US Joe Biden News Megathread - The Other Biden Derangement Syndrome Thread (with a side order of Fauci Derangement Syndrome)

Let's pretend for one moment that he does die before the election, just for the funsies. What happens then? Will the nomination revert to option number 2, aka Bernie Sanders? Or will his running mate automatically replace him just the way Vice-President is supposted to step in after the Big Man in the White House chokes on a piece of matzo? Does he even have a running mate yet?

 

[RodgerDodger]

You're not wrong.

Nobody likes Biden, everyone on that side of the aisle just hates Donald Trump. I'm trying to think of another election where the primary motivator for voting for the candidate was a seething and all-consuming hatred of his opposition that's completely devoid of any legitimate support for the candidate instead of just the party, but I'm kind of coming up empty-handed. I'm not sure if this has ever happened before, and certainly not to this extent.

1972 And 1984 both come to mind. 1984 is probably the best example.We had a charismatic sitting populist outsider President who had lifted the economy out of the stagnation of the previous admin, who’s signature accomplishment was to blame Americans for everything and proclaim malaise as the new normal. The Challenger was the whitest white boy in the room idiot previous Veep. The media loathed the sitting President and ran the same sorts of games (Mondale ahead in all the Battkegrounds!) Mondale brought nothing to the table but the same 40 years of failed policies from his long years as a barnacle in the Senate, and his even more useless years as Veep. The media tried every dirty trick in the book against Reagan, the voters saw right through it. Mondale won 1 state.

 

[The Pink Panther]

1. The Biden campaign did something to royally piss off CNN and we don't know about it.

There is that Van Jones clip where they worry about Biden fucking up, so this seems possible.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

One of two things is happening here.

1. The Biden campaign did something to royally piss off CNN and we don't know about it.
2. These lefty organizations realize that pandering to the far left has done absolutely nothing for them and they're chucking each other under the bus in an attempt to race back to the middle.

Or maybe this:

3. The Biden campaign is live-testing Biden's ability to respond like a normal candidate, and/or the reaction to a failure to do so.

 

[Zero Day Defense]

Or maybe this:

3. The Biden campaign is live-testing Biden's ability to respond like a normal candidate, and/or the reaction to a failure to do so.

They should have been able to appraise that capacity without making him look like a dolt.

 

[Tour of Italy]

CNN backstabbing the Democrats?

WTF, did I wake up in a new timeline...

...again?

Scott Adams has long pushed the theory that the MSM will break for Trump before November because they realize they’ll be making even less money if they can’t push a new Trump scandal every day.

I’m not sure I agree, but it’s a thought.

Maybe it was more true before everyone became Trump fatigued and starting trusting the media less; the traditional media power structure has been so shaken up in just four years that anything’s possible.

Personally I think that while journalists are indeed scum sucking bottom feeder trash whose bosses are just as obsessed with the bottom line as any other business owner, the mainstream media has long reached critical mass in terms of it’s Trump hate. Even if smarter investors wanted to put the breaks on, the whole establishment has become a giant ball of moronic TDS hate that can’t be stopped.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Scott Adams has long pushed the theory that the MSM will break for Trump before November because they realize they’ll be making even less money if they can’t push a new Trump scandal every day.

I’m not sure I agree, but it’s a thought.

Maybe it was more true before everyone became Trump fatigued and starting trusting the media less; the traditional media power structure has been so shaken up in just four years that anything’s possible.

Personally I think that while journalists are indeed scum sucking bottom feeder trash whose bosses are just as obsessed with the bottom line as any other business owner, the mainstream media has long reached critical mass in terms of it’s Trump hate. Even if smarter investors wanted to put the breaks on, the whole establishment has become a giant ball of moronic TDS hate that can’t be stopped.

Adams has got a few good calls under his belt by now, but that one is a stretch, yeah.

A lot of people in the media are deeply, ideologically, against Trump. Even if the mandates from the top changed due to economic pressures and they were told to produce pro-Trump pieces, I'm sure what would happen is that they'd revolt instead.

In Current Year, the only thing the media can say in favor of Trump is not to say anything. If (big if) the media decides to do a sudden 180-degree course correction, you're not going to see a lot of pro-Trump articles and pieces coming from them. Instead, you'll see a lot more "variety" content and a lot more "local" pieces as the news networks have to find gap-fillers to take place of the time and space taken up by 4 years of Trump-bashing.

