The line Joe Biden used to put into nearly every big speech — “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future” — is a long way from what he says in private now.The line Joe Biden used to put into nearly every big speech — “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future” — is a long way from what he says in private now.
These days, multiple people who’ve spoken to him over the last year say, Biden often punctuates conversations with: “You think we can actually come back from this?”
The 83-year-old Biden continues to feel out a post-presidency that may prove to be one of the shortest in history and is already one of the most complicated.
There are days when Biden is heartbroken, indignant or in disbelief about what is happening as President Donald Trump — the man he defeated in 2020 — returned and moved not just to tear down his accomplishments, but to dig in with petty insults like the autopen photograph he put in Biden’s spot in the “Presidential Walk of Fame” installed at the White House.
Yes it’s definitely Biden’s fault that Americans gave the republicans the house, senate and presidency.
Dude sat on the Trump/Epstein files for 4 years and did nothing about it because it would have hurt the donor class and Israel.
Trump won on a (false) pledge to release the files.
Who deserves the blame for this situation in your mind?
Both of them
You’re correct but apparently this thread is only for hyperbole. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
This just in: investigations take longer in real life than on TV. Investigations of people with lots of lawyers take even more time and - stay with me - strategy.
Just because you didn’t see something happening, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. That’s like Object Permanence.
You’re telling me 4 years was too short a time to build a case against an insurrectionist pedophile who was referenced more than any other individual in the files?
And your chastising me for object permanence? L O fucking L
They have testimonies going back decades if they had wanted to look into it they would have by now
I guess letting Trump run out the clock on justice was the voters fault too, then, eh? Even when Biden was literally handed a way to prevent Trump from running on a silver platter by the Supreme Court that basically ruled that anything a President does is part of Presidential Duties. He and the entire apparatus around him including twerps like Merrick Garland has so many fucking options to stop this. The courts, the department of justice, the President, all of them had taken an oath to protect democracy and that oath doesn’t disappear because the voters are stupid. They all bend over like grass under a push-me-pull-you lawnmower going “oh for fucks sake” and deciding that fighting corruption was too hard and too risky for themselves personally. People whined about judges getting death threats and that’s why they were hesitant to play hardball… Are you fucking kidding me? Like they thought that would protect them or anyone else? Now fascism is boldly kicking the fucking doors in and those people and their families are in more danger than they were back then, except now the whole country is in just as much danger. They bent over because their pussy asses thought they could and should save themselves instead of fight fascism and asshats are all like “it’s the voters fault!” when Trump legally shouldn’t have been allowed to run for the Presidency at all for a litany of reasons and nobody with any real power did anything to stop it! Sure, it’s our fault, not a system that allowed it to happen, fuck me, give me a break! The people in charge abdicated their responsibility to justice and then said it’s the voters fault, get the fuck out of here.
Stop rewriting history. In a country where laws actually meant something and mattered he would have been in prison for 34 felonies and not allowed to run due to being an insurrectionist and guilty of treason for stealing and selling state secrets. How the living fuck is that the voters fault? The system failed the voters before the voters failed the system.
here’s something that still fucking rankles me:
think about all the billions of dollars, year after year, we put into the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, and so many other intel orgs - and what good did it do when a treasonous pedophile came knocking?
What’s the fucking point of it all if this is the outcome?
Exactly, what the fuck are we even paying taxes for if not to protect us from this kind of shit???
So that some people who grew up watching movies about spies get to be spies.
To shape a global racial hierarchy and make sure socialism doesn’t get too far
If the voters and non-voters hadn’t voted him back in the wheels of justice would probably kept turning slowly as they do.
Do you want to establish the precedence of a president demanding the DOJ arrest their opposition?
Because I’m not sure that’s a great idea.
Well, it sure seems to have worked without taking so long that the assholes who already broke the laws came back into power like in South Korea and Brazil. Those systems didn’t go “whoopsies we ran out of time, I guess they can take power again!”
A system that allows this to happen and places the blame on the voters instead of fighting for a better world is a system that was always going to end up this way.
A system that can just have the clock run out on justice is always going to be gamed like this, stop lying to yourself.
