US Politics Thread | Biden withdraws from Presidential election race

[bluemc1]

All as full of shit and as bent as the next one

 

[Lovebitesandeveryfing]

It’s not a brilliant analogy as Robson only managed until he was 72 and it was well-documented at the time that towards the end of his spell at Newcastle it was getting harder for him to command the respect of the players because of his advancing age, most notably Kieran Dyer.

Biden will be 86 when his second term would theoretically end.

I don't think it was meant seriously. Surely ironic?
There's no possible meaningful analogy between managing a bunch of athletes that gets together once every couple of months of so — I took it that it was a reference to his spell as England manager, perhaps mistakenly — and running on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis, the world's most heavily armed country that considers that its writ (whether rightly or wrongly, I'm not getting into that) runs wherever it feels like going all over the globe. Not to mention its economic clout, which is felt wherever the military clout isn't deemed to be necessary.

 

[Lovebitesandeveryfing]

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Joe Biden’s record as president. He’s achieved more than anyone imagined he would.

Unfortunately that doesn’t matter when it comes to re-election. The perception to too many people is that he’s a dithering senile old man who doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’ll lose the election because of that.

He needs to bow out gracefully and let someone younger succeed him to take on and beat the orange rapist in the election.

Nothing that I'd disagree with there. He hasn't had a bad mandate, as presidential mandates go.
This election will not be fought on retrospective criteria, however. It will be fought on prospective ones. There's the rub.

 

[Damocles]

All as full of shit and as bent as the next one

Everybody lies, I'm not sure why people expect politicians to be any different. Especially if you watch that clip and see that he seems to be having an adversarial relationship with the person in question (that he presumably has a history with) so is exaggerating his accomplishments to make him shut up. And judging by the SD shaky quality, it appears to have been filmed in nineteen dickety six when Biden was only a wee nipper at 62 years old.
Do we really give a shit about what some guy said 40 years ago to someone who was irritating him? Why? Who is making voting decisions based on that? This is just noise.

Politics is the most incredibly simple thing that is somehow massively complicated by all this noise. I'm not sure if it's the title of President or if people just don't think about this any more due to partisanship. It's like how those "tacticos" on social media forget that football isn't about a exverted libero hybrid wing back blocking passing lanes and creating counter press triggers or whatever word salad is the nouveau style this week, it's about the ability to take a bunch of often scared young children and work with them to increase their confidence and concentration and skills. It's about people not dots on a board, but football discussion has started to forget that footballers are human people with human emotions and human events. Similarly, politics has become the same. There's no understanding of humanity of individuals, they are almost a cartoon - a collection of catchphrases and memorable moments and quotes and storylines, fully authored and animated by numerous outside people.

So I've done some Googling here. The United States has 15 departments of its Government; the largest being Defence at 3.2 million employees and the smallest being State with 30,000 employees. It's around 5 million people (or 3 million if you discount soldiers as civil employees). Each of these 15 departments functions in the same way as any other business unit. It has a coffee boy, it has office romances, it has middle managers, it presumably has shit IT and none of the computers will work correctly for no reason at all sometimes. Then there's a Manager for each section of these Departments. According to trusty Wikipedia, the State department alone has over 30 branches each with its own staff and responsibilities. And each of those branches has numerous offices.

Let's focus on one - the Office of Energy Programs. The Office of Energy Programs apparently has a few hundred (!!) employees and their job is to "work in all energy sectors to strengthen governance frameworks and increase technical capacities to help allies and partners oversee and develop their energy and mineral sectors as well as transition to a net-zero emissions future." These terms get lost in the shuffle in our brains and wash over us. A few hundred employees. That's bigger than most medium sized companies in the private sector and think of all the management structure and HR and the rest that go into them. The Office of Energy Programs is a sub division of the Bureau of Energy Resources which has thousands of employees and structure. The Bureau of Energy Resources is a sub division of the State Department which has as mentioned 30,000 employees which is a sub division of the US Government which has 3-5 million.

The point here that I'm making is that the US Government like all Governments are actual functional departments that do actual work and run actual services. It's not a giant mythical monolith, it is made by and for people who do their jobs. Sometimes bad because they're hungover or they've got flu or they plainly just have checked out and are collecting a paycheck. Sometimes good for all the opposite reasons.

The President of the United States primary job is to be the Chief Administrator. Foreign policy and defence and all the other stuff get all the headlines and drama, and they are important and take time but his primary role is to oversee a "company" with millions of employees in hundreds of departments. A company that is bigger than Walmart and Amazon combined. As I've tried to point out above, the actual personal management is sub divided almost infinitely and you've got office managers reporting to department heads reporting to section chiefs reporting to bureau managers to chief of staffs to undersecretaries and assistant heads and secretaries of state and then finally possibly the Cabinet then President. So his job is to sit in a Cabinet and listen to Heads of these huge departments report all the information that has been passed up to them over the course of that week or few days, then look at a big picture with how these things collide with all the other issues the country is dealing with.

