Biden 2021 - A Mediocre Middle Ground

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
903

Sure the Putin debate is lose-lose for Biden, which is why Putin can safely mock the president by extending it.

Remember when Trump walked slowly down the stairs and the media and Biden ate him up for it? I didn’t because I don’t watch the news everyday, but thankfully there are people who make it their business to remind us of the absurdity.

WATCH: Biden Mocked Trump Last September: ‘I Run Up Ramps’ He ‘Stumbles Down Ramps’ | The Daily Wire

This clip of Biden mocking Trump’s gait last year did not age well at all…

Again, none of this stuff is concerning when examined in a vacuum. I only consider it problematic when taken as a whole. We’re going to end up with an openly Marxist (remember the “equity” video she ran right before the election?) President who was dead-last in the Democratic primary.

#resistance

904

That’s not the point. It’s lose-lose for most any president is my point.

I also remember when you and others ate HRC alive for having trouble exiting a venue. So let’s not get carried away.

Sure, I can accept that. I just don’t agree, YET.

905

How many more policy disasters and irreversible bad outcomes will it take? If H.R. 1 or a similar bill gets enacted that could be the end of the entire experiment, and you can count on the high-integrity media landscape to explain how everything is great, how the election process is more secure than ever, calling anyone who disagrees a white supremacist, etc, etc.

We’re on the knife edge of one-party rule right now. Today. It is no coincidence that mainstream conservative policies are relentlessly attacked as white supremacist. It is no coincidence that our thought police has suddenly deployed in the form of fact checks, shadow bans, actual bans, and highly selective bias about what is newsworthy and what is best left un-reported. It is no coincidence that this is all being done by the private sector on behalf of the presently dominant political and socio-cultural establishment.

There is a word for that kind of partnership, one thrown around quite a bit during the Trump era. Grave warnings were given about Trumpian fascism and none of it ever came to pass during his four years in office.

Meanwhile, today…

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906

Thanks for saving me the time.

I agree not before, but it is increasingly obvious now. The blueprint seems to be to trot him out sparingly, with the appropriate dosage…

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907

Note to Biden handlers: tone down the adrenaline dosage juuust a tad, maybe?

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908

Republicans used the empty suit attack constantly on Obama who did this type of thing all the time. Maybe it’s because if either of them stepped in a Trump suit much of it would be empty?

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909

Come on this is some pretty extreme hyperbole. I get that now that a Dem is back in office the world is ending and all that stuff just like it ended in 09 and the United States no longer existed.

Hell we had a President attack US citizens from a computer screen daily. Who had the Secret Service pepper spray people so he could take a picture to appeal to Christians. Who lost an election and then spent weeks trying to tear down the results of that election in every possible manner. Who convinced legislators from other states to sue states over their own elections. Who helped organize a rally and was responsible for the rhetoric and conspiracies which spurred loonies to assault the capital.

And now weeks in his replacement has sent it all to hell? Never ever to recover? One party rule? Republicans just had all three branches, they have a majority in the Supreme Court and the own the vast majority of power positions in the state legislature. It’s incredibly likely they will be poised to capture Congress in the next cycle. They are already “working” hard at the state level to change voting rules in a way that helps them and they are going to be able to gerrymander the hell out of a lot of important states still just like they successfully did last decade.

Republicans will obstruct every possible thing in every possible way even if it’s stuff their constituents want like the bill that just passed. The world will continue spinning. A bunch of old farts will be arguing about it on t-nation forums with the same hysteria and hyperbole as the posts we can read from 03, 05, or any other random year when this was really it this time.

It really is going to be ok. America survived GWB, it survived Obama, it survived Trump, it will survive Biden. You wanted Trump to win and he didn’t win and it sucks when the person you want to win doesn’t. But it’s really not the end of the world.

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910

That seems to be the trajectory, yes. Many powerful forces are presently rowing in this direction. Hence my concern. I’m not sure how you can call it hyperbole when that de-facto result has already been achieved on smaller scales here in the USA. You don’t need to outlaw the Republican party to neuter it through a variety of mechanisms. There are still many conservatives in Chicago, after all. They just haven’t had any influence over policy in decades.

I’ve been on the planet for 41 years and this is not business as usual in Washington or our society.

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911

One party rule is hyperbole completely. It ignores our history and certainly modern history where power has shifted back and forth between the two major parties.

You had no trouble saying none of the voting changes Republicans at the state level were being put into place to harm Democratic turnout, but you don’t have any trouble saying Democrats are trying to neuter Republicans?

You think liberals in Kansas have had much?