 

[Meat Target]

1972 And 1984 both come to mind. 1984 is probably the best example.We had a charismatic sitting populist outsider President who had lifted the economy out of the stagnation of the previous admin, who’s signature accomplishment was to blame Americans for everything and proclaim malaise as the new normal. The Challenger was the whitest white boy in the room idiot previous Veep. The media loathed the sitting President and ran the same sorts of games (Mondale ahead in all the Battkegrounds!) Mondale brought nothing to the table but the same 40 years of failed policies from his long years as a barnacle in the Senate, and his even more useless years as Veep. The media tried every dirty trick in the book against Reagan, the voters saw right through it. Mondale won 1 state.

This may have been true without Coronachan. But Dems are pushing hard on vote-by-mail, and in Arizona they just ruled they don't need verified signatures on mail-in ballots. Dems can't win in a fair election, and they know it.

Hence, their preemptive talk about delayed results, a red mirage on election night, don't concede under any circumstances, etc.

 

[soy_king]

1972 And 1984 both come to mind. 1984 is probably the best example.We had a charismatic sitting populist outsider President who had lifted the economy out of the stagnation of the previous admin, who’s signature accomplishment was to blame Americans for everything and proclaim malaise as the new normal. The Challenger was the whitest white boy in the room idiot previous Veep. The media loathed the sitting President and ran the same sorts of games (Mondale ahead in all the Battkegrounds!) Mondale brought nothing to the table but the same 40 years of failed policies from his long years as a barnacle in the Senate, and his even more useless years as Veep. The media tried every dirty trick in the book against Reagan, the voters saw right through it. Mondale won 1 state.

McGovern to his credit seemed to be a genuinely likeable and somewhat honest person. Another question would be is did anyone truly like or believe in Michael Dukakis?

 

[X Prime]

This may have been true without Coronachan. But Dems are pushing hard on vote-by-mail, and in Arizona they just ruled they don't need verified signatures on mail-in ballots. Dems can't win in a fair election, and they know it.

Hence, their preemptive talk about delayed results, a red mirage on election night, don't concede under any circumstances, etc.

Article:

https://www.abqjournal.com/1495440/judge-arizona-voters-who-dont-sign-early-ballots-can-fix.html

https://archive.vn/JmSBt

Relevant Wikipedia:

Douglas L. Rayes - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Check the appointed by for this dumbass in a dress for a SHOCKING REVEAL.

 

[Stoneheart]

Superpacs often have some really ing dumb emails, there's studies that show a panicky "we're losing bad" email gets more donations than a "join us in the winner's circle" but never have I seen it that bad.

well i know where they got that from...

 

[RockPaper]

McGovern to his credit seemed to be a genuinely likeable and somewhat honest person. Another question would be is did anyone truly like or believe in Michael Dukakis?

He was the "gotta nominate someone" guy. 1988 was weird, because Gary Hart was the front-runner leading up to the campaign, and also the Party was begging Mario Cuomo to run. Two 'stars" that people in the Party liked. Heck, nominate one of them and we'll have a chance against Bush or whoever. But Cuomo begged off and never ran, and Gary Hart offed himself early with the Monkey Business Business. Dukakis was just the most lucid and seemingly-reasonable guy who was left. He had the most support in a packed field of losers, that eventually winnowed away to just him.

It's like that old "Night Court" joke about "How did you get to be a Judge?"

"I was home and I answered the phone".

That's about it.

 

[Someone Awful]

That's the thing, though. There's no way Biden can be a guns and butter president. He can look like it all he wants, but the reality is that even with this pandemic, unemployment [and possibly poverty] poverty is half what it was back in April. Nevermind Trump's peace deals with North/South Korea and the Israel-UAE.

And it's a chance to avoid the long-term dilemmas that ultimately came from the New Deal long after FDR died.

Exactly. Proposing a four trillion dollar tax raise will only substantially hurt the economy. Biden has absolutely nothing to offer to the working class and that's because Harris is the shadow candidate. The only reason why Biden has a chance - bigger than we'd like to admit - is because of the coronavirus hurting Trump's approval rating and even that is becoming less relevant to the public by the day.

He has to rely on cheating and manipulation from the media against Trump in order to win rather than his own merits.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/joe-bidens-very-manly-campaign/2020/09/10/d20e2548-eed1-11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html

https://archive.md/INULo

As Joe Biden visited a Lutheran church last week in Kenosha, Wis., he was approached, as he often is, by a man looking for a handshake. This being a pandemic, however, the normal grip-and-grin rules of campaigning did not apply. “Can’t do that,” Biden said. And then he reached for the man’s biceps, squeezed it and said, “You’ve got some guns.”