Now if you've ever managed even one person let alone millions then you'll know that this is a really tough job at times. People are difficult and complicated and contradictory. That is without the pressure of an entire country and the welfare of its people on your shoulders and all of the fun that comes with being in a room of (usually) highly skilled politicians who want your job and have been ruthless enough over their career to be able to get to that room in the first place. It is a job that requires time and experience and patience and not everyone can do it. It's even harder to work out who is the favoured person that you should vote for to put into that position, at least most of the time. Just being able to collate that much information and see the potential collisions between events on the decision that you're making is neigh on impossible without proper training and experience.

So the two points I'm making here are simple. The first one that I was reading a couple of pages ago from someone else where it says "but Biden's advisors and Cabinet are having to run the country!!" is ridiculous because the job of a Cabinet is to manage entire departments with tens of thousands of staff as a normal thing, and Joe Biden isn't sat in a bat cave with millions of monitors watching 3 million people doing their job and shouting instructions on a microphone even if he passed every brain test in existence. The second is that "oh no, somebody lied" - who gives a shit?! Does lying to some guy he was having an argument with effect his ability to administer the world's largest economy and probably the world's largest civil service? No. It has nothing to do with anything.

When people say things like "well I just don't TRUST the man", I mean, who are you? Why do you need to trust a politician? I don't trust the girl who pours drinks at the pub to be truthful but she pulls a wicked pint. I voted for Burnham in the Manchester Mayor election because I thought he was a decent with the media so would be a good advocate for funding, he was flexible enough to take a deal if the Tories offered one by compromising instead of putting down pointless red lines, that he was a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury so I presume he can do sums, and that he had ran numerous offices of State so can probably manage a department without blowing everyone up. That's it really. Obviously I also agreed with many of his policies and policy voting is great IF you're informed on all the policies and the likelihood/reality of putting them into practice. I didn't vote for Burnham because I believe he's never told a lie or cheated on his partner or nipped off work early. I don't care if he's done that; there's a dual focus on competency and alignment with beliefs and he was the one who lined up with that the best.

Or back on the Biden, the "Vice President Trump" thing. Seriously, who cares? How does this effect his ability to manage the Cabinet and the employees? It's not like he literally thought that Trump was his Vice President, he made a speaking error. I'm half of Biden's age and I do that all of the time, so do most people. Again it's just noise, it's not a real or thoughtful or even relevant criticism.

Biden can effectively govern, which means managing his Cabinet and understanding the issues that they are presenting so he can help form collective action. That's his job. Everything else is just tiresome horseshit. It literally doesn't matter at all and these Democrats who are jumping on the replace Biden bandwagon, again, they're not REALLY concerned about this mental health because if they were then the entire Cabinet and Party would be immediately removing him. They're just twats attempting to push their own agenda and worried that Trump is ahead in some swing states. This is not a real issue. Almost no political issues any more are real issues.

 

[west didsblue]

Nothing that I'd disagree with there. He hasn't had a bad mandate, as presidential mandates go.
This election will not be fought on retrospective criteria, however. It will be fought on prospective ones. There's the rub.

If the voters were being realistic about prospective criteria, Trump would be lucky to get any votes at all irrespective of the Dem nominee. Unfortunately it’s all about perception rather than reality for far too many people.

 

[TinFoilHat]

A different man on his rally last night. Came across and vibrant and determined.

Maybe he needs a crowd to riff off? He made a couple of mistakes and owned them and ripped into Trump into a way I've not seen him do before.

 

[mexico1970]

A different man on his rally last night. Came across and vibrant and determined.

Maybe he needs a crowd to riff off? He made a couple of mistakes and owned them and ripped into Trump into a way I've not seen him do before.

He's still a better option than Trump, but IMHO they need to get a fully functioning body into the hot seat, anything with a pulse and the Democrats might just win it.

 

[Magicpole]

Everybody lies, I'm not sure why people expect politicians to be any different. Especially if you watch that clip and see that he seems to be having an adversarial relationship with the person in question (that he presumably has a history with) so is exaggerating his accomplishments to make him shut up. And judging by the SD shaky quality, it appears to have been filmed in nineteen dickety six when Biden was only a wee nipper at 62 years old.
Do we really give a shit about what some guy said 40 years ago to someone who was irritating him? Why? Who is making voting decisions based on that? This is just noise.

