I Won’t Pretend That Maybe Biden WAS the First Black Female President

Is this Democrats’ post truth moment?

Here’s something Joe Biden said recently, and yes: This was in one of the interviews in which his campaign gave questions to the interviewer and said “ask these questions,” and the interviewer said “sure!”

“By the way, I'm proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first Black woman, to serve with a Black president.”

The audio is arguably not as bad as the transcript, depending on your definition of “not as bad”. Because the audio makes if fairly clear that Biden was not claiming to be a strong ebony queen shattering glass ceilings on behalf of his Nubian sisters. What Biden was doing (yet again) was stammering through a passage that contained a half-remembered thought that he could not turn into a coherent sentence. So…is that better? Or is it a thousand times worse?

I’d argue that it’s a thousand times worse. Because Biden and his campaign are sticking to the obvious fiction that his struggles are the result of a cold (does this cold also make him hear “r”s as “b”s?). That fiction is getting more and more difficult to maintain, as is the notion that Biden has no need for neurological or cognitive exams. Of course, if Biden is fine — as he would like us to believe — then the “he was muttering incoherently” explanation doesn’t wash. And in that case, well…I guess Biden does want us to believe that he was the first Black female Vice President. And if that’s true, then I have to ask: What’s the story, Joe? Is it that you have previously-undisclosed African ancestry, and also that you spent some period during the Obama years identifying as a woman (but not telling anyone)? Or, are you revealing that you’ve been executing the most ambitious Mrs. Doubtfire/White Chicks-style deception in history, and you actually are Kamala Harris, and you’ve spent the last four years frantically changing clothes and running back and forth in a manic (but successful!) effort to fool everyone. If the latter is true, then I must say: Well done, Mr. President-and-Ms.-Vice-President. I can’t believe that you didn’t ever show up at, say, the G7 summit in the Joe suit and Kamala wig. That actually is a pretty impressive display of your cognitive wherewithal, though I have to admit that I don’t 100 percent buy that explanation.

I also wish that Biden would tell me: How much am I going to be expected to “fake news” away the myriad of polls that show him getting his ass kicked? Because waving away polls has become a core Biden talking point: He responded to George Stephanopoulos outlining the dire state of the race with a resolute “Nuh-uh”. This creates a problem for me, because I’ve spent several years shooting my mouth off about the importance of empiricism. If you’re not a regular reader of this blog, I assure you: I have been an absolute twat about it. And therefore, it will be tough for me to shift gears and pretend that polling — which is imperfect but informative — is just Nate Silver’s version of tarot cards. The polls I’m seeing set off an alarm in my head that screams “DUKAKIS IF YOU’RE LUCKY!!!”, and it’s going to be hard for me to pretend like that’s not the case.

Speaking of the Stephanopoulos interview: Do I need to pretend that I hear Biden saying “as good a job as I know I can do” in the clip below? Because Biden’s backers insist that he said that, even though ABC News transcribed the line as “I did the goodest job I know how to do”. The White House complained, probably because only three year-olds and Hee Haw characters say “goodest”. Here’s the clip — what do you hear?

Personally, I hear “the good as job as I know I can do”, which is what the ABC transcript currently says. So, not “goodest”, but not great, either. And I have a follow-up question: Do I have to pretend that “it’s okay as long as I try my best” is a remotely acceptable answer to Stephanopoulos’ question? Jesus Christ, Joe: No it is not okay if you just do your best THIS IS NOT FUCKING TEE BALL!!! We are not playing Candyland, this is not the water balloon toss at a fucking three year-old’s birthday party, we’re choosing the most powerful person in the world YOU DON’T GET A JUICE BOX AND A “YOU’RE A WINNER AS LONG AS YOU HAD FUN” IF YOU HAND THE NUCLEAR CODES BACK TO TRUMP!!!

Am I supposed to pretend not to notice how Trumpian this is all getting? For starters: You’re orange now, Joe. That’s strange. Do politicians naturally develop an orange hue when they enter their post-truth phase, like how a baboon’s ass turns purple when it’s in heat? You’ve also started calling in to sycophantic morning shows so that you can have fawning conversations that make the red carpet at the Kid’s Choice Awards seem like the Frost/Nixon interviews. You’ve started railing against “elites” and the mainstream media, and claiming that you have internal polls that show that you’re more popular than ice cream and birthday sex. You’re bragging about your crowd sizes and sending your spokesperson out to spew obvious nonsense to a disbelieving press corps…do you see any parallels yet? If you don’t, then allow me to humbly suggest that that’s the surest sign yet that you’re suffering from dementia.

In 2016, I remember looking at sane Republicans and thinking: “poor bastards”. They faced what was, for them, a tough choice: The candidate who would advance their ideological beliefs was also an ignorant lunatic who demanded fealty to an obviously false set of “alternative facts”. Though a few Republicans refused to play along — and were excommunicated from the party for it — most debased themselves by indulging the obvious farce. And liberals like me flayed them for it: I write to you now from an apartment that was basically paid for by writing jokes about how Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio are dickless sycophants. And I regret nothing: They are dickless sycophants. Politicians can keep power by cravenly betraying their principles, but the downside is that doing so abets an underclass of political comedians like myself.

I felt that Republicans’ embrace of Trump was the endpoint of a slow slide towards lunacy that started in the ‘90s. The hothouse right wing media environment prioritized partisan narratives over truth, and with time, the GOP came to be dominated by lunatics and hacks. When Trump asked Republicans to believe things that were literally unbelievable, the party proved more pliant than even a cynic like me would have expected. And now, that party has a cult like devotion to Trump, and is also as capable of solving the nation’s problems as Pizza Hut is of building an interstellar spacecraft.

I’ve also believed that Democrats are less susceptible to that kind of fantasticism because most of the sane people got pushed over to our side (or at least near to our side). Sure, the left has hacks and loons — and I’m funding my son’s college account cracking jokes at their expense — but the Democratic Party was still basically normal. Even as a wave of left-wing nuttiness caused me to question the left’s general sanity, in most contexts, there seemed to be enough sane people to serve as antibodies and stave off the infection that overcame the GOP. We seemed to have some level of immunity to craziness, though we never knew how much.

This episode will test the Democratic Party’s ability to stay sane. Right now, Democratic lawmakers are dividing into pro-Biden and anti-Biden camps; if enough join the anti-Biden group, they should be able to force him off the ticket. But if they can’t…well, then things will probably get pretty nuts. We will most likely dive headlong into a post-truth campaign — the image of Biden as a strong Black woman bringing much-needed POC perspective to the Obama White House will not be the end of the nonsense. What other bullshit will Democrats will be expected to spout? That Jake Tapper is a robot? That Hunter has three NBA championships? That Biden was the inspiration for the sexy feather duster in Beauty and the Beast? I’ll tell you right now: I can’t do it. I won’t do it. Unlike Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, I have limits to how much I’ll debase myself. And if Biden forces this bizarre campaign on the country, then I guess we’ll find out just how far other Democrats are willing to go.

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