I have spent the better part of three days trying to imagine what went on in the former vice president’s head as he improvised this strange moment of retail politics. There must have been a fear of seeming rude, followed by — and for an elderly male presidential candidate, maybe this would have been worse — a fear of seeming wimpy. Hypochondriacal. Unmasculine. Whatever he said next needed to de-wimpify the situation, and by that standard “you’ve got some guns” was actually sort of brilliant in everything it invoked: Muscles. Firearms. Testosterone. Ego. Plus a working knowledge of contagion, a biceps being a less high-touch surface than a palm.

What does a masculine presidential campaign look like, when it’s covered in a mask, doused in hand sanitizer and dutifully wiping down its groceries?

Joe Biden has spent the better part of six months sorting this out, via a series of efforts that swing between endearing and cringeworthy. President Trump’s repeated downplaying of the novel coronavirus is dangerous and ill-advised — the city of Tulsa saw a spike in covid-19 cases a few weeks after he held an in-person rally there. But the president, a man driven equally by optics and ego, has attempted to recast this foolhardiness as bravery: He was out there among his people, while Biden was making YouTube videos in his house. On Tuesday, the president of the United States took to Twitter to formalize a stupid new nickname for his rival: “Basement Biden.”

To be clear, staying in one’s basement continues to be the wisest and most appropriate response to a pandemic that has killed nearly 190,000 Americans, especially if you are in the vulnerable age bracket shared by Biden and Trump. But such caution violates Trump’s Rules for Manly Campaigning. Joe Biden is also playing by Manly Rules, but with a twist: He’s the kind of man who loves epidemiology.

So here is Biden, embarking on a safety-first campaign, doing his hokey best to make that safety sexy. Last month, he slapped on his aviator sunglasses and premiered a nostalgic Corvette-themed campaign ad that looked as though it had been focus-grouped into existence by a panel made up of CDC scientists, Don Draper and a jukebox that plays only “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

“I was afraid I’d go through those guys,” he chuckled from behind the wheel of his 1967 Sting Ray, referring to the dust-eaters behind him. “God, could my dad drive a car,” he continued, while popping the hood and examining the Corvette’s innards. The ad was 100 percent engine-revving but also 100 percent socially distanced. At one point, though he was the only person in the vehicle, Biden wore a face mask.

Here is Joe Biden in another campaign ad, titled “That’s a President” — 15 found-footage seconds that, some viewers noted, had the soundtrack of an ad for a truck you might use to haul the pulverized shards of a boulder around the desert. “This job is about protecting Americans,” a voice-over intoned as the screen flashed photos of Biden in between words like “strength” and “courage” but also “compassion” and “resilience.”

Growling guitars. Sweet rides. Nice guns.

Trump has spent the past few months courting “suburban housewives,” trying to convince them that Biden is leading an antifa army to come overthrow their T.J. Maxx. Meanwhile, Biden seems mostly interested in these women’s husbands.

I am coming for you, he seems to be saying. But when I get there, I mostly just want to compliment all your power tools.

What on earth is going on?

This election season has culminated in a battle between the grumpiest old men, who have created a public narrative in which they would be out-walloping each other, bare-fisted, were it not for a sense of decorum and for the pandemic safety regulations keeping them six feet apart.

By any measure, Biden emits a less-toxic plume of self-conscious masculinity than Trump, who measures manliness via military parades and how many groveling supplicants call him “Sir.” We’d need a whole dissertation to unpack all of that.

[Read Monica Hesse on the weird masculinity of Donald Trump]

Biden, meanwhile, has made a concerted effort to embrace sentimentality and speak openly of his personal grief. He is an empathetic listener. His running mate is a strong woman. He cannot get over how proud he is to have a wife with a doctorate.

But running against a candidate like Trump (“Person, woman, man, camera, TV”) is bound to scramble anyone’s sense of normalcy. “[Biden is] on some kind of an enhancement, in my opinion,” Trump asserted without evidence in a television interview last week. “Did something happen to Joe Biden?” a Trump campaign ad demanded earlier this summer, cutting to footage of Biden briefly stuttering.

