Side note: the title is a dated reference to the Beatles animated film, Yellow Submarine. Apparently, not a lot of people have seen this film, despite it being the Beatles. Carry on.
Last week, wonder boy Democratic presidential nominee, and soon to be nominal drooler, Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris to be his VP running mate. Hugs and cheers were had by people, betraying their cable habits, “celebrating” this moment in history and a jaw breaking yawn was had by me and many others.
A quick rundown for the thinking, progressive Dems scratching their heads over Biden/Harris. Clearly, these people aren’t for you or the 100 million who won't show up to vote...again! You’ll be expected to vote for this corporate rubbish, without a sliver of reason, other than, “Orange Man, Mean!” You’ll get heat for “re-electing Trump.” However, we didn’t do it, the DNC did. History will rinse, lather, and repeat and a collective gasp of astonishment will be gabbed about by so called pundits, regardless the outcome in November with zero self-reflection whatsoever. In fact, Nancy Pelosi is already warming up a China excuse, as Russia is done as a canard.
That’s the simple part first.
Here’s an example, after W. got us into two illegal wars, we voted in Obama. He did not get us out of wars, as promised, and started five more. Where were the romantic protests? Marchers at the White House? The only people I saw in the media were Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin. Everyone else? They took an eight year nap. They loved Obama, despite his “deporter in chief status.” Through Occupy, DAPL, kicking 5.1 million families out of their homes, kicking 850,000 families off welfare, gutting habeas corpus, all of it… After all, he taught law!
Why mention this? Because the argument made by the Blue Meanies is, “When Biden wins, he’ll move left.” Well, no. He won’t. At all. That’s not how politics works.
He voted for every war, we’re currently in, wrote the Omnibus Crime Bill, Patriot Act, pushed NAFTA, voted for Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas and slut shamed Anita Hill to do it, and has been on the wrong side of practically every issue his entire 50 year career. He even said during a pandemic, that he’d “never sign a Medicare for all Bill, even if it passed Congress.”
He has also experienced out of body orgasms on the floor of the Senate explaining how many times he has tried to cut or outright eliminate Social Security and Medicare. He has called it the elephant in the room. Wait…that thing I have been paying into since I was 16? Not defense? Not the wars he voted for? Not a bloated military budget but the benefits of United States citizens? My benefits are the elephant? This is what entitled corruption looks like. One can’t even virtue signal here.
The coup de gras? Picking a fascist cop in Kamala Harris. Her record includes, but is not limited to, having 40% of California State firefighters be prisoners at $1 an hour, and jailing the parents of truant kids up to a year and fining them $2,000. That’s a great social program for the poor; take a parent (probably single) working two jobs and allow them to lose said jobs and now a place to live, while the child ends up in foster care or worse. Heaven forbid we ask how we have entire areas where incomes and schools are worse and near non-existent. No!!! Let’s appeal to the elite suburbs and jail these people! She bragged that she was using her political capital to do this. Not to indict Steve Mnuchin or any of the other bankers for mortgage fraud after the housing crash in California. This.
Will this change under a Biden/Harris administration? Biden wrote the Crime Bill...
She refused to relieve prison overcrowding because it would “affect the State’s prison labor force.” This was said after she was sued by the feds twice. In 2010 and 2014, her Republican opponents ran to her left, pledging to make pot legal and get rid of the “three strikes” law. She laughed this off. After all, she’s a black woman. That should do it. Not only did she jail 1,900 men and women for marijuana violations, she laughed about smoking it, claiming her Jamaican “roots” on the Breakfast Club. Listen to the clip, it’s embarrassing as well as her claiming that Colin Kaepernick was the result of a Russian plot. This is what passes for political theory in America.
The sheer entitlement of her failed presidential bid was pure hubris, on top of a tepid, pro corporate Senate voting record. Tulsi Gabbard destroyed her presidential run, not by calling her Trump like nicknames but by reading off her cruel resume like the Sunday Times.
I’m not one to feign surprise, but the DNC has already distributed guidelines to combat any “disinformation” (i.e. Harris’ actual record), with charges of racism and sexism. Clearly, that’s all any criticism could be, right? I guess because discussing the facts of her record would be divisive amongst Californians who lost their homes to fraud or had their time served extended because Victoria’s Secret were running low on thong panties…
Why not Nina Turner or Barbara Lee? Even Karen Bass is a pretty conservative progressive that might pass the d(owner) smell test. Well, Goldman Sachs doesn’t like them, and they funded Harris’ Attorney General races, her Senate race, and her most recent presidential run until they saw it was useless. She refused to indict Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud at One West, a Goldman Sachs subsidiary. She owes them and will do whatever they say. By the way, Mnuchin is now Treasury Secretary under Trump. But wait! Isn’t Trump a Republican and sends mean tweets? “It’s a big club and we ain’t in it!” as George Carlin said.
So, if there is a President Biden, the same pussy hat people will go right back to brunch, like they did under Obama, while we enjoy zero healthcare, screwing workers, and bombing and sanctioning black and brown countries, taking their stuff. This is what Biden means when he says (if he can remember) “we have to get back to normal.”
To paraphrase Danny Haiphong and Roberto Sirvent in their book, “American Exceptionalism, American Innocence,” on the subject of identity politics, celebrating a “person of color” for rising to the top of the food chain, is like claiming victory over the mafia for its ethnocentric hiring practices.
There it is. This is the ticket that is supposed to be “better for America” than the other idiocracy ticket. Your choices are vote for blood or more blood. Do something else. Vote for that third party you always wanted. These people are not your friends.