Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

POTUS is an ‘existential threat’ to the country he governs?

Just wondering: When have you ever heard someone describe the president of the United States as an “existential threat” to the very nation he was elected govern?

Never? Maybe once in an epochal age? Yeah, maybe.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, one of many Democrats seeking to succeed Donald Trump as president, has called Trump such a threat to the nation.

He is touring Iowa, that key caucus state that kicks off the presidential campaign. He is talking about Trump’s politics of fear and division; he is warning us about Trump’s attacks on American institutions, such as the media.

He is going straight after Donald Trump’s character, or lack of character. He is calling the president a criminal and someone who cannot be trusted to represent this nation firmly on the world stage.

Yes, that is how I would describe the president as well.

Those elements comprise an existential threat to the very nation that somehow, against all reason and odds, elected him to the most noble office in the land.

Still, the hear such a description coming from a major candidate for that office call the incumbent an “existential threat” takes this discussion to a level I do not recognize.

It’s only going to get stranger.

national news

Military service becoming a 2020 issue in POTUS campaign?

Here’s a bet I’m willing to make: If Joe Biden becomes the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee, he will not discuss the bone spurs that kept Donald Trump out of military service during the Vietnam War.

Why? It turns out the former vice president has a potentially dubious medical deferment issue of his own. It appears that childhood asthma kept the ex-VP from being drafted into the military during the war. He had a 1-Y deferment, which disqualified him from the draft.

Now, is it more real, more legitimate than the bone spurs that Trump claimed to have while he was getting those multiple deferments back in the old days? I don’t know.

Veterans across the country, though, are looking at the field of Democrats running for their party’s nomination. Of the whole lot of them, we have three vets seeking the presidency: Pete Buttigieg, a Navy reserve officer who served in Afghanistan, Tulsi Gabbard, who served with the Hawaii Army National Guard in Afghanistan as well as in Kuwait and Seth Moulton, a Marine who also saw service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To be honest, this veteran — as in me — hasn’t made military service a determining factor in deciding for whom to vote for president. Heck, I voted for a draft-dodger twice, in 1992 and 1996. Yes, Bill Clinton’s clumsy explanation about not remembering getting a draft notice didn’t go down well with me, nor with other veterans. I feel confident in disclosing that those who did get a draft notice never “forget” that moment.

However, it didn’t deter me from voting for him for president.

Trump’s deferments do seem phony. He also continues to blather about hypotheticals involving that time. He said recently would have been “honored” to serve. Hmm. And this individual who lies about everything at every opportunity no matter its significance expects me to believe that?

I’ll just stand by my wager that Joe Biden damn sure should steer far away from this military service matter if he intends (a) to be nominated by Democrats and (b) then defeat Donald Trump.

The field is full of issues to raise against the president that have nothing to do with bone spurs, the Vietnam War and medical deferments.

International news

POTUS pans Biden, speaks well of Kim Jong Un? Wow!

Donald Trump ventured to Japan for a state visit, to meet the new Japanese emperor, attend a sumo wrestling match, play some golf with the Japanese prime minister, talk a bit about trade . . . and then bash former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and say nice things about the world’s weirdest tyrant, Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

Biden wants to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination next year and run against Trump. He’s taking the fight right to the president, saying some harsh things about his tenure in the White House.

Meanwhile, Kim Jong Un — who Trump has said he “loves” — launched missiles while threatening our allies in the region. What does the president say about Kim? He has faith that Kim will keep the promises he made to Trump to, oh, dismantle his nuclear weapons program.

Except that intelligence experts say he is doing no such thing. They say he is accelerating the development of those weapons.

It’s really strange, the way I see it.

A U.S. president attacks a potential foe while standing on foreign soil and then makes an expression of good faith about a man who is known to be one of the world’s most murderous despots.

What in the world has happen to what we used to consider to be normal bilateral relations? What has become of our inherent mistrust of one of the world’s most reclusive, unpredictable tyrants? Must I remind everyone that Kim Jong Un’s grandfather invaded South Korea in 1950, intending to conquer that nation and launching the Korean War, which killed more than 33,000 American service personnel?

I don’t get it, man!

national news

Democrats looking for sure-fire ‘diversity’ on 2020 ticket?

At the risk of confirming my pledge to avoid political predictions by getting another prediction dead wrong, I am going to offer a possible result in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary campaign in 2020.

It’s looking to me as though Democrats — whoever they nominate for president a year from now — will include (a) a woman or (b) a person “of color” on their presidential ticket to run against Donald J. Trump, or (c) maybe both.

