Come on, man!

Donald Trump and Joe Biden have both gone and opened their mouths again this week.  Donald Trump in an interview with Axion's Jonathan Swan characterized 150,000 plus deaths in the US from Coronavirus since March as "it is what it is", had only to say about the Civil Rights icon John Lewis's recent death the petty complaint that Lewis chose not to attend Trump's inauguration (like nearly everyone else), said no one had done more than Trump for black people except perhaps Abraham Lincoln (if him), declared himself perhaps the clearest thinker that Swan had ever interviewed, and got very cagey about prospects in the very little time he has left before the election to achieve his campaign promise to end US participation in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan among other places.  In a Fox and Friends call-in the next day, he asserted incorrectly that children were basically immune from coronavirus and should go back to school, the same day that a Georgia second grader was reported to have died from the virus within days of having returned to school.  For his part, Biden, fresh from a town hall with SEIU members in which he declared that no racist had ever been elected president until Donald Trump, testily replied when asked by CBS reporter Errol Barnett whether he had taken a cognitive test like the president:

No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man.That’s like saying you, before you got in this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?  ... I know you're trying to goad me, but I am so forward-looking to have an opportunity to sit with the president or stand with the president and debates, I am very willing to let the American public judge my physical as well as my mental fitness and to, you know, to make a judgment about who I am.

For Trump, November (if he's not able to postpone or preferably cancel it) is about seeing that his vanity presidency continues.  He cares little about anything that matters to anyone other than himself, and his lack of curiosity and involvement is exactly what his handlers see in him.  He does deliver on the most dastardly policy impositions of his base.  He doesn't know or care that he shouldn't be racist.  Racism comes naturally to him and truthfully has never not worked for him so he persists in it.

Biden is vain*, but it's not clear what he thinks he's doing running for president at this stage of his game.  He is a standard issue Democrat as though these were standard times.  Democrats win occasionally,  usually lately while imitating Republicans-- a trick Biden has been in the vanguard at playing throughout his overlong Washington career.  The mojo of the alpha republicans who devised the cool cruelty of socialism for the rich and austerity for everyone else might account for some of the Beta pale imitators’ success among the strategically timid element of their base-- the irony that seems to be lost on the operatives is that with everyone else it's mostly the mere opposition to the alphas, not the imitation that accounts for the bulk of their support--  but democrats have fixated on the strategy of imitation for years, never facing up to the significance of it: they have no ideas to speak of, they have no principles, they have no mojo of their own.  The only life that has been breathed into the democratic party in the last 30 years was imported from independent socialist Vermont, and it was snuffed out by a collective effort of the full spectrum of the remainder of the 2020 field from A to B.  It's pathetic really.

What's left to vote for "is what it is." The reason to vote for Biden is that he might very well be a vegetable by inauguration date.  If conditions merit the unexpected expedited implementation of Medicare for All, Biden may be in such a state that in spite of his insistence that he will veto it with every last fiber of his cognition that remains-- his handlers might just be able by January to commandeer his hand into signing the bill into law.. That is something that would never happen in a Trump second term.  Without the whisper of an incentive to pander to voters for the sake of the next campaign, it is frightening to think where a second Trump term with Trump free to be Trump might lead. 

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* He knows it's unseemly to openly proclaim racism for instance.  He lets his 50 year record do the talking.