So Biden has fought back, mostly by insinuating that he knows how to fight:

“If we were behind a barn somewhere, it would be a different thing,” Biden told reporters at a news conference last week, explaining how his belief that presidential contenders should be role models prevented him from joining Trump in the “gutter.”

“Watch how I run up ramps and how he stumbles down ramps, okay?” he told an ABC news affiliate, as if the campaign were a special geriatric episode of “Floor Is Lava.”

This has been going on for a while, since before the pandemic. “I wish we were in high school and I could take him behind a gym,” Biden told a Pennsylvania audience in 2016, a sentiment he repeated to a Florida audience in 2018: “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Trump responded: “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”
Last year on CNN, Biden envisioned challenging the president to a fitness contest on the debate stage: “C’mon, man, how many push-ups do you want to do here, pal?”

Much like “you’ve got some guns,” there’s a lot going on with Biden’s phrasing. His imagined fight locales are always rugged, manly and vaguely Rust Belt. He never threatens to fight Trump in a Starbucks, for example; he’s never proposing a beatdown at the creperie. Even then, the actual pummeling isn’t going to happen in the barn, bar or gym. It’s going to happen behind, in an alley or parking lot. “Street rules,” a friend of mine translated when I pointed out this phrasing. As in, Biden is implying the fight needs to happen outside, because it’s going to stretch the bounds of legality and get dirty.

It’s not clear whether Joe Biden and Donald Trump actually want to beat each other up, but it’s abundantly clear they want you to know that they could.

As with most aspects of 2020, it's hard to wrap your brain around the fact that we ended up here. After wading through the most diverse, progressive primary season in history, we're suddenly back in Alexander Hamilton times: a world in which the president and his challenger are still conflating leadership with who can bloody up whom in some field outside of Weehawken.

Can you imagine this dynamic happening with Elizabeth Warren? With Pete Buttigieg or Cory Booker? Absolutely not. This is the kind of chest-bumping that occurs between two elderly men, past their physical prime but indoctrinated into the vision that physical prime is paramount. Men who have no business fighting and who most assuredly would embarrass themselves if they tried: something between artlessly hurling themselves at one another a la late-stage Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, and just endlessly circling in a Victorian fisticuffs pose while trash-talking each other’s small hands.

It might be amusing to watch. But it also pins the whole country in a “masculinity trap,” as an essay published by the Center for American Women and Politics points out. “Seeking to disqualify Trump — or any candidate — for his or her failure to meet masculine credentials only maintains power in those credentials and pressures candidates to engage in a competition over who meets them most,” Kelly Dittmar wrote.

This is the campaign we are in. And it will go further. Because somehow, this posturing still works. Or, at least, the creators of campaign ads, yard signs and electoral paraphernalia believe that it works: American voters care about the economy, health care and education, but they also care, deeply, that those issues are taken up by a man who can change the oil of a vintage Corvette after vigorously beating a no-goodnik behind the garage.

As I type this sentence, Biden has just tweeted a new campaign ad. It features footage of the vice president bounding up to things: podiums, stages, airplanes. “Some people are always in a hurry,” a voice-over intones. “They run when they could walk [footage of Biden running up a ramp]. Race up steps, when others take it slow [footage of Trump trundling down a ramp]. . . . Joe Biden knows, when you get knocked down, you get up off the mat.”

Biden’s next ad will probably just involve leafleting all of northeastern Ohio with paintballing invitations. Anyone who RSVPs, he will meet them behind a barn. He will be masked up, and wearing eye goggles that are somehow shaped like aviator sunglasses. He will patrol the assembled masses, complimenting their equipment. He will say they’ve got some nice guns.

Monica Hesse is a columnist writing about gender and its impact on society. For more visit wapo.st/hesse.

 

[King Dead]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/joe-bidens-very-manly-campaign/2020/09/10/d20e2548-eed1-11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html

https://archive.md/INULo

As Joe Biden visited a Lutheran church last week in Kenosha, Wis., he was approached, as he often is, by a man looking for a handshake. This being a pandemic, however, the normal grip-and-grin rules of campaigning did not apply. “Can’t do that,” Biden said. And then he reached for the man’s biceps, squeezed it and said, “You’ve got some guns.”

