocities, or White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre roll her eyes like a bored teenager at impertinent questions would strain credibility of satire, but it's all real, which makes it no fun at all.

Some Biden dead-enders are still fuming that "They stabbed that man in the forehead," though most quickly jumped on the Harris bandwagon.  I still see some complaining that Harris was 'forced' on the voters without a primary, though the immediate flood of support she received, both verbal and monetary, ought to be evidence enough that there was massive uneasiness about Biden at least among the Democratic rank and file before he was pried loose from his candidacy.  Some continued to lie for months that it was too late to replace Biden's name with Harris's on the ballots in various states, though this was propaganda from the Trump campaign.  Even funnier were MAGA complaints about all the campaign material with Biden's name on it that had become useless overnight - all that money wasted, so unfair!

Myself, I felt enormous relief when Biden finally abdicated.  I was not, and still am not, an enthusiast for Harris.  Her choice of Tim Walz as running mate was probably her best high-profile move.  I think it's fair to call her handling of opposition to US support of Israel a misstep, though it's impossible to say how it will affect the election, especially since Trump is even worse on Israel/Palestine than she and Biden have been. Among her supporters there's a tendency to talk as though criticism and opposition come only from Arab-Americans and Muslims, though that is certainly not true.

I think the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling, though again it's impossible to say by how much.  One thing that sticks with me is that, in the small town where I live, whose government is dominated by Republicans, the local GOP office did not have a Trump sign in its window until he secured the nomination: instead there was a De Santis sign, which was removed when he ended his campaign.  For several weeks, the only signs in the window were downticket candidates.  I saw fewer Trump-Vance signs than Harris-Walz signs around town until the past week or so.  This bespeaks a lack of enthusiasm for Trump in an area where I expected him to be much more popular.

The abortion issue is going to be important, and may bode well for Democrats at all levels. That's been clear since the 2022 midterms, and Republicans are running scared.  Even Trump is trying to distance himself from it, which isn't going to win over many voters and has alienated some forced-birther Republicans.

I wanted to write this before Election Day, just out of guilt for not having weighed in before.  One thing that reinforced my sloth was that when I looked at my posts during previous election cycles, I saw that I'd said before everything I wanted to say this time.  But I feel bad because in the future I won't be able to look at what I've written this year as a kind of journal, which I can do for campaigns in 2008 and later.  I won't be following Election Night coverage this time, any more than I have in years past.  One previous post I do want to refer to concerns the likelihood that we won't know who's won for several days.  I remember that this maddened many mainstream journalists in 2020, and it's likely to be true this time around as well.  But we'll see, and one lesson we all should have learned this year is that events can surprise us.  However, I don't think most people have learned that lesson at all; many are determined to know what will happen, what we can expect, in advance anyway.

One prediction I will make with some confidence, though: as they wait impatiently for the results to come in, commentators will be asking: What does this mean for 2028?

Political Fluidity

A reader sent me the link to this good takedown of Neera Tanden, posted before she abandoned her quest to be head of the Office of Management and Budget.  He commented (referring to Biden, of course), "He's already worse than you expected :) "

Well, no.  While it's painful to have to admit it, I actually expected Biden to be a lot worse.  That doesn't mean I think he's good: his foreign policy moves have been terrible overall: dragging his feet on re-entering the JCPOA, continuing Trump's murderous support of a would-be dictator in Venezuela (though to be fair, Trump merely continued and escalated Obama's and Bush's policy there), illegally bombing Syria.  I'm unhappy that he let the $15 minimum wage go, and that he lied about the $2000 stimulus payment, and I'm unhappy not only about his patronage appointment of Neera Tanden but of Pete Buttigieg and Anthony Blinken.

But -- and this is a significant but -- he held firmer on the $1.9 trillion "rescue" package than I expected, he's reversed some of Trump's worst executive orders, he endorsed unionization not only for Amazon workers but for all workers.  While he shrank the pool of recipients for the remaining stimulus payments, the payments will not be $1400 per household but $1400 per person: families of four will get $5600.  It looks like the rescue bill could pass this week.  At the moment it looks like we have a chance at the elimination of the filibuster, and Bernie Sanders and others will keep pushing on the $15 minimum wage -- it doesn't seem that Biden is the obstacle on that.

It occurred to me that a lot of the derision over the idea that progressives would push Biden to the left was misconceived.  Success wouldn't mean that Biden would join the Democratic Socialists, or that his every move would be leftist.  Leftists have been disagreeing vehemently about what they wanted Biden and the Congressional Dems to do, so it's not obvious what a leftist Biden would choose to do. Pushing Biden to the left means pressuring him not to surrender to Blue MAGA / centrist (let alone Republican pressure), and that has largely succeeded.  He simply brushed aside the Senate GOP's "compromise" $600 billion stimulus package. More and more Democrats are recognizing that Biden's bill, contrary to GOP whining, is "bipartisan," for a majority of Republican voters support its provisions even if the GOP elites do not.  He didn't listen to Larry Summers's predictions of doom.  He seems to be supporting the next big Congressional bill to protect voting rights.  I really did not expect even this much from him.

Which doesn't mean it's enough, or that I'm going to relax my attention to his acts.  I'll leave that to Brunch Democrats, who are asleep now anyway, dreaming of Joe and Kamala kissing them goodnight.  I'm going to support the progressive and left members of Congress who are keeping the pressure on him and on their right-wing colleagues, and I'll criticize them when they screw up, as they are bound to do, as I'll criticize Biden.  (I strongly recommend that anyone interested read about Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor, who worked very hard to keep him from selling out the positions and actions that won elections for him.)  But we need to recognize when he does good things, and the rescue bill is going to be one of them.  Let Biden know he's doing what we want, and by "we" I mean the majority of Americans. That doesn't bind us to uncritical support of hm by any means.  It doesn't mean hailing him even as a merely good president; it's too soon for that, and there's no need to do it; but it's fair to encourage him to do more and better.

My God, How the Money Stays In!

The "next post" I promised on Friday was going to be about Joe Biden's January 4 pledge to voters in the Georgia runoff election that

you can make an immediate difference in your own lives, the lives of people all across this country because their election will put an end to the block in Washington on that $2,000 stimulus check, that money that will go out the door immediately to people who are in real trouble.

That pledge has not been kept, and while there may be valid reasons for the delay, such as Republican obstructionism, Biden and Congressional Democrats are walking back the promise themselves.  As David Sirota reported on January 25,

Biden is pushing $1,400 checks, rather than using his election mandate to demand new, full $2,000 checks.

Democrats are now suggesting that it could take at least until March to even pass the legislation, even as the economic crisis worsens.

Biden is now responding to threats of Republican obstructionism by floating the idea of reducing the number of people who would even get the checks. Reuters reports that “he is open to negotiating the eligibility requirements of his proposed $1,400 COVID stimulus check, a nod to lawmakers who have said they should be more targeted.”

The signals of retreat are happening even as new polling data show that the original promise for a full $2,000 survival check is wildly popular.

