The Final Daze
The hysteria over Trump’s election must be tempered by just how awful Biden has been after the entirely predictable, if sinister, decision of the American electorate to return him to power. The liberal abreaction to Trump has revealed how thoroughly blind many have been to the vileness of Biden and his obedient circle of advisors and enforcers. If a secret Biden was waiting until after the election to emerge, it was only a more malicious and baleful version of the Biden we’ve witnessed for the last four years.
Given a chance to cut Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza off at the knees after the Netanyahu regime blew through Biden’s own redlines on permitting more humanitarian aid to reach the starving Palestinian population of Gaza, Biden shrugged off the flouting of his own demands and kept the arms shipments to Tel Aviv flowing. He never intended to restrain Israel’s rampages in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq or Iran. The redlines have always been greenlights.
This week, the U.S. vetoed for the fourth time a resolution by the UN Security Council calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all remaining hostages. Anyone who thought Lame Duck Biden was suddenly going to stand up to Israel hasn’t been paying the slightest attention to his previous 50 years in politics. The vote was 14 for and one against. The U.S. stands more isolated internationally than ever. In the span of two weeks, the U.S. has been almost universally rebuffed by the international community on Gaza and its shameful and cruel embargo on Cuba.
Then there’s Ukraine, where hundreds-of-thousands have died in a war that no one can win, where maximizing the body count seems to be the only goal. By shipping long-range missiles capable of striking inside Russia, cluster bombs and now landmines to Ukraine in a last-ditch drive to prolong a war in Europe and continuing to arm a genocide in the Middle East, Biden will go down as one of the most blood-thirsty Presidents in U.S. history.
The harsh but undisputable reality is that Biden’s tenure has made Trump more dangerous, not less. He has freed Trump from paying even notional deference to U.S. and international laws regarding human rights, crimes against humanity, and even genocide. Trump will re-enter office unbound, and Biden, in pursuit of his own imperial ambitions, delinked some of the last chains that might have restrained him.
There are many reasons to lament and even be anxious about the restoration of Trump, but few to mourn the political demise of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
For four years, while he wailed about the threats to so-called American democracy, Biden did nothing to address the structural perversion of democracy in the U.S. created by archaic institutions like the Electoral College, such as advancing statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has more people than 22 states, all of whom are U.S. citizens, yet it has no voice in who the U.S. elects as president. Puerto Rico just decisively voted for statehood “again” with an absolute majority in a three-option race.
—CounterPunch, November 22, 2024
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/22/roaming-charges-the-final-daze/