I have spent the better part of three days trying to imagine what went on in the former vice president’s head as he improvised this strange moment of retail politics. There must have been a fear of seeming rude, followed by — and for an elderly male presidential candidate, maybe this would have been worse — a fear of seeming wimpy. Hypochondriacal. Unmasculine. Whatever he said next needed to de-wimpify the situation, and by that standard “you’ve got some guns” was actually sort of brilliant in everything it invoked: Muscles. Firearms. Testosterone. Ego. Plus a working knowledge of contagion, a biceps being a less high-touch surface than a palm.
What does a masculine presidential campaign look like, when it’s covered in a mask, doused in hand sanitizer and dutifully wiping down its groceries?

Joe Biden has spent the better part of six months sorting this out, via a series of efforts that swing between endearing and cringeworthy. President Trump’s repeated downplaying of the novel coronavirus is dangerous and ill-advised — the city of Tulsa saw a spike in covid-19 cases a few weeks after he held an in-person rally there. But the president, a man driven equally by optics and ego, has attempted to recast this foolhardiness as bravery: He was out there among his people, while Biden was making YouTube videos in his house. On Tuesday, the president of the United States took to Twitter to formalize a stupid new nickname for his rival: “Basement Biden.”

To be clear, staying in one’s basement continues to be the wisest and most appropriate response to a pandemic that has killed nearly 190,000 Americans, especially if you are in the vulnerable age bracket shared by Biden and Trump. But such caution violates Trump’s Rules for Manly Campaigning. Joe Biden is also playing by Manly Rules, but with a twist: He’s the kind of man who loves epidemiology.

So here is Biden, embarking on a safety-first campaign, doing his hokey best to make that safety sexy. Last month, he slapped on his aviator sunglasses and premiered a nostalgic Corvette-themed campaign ad that looked as though it had been focus-grouped into existence by a panel made up of CDC scientists, Don Draper and a jukebox that plays only “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

“I was afraid I’d go through those guys,” he chuckled from behind the wheel of his 1967 Sting Ray, referring to the dust-eaters behind him. “God, could my dad drive a car,” he continued, while popping the hood and examining the Corvette’s innards. The ad was 100 percent engine-revving but also 100 percent socially distanced. At one point, though he was the only person in the vehicle, Biden wore a face mask.

Here is Joe Biden in another campaign ad, titled “That’s a President” — 15 found-footage seconds that, some viewers noted, had the soundtrack of an ad for a truck you might use to haul the pulverized shards of a boulder around the desert. “This job is about protecting Americans,” a voice-over intoned as the screen flashed photos of Biden in between words like “strength” and “courage” but also “compassion” and “resilience.”

Growling guitars. Sweet rides. Nice guns.

Trump has spent the past few months courting “suburban housewives,” trying to convince them that Biden is leading an antifa army to come overthrow their T.J. Maxx. Meanwhile, Biden seems mostly interested in these women’s husbands.

I am coming for you, he seems to be saying. But when I get there, I mostly just want to compliment all your power tools.

What on earth is going on?

This election season has culminated in a battle between the grumpiest old men, who have created a public narrative in which they would be out-walloping each other, bare-fisted, were it not for a sense of decorum and for the pandemic safety regulations keeping them six feet apart.

By any measure, Biden emits a less-toxic plume of self-conscious masculinity than Trump, who measures manliness via military parades and how many groveling supplicants call him “Sir.” We’d need a whole dissertation to unpack all of that.

[Read Monica Hesse on the weird masculinity of Donald Trump]

Biden, meanwhile, has made a concerted effort to embrace sentimentality and speak openly of his personal grief. He is an empathetic listener. His running mate is a strong woman. He cannot get over how proud he is to have a wife with a doctorate.

But running against a candidate like Trump (“Person, woman, man, camera, TV”) is bound to scramble anyone’s sense of normalcy. “[Biden is] on some kind of an enhancement, in my opinion,” Trump asserted without evidence in a television interview last week. “Did something happen to Joe Biden?” a Trump campaign ad demanded earlier this summer, cutting to footage of Biden briefly stuttering.

So Biden has fought back, mostly by insinuating that he knows how to fight:

“If we were behind a barn somewhere, it would be a different thing,” Biden told reporters at a news conference last week, explaining how his belief that presidential contenders should be role models prevented him from joining Trump in the “gutter.”

“Watch how I run up ramps and how he stumbles down ramps, okay?” he told an ABC news affiliate, as if the campaign were a special geriatric episode of “Floor Is Lava.”

This has been going on for a while, since before the pandemic. “I wish we were in high school and I could take him behind a gym,” Biden told a Pennsylvania audience in 2016, a sentiment he repeated to a Florida audience in 2018: “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Trump responded: “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”
Last year on CNN, Biden envisioned challenging the president to a fitness contest on the debate stage: “C’mon, man, how many push-ups do you want to do here, pal?”