Again the same type of world is ending stuff that was said for 8 straight years of Obama being President. You can go through old PWI posts from almost each year and find similar topics of its all over now. I’m sure you’ve posted in some of them. I mean you just spent a great deal of posts responding to most everything people said was a big deal about Trump largely wasn’t at all. And now the moment the other side has someone in it’s all over for the country?

The Republican Party will be just fine long term. It was all going to be one party rule in 08 as well. And Democrats thought it was over for them in 16.

912

We shall see. If that’s the case I highly doubt the mirage can last 4 years. I just have decided that I want to personally withhold judgement on that given the previous 4 years. And frankly, a president only sparingly visible would be an improvement (for me) on the past where billboards, tweets, and flashing lights shoved one in our face everyday.

This is something I unfortunately predicted after the capitol mob incident. This is much more serious and saddening to see, as the accessibility of our legislators is one of our collective Experiment’s major hallmarks.

913

What irreversible bad outcomes are you speaking of? I recall the post on Biden’s first set of executive orders, which seemed largely a mixed bag in addition to being reversible by virtue of being an EO. I have not seen any concrete irreversible bad outcomes yet. Not that I want them to occur, but I don’t see any evidence of irreversible damage. And this is the same thing all the progressives were doing in the first month after Trump got elected… And GWB.

I fully understand that there are objectionable items in the bill. But why would this be the end of the entire experiment? I don’t believe that for an instant. That is chicken little talking, not twojar.

No we are not. Again, this is the exact same hysteria that gripped the progressive left when Trump was elected, and again gripped the right when Obama was elected, and yet again gripped the left when GWB won the election after supreme Court intervention.

You are very upset, and I cannot share that level of concern. I was much more concerned when Obama was elected for his first term than I am over Biden. I’ve been a conservative pretty much my whole life, and although I am moderating aspects of that as I age I am in no danger of becoming a bleeding heart liberal. I simply do not share your analysis of the situation.

There will undoubtedly be bad policy outcomes, just like I thought there were under Trump… and Obama… And GWB. I recall criticizing all of them. But this is not strangely unprecedented, and not a Manchurian candidate style set up either.

914

Generations of failed policies that result in the conditions present in Democratic strongholds today. To give a recent example, how is it possible that a .17 GPA puts a student in the top half of his class in any school in any place in the USA? You can’t point the finger at a single policy, because outcomes like that don’t happen overnight.

Another irreversible bad outcome would be H.R. 1 passing, because it further muddies up a system that the Democrats seem oddly insistent upon keeping as murky as possible. Because racism, or something? To go back to my simple bar example, you won’t catch fraud at your business if you don’t have any kind of security or basic accounting systems. In fact, there won’t be much evidence of it at all.

See above. It won’t be a dramatic Ned Stark execution, but it could be the tipping point whose outcome would coincidentally be Democrats winning whenever it matters.

I never felt this way about any of that, even though I shared a lot of those basic objections (except I voted for Obama first term). The wide array of information control mechanisms we have today were not in place because they didn’t exist. We weren’t digitally burning any books. Nobody was getting cancelled. The assumption of good faith remained largely intact, at least to the point where having basic and long-established conservative viewpoints wouldn’t put a person at risk of job loss anywhere in the USA outside of the Oberlin College campus.

Today we have a government-enforced press blackout at the border while simultaneously insisting that they are committed to transparency.

Nothing to see here folks. No policy disasters at all.

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915

I rarely link videos or articles to represent my own thoughts, but this is a compilation of Thomas Sowell clips where he outlines a lot of my concerns.

He’s 90, BTW, and still able to get his point across in unscripted conversation. I particularly like how he takes Joe Biden to school in 1987 when Joe Biden was trying to play the same kind of “gotcha” games that remain a staple of Democrat rhetoric today. Have no principles at all, but relentlessly try to point out how people who actually have principles fail to uphold them perfectly.

In that case, Senator Biden failed to do so because his argument began with the flawed assumption that “judicial activism” extends to any decision a court ever makes.

There are few people who’ve studied the world the way Thomas Sowell has, let alone lived a life like his. He’s lived through everything that’s happened since 1930 with a genius-level mind to take it all in that he’s miraculously retained into his 90’s, writing books about what he’s learned for us to read the entire way.

Why Joe Biden MUST NOT Become President - YouTube

916

Oh, ok. I thought you were talking about failed policy decisions of Biden’s first 3 months about why he is the final straw. See, this is why I asked. I agree with your example, but you don’t win the policy battle in one go. Just like you don’t LOSE it in one go.