I temporized for a day before writing about this because there were signs of (much as I hate to use the word) hope.  Bernie Sanders has been talking about using "reconciliation" to push Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill through, which requires only 51 votes rather than the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.  (Indeed, Minority Leader McConnell backed down on his demand that the Democrats promise not to abolish the filibuster - Majority Leader Schumer, almost incredibly, stood firm against him.)   Biden himself told reporters that the bill had to go through whether Republicans liked it or not.  Josh Marshall keeps comparing the Republicans to Lucy pulling away the football from Charlie Brown, but it's really Democrats who have a long history of promising progressive action and then backing away from it at the last minute.

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans have offered their version of compromise, a $600-billion-dollar bill that I'm sure they're willing to lower even more in the interests of bipartisanship and fiscal responsibility.  Numerous commenters have seen this as surrender, effectively telling the Dems "You guys go on without me."  I have no doubt that President Obama would have accepted their compromise, but we live in unprecedented times.

The reason the stimulus payment matters is not only the necessity of the assistance will give to people who are on the ropes financially, but the political price of breaking a high-profile promise to the majority of Americans.  Biden and the Democrats have a very small majority in Congress, and they can't afford to lose a single seat in 2022, especially in the Senate.  I've seen a number of Very Smart liberals/progressives saying that the dumb voters won't remember such a broken promise, but I think it's obvious they're wrong.  Voters in 1994 and 2010 remembered Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's decisions to side with the rich against working people, and yet those wise men learned nothing from those consequences.  My concern is not with them or Biden, or with Democratic elites, but with the millions of non-elites who are suffering and will continue to suffer if meaningful action isn't taken.  It's the Very Smart Brunch Liberals who have short memories.

Naturally, Biden/Harris trolls are busy attacking anyone who criticizes Biden on the stimulus payment.  They say it should have been obvious to the stupid voters that by "immediately" Biden meant by summer of 2021, and by $2000 he meant $1400 or less, means-tested to create more jobs for the means-testers. And don't forget the Republican obstructionism -- if only the dumb voters understood how government works!  Maybe it should have been obvious, but Biden's statement was not likely phrased without trying it out on focus groups in advance: he and his team knew exactly how voters would understand it.  If anyone was ignoring Republican obstructionism, it was Biden.  It's been suggested that Biden didn't expect Ossoff and Warnock to win the runoffs, so he wouldn't have to deliver, but it's not the voters' fault if Biden stepped on his dick again.

It's also worth remembering that, as Sirota's article reminded me, the House of Representatives not only wrote and passed a clean and simple $2000 stimulus bill immediately after Trump endorsed the idea.  The GOP blocked it in the Senate, of course, but now that the GOP no longer controls the Senate, it should be easy enough to get the same bill through.  (Maybe through reconciliation?)  Make the Senate GOP oppose it, including the majority who are still loyal to Trump.  Yell it to the press every damn day until it passes and is signed and the money goes out.

I might be wrong about this, but bear with me: So far I haven't seen anyone post that they spend hours each weekend in a line for a food bank, that they haven't been able to pay their rent or utilities for six months, and they still haven't received the last $600 stimulus -- but they nevertheless understand why POTUS can't deliver on his promise of $2K and will be happy to wait until the end of March for $1400 or whatever he decides is good enough for them.  The Democrats presently defending the delay are not those who are suffering.  I'm not suffering for lack of another payment either, but it's not about me, it's about us.

Maybe I'll have to retract this later on.  If Biden & Co. deliver meaningful relief to Americans, I'll be happy to acknowledge it.  They have to prove they can be trusted, however.

Surely, Comrades, You Do Not Want Trump Back?

So, where to begin?  I haven't had any ill effects from the COVID-19 vaccine shot I received last Friday.  I meant to post sooner, if only because going silent so soon after getting the vaccine felt a bit irresponsible, but I couldn't bring myself to sit down and focus on our depressing politics.  The next post I write will clarify that, if it isn't obvious.

Anyway, I just watched this clip:

I think Ball and Enjeti made some good points here.  I side more with Ball on the quality of the Times' cavilling about Biden.  Enjeti is right that the complaint was entirely predictable: the elite media always urge Presidents to move to the "center," meaning the right, so who in their right mind would pay attention to them?  That question answers itself: nobody, but the op-ed writers of the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal, and those who read them aren't in their right minds.  Ball is right that Biden is the kind of politician who would take them seriously and feel stung by them.

Ball argued that it's absurd to set the Trump administration as the bar the Biden administration must clear.  That's true, but absurdity is the name of centrist politics.  Establishment Democrats have been creeping rightward ever since the death of FDR, and they've only gotten worse since Ronald Reagan was elected.  Trump is a godsend to them, and they've been celebrating his usefulness since Biden won the election.  There was an outpouring of delight when Biden began announcing his cabinet picks, for example: Finally! Dems exulted. Finally we have intelligent, competent people in government again!  This was pure fantasy, since these people had no idea who Biden's nominees were, or anything about their backgrounds.  That was even clearer with regard to people like Pete Buttigieg, whom we do know enough about to know that he's terrible.  Any reservations about him were met with the insistence that he was smart and competent, and anyway, he's better than Trump's appointees.  After four years of the Donald Trump regime, the world doesn't need politicians who are merely "better" than Trump's people.  It needs people who really are competent.  And from what I can tell, based on reporting by people who don't just jerk their knees, some of Biden's nominees are competent and intelligent.  But party loyalists neither know nor care.

"Better than Trump" is going to be Democrats' main line of defense for the next four years.  It's almost ironic, since one of their refrains during the primary period was that literally anyone would be better than Trump: their two-year-old grandchild, their dog, their pet turtle, a dead bat, that sort of thing. They didn't really mean it, of course. Bernie Sanders, especially, wasn't literally anyone: he made their skin crawl, he had bad body language, he was loud and obnoxious, nobody liked him, nobody wanted to work with him.  

Biden's ignorant armies are already in action online.  Biden could shoot someone in Brooklyn, and they would cry, "At least he didn't shoot them on Fifth Avenue!"  Naomi Klein answered such people four years in advance -- not really, since the pattern was already obvious.

The danger of Trump is, everybody looks good by comparison, everybody can stand up and look like a hero, I mean, I live in Canada, right? So I know.  So I think the logic needs to be, we're not gonna give you a pass because you're better than Trump. We're gonna demand so much more of you, because of Trump...

2021 Will Be Welcomed as a Liberator, and Will Pay for Itself

I'm going to cheat and fiddle with the timestamp on this post, because I really truly did intend to post it yesterday.

On Wednesday the libertarian writer and Cato Institute wonk Julian Sanchez posted this in response to a deranged tweet from a Trump Republican:

It seems that by "the party that always wants larger, costlier government" Sanchez meant to refer to the Democrats.  It's hardly obscure that although Republicans like to campaign against big-spending and big government, when they are elected they increase spending, raise the deficit, and increase government surveillance into ordinary citizens' lives.  It's arguable that what matters is not the amount of government spending, but what and whom it's spent on.  Or other considerations, as when Barack Obama perpetrated a hiring freeze for government employees in the middle of an economic crisis.

That Sanchez got an obvious point so wrong discredits him, which reminds me of something else.  It's difficult to know whether every Republican who wants to overturn the 2020 presidential election has any evidence or other basis for their belief that the election was stolen.  But it appears that most if not all such Republicans also believe that Joe Biden is a radical-left socialist, which is delusional in a classically Republican way.  The only mitigating factor could be that many Democrats believe that Biden is a "progressive," which is just as delusional but in a classically Democratic way.