Much like “you’ve got some guns,” there’s a lot going on with Biden’s phrasing. His imagined fight locales are always rugged, manly and vaguely Rust Belt. He never threatens to fight Trump in a Starbucks, for example; he’s never proposing a beatdown at the creperie. Even then, the actual pummeling isn’t going to happen in the barn, bar or gym. It’s going to happen behind, in an alley or parking lot. “Street rules,” a friend of mine translated when I pointed out this phrasing. As in, Biden is implying the fight needs to happen outside, because it’s going to stretch the bounds of legality and get dirty.

It’s not clear whether Joe Biden and Donald Trump actually want to beat each other up, but it’s abundantly clear they want you to know that they could.

As with most aspects of 2020, it's hard to wrap your brain around the fact that we ended up here. After wading through the most diverse, progressive primary season in history, we're suddenly back in Alexander Hamilton times: a world in which the president and his challenger are still conflating leadership with who can bloody up whom in some field outside of Weehawken.

Can you imagine this dynamic happening with Elizabeth Warren? With Pete Buttigieg or Cory Booker? Absolutely not. This is the kind of chest-bumping that occurs between two elderly men, past their physical prime but indoctrinated into the vision that physical prime is paramount. Men who have no business fighting and who most assuredly would embarrass themselves if they tried: something between artlessly hurling themselves at one another a la late-stage Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, and just endlessly circling in a Victorian fisticuffs pose while trash-talking each other’s small hands.

It might be amusing to watch. But it also pins the whole country in a “masculinity trap,” as an essay published by the Center for American Women and Politics points out. “Seeking to disqualify Trump — or any candidate — for his or her failure to meet masculine credentials only maintains power in those credentials and pressures candidates to engage in a competition over who meets them most,” Kelly Dittmar wrote.

This is the campaign we are in. And it will go further. Because somehow, this posturing still works. Or, at least, the creators of campaign ads, yard signs and electoral paraphernalia believe that it works: American voters care about the economy, health care and education, but they also care, deeply, that those issues are taken up by a man who can change the oil of a vintage Corvette after vigorously beating a no-goodnik behind the garage.

As I type this sentence, Biden has just tweeted a new campaign ad. It features footage of the vice president bounding up to things: podiums, stages, airplanes. “Some people are always in a hurry,” a voice-over intones. “They run when they could walk [footage of Biden running up a ramp]. Race up steps, when others take it slow [footage of Trump trundling down a ramp]. . . . Joe Biden knows, when you get knocked down, you get up off the mat.”

Biden’s next ad will probably just involve leafleting all of northeastern Ohio with paintballing invitations. Anyone who RSVPs, he will meet them behind a barn. He will be masked up, and wearing eye goggles that are somehow shaped like aviator sunglasses. He will patrol the assembled masses, complimenting their equipment. He will say they’ve got some nice guns.

Monica Hesse is a columnist writing about gender and its impact on society. For more visit wapo.st/hesse.

Has there ever been a campaign built entirely around gaslighting before? They're seriously trying to claim that the almost octogenarian Joe Biden, who's clearly not all there physically or mentally, is the manlier of the two candidates. The Biden campaign is actually pretending like their candidate that they've hidden in the basement for the past six months doing nothing is healthier than Trump, and flunkies in the media are running cover for them. I mean, who in their right mind would even think to suggest...

...oh right, the Washington Post. Duh.

 

[Meat Target]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/joe-bidens-very-manly-campaign/2020/09/10/d20e2548-eed1-11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html

https://archive.md/INULo

As Joe Biden visited a Lutheran church last week in Kenosha, Wis., he was approached, as he often is, by a man looking for a handshake. This being a pandemic, however, the normal grip-and-grin rules of campaigning did not apply. “Can’t do that,” Biden said. And then he reached for the man’s biceps, squeezed it and said, “You’ve got some guns.”

I have spent the better part of three days trying to imagine what went on in the former vice president’s head as he improvised this strange moment of retail politics. There must have been a fear of seeming rude, followed by — and for an elderly male presidential candidate, maybe this would have been worse — a fear of seeming wimpy. Hypochondriacal. Unmasculine. Whatever he said next needed to de-wimpify the situation, and by that standard “you’ve got some guns” was actually sort of brilliant in everything it invoked: Muscles. Firearms. Testosterone. Ego. Plus a working knowledge of contagion, a biceps being a less high-touch surface than a palm.
What does a masculine presidential campaign look like, when it’s covered in a mask, doused in hand sanitizer and dutifully wiping down its groceries?

