Ratfucking all the way around

So, Biden ratfucked Kamala Harris's campaign by pursuing his policy of letting Israel do whatever the fuck it wanted to in Gaza. Biden's long been for Israeli war crimes. In 1982, he defended Israel's Lebanon incursion, including the masscres at the Shaba and Shatila camps. This is what Begin said Biden said: "Begin’s recollections of that meeting were reported at the time in a mainstream Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Aharonot. Some of the details of what Begin recalls Biden telling him are genuinely shocking, but they seem to now be largely forgotten in Israel — especially a hypothetical Biden floated about the United States bombing cities in Canada. “If attacks were launched from Canada into the US,” Biden remarked, “everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’”

Although Dem fans have a hard time swallowing this, Biden, first by refusing to follow through on his promise to be a one term prez, which basically subverted the primary season for Dems in 2024, then by showing himself to be the senile old geezer he is in a debate, then by sending upwards of 15 billion dollars in armaments to Israel to wipe out Gaza and playing defense for Israel as most of the world expressed its abhorrence of Israel's genocide, basically gave Trump the election. KH did the best she could for a candidate who had one hundred days to run against a former president who has been campaigning for the past four years. Of course, Trump was immeasurably helped by the criminal negligence of the Biden Justice Department, whose last act was to issue a coulda shoulda report about prosecuting Trump for the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2020.

It is easy to go to town on Biden. The propublica report is totally damning. But myself, I think he is only symptomatic, only the public face of a disease that is getting worse and worse: trying to reconcile plutocracy and democracy in our nasty neolib era.

This has failed everywhere. And everywhere, the political elite has benefited enormously from the neoliberal culture and the robust deregulations that unleashed massive amounts of money to those in the political bubbles (DC, Westminister, Paris, same story).

There is no party in America that we can use for a vehicle to make the fundamental changes that will actually resolve our crises. In the absence of those vehicles, and in the capacity of the Dem party to absorb and disarm civil movements, I myself am in a mood of utmost political pessimism. On the other hand, I also think millions of people are so frustrated with things as they are that we do have an environment in which movements can emerge, as they have done before. That's my hope.