What Can You Do With a Boy Like Pete?

When President-elect Biden announced his first batch of staff and cabinet nominees, there was a great surge of celebration among liberal Democrats online.  So wonderful! they exulted. He's appointing competent, qualified adults! and so on. I had the feeling something was wrong, but concentrated more on what the reporters I trust were saying about the appointees.

As time went on and more nominees were put on display, a reasonable amount of skepticism about some of them emerged.  Biden-Harris loyalists angrily rejected discussion, which didn't keep it from continuing, but basically they were trolling: Who cares, they're all better than Trump's people, I'm just so glad I don't have to think about what he's doing! I suppose you wish Trump had won the election, you dirty Bernie Bro!

This came to a head with speculation about what role Pete Buttigieg would play in the Biden administration.  Word was that Buttigieg insisted on a cabinet post and wouldn't settle for less. Excited Mayor Pete fans tossed out possibilities.  An ambassadorship?  China, maybe?  He speaks so many languages, he could pick up Mandarin in no time!  Or how about the United Nations?  He's so smart, he's qualified for anything and everything!  He's got this youthful energy!  He went on Fox News and shut them down!

Now, most of these recommendations didn't amount to much, certainly not as qualifications.  I noted that Buttigieg's polyglot brilliance was exaggerated; the two languages he speaks that I know (without calling myself fluent in either Spanish or French), he doesn't speak very well.  The United Nations has a corps of interpreters so that ambassadors don't need to try to master dozens of languages.  Even if Buttigieg were as fluent in seven languages as his fans believe, it's not a qualification for a prominent government post.  Nor are most of the qualities his fans gushed about.

I haven't watched his appearance on Fox News, but I do remember that when he was asked a pointed question by a New York Times reporter, he got flustered and tried to cuss and lie his way out of it, without success.  In general he doesn't seem to deal well with disagreement or criticism; his blundering encounter with angry black voters in South Bend, for example. I see no reason to suppose that he's cut out to be a diplomat, even on the rather soft level of an ambassador.  He's simply too inexperienced for any important post on the level of China.

His inexperience is the sticking point for a cabinet post too.  Two terms as mayor of a small city -- I was going to call his tenure undistinguished, but even that might be too kind -- are not enough to let him lay claim to any national office.  Buttigieg's a fairly adroit and mostly lucky self-promoter, but most of the image he projected when he began running for President crumbled under press scrutiny.  It was widely held, this past week or two, that he thought he'd earned a place in the cabinet simply by quitting the primaries to clear the way for Joe Biden; I began to wonder if he might be hurting himself by his entitlement.  Importunate troublemakers with little to offer tend not to get what they want.

But no, Biden tapped Buttigieg for Secretary of Transportation.  Stress was laid on his homosexuality, on what a historic first it will be for an openly gay man to head DoT.  It is that, but homosexuality is not a qualification for a cabinet post.  Biden's been touting the diversity of his cabinet choices, and I bet he's going to try to distract attention from the inadequacy of several of them by pointing to it.  Certainly his toadies and trolls will do it, as Obama's and Hillary Clinton's did for them.  I don't think it will work too well, but what else has he got right now?

I've been arguing about this with a lot of people on social media, and it's fascinating (as well as dispiriting) to see how quickly Democrats have abandoned any concern that the Biden administration should be competent or qualified.  It's all the more remarkable when you recall how exercised they were by the inadequacy of Trump and his people, right up to the present.  That's one of their rebuttals in fact: Who cares, he's better than the trash Trump put into those positions!  Which may be true, but it sets the bar absurdly low.  Someone actually argued seriously that Buttigieg would lower the average age of Biden's cabinet.  So it would, but you could say the same about Ivanka or Jared.  (Most defenses of Biden, as with Clinton or Obama, could be made as fairly of Trump.)  As someone pointed out, "The defense of the centrist establishment of how Pete Buttigieg is qualified to be Transportation Secretary is pretty funny to watch & akin to Trump saying how Dr. Atlas was qualified."

Ryan Grim and David Sirota, who are among the left journalists I rely on these days, have made cases that some of Biden's nominees are pretty good, just as some are very bad.  They're still being attacked by Biden-Harris trolls for their lack of obedience and submission, but the trolls have no real arguments and are getting a lot of good pushback.  On the other hand, I just had a depressing exchange over Buttigieg with my old friend the ambivalent Obama supporter, who at first defended Buttigieg as smart enough to learn to do the job -- quite a weak defense.  When I leaned on him a bit, he conceded that Buttigieg wasn't a good choice, but Biden could have done worse.  That's not even a defense; it's capitulation to the Dark Side.  Of course Biden could have done worse, but this country may not survive four more years of "could have done worse."

I've seen several statements (including long threads) like this:

The doublethink is impressive; these people are dedicated servants of Big Brother.  I'm beginning to realize that they don't know what qualifications are, and they don't care.  They want to forget that the Trump years ever happened, though as with George W. Bush, it's difficult at times to figure out precisely what they objected to about him.  Policies that liberals claimed to hate from Dubya became virtuous when Obama took them up, and I expect we'll see the same pattern with Biden.  I also expect that Biden won't get the same indulgence that many progressives extended to Obama, which hindered resistance to his worst policies. It may even be that liberals' expressed intention to shut off their brains for the next four years while Uncle Joe takes care of them will keep them out of the way to some extent.  Not many people are genuinely excited about Biden, as they were about Obama, so he may have fewer defenders.

"Even if our country goes off the rails," a DJ on the community radio station just said a moment ago, "we have a heritage of music that delights and inspires."  That doesn't make me feel even a little better; Trump Derangement Syndrome is a hell of a thing.  Fasten your seatbelts, liberals: we're all in for a bumpy ride.

Beloved, I Am Writing to You...

 

If only they hadn't bought those new iPhones, or the Air Jordans!  But no - they started listening to that hip hop, were seduced by the bling, the cars, the fast women, the blow.  And now they're broke.

Slightly more seriously, I've been getting mixed messages on this.  On one hand, their crew are saying that they have to ask for money because Trump is denying them that government money that should pay for the transition.  I could believe that.  But I'm also hearing that it's totally normal, all incoming administrations raise money for the transition, so shut up shut up shut up.  This latter explanation simply justifies the anger of some critics who point to the number of Americans who can't pay their bills, who are lining up for food banks, who know that if they get sick they won't be able to afford treatment.  Some apologists point to the words "if you're able", but that doesn't help either; of course people with no income aren't going to be able to donate, but who will help them?

Naptime with Joe and Kammy

I'm anticipating the upcoming election with dread, partly because there's a real danger that Donald Trump will be re-elected and partly because the alternative is that Obama's hand-picked candidate Joe Biden will be elected.  Apart from Biden's own liabilities, I'm concerned about the class of Democrats who are rapidly becoming known as Brunch Liberals.

For me it began when I saw this tweet:

See that?  335,400 likes, 58,400 shares.  The replies were a mix of agreement from people who wanted to be able to sleep at night, to be bored, instead of "doomscrolling" constantly for fear of "missing something," and disagreement from people like me who remember eight years of Obama bombing wedding parties and hospitals, deporting refugees by the millions, offering Social Security and Medicare as hostages to the GOP, trampling on civil liberties, blocking equal rights for LGBTQ people until the courts took that one out of his hands, and so on.  There's no reason I can see to believe that Biden will be any better, but these people will be able to sleep at night, which is all that matters.

