By Nathan Robinson
Did we learn nothing from 2016? Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians – and Biden would lose.
upporters of Joe Biden are unlikely to be persuaded by most of the common criticisms. They know he can be rambling and unintelligible. They know his record is unimpressive and that he doesn’t really have “policy proposals”. None of this matters, though, because to them he has the most important quality of all: he can beat Donald Trump. Nothing you can say about the former vice-president’s record, platform or mental state matters next to the argument that he is the best hope Democrats have of getting Trump out of office.
There’s just one problem: it’s a myth. It is a myth just as it was a myth that Hillary Clinton was a good candidate against Trump. Biden is not, in fact, the pragmatic choice. He would not beat Trump. He would lose. And we must say this over and over again. Forget his flubs. Forget his finger-nibbling. Biden would be crushed by Trump. If you want Trump out of office, don’t support Biden.
Last time round, Clinton supporters lived in a strange kind of denial. Anyone could see she had unique vulnerabilities Trump could exploit. She was a Wall Street candidate, and he was running to “drain the swamp”. She was under investigation by the FBI, and his pitch was that Washington was corrupt. She had supported the catastrophic Iraq war, and he portrayed himself as an outsider opponent of those wars. Trump could “run to her left” and make criticisms she would be unable to respond to, because they were accurate. Clinton’s attempts to attack Trump as an out-of-touch, reckless billionaire sex criminal would fail, because Trump would point out that she herself was out of touch, bought by billionaires and had an unrepentant alleged sex criminal as her husband and chief campaign surrogate.
Joe Biden will face many of the same problems. He has been in Washington since the age of 30, representing Delaware, the “capital of corporate America”. He is infamous for his connections to the credit card industry, and he has lied about his degree of support for the Iraq war. Even Matthew Yglesias of Vox calls Biden the “Hillary Clinton of 2020” for his corporate ties and war support. It is worth remembering what being the “Hillary Clinton” of anything means in an election against Trump.
Consider the Ukraine scandal, which is far worse for Biden electorally than usually acknowledged. Democrats have made this the centerpiece of their impeachment case against Trump, setting aside Trump’s most consequential crimes in order to focus on the charge that Trump tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. For Democrats, the scandal is clear-cut: Trump was abusing the power of his office to “damage a political rival”. And they believe that the American people will agree, and will be disturbed by Trump’s unethical behavior. They insist there was “no evidence” that Joe Biden did anything wrong, and that Trump and his associates have been unfairly trying to smear Biden.
Democrats who think this way are walking into a buzzsaw. Let us recall: Hunter Biden was paid up to $50,000 a month by a Ukrainian oil company. Officially, the chief Ukrainian prosecutor had an open investigation into that company. Joe Biden bragged about pressuring Ukraine to fire that prosecutor, which they did. Hunter Biden says he told his father about his position in Ukraine, and Joe Biden did not ask him to step down. Joe Biden contradicts his son’s story, saying they never discussed Hunter Biden’s “work” in Ukraine. One of them is not telling the truth.
Defenders of the Bidens like to point out that the prosecutor was fired for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with Hunter Biden. In fact, there was widespread pressure to fire the prosecutor because he wasn’t doing enough on corruption investigations, and there was a consensus among experts that this was the case. Biden’s actions had absolutely nothing to do with his son and it is ridiculous to suggest that they did.
All this is true. But the important question is: does it sound good? And the answer is: no. It sounds terrible.
One reason Democrats are bad at politics is that they concern themselves too much with facts and not enough with impressions. With Clinton’s “emails scandal”, they tried to show Clinton had not technically violated the law, but having Barack Obama’s FBI actively investigating Clinton for possible criminal wrongdoing looked terrible regardless of the facts.
Left-leaning journalists and pundits love to “fact-check” Trump, as if proving that he has lied is in itself persuasive. But 2016 should have showed us how powerless “debunking” is next to “optics”. If you have a Democratic candidate who looks really corrupt, it doesn’t matter if they’re not. People don’t trust the press and they don’t trust politicians.
Imagine Biden running against Trump. Trump will run ads like this, over and over. Good luck responding. Remember that time you have to spend defending yourself against Trump’s accusations is time not spent talking about issues that affect people’s lives. And Biden has already shown little interest in drawing people’s attention to the areas where Democrats should run strong against Trump, such as healthcare, taxation, working conditions and the climate crisis.