To be fair the voters and non-voters have a large share of the responsibility for this situation that’s how a democracy works.
Yes and we voted in people to represent us by upholding the law and following their oaths to office and they failed at representing our interests, upholding the law, and following their oaths miserably.
We voted in Trump and his gang with majorities in the house and senate.
After voting in Obama, who didn’t want anything to do with prosecuting Bush & Cheney for warcrimes, and then Biden, who didn’t want anything to do with prosecuting Trump, obviously. But I guess those times don’t count for whatever fucking reason??
American reluctance to hold powerful figures accountable isn’t a good thing and we’ve literally just left the question of whether you can prosecute a President at all dangling since we allowed Nixon to resign and fly away. That’s qualitatively a bad thing. We have had decades of chances to fix this problem and it doesn’t matter who we vote in, no one is dismantling the horrific things that are created in the meantime.
For example, instead of questioning why the TSA and it’s security theater exists or whether or not the DHS was a good idea at all, we have people going “Oh but the TSA agents aren’t getting paid!” They miss something like 60% of illicit items anyway, and if someone wanted to kill a mass amount of people they would just have to set off a bomb in the long security lines leading up to the airports. It’s been security theater since the fucking Bush era, but it’s become so normalized we’re whining about people who are violating the fourth amendment against unlawful search and seizure by choosing us at random for an unlawful search of our bags not getting paid! Boo hoo! These people who helped throw the fourth amendment out the window two decades ago now aren’t getting paid! Cry me a fucking river.
We voted, numerous times, as a country, to hold this kind of corruption to account and numerous times the people in charge failed us miserably, all the way back to Nixon.
That’s one hell of a detour away from the conversation we were having.
Every one of your comments is beyond ridiculous. I think you’re just here to troll.
Do you not think that voters and non-voters have a large role in how a democracy plays out?
Why did the voters cause Biden not arresting Trump? Explain this mental gymnastics.
Merrick Fucking Garland was a poor choice in the first place, a sop to ‘the other side’ and he performed exactly as expected.
Bernie Sanders would have won against Trump all three races, if we just had to have an old white guy.
Biden was earnest, but he did not, and does not have the balls required in these modern times
Can we come back from this?
What a joke. Biden himself had the opportunity and the authority to start that process, and his entire administration farted around for three full years.
You are so fucking ignorant if you think the wheels of justice were slowly turning.
Actually, I do blame him for overestimating his health, and thinking he had enough in the tank for another run. He clearly did not.
Would Harris have still been the nominee had there been an actual primary? Maybe, maybe not. But whoever won that would have been a better candidate.
I was extremely pissed off after watching that debate. The man I saw that night simply didn’t have it anymore, and it was more than just jetlag or a cold. There was nobody close to Biden who could have sat down with him before the election and told him directly that he didn’t have it anymore?
We talk about how Trump surrounds himself with yes-men and sycophants. I think Biden didn’t do much better.
His health was plain as day before he was elected, but liberals kept insisting it was only a stutter. They buried their heads in the sand so they could be the oppressors of the working class again.
Although somehow, Trump being just as mentally incompetent, wasn’t an issue. He may be a couple years younger but he is in no objectively measured way more competent. The GOP could run a sewer rat and leftists would still complain that the human Democrat was more of a problem. No, Biden, there isn’t a way back. America is hooped.
We were not the ones that chose to overlook his mental decline, the fact his campaign was tanking, and his racist past. That wound of Biden was self inflicted. There was a candidate that several leftists compromised with, but not having the balls to do what’s right, liberals selected the candidate that the party chose for them
He still speaks better than Trump. He is more cognitively in tact and shows better judgement as well. Always has.
No. He doesnt. You can stop lying about how feeble Biden is. Trump may be flatly and criminally insane but he can talk/ramble like a two year old. Biden cant. Thats just a simple fact, and your denying reality about Biden still highlights a huge problem on both sides. There just is no objective reality anymore. People like yourself want to claim self serving bullshit is real. We need to bring truth back.
Nope.
