Category Archives: Joe Biden

Does Joe stay … or go?

My mind has been flip-flopping like a fish out of water on the issue of President Biden’s viability as a presidential candidate in 2024.

I believe I have reached a conclusion on this matter, so I will share it with you right now.

The president needs to step aside. He needs to hand the top spot on the Democratic ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, who needs then to find a suitable running mate to carry the fight forward against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

I will offer only one caveat. If the president stays in, I’ll be with him until hell freezes over. Which ain’t gonna happen.

The foremost issue must be to keep Donald Trump from darkening the Oval Office’s door ever again.

I have been watching many of VP Harris’s speeches over the past few days and to my aging but still perceptive ears, she has found her voice. One hears no quiver in her voice. She is certain on where she stands and she delivers her views with vigor and conviction. The vice president relies heavily on her years as a prosecutor, telling cheering audiences, “Let’s look at the facts.”

When I watch the vice president recite chapter and verse how Trump and Vance are wrong, on, say, women’s reproductive rights, I see a stand-up champion. When she talks about how the GOP talks out of both sides of its mouth on seeking “unity,” I see a fierce fighter.

Sadly, the Joe Biden I grew to admire from his first days in the US Senate — the ferocious and occasionally garrulous advocate he became — no longer exists. Make no mistake, though, on this key point: Joe Biden has been one of the better presidents of the past century and he accomplished plenty during his time in office. He will leave office, whether this coming January or in January 2029, with his head held high.

However … the Democratic Party leadership is bailing on him. The source of the money the party will need to defeat Trump has dried up. President Biden should step aside.

Joe Biden chose well when he picked Kamala Harris to run with him in 2020. It’s her turn now.

‘Vote shaming’ has commenced

There appears to be a tide of “vote shaming” that is swelling across the land as Democrats are now rallying behind their presumptive presidential nominee.

We now are hearing it more loudly and clearly than at any time during the past three presidential cycles. A vote for Donald J. Trump for president is going to relegate the presidency and the nation into a spiral from which neither can recover.

And it is to the ever-lasting shame of those who today remain dedicated to casting their presidential vote for a convicted felon, an admitted philanderer, a man found liable for rape and an individual who admits to groping women.

Democrats are ramping up their message machine to cast shame and embarrassment on the MAGA cultists and the Republican Party leadership who continue to back a man who has been shown to be a fraud, someone who isn’t even close to being the smartest businessman in the room. Indeed, as President Biden has been saying, Trump has filed for bankruptcy “six times, even for a casino” in which had invested. “I didn’t know that was possible,” Biden has said.

President Biden and the Democrats are making Donald Trump the issue in their battle to keep him away from the Oval Office.

They damn sure should make Trump the No. 1 issue in this campaign.

But here we are, wringing our hands over whether Joe Biden is too old and too mentally infirm to run for president. I am teetering on this issue myself and I am not comfortable admitting that. However, you may count me as one American patriot who will gladly cast my ballot for Joe Biden if the choice happens to be Donald Trump.

Those who are standing behind a moral reprobate who is now a convicted felon, someone who embraces tyrants over small-d democrats, well … you deserve the shame you are getting.

Most important … ever!

My active involvement in presidential elections goes back a while, to 1972, when I cast my first vote for president.

And just as surely as the sun rises in the morning, every election cycle has contained the phrase “the most important election in our lifetime.”

I believe the 2024 election fits the bill. It’s the real thing. It appears to be the most important election in our nation’s storied history.

The candidates for president aren’t the best we can offer. The consequence of electing one of these men is what gives the result the heft it deserves.

Where do we stand? The Democratic Party nominee appears to be the incumbent, Joe Biden. Then again …

The president had that debate a few days ago and everything seems to have changed. The party of which he has been a faithful member might be turning on him. Or it might stand firm. He looked and sounded like a doddering old man in that debate and the party faithful is full of doubting members who are concerned about whether he’s up to the job.

The Republican Party nominee? Oh, brother. He is a former POTUS who got impeached twice while in office. He’s now a convicted felon. There might be more convictions on the way. Donald Trump has vowed to sic the Justice Department on his political foes. He well could end our support for Ukraine, which is fighting the Russian invaders. He vows to reverse virtually every law that Biden has signed. Trump has threatened to toss the U.S. Constitution into the shi**er on the first day of his administration.