Actually such tweets have been around for some time, but they hadn't crossed my path.  And I think they've been getting more common in the past few weeks.

And:

Some people whined that they weren't saying they wanted to tune out, it wasn't so bad to want like an hour of peace now and then after four years of Drumpf, what's wrong with that?  But they made it clear that they did want to tune out, and not for an hour but for a lifetime.

It went on, getting worse.

When was this, exactly?  Lurie didn't reply, but several commenters chimed in; it was apparently during the Obama years, and one person was more specific: "I totally checked out from 2013 till the 2015 primary-it was bliss."  Not for people being shot in the back by cops, or children being shredded by US bombs we'd thoughtfully supplied to Saudi Arabia, or kids being poisoned by lead in their drinking water; but who cares about them?

And so on, right down to the past week:

It takes some serious stupidity to believe that your crazy Trump-loving aunt and uncle will suddenly shut up if Biden becomes President.  Did they hold their tongues while Obama was in office?

I've been trying to look on the bright side: If Biden tucks these people into bed, gently puts a teddy bear into their chubby little arms, and tenderly sniffs their hair before he tiptoes away, maybe they'll stay out of the way while good people hold his feet to the fire, and yell bloody murder when he does wrong.  But I doubt it: they'll wake up, furious at being disturbed, and curse us out for ruining their peace.  Think of the midterms!  You're just helping the Rethugs!  Think of 2024!  Surely, comrades, you do not wish Trump back?

Is Your Hate Pure?

Samuel Moyn was referring, I thought, to Democratic loyalists' obsession with Trump and their evident belief that all criticism of Democratic politicians comes from the Right, and is therefore motivated by love of Donald Trump.  People on the left who vote Democratic but still criticize Democratic candidates must therefore love Trump and want him to win in November.

On reflection, though, I had to admit that I don't hate Trump all that much.  I want him out of office, I want him in prison, and he seems to be a completely loathsome person.  Is there anyone who likes him as a human being, let alone loves him?  He seems to have plenty of toadies, hangers-on, people who cling to him in hopes of scoring some money, prestige, or power: but asking whether they like him is like asking whether remora fish like sharks.  That's what a powerful man is supposed to be like, isn't it?

Perhaps since I'm at a safe distance from Trump, I don't feel a personal hatred or loathing for him.  I'd feel a profound satisfaction if he was convicted for his many crimes and spent the rest of his life in prison.  If he caught COVID-19 and died strangling in mucus, I'd feel a detached sympathy for him, but I would still say "Good riddance," and I wouldn't indulge in the eulogies that most people can't seem to resist about the worst human beings on the planet: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John McCain, etc.  I figure there's a good chance I'll outlive him, and after the terrible damage he's done to this country and the world, I'm curious to see if the usual suspects try to paint him as a good man despite everything.  How low will they sink? ... But the point is, I don't hate him the way so many of liberals do, he's not an itch I have to scratch 24/7 until I bleed.  As my mother always said, if you pick at it, it won't get well.

I used to feel the same way about Barack Obama, as evil as he is.  I admit, when I learned he'd been lying about the Affordable Care Act, claiming falsely that "if you like the policy you have, you can keep it," I felt great anger and disgust; but that was about me, because I'd been defending the ACA based on that claim.  In the end I was even angrier at liberal ACA apologists who defended Obama's lies.  But I didn't hate him; to me that would be as absurd as loving him, thinking he's my father and and that he loves and cares for me. 

Until lately, that is.  His interventions and comments on the political scene this past year have been progressively more obnoxious, and last week he gave us this:

Quite a few people quoted Obama's by-now notorious boast:

“You wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas that was me, people.”

This is funny, really: I thought that Obama couldn't do anything, he was totally helpless because the wicked Republicans obstructed him at every turn?  So apparently he could do some things: subsidize fossil fuel companies, open the Arctic to drilling, waffle on the Dakota Access PipeLine, okay other oil pipelines.  Ironically, though, according to the AP article which quotes Obama's boast, many don't agree that he can take the credit for America's increased oil production.

People threw Obama's terrible environmental record back in his face.  One of the pleasant things about Twitter is that you often can get up in a politician's face, or at least his account, and tell him or her off.  You'll almost never get a reply, but it's better than shaking your fist and yelling at the TV. 

I've said before that Obama unknowingly did serious damage to the claim that voting can bring about change.  That ultimately helped to give us Donald Trump, as large numbers of people lost faith in the promises candidates make.  It didn't help that Obama was openly contemptuous of the voters, especially poor black voters, once he was in office, and just as contemptuous of activists who organized to pressure him outside the electoral process.  His wife, friend to war criminals, seconded that contempt this year. 

So now Obama claims that "Protecting our planet is on the ballot."  Is it?  Biden's website (recently and miraculously updated after the actress and activist Susan Sarandon pointed out it had been neglected) promises lofty goals, even alludes glancingly to the Green New Deal.  Will he deliver, assuming he wins the election?  Who knows?  Given his past, I sure don't.  One would have thought protecting the planet was on the ballot in 2008 and 2012, but it didn't quite work out that way.  Like it or not, you're not voting for issues, you're voting for a candidate, and then you're expected to shut up and get out of the way -- until your candidate needs more money.

Now, though, when I see that Obama has tweeted something, I feel a twinge of hatred.  Hatred isn't something I give lightly.  Like a vote, it has to be earned.  And I'm finally recognizing that Obama has earned it.  Which, I admit, with a dollar, will get him on the bus.  But it's a milestone for me.

Honeymoon? We Aren't Even Married Yet!

After someone on Twitter criticized the Biden campaign's decision to invite the Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich, to address the upcoming Democratic convention, a stable genius replied:

Kasich is anti-union, so it's hard to see how he's going to inspire the Democrats' union base; he's also an antigay bigot, and a former failed Republican Presidential candidate and therefore of Satan.  Or so you'd think.  Are Democratic voters such weak reeds that they need to know that Republicans dislike Trump too, or they won't be able to drag themselves to the polling stations?

Notice too that dismissive "spar over policy."  No doubt he'll say the same thing after Biden is elected and guts Social Security and Medicare, forces workers to work in a pandemic or starve, bails out Wall Street again, and vetoes the new voting rights bill.  That most people aren't just sparring, which is to say playing, but concerned about their lives and their families' lives and the lives of everyone who isn't at least a multimillionaire, escapes him.

We went through this in 2008, I remember.  Before Obama was elected, we skeptics were told that after he won we could hold his feet to the fire and make him enact good policies.  But as soon as he was elected, before he even took office, we were told to back off, give him a chance, it was too soon to judge him, wait and see what he'd do.  As I pointed out at the time, his corporate donors and friends weren't backing off: they were making sure he made the appointments they wanted, pushing him in the direction they wanted him to go.  True, he would have done it anyway, because his priorities lay in corporatism and protecting the powerful from accountability.  And it's doubtful how much pressure anyone to his left could have brought to bear on him.  His few good appointments, such as Hilda Solis, were quietly eased out in a few months.  Anyone the Right disliked had to go; Obama was very obliging.