People that support trump think the same about him. You are blinded by the D in front of his name
I couldn’t give a fuck about party
Biden was one of the best presidents in my lifetime and he would have been for a second run too.
Being a white male he probably could have pulled off the win again too.
Not after that debate. If he had stayed in, all Trump would have had to do was play clips from it.
I do think that he was a very good President. His entire legacy is tarnished by holding on too long. If this is it for America, historians will write volumes on how Fascist America was enabled by people like him (and RBG) holding on to power past their “best by” dates.
Trump sounds the exact same but he won so I don’t think you’re right.
Both Biden and RBG trashed their legacies by failing to step aside
Bro. It took Biden until October '24 to even realize that half of america lives pay check to pay check and is struggling to buy fucking food and housing.
Biden was not a good president. he just wasn’t as bad as some of the others, and that’s an incredibly low bar.
Also, good presidents lock up pedophiles.
one of the reasons Kamala had such a hard time was that she wasn’t coming in on a fresh campaign, but rather trying to clean up and fix the mess Biden handed her. (there’s other reasons like not distancing herself from biden on certain issues, too. And racism. racism and mysogeny probably didn’t help, but that was surmountable.)
You’ll notice all these comments are basically a criticism for Biden not being the superhero they wish for…
None speak to anything the admin did or what actually happened during his four years vs the four prior or after…
100% a troll.
Nah, just the resident blue MAGA, spinning the same yarn as always.
So. like. the too-long-didn’t-care is treating responsibility for things like it’s zero sum game is stupid. Absolutely… incomprehensibly stupid.
Biden is absolutely repsonsible for having not done everything in his power as POTUS to put trump in jail.
and lets not forget… for the first half of Biden’s presidency, he had both the house and the senate- not by supermajority levels, no. but they had control and they pissed it away with compromise.
And if you’re going to give Biden credit for the Build Back Better bill and the other one… which I’m sure you do… then Biden can also take credit for that. (especially the decision to not pack the courts, or break the filibuster.)
His arrogant hubris and the DNC not forcing him out gave us Trump, again.
I’m interpreting the way you’re saying it as being a sarcastic joke but him being the POTUS made him the de facto leader of the Democratic party, who in turn failed to influence the majority of Americans to vote for them. It’s been coming out recently that the party’s own investigation into their 2024 loss revealed that the policy around Gaza played a significant role in their defeat, policy that self-proclaimed zionist President Biden had the power to influence and ultimately supported.
So yeah… It kinda is his fault.
He’s not blameless
Finally, you get it.
Yes it’s definitely not the people who voted for Trump or that decided not to vote at all.
You gave them the option between genocide and genocide. We told you that this would lose the election for the Democrats. You got the outcome you advocated for.
God that argument is so disengenuous. It basically comes to “cater to us a vocal minority or we won’t play.”
You leftists scream about the genocide but what exactly did you accomish? Smugness? Superiority? I haven’t heard a single leftist give a shit about South Sudan or Myanmar. Leftists are quiet when it comes to Ukraine. But you’re incredibly loud about Gaza… you know, the crater where a people used to live because the crap candidate didn’t capitulate to your demands.
Well now everything is fucked, the US has zero creditability, our allies hate us, ICE is officially the Gestapo, and concentration camps are being built.
But hey. Continue the tired ass line about “well we should have had a candidate who was against the genocide.”
Fun fact. Historically, when fascists take control, the first ones they try to stamp out is leftists.
But at least you can sleep at night now knowing that because you didn’t vote for genocide, you now allowed one to be completed with impunity.
Well done tankies.
Edit: Joe Biden was a fucking pussy who didn’t do what needed to be done.
What did you reactionary centrists accomplish? You handed us Trump. We gave you the path to winning and you chose not to take it. Its on you.
Yeah, your fucking fault dude.
You couldn’t win the election otherwise. Did you actually want to win the election or not? Because it follows that if you defended the candidate while they held an unelectable policy position, you were doing the work to get Trump elected.
Leftists rarely show up anyways. But hey. Continue to shift the blame. Whining and doing nothing is what you do best.
