Who's More Senile, Trump Or Biden?

Massachusetts Democrats were asked to for one-word descriptions of each presidential candidate. That's Biden's above. Aside from Bloomberg's it's the only one that is predominantly negative. "Old," "creepy," "boring," "tired" and especially "senile" are pretty bad indications. Politico seems to be describing the "senile" aspect in a post from Spartanburg, South Carolina they ran yesterday. Biden, basically, sounded like my grandmother before she passed away. When he was asked about women’s empowerment and reproductive rights, "he rambled for 19 minutes, and wound up discussing how unfair it is for women’s outfits to be discussed in rape cases-- a topic that wasn’t implied in the question."

“I’m going to make a controversial statement,” Biden acknowledged, before diving in. “If someone in this room got up, took off all her clothes and walked out the door, no man has a right to touch her. Zero.”

The crowd politely applauded.

The former vice president kept going: “She can be arrested for indecent exposure!”

No applause followed. Some in the crowd wore puzzled expressions when Biden then mentioned how police or even parents of rape victims face questions about their clothing.

“Did you have underwear on? Were you wearing a bra? How short was your skirt? What did you say?” Biden said in a mock colloquy of a rape victim being questioned. He also mentioned a case of a woman who refused to date a man, resulting in an attack from “two goons [who] slashed her face with razors.”

This is Joe Biden, unplugged on the campaign trail: edgy, meandering, graphic, oddball-- all attributes that are features, not bugs, of his presidential campaign.

His undisciplined and unorthodox speaking style failed to serve him well in the first three early voting states where he struggled to catch fire. He frequently left audiences bored or confused, or committed gaffes that sandbagged his campaign for days.

But here in South Carolina, Biden has had more success as voters have focused on other aspects of his candidacy-- like his loyalty to former President Barack Obama or his empathy.

Politico also reported that Biden's moribund campaign got a last minute infusion of cash from a few fat cats trying to stop Bernie. $2.5 million went into his slimy Unite The Country superPAC, although Biden has basically abandoned reaching out to everyone but rich donors petrified their taxess will go up when Bernie is president, and the African-Americans who don't already think Obama endorsed Bloomberg.

The Pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, which spent $4.5 million in Iowa, spent only $1.3 million on TV ads in the weeks that followed in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, according to Advertising Analytics. And after Biden’s poor performance in the Iowa caucuses, some of the former vice president’s donors privately weighed helping one of his rivals-- often Mike Bloomberg, whose campaign has courted donor support even though the billionaire former New York City mayor is self-funding his campaign.

Biden’s campaign was the last major campaign to reserve advertising in Super Tuesday states, and those reservations were only a “low six-figure” digital ad buy made by the campaign this Wednesday.

...The day after Super Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, both Biden supporters, will be among the hosts of a Los Angeles fundraiser for Biden held by former Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing.

I hope some of these people decide to pay attention to Noah Chomsky, author and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at MIT... but I'm guessing they don't because if they did they wouldn't be supporting Biden in the first place. Last November, during an interview with C.J. Polychroniou for TruthOut, Chomsky noted that "The dark forces were gathering long before Trump appeared to mobilize them. It’s worth recalling that in previous Republican primaries, candidates that emerged from the base-- Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum-- were intolerable to the conservative establishment and were crushed. In 2016, those efforts failed. None of this is too surprising. In recent years, the Republican Party has dedicated itself [with] such fervor to its constituency of wealth and private power that a voting base had to be mobilized on grounds unrelated to its primary policy objectives-- with many dark forces. And it’s also worth recalling that there are parallels elsewhere, notably in Europe, with the collapse of centrist parties. Much of what has been happening can be traced to the neoliberal assault on the general population launched a generation ago, leaving in its wake quite understandable anger, frustration and search for scapegoats-- terrain that can readily be plowed by demagogues and con artists of the Trump variety."

TruthOut: "The power brokers in the Democratic Party are out to kill the left wing, and this time includes not only Bernie Sanders but also Elizabeth Warren. If that happens, how will it impact Trump’s chances of getting re-elected?"

Chomsky: "The donor class is clearly perturbed by Warren’s critique of wealth and corporate power, and even more so by Sanders, who committed a major crime: inspiring a popular movement that doesn’t just show up every four years to push a button and then leave matters to their betters, but continues its activism and the engagement in public affairs that is none of their business, according to long-standing democratic theory. The intense hatred of [Labour Party leader Jeremy] Corbyn in England, I think, has a similar basis. These have been concerns of the self-described “men of best quality” since the first modern democratic revolution in 17th-century England, and they haven’t abated.

"The consequences are hard to predict. If the donor class succeeds in nominating a centrist candidate, progressive activist forces might be disillusioned and reluctant to do the work on the ground that will be needed to prevent the tragedy-- repeat, tragedy-- of four more years of Trumpism. If a progressive candidate does gain the nomination, centrist power and wealth may back away, again opening the path to tragedy. It will be a fateful year. It will be even more important than usual to remain level-headed and to think through with care the consequences of action, and inaction."