Politics is the most incredibly simple thing that is somehow massively complicated by all this noise. I'm not sure if it's the title of President or if people just don't think about this any more due to partisanship. It's like how those "tacticos" on social media forget that football isn't about a exverted libero hybrid wing back blocking passing lanes and creating counter press triggers or whatever word salad is the nouveau style this week, it's about the ability to take a bunch of often scared young children and work with them to increase their confidence and concentration and skills. It's about people not dots on a board, but football discussion has started to forget that footballers are human people with human emotions and human events. Similarly, politics has become the same. There's no understanding of humanity of individuals, they are almost a cartoon - a collection of catchphrases and memorable moments and quotes and storylines, fully authored and animated by numerous outside people.

So I've done some Googling here. The United States has 15 departments of its Government; the largest being Defence at 3.2 million employees and the smallest being State with 30,000 employees. It's around 5 million people (or 3 million if you discount soldiers as civil employees). Each of these 15 departments functions in the same way as any other business unit. It has a coffee boy, it has office romances, it has middle managers, it presumably has shit IT and none of the computers will work correctly for no reason at all sometimes. Then there's a Manager for each section of these Departments. According to trusty Wikipedia, the State department alone has over 30 branches each with its own staff and responsibilities. And each of those branches has numerous offices.

Let's focus on one - the Office of Energy Programs. The Office of Energy Programs apparently has a few hundred (!!) employees and their job is to "work in all energy sectors to strengthen governance frameworks and increase technical capacities to help allies and partners oversee and develop their energy and mineral sectors as well as transition to a net-zero emissions future." These terms get lost in the shuffle in our brains and wash over us. A few hundred employees. That's bigger than most medium sized companies in the private sector and think of all the management structure and HR and the rest that go into them. The Office of Energy Programs is a sub division of the Bureau of Energy Resources which has thousands of employees and structure. The Bureau of Energy Resources is a sub division of the State Department which has as mentioned 30,000 employees which is a sub division of the US Government which has 3-5 million.

The point here that I'm making is that the US Government like all Governments are actual functional departments that do actual work and run actual services. It's not a giant mythical monolith, it is made by and for people who do their jobs. Sometimes bad because they're hungover or they've got flu or they plainly just have checked out and are collecting a paycheck. Sometimes good for all the opposite reasons.

The President of the United States primary job is to be the Chief Administrator. Foreign policy and defence and all the other stuff get all the headlines and drama, and they are important and take time but his primary role is to oversee a "company" with millions of employees in hundreds of departments. A company that is bigger than Walmart and Amazon combined. As I've tried to point out above, the actual personal management is sub divided almost infinitely and you've got office managers reporting to department heads reporting to section chiefs reporting to bureau managers to chief of staffs to undersecretaries and assistant heads and secretaries of state and then finally possibly the Cabinet then President. So his job is to sit in a Cabinet and listen to Heads of these huge departments report all the information that has been passed up to them over the course of that week or few days, then look at a big picture with how these things collide with all the other issues the country is dealing with.

Now if you've ever managed even one person let alone millions then you'll know that this is a really tough job at times. People are difficult and complicated and contradictory. That is without the pressure of an entire country and the welfare of its people on your shoulders and all of the fun that comes with being in a room of (usually) highly skilled politicians who want your job and have been ruthless enough over their career to be able to get to that room in the first place. It is a job that requires time and experience and patience and not everyone can do it. It's even harder to work out who is the favoured person that you should vote for to put into that position, at least most of the time. Just being able to collate that much information and see the potential collisions between events on the decision that you're making is neigh on impossible without proper training and experience.

So the two points I'm making here are simple. The first one that I was reading a couple of pages ago from someone else where it says "but Biden's advisors and Cabinet are having to run the country!!" is ridiculous because the job of a Cabinet is to manage entire departments with tens of thousands of staff as a normal thing, and Joe Biden isn't sat in a bat cave with millions of monitors watching 3 million people doing their job and shouting instructions on a microphone even if he passed every brain test in existence. The second is that "oh no, somebody lied" - who gives a shit?! Does lying to some guy he was having an argument with effect his ability to administer the world's largest economy and probably the world's largest civil service? No. It has nothing to do with anything.