So this is all annoyingly familiar.  Biden is already surrounding himself with some of the same people Obama gravitated to, such as Larry Summers.  His sycophants are telling us to wait and see, to give him a chance.  I look forward to seeing the last of Trump, though former Presidents rarely disappear from public life altogether.  But as Biden has said, nothing will fundamentally change under his presidency, and those who try to push him in a better direction will face not only his inertia, but the vindictive fury of his Democratic cult.  It won't be pretty.

Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy, They First Make Mad

"Our old friend Jon Stewart weighs in on the choice America faces at the ballot box this November, pointing out that only one candidate possesses the humility necessary to lead this country out of this moment of great struggle and sadness."  So says the description under the video, and it might even be true, but unfortunately the one candidate capable of leading this country out of the current morass was torpedoed by the DCCC, and now we're stuck with Joe Biden as the alternative to Donald Trump.

I broke my vow never to watch Colbert again to watch this clip. It's painful, much worse than even I expected, to see Stewart contorting himself -- literally! -- to make an absurd argument for Joe Biden's humanity.  Just for comparison, John McCain also suffered pain and loss, but he never stopped being a vicious racist bigot till the day he died.   I've never seen any reason to believe that Biden's personal losses taught him anything. They certainly haven't kept him from lying shamelessly about his political record, or from being truculent and abusive on the campaign trail before the pandemic shut him down.  I think those issues are what matter, not Stewart's febrile fantasies about the inner man.

I was going to say that Stewart is better than this, but he's never been able to hold Democrats to the same standards he applies to Republicans, let alone criticize them with the same conviction and glee.  His protestations that Biden wasn't even his fourth choice ring hollow to me: if Biden really has these well-hidden depths, why didn't Stewart (or anyone else) detect them before?  Once again, though not for the last time, I marvel at Democratic loyalists' irresistible need to convince themselves that a terrible candidate is really an inspiring demigod if you look at him or her with the eyes of the Spirit.  Can't they cast a vote without being drunk on their candidate's grooviness?  It's strange, after (but also before -- they'll play the theme again many times over the next five months) they've lectured critical voters that you shouldn't need to be inspired, just vote strategically, that they simultaneously insist that you adore the nominee without reservation.

One good thing about Biden, if he wins, is that he's not likely to get the indulgence Obama got.  Sure, toadies like Stewart and Colbert will try to attack anyone who criticizes Biden from the left, but I don't think they'll be very effective.  It's far too early to say right now, but it looks like some genuinely leftish candidates beat entrenched Democratic hacks in these primaries.  If they win in November, the voters may have some genuine representation in Congress.  I'm almost hopeful for the first time in years.

Let's You and Jesus Smash the State!

Last weekend I saw a number of people in social media endorsing street violence by invoking the cleansing of the Temple Court by Jesus, a story that appears in all four canonical gospels.  I've written about the episode at length before, and won't go into much detail today.

What first got me going was the reaction to Donald Trump's use of a Washington, D.C. church as the background for a photo op (and probable campaign ad) proclaiming "law and order" as he waved a Bible around.  There were cries of "sacrilege," and the Episcopal overseer of that church denounced Trump to the Washington Post: "I was not given even a courtesy call that they would be clearing with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop, holding a Bible, one that declares that God is love and when everything he has said and done is to enflame violence."  The Bible also contains many divine commands to commit genocidal violence, plus threats of eternal punishment in fire and fury, the likes of which the world has never seen.  "God is love" appears once, and not very convincingly in such a context.

There has been less outrage over Joe Biden's appearance in another church, the Bethel AME Church in Wilmington Delaware, in which he taught the true meaning of love: "Instead of standing there and teaching a cop when there's an unarmed person comin' at 'em with a knife or something to shoot 'em in the leg instead of the heart is a very different thing."  You know - the thing.  So far I haven't seen anyone denounce as sacrilege this endorsement of violence in a holy place, but I might have missed it.

So, those guys who encouraged undefined violence against unspecified targets with Jesus as their role model: what do they have to say about Donald Trump's invocation of the Bible to justify smiting evil?  This is one more example of why the Bible has no authority: you can use it to justify almost anything, but an informed reading isn't going to be kind to selective, biased quotation by anybody.

Is Your Hate Pure?

There's an article at The Hill from yesterday about how Bernie Sanders is being "urged" to hand over his donor list to Joe Biden's campaign.  It isn't the Biden organization that is doing the urging, however: so far they're being diplomatic according to the article, praising Sanders for his cooperation and help.  They're "been pleased with how Sanders committed from an early point to rallying his supporters behind the presumptive nominee."

The complaints in the article come from not one but two unnamed pissy Democratic "strategists," too cowardly to speak on the record under their own names.  The article gives adequate space to a couple of named progressives, who

noted that the pro-Sanders super PAC Our Revolution was given access to Sanders’s 2016 email list and was only able to raise a fraction of what the campaign raised because it didn’t resonate the same way coming from a different source.

“That email list only works for Bernie Sanders and we’ve proven it,” Rocha said. “The strength of the list isn’t the list itself. It’s Bernie Sanders. If Joe Biden had four Bernie lists, he couldn’t raise much money off of it. That’s not a critique of Joe Biden. It’s just that Bernie is the reason that the list works.”

And scoffed:

“The idea that all Bernie Sanders has to do here is turn over his email list so they can pillage it and batter it until it spits out gold coins is absolutely ridiculous,” [Democracy for America strategist Neil] Sroka said.

This is true.  I'm still making donations through Sanders's list to progressive candidates for downticket races.  (I doubt that Biden, whose billionaire boosters evidently aren't coming through for him, would do as much.  He prefers to take money to support Republican candidates.)  If I started getting pleas the from the Biden campaign through Sanders's list, though, I would unsubscribe immediately, probably after sending an abusive email condemning the move.  Comments on Twitter indicate that other Sanders voters feel the same way.

I noticed, however, that a number of avowed Sanders supporters misread "urged" as "already has given Biden the list, and is cackling and rubbing his hands together gleefully."  They accused Sanders of selling out, and while one could make a case for that more generally, he evidently hasn't gone as far as they want to think.  (They must want to think it, since they chose to fantasize a falsehood.)  Malignant stupidity is not, alas, confined to Trump supporters and Democratic Party loyalists.

I would be upset, even angry, if Sanders shares his donor list to the Biden campaign, but not all that concerned.  As Sroka and Chuck Rocha, the other named Sanders associate, say, it would not do Biden much good, and might hurt him even more.  It would also hurt Sanders, who has already angered many of his supporters by declaring Biden to be a "decent" man.  Of necessity, as Nietzsche wrote, the party man becomes a liar.

But contrary to centrist delusion, most Sanders supporters are not personality cultists.  We support him because the principles and policies he stands for, and if he abandons them, we will abandon him.  He's not, contrary to the fantasies of some of his fans, the One without whom there is no hope.  And I must say, I was not pleased that he chose not to show up to vote against the new bill giving more surveillance power to the executive branch.  That's not as bad as voting for it, as ten Democrats did, but it's bad enough if you believe, as Sanders has said he does, that Trump is the most dangerous president in history.

Someone tried to counter criticism of Sanders on this matter by posting at least twice that Sanders "is over 65 and there's a pandemic going on."  I replied that he'd just described most of the Senate, so that doesn't give Sanders a pass.  I confess I hadn't fact-checked myself.  Today I did, and I found that 48 Senators are over 65 years old (as against 147 Representatives).  I am abashed, but if 47 other elderly Senators were able to brave the pandemic to vote, so could Sanders - especially since the bill only passed by one vote.