Consequential election? The most important in US history?

It damn sure looks that way to me.

Are we really and truly ready to throw the very foundation of our government — the one other nations use as their model for freedom and liberty — away because a newly elected president wants to make friends with killers, despots and tyrants?

If we are then … God help us!

My mission: defeat Trump!

OK, kids. Here comes the latest proclamation from High Plains Blogger, which is that my public policy mission in life is to defeat Donald John Trump and end forever this reprobate’s lust for political power.

How does that happen? Beats me. I have this forum. I intend to light it up with every known lie, defamatory epithet, bizarre pronouncement that has flown out of this megalomaniacal moron’s piehole. I am going to remind readers of this blog that this POTUS wannabe has been convicted of multiple felonies!

Trump is a tangible, existential threat to our way of life, to our democratic system of governance, to our existence as the world’s pre-eminent nation.

I am going to get grief for this declaration from critics who accuse me of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

You know what? I admit that I do! Bring it, MAGA cultists!

I am concerned about whether President Biden is able to carry that message forward on our behalf. And, no, I do not believe he is incapacitated. I fear that the rumor mongering is going to overtake his candidacy. He might be unable to shake loose the political hyenas who have gripped him in their jaws.

Who should replace him as the Democrats’ standard bearer? I don’t have a clue. I do know this: Whoever emerges at the top of the Democratic ticket will have my support over the former Dipsh** in Chief who continues to masquerade as a Republican.

And, yes, that support extends to President Joe Biden should he stay in this race for its duration.

Biden on the hot seat

All of us are entitled to change our mind on important matters … correct? Therefore, I am going to announce to you a shift in my thought process on the difficulty that President Biden is facing.

I have declared my desire that Biden stay in office, that he not back down, that he not forgo a re-election campaign. My commitment to that stance is beginning to waver.

The president is facing the kind of pressure to pull out that none of us has witnessed. He stumbled badly this past week in the debate with Donald Trump. He sounded confused. He looked even worse, appearing at times as if he couldn’t remember what he had just said or the latest lie that flew out of Trump’s overfed pie hole.

I am not going to wander down the alley that suggests that Biden has lost his snap that he should suspend his campaign and hand the effort over to a young gun.

That is his decision to make. Only the president can know if he is up to the task. I believe he is, but I am peering at him through a far-away prism. My thought at this moment is that if he makes that decision to pull out that I will support him.

Stop the armchair diagnoses!

Everyone’s a doctor, a scientist, someone with inside knowledge on what makes total strangers tick.

You hear it especially when a prominent individual is forced to answer questions about his or her mental acuity. The most prominent person on Earth, President Biden, is facing those questions these days. He endured that hideous debate performance the other evening and now is being pressured to drop out of his race for re-election to the presidency.

Biden says he ain’t going to do it. He says he plans to soldier on. He says only he can defeat Donald J. Trump, which he did four years ago. A whole host of things now work in his favor: Trump’s convictions on felony counts; the nation’s economic revival; Trump’s continuing blather about The Big Lie; Biden’s ability to rally international support against the immoral Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Then the 81-year-old president stumbled badly in that debate against the consummate liar.

I’ll lay out my bias for you. Biden is not diminished to where he cannot do the job to which we elected him. Trump is patently unfit at any level one can imagine for the job he seeks. I base my assertions about Biden on what I have witnessed, albeit from a distance. I concluded long before he won the 2016 election that Trump’s professional experience and his personal proclivities render him unfit for public office.

I am going to hang with the president until he decides all by himself whether he wants to keep fighting for his job … and fighting for you and me.

Yes, he will ‘leave’

Robert DeNiro kinda got ahead of himself today when he launched into a highly emotional rant about the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee.

The two-time Oscar-winning actor said that POTUS No. 45 “will never leave” if he’s elected president in 2024. He said it repeatedly.

Oops. Yeah, he will leave.

Here’s the deal that DeNiro has declined to acknowledge. POTUS 45 is 77 years of age, just a bit younger than President Joe Biden. No human being is immortal. No one! We all meet the same fate, which is that none of us gets out of here alive.