Joe Biden has spent the better part of six months sorting this out, via a series of efforts that swing between endearing and cringeworthy. President Trump’s repeated downplaying of the novel coronavirus is dangerous and ill-advised — the city of Tulsa saw a spike in covid-19 cases a few weeks after he held an in-person rally there. But the president, a man driven equally by optics and ego, has attempted to recast this foolhardiness as bravery: He was out there among his people, while Biden was making YouTube videos in his house. On Tuesday, the president of the United States took to Twitter to formalize a stupid new nickname for his rival: “Basement Biden.”

To be clear, staying in one’s basement continues to be the wisest and most appropriate response to a pandemic that has killed nearly 190,000 Americans, especially if you are in the vulnerable age bracket shared by Biden and Trump. But such caution violates Trump’s Rules for Manly Campaigning. Joe Biden is also playing by Manly Rules, but with a twist: He’s the kind of man who loves epidemiology.

So here is Biden, embarking on a safety-first campaign, doing his hokey best to make that safety sexy. Last month, he slapped on his aviator sunglasses and premiered a nostalgic Corvette-themed campaign ad that looked as though it had been focus-grouped into existence by a panel made up of CDC scientists, Don Draper and a jukebox that plays only “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

“I was afraid I’d go through those guys,” he chuckled from behind the wheel of his 1967 Sting Ray, referring to the dust-eaters behind him. “God, could my dad drive a car,” he continued, while popping the hood and examining the Corvette’s innards. The ad was 100 percent engine-revving but also 100 percent socially distanced. At one point, though he was the only person in the vehicle, Biden wore a face mask.

Here is Joe Biden in another campaign ad, titled “That’s a President” — 15 found-footage seconds that, some viewers noted, had the soundtrack of an ad for a truck you might use to haul the pulverized shards of a boulder around the desert. “This job is about protecting Americans,” a voice-over intoned as the screen flashed photos of Biden in between words like “strength” and “courage” but also “compassion” and “resilience.”

Growling guitars. Sweet rides. Nice guns.

Trump has spent the past few months courting “suburban housewives,” trying to convince them that Biden is leading an antifa army to come overthrow their T.J. Maxx. Meanwhile, Biden seems mostly interested in these women’s husbands.

I am coming for you, he seems to be saying. But when I get there, I mostly just want to compliment all your power tools.

What on earth is going on?

This election season has culminated in a battle between the grumpiest old men, who have created a public narrative in which they would be out-walloping each other, bare-fisted, were it not for a sense of decorum and for the pandemic safety regulations keeping them six feet apart.

By any measure, Biden emits a less-toxic plume of self-conscious masculinity than Trump, who measures manliness via military parades and how many groveling supplicants call him “Sir.” We’d need a whole dissertation to unpack all of that.

[Read Monica Hesse on the weird masculinity of Donald Trump]

Biden, meanwhile, has made a concerted effort to embrace sentimentality and speak openly of his personal grief. He is an empathetic listener. His running mate is a strong woman. He cannot get over how proud he is to have a wife with a doctorate.

But running against a candidate like Trump (“Person, woman, man, camera, TV”) is bound to scramble anyone’s sense of normalcy. “[Biden is] on some kind of an enhancement, in my opinion,” Trump asserted without evidence in a television interview last week. “Did something happen to Joe Biden?” a Trump campaign ad demanded earlier this summer, cutting to footage of Biden briefly stuttering.

So Biden has fought back, mostly by insinuating that he knows how to fight:

“If we were behind a barn somewhere, it would be a different thing,” Biden told reporters at a news conference last week, explaining how his belief that presidential contenders should be role models prevented him from joining Trump in the “gutter.”

“Watch how I run up ramps and how he stumbles down ramps, okay?” he told an ABC news affiliate, as if the campaign were a special geriatric episode of “Floor Is Lava.”

This has been going on for a while, since before the pandemic. “I wish we were in high school and I could take him behind a gym,” Biden told a Pennsylvania audience in 2016, a sentiment he repeated to a Florida audience in 2018: “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Trump responded: “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”
Last year on CNN, Biden envisioned challenging the president to a fitness contest on the debate stage: “C’mon, man, how many push-ups do you want to do here, pal?”