I'm not all that surprised, though.  I regard Sanders as a lesser evil.  He's good on some issues, terrible on others, especially in foreign policy.  I'll cast my vote for him in the primary next month, make the occasional donation, and continue to criticize him as seems appropriate.

He May Be a Senile Rapist, But He's Our Senile Rapist

Barbara Ehrenreich, the socialist feminist and writer, tweeted today: "I promised the grand-dots I would hold my nose and vote for Biden but since his China-bashing ad I’m just gagging and choking."

That's exactly how I feel too, but I wasn't surprised to see how dozens of people getting on her case, in terms painfully familiar to me from campaigns past.  For example: "no gagging and choking with the alternative to Biden?"  Similarly, "How in God's name have you managed to survive the Trump administration if Biden makes you gag and choke?"

If you don't like the Democrats' senile rapist and racist, you see, you obviously love the Republicans' senile rapist and racist.  It is thoughtcrime in the first degree to express any criticism of the Party's anointed one, even to entertain the thought that he or she is less than perfect.  Both of these clowns are insinuating that Ehrenreich is soft on Trump, a tactic I've often encountered over the years: If you don't adore Obama, you must want four more years of Bush; if you don't adore Obama, you must intend to vote for McCain.  The crowning irony here is that both Bush and McCain have been rehabilitated by Democrats; I guess they were never as vile as we were told in 2008.

Several replies appear along the lines of "Just do it!" and "You gotta do it Barb."  As with the previous lickspittles, I challenged them to say the quiet part aloud: Barb must vote for a senile rapist and whose only selling point is that he isn't Trump, who's stirring up anti-Asian racism because he thinks it will win the election for him.  Only one, the "How in God's name" guy, has responded so far, and he only wrote "Yes."  Even he, it appeared, isn't ready to say it right out.  Perhaps he has a sensitive gag reflex.

Another: "Just stop. STOP. Use your voice to get rid of this menace."  Although Ehrenreich's voice couldn't even penetrate this person's thick skull, she still supposes Ehreneich is so powerful that she can determine the results of the election all by her lonesome.  If Biden manages to win, of course he'll be totally helpless, as Obama was, and anyone who tries to hold his feet to the fire will be accused of giving aid and comfort to the GOP, if not an actual Republican. But Ehrenreich, a mere writer, is all-powerful, a she-devil on the order of the she-devil Susan Sarandon, who could sway the masses for Good but instead chooses Evil.

I mustn't forget this one: "If you make a list of consequences if Biden wins & another if Trump wins It helps. The election is about so much more than one person, eg SCOTUS/fed judges, environmental laws, tax policy, climate, health care, could get some progressive policies passed under a Dem President."  If you make a list of Biden's actual record, you'll remember that he isn't interested in progressive policies. As for the Supreme Court, it's especially careless to remind Ehrenreich of the real-life (as opposed to fantasy-land) justice Biden gifted us during the first Bush administration, Clarence Thomas.  Biden has already stated his opposition to a Medicare for All reform, though he reportedly is considering lowering the present Medicare age of eligibility to 60.  Progressive!

And finally, because this is as far as I can go down Memory Lane without gagging, there was this, from an admitted Canadian: "Don’t be absurd. There is no equivalence. Not even close. SMH" [Shaking My Head, for those unacquainted with Internet conventions].  Ehrenreich hadn't asserted "equivalence", indeed according to her other ankle-biters she loves Trump and only hates Biden.  But this claim turned up often in the 2016 campaign: if you said that Hillary Clinton was the lesser evil, you'd be accused of saying there was no difference between her and Trump.  I'm still trying to figure out what kind of thought process could come up with this non sequitur, but of course there is no thought process involved.

My Decree

(Source)

I want every Biden Bro, from Obama, Sanders, Warren, and Chomsky on down, to say that they will vote for a senile rapist whose only selling point is that he isn't Trump, and they want everyone else to do it too.  That is all, at least for now.

Just Trying to Clear Up a Few Things Here in the Augean Stables

I'll try to finish this before the Super Tuesday polls close.

Incidentally, a young woman of about 30 who works in my apartment building's rental office asked me yesterday what "Super Tuesday" is.  I explained it to her, and she really had no idea.  Not only about Super Tuesday, but what primaries are for, and some other basic parts of the electoral process.  I did my best.

Every day I feel inadequate to comment on this campaign season, compared to years past when I wrote quite a lot on the subject, because I don't think I know enough.  I haven't been following the process as closely this time because I'm old and tired and depressed by the raving ignorance (see the comments under that one) and irrationality (ditto) of so many people of "progressive" and "left" politics.  A lot of people are shooting off their mouths and keyboards about politics despite knowing not much more than the young woman I was talking to yesterday.  Yet I realized, and not for the first time, that despite my ignorance I am much better informed than many of my fellow citizens, and indeed better than many professional commentators whose job it is to inform themselves.  I'm not bragging here, understand, just pointing out how disturbingly low the bar is.

That realization is probably not going to open the floodgates of discourse around here.  But I just started watching a clip on Youtube from The Hill's Sunrise morning program.  I've been semi-following Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti for a couple of months now, and they are much better than most news commentators I've come across, despite some blind spots.  (I thought I'd already written here about some of those, but it seems not.)



As I hope everyone knows (though after yesterday's conversation I realize I could be wrong), both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the Democratic competition yesterday and endorsed Joe Biden. As someone remarked of Buttigieg, this represented perhaps the first time a rat has been observed boarding a sinking ship.  Today Beto O'Rourke chimed in for Biden too.  Krystal Ball commented, with her trademark snark: "Pete and Amy ... may hate each other, but not as much, apparently, as they hate universal health care."

Even I thought at first that this was somewhat unfair - I mean, Pete and Amy and Joe and Elizabeth and Beto are all nice Democrats, surely they don't hate universal healthcare?  That's so harsh.  And I'm sure many moderate, reasonable centrists would agree with me.  Pete and Amy and Joe and Elizabeth and Beto want us to have affordable, accessible universal healthcare that doesn't take away our freedom of choice to pay exorbitant premiums for policies with outrageous deductibles and still be turned down for treatment much of the time - that's America.  They don't disagree with Sanders's policies, they only oppose his stridency and loudness and ideological rigidity, and of course all his many privileged white-guy supporters who are so mean and alienating.  But then I remembered: if they really didn't object to universal healthcare, they wouldn't oppose it so firmly and dishonestly; they wouldn't have initially have made supportive noises and then backpedaled.  If their differences with Sanders really lay in matters of style rather than policy, nothing is stopping them from adopting his policies so that voters could choose based on the important things (his New Yawk accent, etc.) and not his many good and very popular ideas.

But they don't.  It's because they hate universal healthcare, an increased minimum wage, free public college, forgiveness of student loan debt, and all the other "divisive" (but very popular) policies that have one vital thing in common: they benefit most or all Americans, not just the rich.  So Krystal Ball was right on target.  Snarky, but right.

The Twitterverse of Hysteria

On Friday Donald Trump delivered himself of another rambling word salad to CNBC's fawning Joe Kernen.  As usual, there was little substance in his remarks, but the closing upset a lot of people, particularly people who hadn't read it.  Or people who can't read; take your pick.