Sooner or later, the former Liar in Chief is going to croak. He’ll be gone. We won’t have this old man to kick around any longer. Eventually, it’ll happen. Eventually!

Do I wish that moment will arrive sooner rather than later? Hah! As my dear Mom used to say: I’ll give you three guesses … and the first two don’t count.

What happens if … ?

So help me I don’t like even thinking about this possibility, but the reality of the moment requires me to do so.

Here goes: What will happen if Joe Biden actually loses the election this November to the Republican presidential nominee, who at this moment looks as though it will be the dipsh** Biden defeated in 2020?

Specifically, will the president extend an olive branch to the man who has refused to acknowledge his own loss to Biden four years ago?

My gut and my trick knee tell me President Biden likely will do the proper thing. He would place the obligatory phone call; he then will invite the president-elect and his wife to the White House; he will smile and speak about “working with” the new president.

Given all the bad blood, the recrimination, the Big Lie, and all the things that POTUS 45 has said about POTUS 46, I wouldn’t be surprised to see No. 46 stick it in No. 45’s ear.

But then again, President Biden understands the process better than practically any of us. He also is a man who adheres to tradition.

Will the president’s adherence to custom force him to behave like the pro that he is? Probably.

However, if he falls victim to the hurtful blather of POTUS 45, well … I wouldn’t blame him one little bit if he told him to fu** off.

This is no normal year

If only this were a normal presidential election year, but it is far from normal.

We have two major-party candidates who reportedly are the two most unpopular public figures since, oh, The Flood. We also have a third-party goofball, who happens to be a scion of one of the 20th century’s great political families.

Does all this portend a dismally low voter turnout? Not so fast.

We had the same two major-party guys running in 2020. When all the ballots were counted, 158 million Americans voted, a record. Joe Biden was elected president. The other guy called the election “rigged” and said it was “fake.” Never mind that the Republican Party presidential nominee tried like hell to rig the election in his favor.

Oh, and he hasn’t conceded that he lost to President Biden.

In steps Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the former U.S. attorney general and former U.S. senator from New York. RFK sought the presidency in 1968 and well might have been elected … except for the assassin who gunned him down in the Los Angeles hotel kitchen.

This isn’t a normal election any more than the previous one, or the one before that when the former Liar in Chief got elected.

Joe Biden promised a return to normal presidential behavior. He has behaved like the adult in the room. Unlike the guy he defeated,

Now they’re preparing to square off again. I get that they’re bold old men. Allow me this bit of candor: Time is on neither man’s side, although the chatter almost always seems to focus on Joe Biden’s alleged decline in acuity. I am prepared to argue that the GOP nominee in waiting is exhibiting even more frightening examples of unhinged behavior.

Does any of this mean a dismal turnout in this fall’s election? Hardly.

Both sides are going to gin up their respective bases. My fervent hope is that President Biden wins the day, the election and continues to restore our national soul.

Compromise: it works

President Biden signed into a law a $1.2 trillion spending bill that arrived at his desk after a deadline had lapsed.

The president didn’t hesitate for a nano-second to sign the bill and issued a statement that stated the obvious: Not everyone is totally pleased with what’s in it, but Congress got the job done thanks to some serious compromise.

Therein lies at the heart of what I call “good government.” Compromise works. It results in laws being enacted that are going to anger some folks, make others happy but in the end will keep our government running so that it can deliver needed services to those who need it.

The current rabble-rousers who seek to control Congress — the MAGA cultists who insist that it’s their way or the highway — don’t follow that truism. Oh, no. They continue to resist things in this latest spending package that threaten our allies, such as Israel or the Ukrainians who are fighting against Russian invaders.

Joe Biden sees government through an entirely different prism. He is, in reality, a creature of the government over which he now presides. He has worked in the federal system since January 1973, when he took office as a 30-year-old U.S. senator from Delaware. He served in the Senate until 2009, when he moved into the vice president’s office, where he worked for another eight years. He took four years off and then was elected president in 2000.

I am going to continue to embrace the view that compromise need not be synonymous with surrender of one’s principles.

If only the MAGA cultists and, yes, the far-left progressives would learn that there are times when they can accept compromise as an avenue to keep government functioning for the betterment of all Americans.