When people say things like "well I just don't TRUST the man", I mean, who are you? Why do you need to trust a politician? I don't trust the girl who pours drinks at the pub to be truthful but she pulls a wicked pint. I voted for Burnham in the Manchester Mayor election because I thought he was a decent with the media so would be a good advocate for funding, he was flexible enough to take a deal if the Tories offered one by compromising instead of putting down pointless red lines, that he was a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury so I presume he can do sums, and that he had ran numerous offices of State so can probably manage a department without blowing everyone up. That's it really. Obviously I also agreed with many of his policies and policy voting is great IF you're informed on all the policies and the likelihood/reality of putting them into practice. I didn't vote for Burnham because I believe he's never told a lie or cheated on his partner or nipped off work early. I don't care if he's done that; there's a dual focus on competency and alignment with beliefs and he was the one who lined up with that the best.

Or back on the Biden, the "Vice President Trump" thing. Seriously, who cares? How does this effect his ability to manage the Cabinet and the employees? It's not like he literally thought that Trump was his Vice President, he made a speaking error. I'm half of Biden's age and I do that all of the time, so do most people. Again it's just noise, it's not a real or thoughtful or even relevant criticism.

Biden can effectively govern, which means managing his Cabinet and understanding the issues that they are presenting so he can help form collective action. That's his job. Everything else is just tiresome horseshit. It literally doesn't matter at all and these Democrats who are jumping on the replace Biden bandwagon, again, they're not REALLY concerned about this mental health because if they were then the entire Cabinet and Party would be immediately removing him. They're just twats attempting to push their own agenda and worried that Trump is ahead in some swing states. This is not a real issue. Almost no political issues any more are real issues.

If I tell you I finished top of my class at Uni, I might have, you wouldn’t bother your arse checking, preferring to write me off as a boasting wanker. But, if you’re in high profile Politics you have to know these claims woukd he checked. The fact he spun the tale, not realising this, is all the proof you need he never finished top of anything. Clever cunts tend not to set their own traps.

 

[BlueMoonAcrossThePond]

Shh don't say that on here, it's just lovely old joe innocently handsy with little girls, clearly.

Just like a diary that has been through a court case and had its contents verified and people convicted is not worth using to question him as a man..or its not true because CNN didn't report it.

The gullible Right emerges. Energized by Biden's obvious frailty. Now a stolen diary written by a distraught daughter who went through a very hard spell of life and wrote things off the cuff are proof positive that Biden is a pedophile. In spite of said daughter absolutely denying the accusation; in spite of zero evidence other than some cobbled together amplifications/intentional misinterpretations of fact.

I concede that the passage in Ashley Biden's diary where she scribbled a brief sentence about "probably not appropriate" showers while in a clearly confused state of mind seems to be authentic. Given her state of mind when writing this passage it comes across as more of a stream of conscious wondering from a likely intoxicated mind, rather than an accusation against her father.

Let's say, for example, that Biden is actually a pedophile. Then why isn't the diary full of passages about Biden's molestation? Where are the other children whom a true pedophile would molest? Why hasn't Ashley Biden now, or in the past, ever leveled accusations of pedophila against her father? What about Jill Biden? If a mother thought that her husband was sexually molesting her daughter, 99.9% of them would demand divorce and seek full custody.

The accusations about Biden being "a pedophile" and "not a nice guy" are total bullshit - it's the Right's politicization of events, warping the narrative to bring down a democrat.

Meanwhile, their convicted felon with actual documented, proven evidence, court records included, is somehow not to be condemned. The guy had sex with a prostitute while married; and paid hush money to her during an election campaign in order to keep her quiet; and then lied about the expenses. Numerous other court cases against their guy are underway, including mishandling of classified documents and promoting sedition- but no, all of this is conspiracy.

TL/DR - Biden's extremely poor performance in the debate energizes and emboldens the MAGA Right to make further completely unfounded attacks on Biden. And Joe's performance in the debate is so depressing to the Left, that the tendency is to give in to despondency - a mindset which results in lack of enthusiasm to push back against ridiculous claims by the MAGA Right.

FWIW - I think that BIden is old, but would be competent as president. I'm not sure if he'd live out his next term, but if he were to pass away while in office, Harris would assume power and I've every confidence in her ability to govern. Meanwhile, there's no recovering from Biden's debate debacle no matter how hard he tries. Any slight slip, however innocent, will be jumped on by the Right to insist that Biden is incompetent. Any major gaff would be far worse - and I suspect that Biden has several major gaffs in store should he continue to run.

 

[Damocles]

If I tell you I finished top of my class at Uni, I might have, you wouldn’t bother your arse checking, preferring to write me off as a boasting wanker. But, if you’re in high profile Politics you have to know these claims woukd he checked. The fact he spun the tale, not realising this, is all the proof you need he never finished top of anything. Clever cunts tend not to set their own traps.

True but even clever people aren't perfect and make mistakes. Biden is the leader of the world's most powerful country and has been a Senator for six hundred years. You don't become President by winning a raffle he's obviously an intelligent man.