His slogan is “no malarkey”, but since Biden himself is a longtime spewer of malarkey, Trump will successfully paint Biden as a hypocrite. Biden’s central case is that he is “not Trump”, that he will return the country to virtuousness and decency. But if Biden doesn’t actually look virtuous and decent – because he isn’t – the argument that he has made for himself collapses completely.
Biden does have some strengths against Trump that Clinton did not. We mock his rambling and tendency for “gaffes”, but these do mean he never sounds like a “scripted politician”. Clinton was criticized as robotic and focus-grouped. Biden is anything but focus-grouped; whatever pops into his head comes out his mouth.
At the same time, compared to Trump, Biden has:
No money
No voter enthusiasm
No organization
No agenda
Ask yourself: how likely is such a candidate to win? Is such a person really the one you want to run against Trump? Look at the enthusiasm Trump gets at his rallies. It is real. Trump has fans, and they’re highly motivated. How motivated are Biden’s “fans”? Is Biden going to fill stadiums? Are people going to crisscross the country knocking on doors for him? Say what you want about Clinton, but there were some truly committed Clinton fans, and she had a powerful base of support. By comparison, Biden looks weak, and Trump is savagely effective at preying on and destroying establishment politicians.
Complicated factchecks that attempt to explain the nuances of the Ukrainian criminal prosecution system will not help Biden. People’s already limited enthusiasm for Biden will further wane, and Trump will point to his “strong economy” and “job creation” as evidence Obama and Biden were weak failures. Biden will look tired and irrelevant, and possibly forget why he is even running in the first place. Trump will be re-elected comfortably.
If there are Biden supporters in your life, you need to have serious conversations with them. Do not dwell on things that do not matter to them, like Biden’s record on bussing, or his latest nonsensical comment. Instead, keep the focus on the main argument that is sustaining his campaign: the idea that he is the best candidate to beat Trump. He isn’t. His electability is a myth, and when we look honestly at the facts we can see that Biden is actually a dangerously poor candidate to run.
Memo to Dr. Fetzer:
Would you please comment on this Jay Weidner video.
https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=Y1OU2A82X8AM
When Biden was asked a simple question about electability, he called the lady “a lying dog faced pony soldier”… still the funniest thing I have a politician utter in years. It’s pretty bad to be called a dog faced pony soldier, by a lying one? If I was Trump I would just keep hammering that and the other ridiculous things. Create a highlight reel of insane ramblings and ask is this the guy you want with the launch codes? Boom! Trump is the only choice. Warts and all. We can also thank Biden for the 21% interest on credit cards from that little shit=hole state Delaware. how long has he carried the water for those vampires ?
https://www.christianpost.com/news/what-is-the-presidential-medal-of-freedom-why-vp-joe-biden-was-awarded-one-with-distinction.html
Even Biden himself said he didn’t deserve it. He even was awarded one “with distinction”. Here is the simple answer. These awards are not given for any great achievement, but to buy silence. Biden knows all the dirt inside the Obama Administration. It is and was an obscenity to give this political whore this award. Here is the scientist who should have been awarded the Medal of Freedom:
http://whale.to/cancer/burk.html IN MEMORIAM — DEAN BURK (1904-1988), FLUORIDE, 22:3, 1989 July
by H.L. McKinney, University of Kansas; Lawrence, Kansas
Partial quote:
“Both science and the humanities have lost a major intellect with the recent death of Dean Burk, October 6, 1988, at the age of 84, Burk was born March 21, 1904, in Oakland, California, the son of Frederic Burk, who was President of what is now San Francisco State University. He entered the University of California Farm School at Davis at the age of 15 and studied agriculture. A year later, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his B.S. in Entomology in 1923. Four years later at the age of 23, he earned a Ph.D., in Plant Nutrition and Chemistry (1).
He continued his advanced studies as a fellow, National Research Council/International Education Board (1927-1929), successively at University College, University of London (with A.V. Hill, a Nobel laureate), the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin, and Harvard University. In Germany he had investigated nitrogen fixation with Otto Meyerhof and also befriended Otto Warburg, both Nobel Prize winners, and their students.
He maintained a forty-year friendship with Warburg, “my greatest mentor,” and perhaps the world’s greatest biochemist, who worked with him in Bethesda, Maryland, on photosynthesis in 1949. From 1950 up until 1969, the year before Warburg’s death, Burk spent most summers in Berlin and translated many of Warburg’s “most important contributions on cancer and photosynthesis….” (2). In 1953, he became a Foreign Member of Warburg’s Institute….”
This is where we’re heading.
