July 19, 2024
The Biden Exit plan is underway. As reporting from NBC today shows, Joe Biden and his family are moving through the grieving process over the coming conclusion of his campaign for a second term.
In order to induce the declining old man Biden to admit that he’s a catastrophic loser bringing down his party and greatly increasing the likelihood of full Republi-fascist takeover in 2025, Democrats are going to have to kiss the president’s ass.
The only way to get Bernie Sanders’ “good friend” “Genocide Joe” Biden to give up his delegates and allow them to go to someone with a likely better shot at beating Adolph Trump (the man Trump’s 2024 vice presidential running mate JD Vance called “America’s Hitler” in 2016) is to praise the incumbent as “a man of great integrity with a long and noble record of service to America and humanity including his heroic defeat of Trump in the 2020 election” (or words very much like that).
There will be two big problems with this narrative.
First, Biden’s career has been a capitalist- imperialist disgrace against humanity within and beyond the United States. Please read this 2019 exposé I wrote on this bloody-jawed war criminal’s long record of lying, cheating, serving big business (while pretending to be “Blue Collar Joe”), and advancing the dreadful and bloody US empire: “No Joe: On Character, Quality, and Authenticity,” CounterPunch, September 6, 2019.
Consistent with that essay, the Biden presidency has been a moral nightmare. The Biden administration has intensified the climate catastrophe, preserved and expanded the crushing neoliberal economic insecurity of masses of ordinary Americans, and pushed the world closer to nuclear war than it has been in decades. Biden has backed horrific genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza, appeased a women-hating Christian Fascist Supreme Court, failed to prosecute Trump in a timely way (for, you know, trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy), and generally let Trumpist Amerikaner fascism run rampant without calling it out and making any serious effort to mobilize masses against it.
Like his Democratic president predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton but without any of their telegenic eloquence and charisma, president Biden in the White House has been a depressing monument to the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s memorable description of the Democrats as “the inauthentic opposition.”
“Should Democrats somehow be elected,” Wolin prophesied in his book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, 2007) near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, they would do nothing to “alter significantly the direction of society” or “substantially revers[e] the drift rightwards. … The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts,” Wolin wrote, “points to the crucial fact that for the poor, minorities, the working class and anti-corporatists there is no opposition party working on their behalf.” (Wolin might have added “for peace activists and environmentalists.”) The dismal, dollar-drenched Dems would work to “marginalize any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.”
That was a good fit for the coming Obama and Biden presidencies. And since Wolin wrote those words, the Republican Party that the Dems fail to authentically oppose has gone full-on MAGA – something Biden once haltingly described to wealthy donors as “like semi-fascism.”
Biden could have dropped the “like” and the “semi-.” Trump and the party of Trump now check off one fascist box after another, as I have been demonstrating for years (for starters see the first three chapters of my latest book).
A second problem with the aforementioned ass-kissing story line is that Biden did not heroically defeat Trump in 2020. He didn’t really defeat Trump at all. Covid-19, the racist Minneapolis cop who murdered George Floyd, and Trump himself defeated Trump in 2020. But for the coronavirus and the George Floyd Rebellion, and Trump’s terrible response to both, Biden would surely have lost the last presidential election. His two previous presidential campaigns were fiascos.
Please bear in mind that the only reason Sloppy Joe Biden made it to the center stage of American and world history is Barack Obama’s cynical 2008 choice of him as a conservative old white male running mate who would help alleviate moderate voters’ fear of supposed Obama’s supposed (and mythical) Black radicalism. Obama helped rig the Democratic presidential nomination game for Biden over Sanders in 2020. (For that unpleasant history, please see the fifth chapter, titled “Joe Biden? Thanks Obama” in my 2020 book Hollow Resistance: Obama Trump and the Politics of Appeasement [CounterPunch Books, 2020]).
Fially, here’s something else you won’t hear in the efforts to kiss Biden’s ass out of the 2024 race: a considerable number of establishment Democrats are concerned not merely with Biden’s viability and “down ticket” drag on the party but also with his abject fecklessness atop the US American Empire.
Let’s review.
There was the humiliating fiasco of how the US finally left Afghanistan under Biden, reminiscent of the America’s flight from Saigon in 1975 under the hapless toady Gerald Ford.
There was Biden’s pathetic oil-begging fist-bump with the Saudi crown prince MBS, head of an arch-reactionary absolutist state that Biden had in 2020 called a “pariah” nation – a meeting which hardly deterred Riyadh from continuing to sell oil to Washington’s geopolitical rivals.
There’s Biden’s ongoing reckless and ridiculous refusal to negotiate some kind of settlement of the mass-murderous meatgrinder of an inter-imperialist war that he sparked in Ukraine. It’s a criminal war that never would have happened if Biden had early on picked up a telephone and told Vladimir Putin that Ukraine would never be invited into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Biden can warmonger all he wants but Russia is not giving back any significant amount of the territory it has seized from Ukraine. He is not even involved in efforts to find a settlement, a telling sign of Washington’s waning power under Biden.
And then there is Biden’s sloppy and sickening post-October 7 embrace of the Zio-fascist Israeli tyrant Bibi Netanyahu and Biden’s continued funding and equipping of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. This criminal support continues as Biden lamely pretends to be concerned about Palestinian civilians. Netanyahu has brazenly thumbed his nose at Biden’s “humanitarian concerns,” showing open contempt for the doddering US president and a calculation that Bibi’s fellow authoritarian and racist Trump (who’d be happy with a million Gazan deaths by now) will be back in power next January.
The world sees the weakening of US power and influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and the grotesque hypocrisy inherent in the contradiction between (a) Biden’s outrage over the American Empire’s enemy Russia’s invasion of the US imperial ally Ukraine and (b) Biden’s backing of the US imperial ally Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza. (The racial/racist dimension of this seeming double standard is not lost on the global South.)
Adam Schiff et al. won’t say it in public but they see Biden not only as an electoral liability very likely to open the door to the full white nationalist takeover of US government but also as a pathetically failed steward and agent of the American Empire, which they think is best and most effectively managed and advanced by Council on Foreign Relations Democrats, not supposedly isolationist Heritage Foundation nationalists.