A Politico.com story talks about how former Vice President Joe Biden is building on his early front-running momentum as he kicks his presidential campaign into high gear. It also references the chatter about how Biden, the prohibitive early front runner, could produce a political juggernaut if he wins the presidential nomination and then selects Sen. Kamala Harris to run with him as his vice-presidential nominee.

I don’t know who the Democrats will nominate. If it’s Biden, it seems to make all the sense in the world for him to find a young, vibrant running mate. Harris fits the bill. She also, quite obviously is of the correct gender and she also happens to be biracial.

A woman of color!

How does look?

As Politico reports: “Harris is everything the 76-year-old Biden is not. The freshman senator from California is younger, a woman and a person of color. As Biden gets dinged for his bipartisan bromides, Harris is winning applause for her merciless cross-examination of Trump officials.”

OK, I cannot predict a Biden-Harris ticket will materialize. It seems to make perfect sense, though, for Democrats to look consciously for someone who isn’t a white guy for one of the two spots at the top of their presidential ticket.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus call such a lineup to be a political “dream ticket.” They might be on to something.

national news, political news, State news

Beto’s early burst needs a boost

Beto O’Rourke burst on the national public political stage with a near-miss loss to a Republican U.S. senator in Texas in 2018.

Then the former El Paso congressman launched his presidential campaign and hearts started fluttering beyond Texas’s state line. He raised a lot of money in the first 24 hours of his 2020 presidential candidacy.

But then . . . O’Rourke plateaued. Other Democrats — and there are a lot of ’em out there — began stealing Beto’s thunder. They spoke in many more specifics than O’Rourke has offered.

So now, according to the Texas Tribune, O’Rourke is now finding himself looking for a bit of a reset. He is settling in for the long haul. The Tribune reports that O’Rourke is still campaigning “aggressively,” but he’s now just one among a large field of politicians who want to become the next president of the United States.

Yep. It’s going to be a long one, no matter how O’Rourke finishes this campaign.

The RealClearPolitics poll average has former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the runaway frontrunner for the Democratic Party nomination. Biden stands at 41 percent among all the announced candidates; Sen. Bernie Sanders is next at something like 16 percent. Beto stands at 4 percent, according to the RCP poll average.

It’s way too early to write Beto off, just as it way too early to anoint Joe Biden as the next Democratic Party presidential nominee.

I guess O’Rourke’s recent struggles tell us about the fickle nature of the voting public and offer an example of how a candidate cannot rely solely on a prior campaign . . . that he lost!

national news

Trump flies off the rails … over Biden endorsement

I have tried for the past couple of years to avoid saying things such as Donald Trump has gone “unhinged,” or that he has “lost his mind.”

However, when former Vice President Joe Biden secured a key union endorsement in his bid for the presidency in 2020, the president . . . well . . . went ballistic!

Vanity Fair reports that Trump set some sort of personal record with a 60-tweet tirade that erupted after the International Union of Firefighters endorsed Biden’s presidential bid.

He ripped into what he called the firefighters’ “dues-sucking” union leadership. Trump said he expected the leaders to endorse Biden, but added that the rank-and-file firefighters will vote for the president.

Really? He knows that?

The president’s Twitter tirades are nothing new, of course. What is amazing is that he spends so much of his supposedly valuable time firing these messages into cyberspace. Oh, I forgot: We’ve got that “executive time” that Trump sets aside for doing whatever he does when he’s not making America great again. 

I am having difficulty understanding how the president can function like this. I guess is he doesn’t function in his capacity as head of state/head of government/commander in chief/leader of the free world/chief executive of the world’s most indispensable nation.

He’s too preoccupied with fomenting lies about his foes and hurling insults at those who want to know the truth about whether this individual sought to obstruct justice while special counsel Robert Mueller looked for answers into whether there was “collusion” with Russians.

Vanity Fair suggests, too, that Trump is “panicked” at the prospect of facing the former VP in a fall 2020 campaign. Thus, he is launching a pre-emptive Twitter strike against Biden with the hope of torpedoing the ex-veep’s reported surge in public opinion polling.

I’ll continue to steer away from words such as “unhinged” when talking about Trump. My sense is that he knows what he is doing when he ignites these Twitter tirades.

I hope this strategy explodes in his face.

national news

First things first, Mr. VPOTUS: you gotta be nominated

This is just my view, but my sense is that the national political media are getting ahead of themselves with regard to Joe Biden’s entry into the 2020 presidential campaign.