It won’t be good for Trump, but maybe it will be good in other ways.
The “Greater Depression” Is Coming
By Doug Casey, founder, Casey Research
We’re now at the tail end of a very long, but in many ways a very weak and artificial, economic expansion. At the same time, we’ve had one of the strongest securities bull markets in history. Both are the result of trillions of new dollars created over the last decade. The U.S. economy is a house of cards, built on quicksand, with a tsunami on the way. I urge everyone to read up on the topic. For now, I’ll only briefly touch on the nature of depressions. There are at least three good definitions of the term:
A period of time when most people’s standard of living drops significantly.
A period of time when distortions and misallocations of capital are liquidated.
A period of time when the business cycle climaxes.
Using the first definition, any natural disaster can cause a depression. So can living above your means for long enough. But the worst kind of depression has not just economic effects, but economic causes. That’s where definitions two and three come in.
What can cause distortions in the way the market operates, causing people to do things they’d otherwise consider unreasonable or uneconomic? Only government action, i.e., coercion. This takes the form of regulation, taxes, and currency inflation.
Always under noble pretexts, government is constantly directly and indirectly inducing people to buy and sell things they otherwise wouldn’t, to do things they’d prefer not to, and to invest in things that make no sense.
These misallocations of capital subtly reduce a society’s general standard of living, but the serious trouble happens when such misallocations build up to an unsustainable degree and reality forces them into liquidation. The result is bankrupted companies, defaulted debt, and unemployed workers.
The business cycle is caused mainly by currency inflation, which is accomplished today by the monetization of government debt through the banking system; essentially, when the government runs a deficit, the Federal Reserve buys its debt, and credits the government’s account at a commercial bank with dollars. Using the printing press to create new money is largely passé in today’s electronic world.
Either way, inflation sends false signals to businessmen (especially those who get the money early on, as it filters through the economy), making them overestimate demand for their products. That causes them to hire more workers and make capital investments – often with borrowed money. This is called “stimulating the economy.”
Inflating the currency can actually drive down interest rates for a while, because the price of money (interest) is lowered by the increased supply of money. This causes people to save less and borrow more, just as Americans have been doing for years. A lot of that newly created money goes into the stock market, driving it higher.
It all looks pretty good, until retail prices start rising as a delayed consequence of the increased money supply, and interest rates skyrocket to reflect the depreciation of the currency.
That’s when businesses start failing. Stocks fall. Bond prices collapse. Large numbers of workers lose employment.
Rather than let the market adjust itself, government typically starts the process all over again with a new and larger “stimulus package.” The more often this happens, the more ingrained become the distortions in the way people consume and invest, and the nastier the eventual depression.
This is why I predict the Greater Depression will be… well… greater. This is going to be one for the record books. Much different, much longer lasting, and much worse than the unpleasantness of 1929-1946.
Doug Casey
Founder, Casey Research
My first response to this article is to laugh like my 2 year old daughter when I’m being silly or tickling her. Uncle Joe creepy past will come out and President Trump is keeping the cabal happy and the rest of America distracted as they work on our new digital currency and depopulation. Now back to COVID-19 and March Madness.
If Trump loses I’ll have to get Disney Plus.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-campaign-sues-cnn-false-defamatory-statements-millions-damages
I’ll highly recommend it if you got grand children or want to see all the Star Wars movies.
Grand children…Disney…really?
Sarcasm at it best Will. I’m sure Ralph was doing the same. Keep in mind that all of the cable & entertainment companies are all owned by defense companies and in the pass 10-15 years or so they have been monopolized and all showing the same garbage on TV. The distraction of the American people will continue.
Walt Disney was a pedophile and was all about the occult. In an non publish book in title Babylon Hollywood it provides a sick history of who he really was and why Disneyland /world was built.
Thank god the idiotic and thoroughly corrupt Biden probably can’t win.
The vacuous, Jew toady Trump is the best we can do! Or, maybe Trump has just been fooling everyone until he gets his last term.
And then he will revoke the Fed charter, install USG gold backed currency, build wall, deport illegals, bring troops home, slash military budget, outlaw 5G, fire dual national Jews in USG.
I think that’s what “Q” claims.
Thanks for the laugh.
Lol.. Ralph. Let’s not forget his middle Eastern expert and how the Palestinians are so grateful for his foreign policy in their regards. The chosen ones are happy so who cares who is President.
No doubt Trump would win…..MINUS GOOGLE….and I see nothing stopping them….not even a hint of anything. THAT gives me great pause.