Much like “you’ve got some guns,” there’s a lot going on with Biden’s phrasing. His imagined fight locales are always rugged, manly and vaguely Rust Belt. He never threatens to fight Trump in a Starbucks, for example; he’s never proposing a beatdown at the creperie. Even then, the actual pummeling isn’t going to happen in the barn, bar or gym. It’s going to happen behind, in an alley or parking lot. “Street rules,” a friend of mine translated when I pointed out this phrasing. As in, Biden is implying the fight needs to happen outside, because it’s going to stretch the bounds of legality and get dirty.

It’s not clear whether Joe Biden and Donald Trump actually want to beat each other up, but it’s abundantly clear they want you to know that they could.

As with most aspects of 2020, it's hard to wrap your brain around the fact that we ended up here. After wading through the most diverse, progressive primary season in history, we're suddenly back in Alexander Hamilton times: a world in which the president and his challenger are still conflating leadership with who can bloody up whom in some field outside of Weehawken.

Can you imagine this dynamic happening with Elizabeth Warren? With Pete Buttigieg or Cory Booker? Absolutely not. This is the kind of chest-bumping that occurs between two elderly men, past their physical prime but indoctrinated into the vision that physical prime is paramount. Men who have no business fighting and who most assuredly would embarrass themselves if they tried: something between artlessly hurling themselves at one another a la late-stage Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, and just endlessly circling in a Victorian fisticuffs pose while trash-talking each other’s small hands.

It might be amusing to watch. But it also pins the whole country in a “masculinity trap,” as an essay published by the Center for American Women and Politics points out. “Seeking to disqualify Trump — or any candidate — for his or her failure to meet masculine credentials only maintains power in those credentials and pressures candidates to engage in a competition over who meets them most,” Kelly Dittmar wrote.

This is the campaign we are in. And it will go further. Because somehow, this posturing still works. Or, at least, the creators of campaign ads, yard signs and electoral paraphernalia believe that it works: American voters care about the economy, health care and education, but they also care, deeply, that those issues are taken up by a man who can change the oil of a vintage Corvette after vigorously beating a no-goodnik behind the garage.

As I type this sentence, Biden has just tweeted a new campaign ad. It features footage of the vice president bounding up to things: podiums, stages, airplanes. “Some people are always in a hurry,” a voice-over intones. “They run when they could walk [footage of Biden running up a ramp]. Race up steps, when others take it slow [footage of Trump trundling down a ramp]. . . . Joe Biden knows, when you get knocked down, you get up off the mat.”

Biden’s next ad will probably just involve leafleting all of northeastern Ohio with paintballing invitations. Anyone who RSVPs, he will meet them behind a barn. He will be masked up, and wearing eye goggles that are somehow shaped like aviator sunglasses. He will patrol the assembled masses, complimenting their equipment. He will say they’ve got some nice guns.

Monica Hesse is a columnist writing about gender and its impact on society. For more visit wapo.st/hesse.

Why is WaPo upholding toxic masculinity?

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

Since everyone is thinking up conspiracies for why CNN actually criticized Biden, I might as well be the contrarian and point out that maybe we might be seeing actual frustration?
I mean, they're trying to give a soft-ball interview and help him prepare for obvious lines of attack and Biden can't even do that successfully?

If I was being paid to make Biden look better I would frustrated too.

 

[Mepsi Pax]

I know that was a chump article written by a freak, but there is NO way you should decline a handshake as any kind of leader or leadership candidate. There's no way to make it look good, there's no upside to it, and squeezing some guy's arm and making a gay comment is not, even in today's clown world, an acceptable frame for a presidential candidate (male or female identifying). If things were really so bad that you couldn't safely shake some asshole's hand, there would be no election and there would be APCs in the streets. It's weak, and it looks weak from all angles.

 

[ChikN10der]

Can I wake up in the timeline where politics are sane and people don't suck?

That's the same timeline where piss tastes like fine champaign and root canals are more pleasurable than sex.

 

[Jimmy Durante's Ballsack]

Good God, Brett Baier looks terrible. It's like he's doing a bad Charles Krauthammer impersonation.

I wish the Krauthammer was still around to bitch about another election cycle with Donald Trump as a candidate.

Remember kids: don't dive in shallow water.

 

[Happy Fish]

That's the same timeline where piss tastes like fine champaign and root canals are more pleasurable than sex.

Fuck, I'll take it.