Kernen approached his quarry cautiously:

JOE KERNEN: Do I dare-- one last question.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Go ahead.

JOE KERNEN: Entitlements ever be on your plate?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: At some point they will be. We have tremendous growth. We’re going to have tremendous growth. This next year I-- it’ll be toward the end of the year. The growth is going to be incredible. And at the right time, we will take a look at that. You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look, cause it’s such a--

JOE KERNEN: If you’re willing--

PRESIDENT TRUMP: --big percentage.

JOE KERNEN: --to do some of the things that you said you wouldn’t do in the past, though, in terms of Medicare--

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, we’re going-- we’re going[,] look. We also have-- assets that we’ve never had. I mean we’ve never had growth like this. We never had a consumer that was taking in, through-- different means, over $10,000 a family. We never had the kind of-- the kind of things that we have. Look, our country is the hottest in the world. We have the hottest economy in the world....

Some people on Twitter have suggested that Trump doesn't know what "entitlements" are.  That's plausible, but it seems more likely to me that he just wasn't listening, and he didn't let himself be diverted by Kernen's attempt to drive him the way he wanted him to go.  Trump didn't take up the subject of entitlements, and Kernen gave up on it.

However, some on Twitter panicked; I'm not sure why.  One business journalist, Pedro Nicolasi da Costa, said flatly "Trump told CNBC he wants to cut Social Security."  I imagine he does want to, but he didn't say so to Kernen.  For backup he retweeted a tweet from something called The Bridge Project: "realDonaldTrump admitted he’s coming for your Medicare and SocialSecurity at the 'end of the year.'"  No, he didn't, but who cares?  We've got an endless election campaign going on here, and there can be no lily-livered white-feather conscientious objectors.

Two main themes emerged in replies.  One was that Trump and the GOP want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare, and his base of old white people are stupid to support him because he's taking away their money and OMFG we have to vote Democrat in November!  It's true that the GOP wants to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and your little Medicaid too, but so do elite Democrats.  The current Democratic favorite among older voters, Joe Biden, has been trying to cut these programs for forty years.  How will voting for Biden benefit me on this issue?  I spent some time pointing this out, and the few people who answered me said that Trump must go and they will Vote Blue No Matter Who so don't bother me with this trivia.  

They simply ignored the little problem of Biden, though I liked the person who wrote: "Interesting some claim Joe Biden is for cutting Social Security but ignore that Trump AND [McConnell]have been saying it for months and ARE CUTTING SSDI & EBT now. They openly say they will cut SS if they win the 2020 election. It should be a major scandal but is ignored!"  "Some claim" - that's funny, because Biden's record on cutting Social Security is well-documented, but his campaign claims that the videos have been misleadingly edited and are Fake News.  Even such Trumpian tactics are acceptable when Democrats use them.

Not only that, but Barack Obama wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare, blaming them for the deficit.  He failed because the Congressional GOP was so determined to block him that they wouldn't accept a gift they'd long wanted.  (One person answered me, claiming that yes, Obama wanted to, but he failed and he realized he was wrong, so it doesn't count.  First, it's not true, Obama never changed his position; and second, this is exactly the argument Trump's defenders have made: that yes, he wanted to withhold military aid from Ukraine, but he didn't get the investigation he asked for, and he released the aid in the end, so it doesn't count.  Again, it's okay to use such a worthless defense for Obama, but not for Trump.)  Trump's willfully blind base have nothing on these people.

The other theme was the familiar one about how Social Security and Medicare are not "entitlements," they're "earned benefits," and anyway, it's our money that we worked for and paid, so they are entitlements and we are entitled, so there, too!  If you don't like it, I want my money back!  You'll remember the suggestion that Trump doesn't know what "entitlement" means?  Well, neither do Democrats.  (To be quite honest, I'm not sure it's only Democrats who say this; pro-Trump Republicans do too, if they think a Democrat wants to put his government hands on their Medicare and Social Security.)

But really, the worst part -- both hilarious and terrifying -- is the claim that Democrats will protect our Social Security and Medicare so Vote Blue No Matter Who.  What Obama tried to do is down the memory hole, if they ever noticed it -- and it's not as if Obama weren't open about it and it weren't covered in the mainstream media.  Bill Clinton also tried, but was blocked by his impeachment.  But what must not be cannot be. 

Say It Ain't So, Joe!

Joe Biden has lost the Democratic presidential nomination four times already, so he probably won't mind too much losing it, or the general election, again.  The Democratic establishment (by which I mean not only the Party leadership but the corporate media punditry) seems determined to anoint him, and that means it will be an uphill struggle to stop him, but we're still several months from the primaries and almost a year from the national convention.  A lot can change in that time, as it has before.

There's been some consternation about Biden's handsiness, his irresistible fondness for violating other people's personal space.  It's not the only reason to reject him, and probably not the most important one, but a good many anti-Biden people have thrown tantrums over it.  People's -- especially children's -- boundaries around physical affection should be respected, but I'm not sure how sincere a lot of the outrage has been.  I'm not defending Biden here, but there are so many double standards in partisan politics that I've become more than a little cynical, and as I say, Biden has a lot worse on his record.

A couple of weeks ago (I've been procrastinating again, sorry), someone posted a video clip on Twitter of Biden at some campaign event, kissing a young woman lightly on the lips, after which she leaves the stage.  I haven't been able to find it again in the bowels of Twitter, but of course a version of it has been posted on Youtube.  The young woman, wearing a Biden t-shirt, turned out to be his granddaughter, and she didn't exhibit any of the discomfort some other people, including young children, have exhibited when Biden caresses their shoulders or sniffs their hair.  The clip was, of course, overanalyzed, so that her serious expression as she steps down becomes a cry for help against her rapey Grandpa, but I don't see it.  My reading is that she's concentrating on not stumbling as she leaves the stage; she might even be thinking Oh, no, people are going to make a big thing out of that.  I doubt anyone but her and her family know, and I wouldn't care to see her interrogated publicly about it.  Pick on Joe, but leave the kid alone.

What I noticed in the comments under the tweet went beyond just hatred of Joe Biden.  It was a remarkable squeamishness about familial affection.  For parents or grandparents to kiss their children or grandchildren on the lips was disgusting, numerous people said.  Not in their family!  Any family that indulges in such behavior is sick and perverted.  One person posted a 2009 photo of Melania Trump kissing her son Barron, who was three at the time, on the lips; he's kissing her back.  The poster was disturbed by the kiss -- parents shouldn't do that, she said.

I don't really have an opinion about the propriety, let alone psychopathology, of family members kissing each other on the lips.  Again, people's boundaries should be respected, but the reactions to the Biden clip and the Melania / Barron photograph went beyond that: even if the kids didn't know it was wrong, it was wrong and abusive and sick.  Now, my own family was not very affectionate; I can't remember the last time either of my parents kissed me or my brothers.  But I know that families differ widely in their practices and attitudes, and I don't know how to draw the line in principle, as opposed to individual comfort.  A child might be traumatized by demands that she kiss an adult relative if she doesn't want to do it, but the harm comes in the coercion, not the kiss, as far as I can see.  And no one, needless to say, justified their strictures: they were just certain that they knew.  If they thought it was disgusting, then it was objectively disgusting, and no one ought to do it.  That, to me, is a sign of something seriously wrong.

