Jennifer MATSUI
Since becoming his party’s frontrunner and presumed nominee, Joe Biden has been hard at work, providing more fodder for future Trump campaign attack ads against himself. No need for ‘deep fakes’ when your opponent willingly offers up his Blooper reels for the benefit of your own re-election campaign. There was something more viral than COVID-19 going around last week – recent footage of the former VP losing his marbles on Livestream and then wandering offscreen to retrieve them – or was he sleepwalking into traffic after hearing about his own car crash performance as it happened? Let’s just say his latest attempt at self-immolation just added more fuel to the rumors that he’s firing blanks instead of neurons.
Some will consider this open acknowledgment of Biden’s obvious and worsening dementia as belittling to all aging sufferers of this disease, but they would be missing an important point: Ordinary people in his position relinquish their driver’s licenses, give power-of-attorney to responsible relatives or caregivers, and voluntarily cede their autonomy for their own well-being – and for the safety of others. They perform these grim, end-of-life rituals with dignity and above all, integrity. By clinging to denial and ignoring medical advice, (as Biden seems to be doing) he risks being manipulated and exploited by those who will eventually exert absolute control over him, and by extension, us.
It’s not just dementia behind his decision to make another failed bid for the presidency, but the still active reptile part of his part that has always been its guiding force. ‘Survival of the unfittest’ is the evolutionary principle of the political class and the law of the Swamp. Biden has always been a primordial, slime dweller with a keen cockroach-like ability to adapt to his surroundings. He can do the bidding of a pro-segregation Senator, taking the opposite stance of his party on the issue of bussing, while using Black Panther talking points to make the case for institutional racism. He can serve at the behest of the first black president as his official court jester without ever having taken an honest inventory of his past, except to fill in the blanks between writing and passing atrocious Republican bills with fabricated stories of civil rights heroism. Today, Biden sees his role as the DNC’s black vote magnet as a natural extension of his previous incarnation as a “tough love” foreman on Strom Thurmond’s cotton plantation. There, he sharpened the implements Master Thurmond used to keep the slaves in line.
As Vice-President, he put a drunk handyman spin on the murderous policies for the two parties he serves, making drone programs and regime change seem as harmless as pretend-pissing in a punchbowl. You might even say that pretend pissing in a punchbowl has been Biden’s stock in trade for his entire political career. Degenerative brain disease has eroded the buffoonery down to a husk, and made visible the incontinent serial killer behind Pogo the Senator. The brightly colored cords that the infamous clown killer used to publicly entertain children with sleight of hand magic tricks was the same ligature used in private to incapacitate his victims. On both occasions, his targets were willingly duped into entrusting their safety to a clown with handcuffs. Now the DNC is asking voters to do the same. Biden’s bland, the average guy next door appeal has always masked a homicidal predator, now reduced to a math-addled playground flasher.
Neither time nor cognitive decline has, however, has calmed his blood lust or a lifelong commitment to planetary collapse. Violence has never been far from the surface of Biden’s carefully crafted persona of an affable, gaffe-prone uncle whose wandering hands always “accidentally” settle on a pre-pubescent girl. Nor has his tongue ever resisted the urge to turn a plagiarized platitude into a bellicose non sequitur. Gone is the deceptive veneer of unfiltered naivete, and in its place, open declarations of violent intent. At this onset stage of his senility, he is only able to articulate the hate speech underlying every bill he helped write in the Senate, including the Patriot Act which he insists was pushed through by leprechauns who had stolen his identity.
Girls over the age of eleven are “dog-faced pony soldiers”, a pro-gun union leader at his campaign events, a street gang rival to be taken outside and thrashed. Black voters remain on the receiving end of badly told anecdotes involving of all Freudian things, “thugs” with switchblades – not to mention fabricated stories about being arrested in apartheid-era South Africa. Was it there that he wrapped a bicycle chain around the skull of President Corn Pop after he was caught in the White-Only swimming pool? “I’d better ask my sister/wife who has a birthday next year in 2018 while I was serving pizza in the Senate as its grease monkey on my back”. Biden seems to fare better when just telling bald-faced lies as he did recently during his debate with Bernie Sanders. Not reviving Corn Pop or mangling the Declaration of Independence was evidence provided by the establishment media of their preferred candidate’s triumphant return to lucidity.
Perhaps his fellow swamp denizens see the opportunity the ascension of another unqualified halfwit to the presidency. The opportunity, that is, to keep another Imbecile-in-Chief pre-occupied with crayons, just as they kept Bush Jr entertained with finger paints, and Trump pre-occupied with Twitter. Where most people see a Biden presidency as a climactic finish to a decades-long race to the bottom, the mostly unseen Beltway bottom feeders perhaps relish the prospect of coalescing around a compliant invertebrate that will do their bidding. This can be easily achieved if the Democrats can convince those much-coveted and largely imaginary swing voters that Joe Biden is the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. “America, we present to you another doddering, red-baiting crypto-fascist with word soup all over his bib”. Somewhere Donald Trump is scratching his hair plugs in wonder over his latest victory.
counterpunch.org
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