Oh come on. Both parties have every incentive to muddy the waters. They just do it different ways. And HR 1 has many more aspects to it than just that, so I don’t think you should say it is an irreversible bad outcome. I mean the damn bill covers like a dozen or more topics. Like every piece of legislation in the last… forever… It’s a mixed bag of junk and reasonable. Again, I don’t think this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

In some ways yes, but in others there were less outlets to control and therefore you can argue control was easier then. We have all kinds of alternative outlets now, for better or worse depending on the source.

Cancellation picked up steam during Obama, and isn’t new, but I agree in general.

Sure, never been any hypocrisy with the previous guy either. Come on. This example is weak. Is it wrong? Yeah. But many things from the 3 previous adminstrations were equally or more wrong.

Look, your previous post to me sounded as if you felt Biden’s brief tenure was filled with bad policy and irreversible outcomes. It’s just too soon to say that, that’s why I asked.

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917

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918

Can you explain the reason you’re moving in the opposite direction from most?

919

“150 million people have been killed by firearms since 2007” I think Biden pulled that one out of his arse, even if he’s talking worldwide. That’s probably more than killed in the two world wars. “carnage on our streets” , sounds like he’s referring to USA, so that’s at least half the population of the USA, dead from gun violence. We all know that’s not true, not even close.How did no one call him out on that, at the time?

First we had Sleepy Joe, then Creepy Joe, but he’s always been Batshit Crazy Joe, and now Senile Joe.

920

I failed in communicating if I made it sound that way. I think most of your criticisms are reasonable. I still don’t feel there’s any “same stuff on both sides” general equivalence when you consider the totality of circumstances when it coms to election policies and practices. If I went to work on Monday and began implementing the election security ideas of the Democrats in our business accounting software I’d be fired as soon as someone realized what I had done.

We now have four years of Trump, warts and all, exposing most of his professional and amateur critics as being completely off-the-mark. Any reasonable audit of what people have said over the years would showcase this absurdity. Four years and a conceded election later, with plain-English pleas for non-violence in the lead-up to the Capitol riot, I still have no reason to believe that Trump assumed the Presidency with anything other than good intentions in mind, with plenty of policy results to back that up.

The most obvious explanation for Joe Biden’s entire career is the pursuit of power and personal enrichment via elected office, along with the easily-observed willingness to say whatever Joe Biden thinks will get him elected. Joe Biden’s never been wrong and he’s never had to answer for any outcome of any policy he’s ever advanced. He can just keep saying the right words to get votes and claim policy passage as signs of success, ignoring the downstream outcomes of policy passage.

If a reality TV blow-hard as President was bizarre, a barely-functioning caricature politician straight out of the Simpsons assuming the presidency and advocating more woke, race-based nonsense policies is straight out of the Twilight zone. Dr. Levine, who Biden’s handlers appointed to assistant health secretary, is a character straight out of woke central casting who openly advocates for the mutilation of children through surgery and hormone treatments.

Again, taken in a vacuum, there are worse things than a transgender assistant health secretary, which is a job that probably doesn’t even need to exist. Exist though it does, and the Biden Handler administration has seen fit to advance the notion that transgenderism is best treated as soon as possible through irreversible means, rather than letting adolescence play its course and make adult decisions as an adult.

BTW, Amazon refuses to sell empirical observation and common sense notions that are deemed “problematic” by narrow-minded trans activists. Who cares how many kids suffer irreversible harm by going along with pro-trans dogma instead of simply going trough adolescence with responsible adult guidance?

Once you’re an adult, do whatever the hell you want as far as I’m concerned. One of my very best friends is a trans adult. Just leave the children out of it.

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921

To add one more point of clarification. I agree that nothing is “irreversible”, but that doesn’t mean you can’t cross a deeply significant point of no return.

The USA, for instance, holds the historic distinction of grinding two separate world powers into economic and even radioactive dust and then laying down the conditions for both of those nations to become first world powers with remarkably high standards of living in less than a lifetime.

Thomas Sowell has lived through that entire rise and fall, if you can imagine such a thing.

Of course policies are reversible. Eventually. Nazis hold no sway over Germany today, and Japan is no longer slaughtering Chinese by the millions. But to quote my favorite economist, ask a few questions first.

I’ve often said there are three questions that would destroy most of the arguments on the left.

The first is: ‘Compared to what?’

The second is: ‘At what cost?’

And the third is: ‘What hard evidence do you have?’

Now there are very few ideas on the left that can pass all of those…”

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922

The president should give in to pieces of garbage like Putin? Why? To make you feel better about Trump losing? That’s just sad.