The former vice president is the 20th Democrat to enter his party’s primary. A lot of highly qualified, well-heeled, articulate candidates have been in the game for a good while.

Yet the media have become focused on Biden’s campaign rollout and the ire he is incurring from Donald Trump, who is responding to Biden’s direct criticism of him.

I hope Biden keeps getting under Trump’s skin. The president deserves to be rankled and riled. I want him to lose the next election. I want him gone from the White House. He has disgraced the office. He has sullied and soiled our nation’s good name. He has proven to be an incompetent imbecile, a lying narcissist.

However, I am not yet willing to say that the former VP is the man who should beat him. Biden has a towering hurdle to clear if he hopes to win his party’s presidential nomination. He has to get past those 19 other Democrats. That’s just for starters.

I just want the media to stop inching toward treating Biden as if he’s the presumptive nominee already.

media news

Biden should channel G.W. Bush?

Mark Shields is well-known to watchers of PBS’s “NewsHour” as a regular commentator and pundit who, along with his pal David Brooks, regularly assesses the week’s political goings-on.

Shields had some good advice for Vice President Joe Biden: Don’t talk too much when trying to explain yourself over questions regarding how you “invade others’ space” by getting too touch-feely.

Biden entered the 2020 presidential race amid questions and complaints from those who said he was a bit too, um, ebullient in his treatment of them.

Even now, the former VP tends to over-talk himself while explaining his actions. Shields had a reasonable option for Biden to consider: Model your response after former President George W. Bush’s manner in dealing with some of his own past behavior.

Shields noted (and it’s in the video attached to this blog post) that when Bush ran for president in 2000, he was dogged by questions from the media about his drunk driving arrest, how he drank too much alcohol and about how he found religion and sobriety at the age of 40.

Bush developed a pat answer, Shields said, which was: “When I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.” 

Shields said that the future president recited that mantra with such regularity and frequency that reporters got tired of asking him about it. The issue effectively faded away during the course of the 2000 campaign.

Good advice to follow? Oh, sure . . . but only if the media still lack the staying power to keep harping on an issue that can be explained in a single sentence or two.

national news

Trump vs. Biden: Battle of ‘Both Sides’

Joe Biden has fired a salvo at Donald Trump and Trump has responded by doubling down on arguably his most disgraceful moment as president of the United States.

The former vice president entered the 2020 presidential contest Thursday with a video in which he says the president’s comment on the Charlottesville, Va., riot demonstrates the depths he has taken the country. Trump said in 2017 that there were “fine people on both sides” of the riot; one of those “sides” featured KKK members and Nazis. Biden said the president attached “moral equivalence” between those who spread hate and those who fight them.

Well, Trump responded today by taking Biden’s bait. He said his “both sides” comment was the “perfect response.” Trump said he was referring to those who were protesting the takedown of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, who he described as a “great general.”

I’m trying to recall any mention of Gen. Lee in the moment when Trump made that “both sides” remark. I can’t discern any of it. He might have intended to make that reference — except that he didn’t.

Instead, he spoke about the alleged violent intent of those who counter-protested the hate groups’ march against the statue removal.

I believe VP Biden has punched Trump squarely in the biggest hot button he could find.

How do I know that? I don’t, exactly. However, the president’s response to the Charlottesville criticism illustrates how easily he can be rattled into making patently ridiculous assertions.

I must wonder: Will it matter that Donald Trump is a blundering buffoon who cannot be trusted to tell us the truth?

national news

Biden takes fight straight to Trump

Joe Biden has a huge hurdle to clear if he intends to take up residence in the White House in January 2021.

The former vice president must defeat an enormous field of Democratic opponents vying for their party’s nomination; then if he succeeds at that he will have to defeat Donald Trump in the general election.

The ex-VP’s opening gambit, released this morning via video, goes straight after Trump. I have to hand it to Biden. He is acting like the Democratic front runner.

Biden’s video takes dead aim at the president’s hideous comment about “fine people . . . on both sides” of the Charlottesville, Va., riot that erupted in 2017. One of those “sides,” let us recall, comprised neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Ku Klux Klansmen. Biden noted in his campaign video that Trump sought to attach “moral equivalence” between haters and those who protested against them.

That was the moment, Biden said, that he realized the nation was facing the worst threat he has seen “in my lifetime.”

Biden’s front-running status is likely to diminish as his fellow Democrats start picking away at his huge public service record. It contains more than a few missteps, mistakes, misstatements and assorted gaffes along the way.

For now, though, the former vice president has decided that his No. 1 happens to be the current president of the United States.

To which I say: Give him hell, Joe!