I’m not shifting the blame. I’ve always blamed fake “centrists” (read: reactionary rightwing voters who wear a blue hat) for losing the election. Its your fault.
Did you want to win the election or not? Because there was a path to doing so: The candidate needed to change their policy on Gaza.
We show up, we just don’t vote for POS parties
So you don’t show up. Got it.
If this was any normal election, then I would have supported the protest voters.
The problem was that it wasn’t. Trump is trying to ethnically cleanse Latinos out of America. I knew this was going to happen and I wanted to avoid it.
Immigrants were pleading with protest voters during the election. There are Latinos who protested with them from the beginning that have now gone into hiding. I talked to an immigrant that was begging leftists to care, and they accused them of being for genocide just for wanting their family to survive.
It’s not that I hate leftism. But a lot of leftists are unsafe for POC and women. They are privileged enough to prioritize ideals over safety. I only trust leftists that are intersectional, not those who champion some mythical homogeneous global working class.
This guy gets it. And I’m still waiting for a leftist to acknowledge South Sudan.
I don’t really expect leftists to show the exact amount of empathy for every crisis around the world. Most people focus on issues that matter to them. Leftists are no exception.
My problem is that many assume they are the absolute moral authority. They don’t view their preferences for issues as being biased, just like that of liberals.
Like, it was pretty clear they cared more about Palestine than immigrants. Fair enough. The problem I had was the way they reacted to those who cared more about immigrants than Palestine.
They told immigrants they were crazy for worrying about Trump. They told them “it would have been the same” under a liberal, which goes against a lot of people’s lived experience. And when all else fails, they just blame the democrats for their failures.
I would have respected Uncommitted a lot more if they admitted they took a gamble that failed. Even though I’m against protest voting, I can at least admire that they stood up for what they believed in. They simultaneously want to be trusted with all the power, and use liberals as an eternal scapegoat for any failures.
This guy also gets it.
For being a minority we seem to hold all the power
Schrödinger’s anti-genocide vote. Simultaneously able to have determined the outcome of an entire election, but also not important enough of a coalition to address their concerns and bring them (back) into the tent.
Glad you think a slide into fascism is a joke.
This country has been fascist. Liberals bury their heads in the sand when it’s their team doing it
I think DNC centrist clownshow leadership and constant failure at everything they touch is a joke. A sad one, but a joke nonetheless. At least they got paid by the zionists for selling us all out. Taking bribes sure wasnt a joke, was it u/Devolution?
The only joke jokier that that is your continued warpath in support of them.
AP News 6 hours ago: Americans’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted dramatically, new poll shows
You’re heads in the sand thinking this is a minority extremist position. The people advocating for this saw where the winds were blowing and your ego still can’t acknowledge it.
I’m sure they appreciate the change in sympathies from the world.
Oh wait.
Wait is the point you are trying to make right now that less Palestinians would have died under Harris?
Genocides are horrible things that should never happen but too many people are using the word as critical-thought terminating cliches.
It’s like trying to talk to an anti-abortionist and the only thing they can do is call you a baby killer.
You have to decide if you wanted to win the election or not, and its never been clear to me that you ever actually wanted to win. What its always appeared to be, is that you wanted to mantain ideological control of the party (which you did do, and have continued to: the party is still pro-genocide).
But what is clear, is that the party could not win with the general election with a Democratic candidate supporting a genocide.
How many house and senate democrats support Israel and how many don’t?
Did you want to win the election or not? The only path to winning was to get Harris to change her stance on Gaza.
Are you able to answer the question or are you dodging it because the answer doesn’t line up with the narrative you’re pushing?
The USA is a democracy; every one of us is responsible individually for what we do with our votes.
You, I infer, decided that the best thing to do with your vote was endorse the rapist who promised to do absolutely nothing to stop the genocide in Gaza over the candidate who at the least would have protested.
Which sure as fuck was your right, but it’s kinda weird that you’re trying to argue that this isn’t exactly what you voted for.
In a single-ballot plurality-wins-all election anything but a vote for the runner up is an endorsement of the eventual winner.