Graham Shaw's 1982 book The Cost of Authority: Manipulation and Freedom in the New Testament (Fortress Press) contains much intelligent discussion of community and power, but I've always been dissatisfied with his remarks about the apostle Paul and the controversy over meat sacrificed to idols in 1 Corinthians 8.  (I bring this up not because the Bible has any authority, but to show that the problem I'm discussing now is not new.)  There seems to have been concern among the Corinthian Christians over Christian freedom to eat: meat was usually connected to sacrifice, whether to Yahweh or to the old gods.  "As the false gods to whom food has allegedly been consecrated have no real existence, it might be assumed that Christians are free to eat it. But not everybody knows that the false gods do not exist, and they feel shame in eating such food" page 80).  The Christians in Corinth were not Jews but Gentiles, so they would have grown up eating meat from those sacrifices.  Paul acknowledged Christian freedom - after all, it was a pillar of his teaching - but encouraged his congregation to limit their freedom in consideration of the weaker faith of some of their fellows.  Shaw writes:

Much in Paul's response to the food question has been self-regarding, authoritarian and manipulative, but this should not conceal either the radical nature of his teaching or the sophisticated way in which he permits the conscience of others to limit the freedom of the Christian [85].

This fits oddly with Paul's confrontation with Simon Peter, recounted in Galatians 2:11-21, over the freedom of Jewish Christians to ignore traditional purity rules so that they might eat with Gentile Christians.  Paul brushed aside the conscience of weaker brethren, which he dismissed as "hypocrisy" (Gal. 2:13), to insist on "the freedom that we have in Christ Jesus" (2:4).

Shaw continues:

What seems to worry Paul is not that the other person might remain unenlightened, but that he might be shocked.  Thus he concludes the passage: 'Give no offense to Jews, or Greeks, or to the church of God' ([1 Cor.] 10:12).  The moral sensitivity of other people would seem here to be a constraint on the Christian's freedom.  Paul is trying to avoid a situation where freedom is aggressively asserted without regard to the response of other people [85].

The letters to Corinth are later than the one to the Galatians, so perhaps Paul modified his views in the light of further experience.  But it would seem that he should have restrained himself when Peter suffered pangs of conscience and shame, and stopped eating with the Gentile Christians.  Not only Peter but the rest of the congregation must have been confused, but Paul didn't worry about their scruples; he aggressively asserted his freedom.

Paul also exulted in proclaiming Christ crucified, a scandal to the Jews and a folly to the Greeks.  Where was his concern for offending weaker vessels then?  Christians might argue that the crucifixion is an essential part of Christian faith but Christian freedom is not; but it appears from Paul's letters that not all Christian preachers made the crucifixion as central as he did, hence his pride in doing so.  Christian freedom, which he tied to the crucifixion, was important enough that he quarreled publicly with Simon Peter over it: Paul was willing to divide congregations over Christians' freedom from the purity commandments, so it was not a trivial issue, except when it was.

This episode is useful because we no longer eat meat that has been sacrificed to any gods, so we can focus more on the principles involved with a minimum of gut-level reaction.  (There are other such controversies in Paul's letters, such as whether Gentile Christians should be circumcised, and the status of women as teachers in the churches.  Paul wasn't any more consistent or clear on these issues than he was on food.)  I see Shaw's point, and even agree to some extent; but I think it works both ways.

Paul and Shaw frame the question in terms of "knowledge" (conflated, perhaps inaccurately, with gnosis) invoked by some Christians to justify their freedom, versus the tender consciences of the weaker brethren.  I suspect this is not quite fair to the freer Christians, especially given Paul's own practice, and too indulgent of the weaker ones.  I think that letting the more restrictive believers set limits on others is how you end up, for example, with women covered from head to toe to protect the "weakness" of men.  There needs to be some restraint on the power of more restrictive members of a community to control others.  Of course the latter will try to present themselves as victims of the former, and to claim that the only alternative to their restrictive position is total, destructive license.  In Paul's case, he declared that if women cut their hair at all, they might as well cut it off entirely.

The territory between the two poles can be viewed as a continuum -- or a slippery slope, as it's often called -- and the problem is that there's no obvious point at which to stop, at least in theory.  In practice, a slippery slope is invoked to claim that though a given practice -- gay marriage, say -- may not seem so bad, but if you allow it, why not permit marriage between humans and animals, or incest, or polygamy?  The proper reply is that if these latter practices can be shown to be harmful, then they can be forbidden, but they aren't grounds for forbidding gay marriage.

So, back to grandfathers and granddaughters, or mothers and sons, kissing each other on the lips.  The people who were repulsed by Melania and Barron didn't give any reason for their revulsion; it was just obvious to any decent healthy person that what they were doing was wrong, and if we don't draw the line there, we can't stop Donald Trump from grabbing women by the pussy.  Or something.  But where will we draw the line?  Not so long ago, it was obvious to all decent healthy people (including many gay men) that two adult men kissing was disgusting, sick, perverted.  Some people are horrified by women breastfeeding infants in public, or even by the mere idea of women breastfeeding: it's barbaric, it's animalistic.  (If we don't stop them, why not let men just "all hang out" in public?)  Many liberals who endorse same-sex marriage are squicked by the thought of cousins, even third or fourth cousins, marrying.  When the movie The Watchmen featured a nude male blue CGI character, many people panicked, and claimed that the trauma of the sight of a penis was equivalent to seeing one's grandparents copulating.  There was also a tendency to claim that the blue penis was on screen for the entire two and a half hours of screentime, which was false -- that slippery slope again.

One thing that especially bothered me was the question of where the anti-kissers wanted to draw the line, what kinds of physical expression of affection between parents and children they considered acceptable.  There have been periods, fairly recent, when expert opinion discouraged parents from being affectionate to children at all.  There was no valid scientific reason for this position; it probably sprang from the hangups of the doctors in question. We know that young children especially need to be cuddled, held, and probably kissed if they're going to grow up healthy, and that people of all ages need physical affection and contact.  Perhaps some individuals don't, and their limits should be respected -- for them; but if they denounce others' affectionateness as sick and perverted, they should be opposed and blocked firmly.

I've considered the possibility that the people who denounced relatives kissing had experienced abuse of some kind themselves; but I don't recall any who actually said they had.  They simply claimed that such kissing was intrinsically sick, harmful and repulsive.  Not everyone agrees, however, so how to resolve the conflict?  I don't think it can be resolved.  It can only be negotiated.  But I think we need to push back against people who try to impose their limits on other people.  Those who draw the line elsewhere should, as Graham Shaw argued, show consideration to others, but the 'weaker brethren' should also show consideration for the 'stronger,' which they don't seem inclined to do.

Now, I'm not claiming that this sort of squeamishness is something new, or even more common now than it used to be.  I have no evidence for such a claim, and don't believe it anyway.  I think it has always been with us, as shown by its long pedigree in religious and other domains.  What surprises me is that it's still so prevalent, and still so virulent.  When I was growing up in the 60s, many (including me) took it for granted that these superstitious hangups were waning and would soon fade away altogether.  I don't think that's going to happen, which is all the more reason why we must resist those who want to impose them on others.