Joe Biden Won’t Be the Democratic Candidate in 2024
In December of 2022 I went on record saying that Joe Biden would not be running for president again in 2024. The response I got from my Democrat friends when I said this ranged from things like “You’re drinking the red Kool Aid.” to “Yeesh, I don’t even wanna think about it.” to “I don’t know man, I just don’t know.” My Republican friends either laughed or made a joke about Biden’s incompetence.
We’re in mid-September of 2023 and my claim is that now no one, literally no one (really) believes any longer that Joe Biden is mentally capable of either running for president again or of doing the job of POTUS now. It’s glaringly obvious to everyone that Biden is in the process of cognitive decline.(1)
There is no one who has watched Biden repeatedly forget what event he’s attending, there’s no one who’s watched him lose the thread of basic sentences again and again, there’s no one who’s seen him walk off stages at the wrong time, who’s seen him fall multiple times, etc., that isn’t aware of what is happening to him. And all of these gaffs, mental meanderings, stumbles and tumbles are happening with greater and greater frequency with each passing month. There is simply no way for the establishment media to continue to spin this. Joe Biden is mentally unfit to govern.
Add to all of this the fact that it’s becoming evident that Biden and his family have committed serious crimes over the past decade. We’re talking about fifteen shell companies and 20 million dollars of undisclosed payoffs from Ukraine and China.(2)
Mitch McConnell is Also Unfit to Govern
Over the course of the last seven weeks Mitch McConnell has twice frozen, going utterly silent and still, in the middle of press conferences. (3) Anyone who has seen clips of these incidents knows that they are nothing to laugh about. In fact, even on political comedy shows, comics and commentators have avoided making direct jokes about these episodes because they are so clearly indications of cognitive deterioration.
McConnell is not only a state Senator, he’s one of the top voices of the Republican Party. A large part of his job involves speaking publicly. It goes without saying that McConnell is no longer fit to do the job he’s been doing. He’s no longer mentally fit to be a US Senator.
What This Symbolizes
Mitch McConnell is 81. Joe Biden is going to be 81 in two months. These two octogenarians, together, are the two-faceted face of the ensconced neoliberal/neocon government power structure in the US. What Mick and Keith are to Rock n Roll, Mitch and Joe are to neoliberal establishment politics.
There are a couple of Leonard Cohen lines from a song called “Everybody Knows” that come to mind:
“Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died”
A few decades ago America began to take a turn. Without going into a bunch of details, in short, we began to drift, with people like Biden and McConnell at the helm, away from the principles and programs of the New Deal.
The unprecedented craziness that has been building over the course of the last two or three years is the product of over four decades of wealth and power transference. Our fragile yet undeniably fruitful democracy has transitioned back into an oligarchy. (4) Our media, our electoral process and most of our other major institutions have all been usurped by the establishment, by an ultra-wealthy military-industrial complex connected minority.
We can all hear the sideboards creaking. We can all see that the roof is leaking. We’ve lost our way and we all suspect that there’s no one at or near the wheel now who is capable of correcting our trajectory. We’re off course … and Everybody Knows it.
“Everybody knows it’s coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
Everybody knows”
CITATIONS
(1) https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/joe-biden-us-president-mental-health-b1106452.html
(2) https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-oversight-committee-has-uncovered-mounting-evidence-tying-joe-biden-to-family-business-schemes/
(3) https://time.com/6312363/mitch-mcconnell-freezes-history-lying-doctors/
(4) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/opinion/america-economic-inequality.html