But the system we vote for isn’t responsible for enforcing laws like… *checks notes… putting 34 time felons in prison, preventing insurrectionists for running for office, and letting people who commit treason of stealing and selling state secrets to the highest bidder run for office? It’s all our fault huh? The system didn’t fail us first, huh?
You’re trying to place blame on an individual instead of a party that encourages policies that creates voter disenfranchisement.
Why is critical analysis attacked?
No. I’m recognizing the actual system we have pointing out that anti-genocide non-voters made a deliberate choice.
This isn’t a disenfeanchisement issue so much as it is a disengagement problem. There citizens had the sane franchise as everyone else, and chose not to go vote against a rapist.
There’s plenty of blame to slap on the Democratic party from the former president and candidate all the way down. But Biden not standing by his purported morals and Harris not breaking with him when he didnt compel non-voters not to cast a vote. They’re adults and citizens and should either stand by their choice and argure that it was correct or else concede that they made a mistake and would change it if they could
IF you are going to make that argument, you also have to provide a mechanism which can change the minds or engage the millions of voters necessary for Harris to win, otherwise its irrelevant.
Harris could have changed her policy to win the election. She’s a single individual, in the exact position of power to do precisely this.
If you can’t offer a credible mechanism for changing the minds of 6 million plus voters on the issue of genocide over the course of approximately 4 months (July/August 24 to November 24), you must cede that the only path to Harris winning was to change their policy.
Single issue voters are one of the biggest problems with US politics. They’re willing to ignore everything else about reality. Doesn’t matter if it’s Genocide, LGBTQ issues, or Abortion, it’s the same outcome.
The worst option overall becomes the most likely.
You don’t control the electorate. You don’t have to like the way people are to recognize that they are in-fact that way. Stop confusing how you want the world to be with how the world is.
Candidates can either address the issues of those single issue voters or they lose the election.
Crickets regarding South Sudan and Ukraine…
Are we participating in those genocides like we participated in the genocide of Palestine? Are we the worlds police?
The answer is No to both questions. So the question becomes, why are you running interfernce for the genocide of Palestine? Personal for you, is it?
You’re right. This is personal for me. To know that dipshits like you with your “moral high ground” is why everything is so fucked.
But since your privileged white ass doesn’t have to suffer the consequences, oh well.
Oh wait, even white people aren’t immune to it. Just ask Alex Pretti and Renee Good. You can’t can you. Because they are dead and fucking ignorant tankies like you are the reason why.
Yeah it’s personal. People like you make me sick.
Who’s “we”?
gestures vaguely at all the independent media coverage from 2023-2024
So you didn’t vote for Harris and you’re part of the Independent media?
I’m torn. Do you think what you are doing is more like the ‘Tu quoque’ fallacy or more of a ‘red herring’?
‘Tu quoque’ would be like, because we think you did thing X, your argument about A or B is invalid.
‘red herring’ would be like, instead of engaging the actual claim (that the campaign lost for strategic reasons), you’re trying to drag the conversation onto something about personal preference, which doesn’t answer the strategy argument at all.
Or it could just be an appeal to hypocrisy / circumstantial ad hominem, where you’re implying I don’t have standing to make the argument (or that my argument should be discounted) because of what you assume about my personal behavior.
Any which way, it doesn’t do anything to detract from my claims.
You said basically, “We told you so!” and I wanted to know who the “we” was. You said the “we” was independent media. So from that, I took it that you are included in the independent media. You’re also complaining about Harris a lot, so that lead me to believe that you didn’t vote for her as well. It could be that you voted for her, but you can see why others didn’t, that’s why I’m asking. I’m not pulling anything, just trying to see where you’re coming from and if you’re an American.
Here it is. Not pretending that this is about anything beyond your ability to claim the high ground. How has that worked out for Gaza?
Tankies cry about Gaza but don’t give a shit about Ukraine, South Sudan, or Myanmar. That lack of discussion there not only undermines their creditability, but it makes them look as antisemitic as MAGA.
It was your party
Democrats could have met the moment and parroted popular leftist policies like taxing the billionaires, ending the Palestinian genocide, installing universal healthcare, etc.
Instead they dug themselves a hole with idpol and chasing the Right