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Poll Vaulting: Bye Bye Biden? [1]
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Date: 2023-07-13
With 2024 looming, the President’s approval ratings lack luster. The good news: a recent Economist/YouGov poll shows his orange-skinned GOP nemesis trailing him AND an upstart Dem. The not-so-good: yon donkey-come-lately tops Mr. Biden himself.
Granted, RFK, Jr has a fine name. He’s younger than Ordinary Joe or Big Blonder. He’s worked to help have-nots and the environment. In a way, he grew up near the front lines of our nation’s fractious, long-term schism. We owe him appreciation and respect.
Still, we owe it to ourselves to conjure with the ground he shares with Donald Trump.
1) He hails from a rich, powerful family.
2) Before setting his sights on the top spot, he’d never held elected office.
3) By mongering fear over life-saving vaccines (most notably the Covid ones), he’s effectively cozied up to the QAnon/GOP/DJT reign of error.
Lest we forget, Covid snarled the economy. Wrecked businesses. Overloaded, endangered, and hyperstressed healthcare pros. Fogged brains. And slew millions (world-wide). Biden’s tough, exemplary, rigorously science-based work to curb it has yet to receive due credit.
Not to mention the extraordinary danger faced by Biden himself. On 9/23/20, Trump ominously vowed to “get rid of the ballots” that might not pass MAGA muster. Six days later, in Cleveland, he debated Biden. Doing so, Trump’s behavior raised a question we’ll do well to stop glossing over: did he do everything in his power to try to “get rid of” our ex-veep?
Under the aegis of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), Biden was wont to assume Trump was acting in good faith. Whoa. According to Mark Meadows’s self-strokingly titled tome The Chief’s Chief (2021), on or near 9/26/20 Trump tested positive for the novel coronavirus...and then tested negative. Enter a remarkably malign double standard. For those near and dear to The Donald, few precautions were spared. Meadows recalls “instruct[ing] everyone in [Trump’s] immediate circle to treat him as if he were positive” (and hence highly infectious).
On debate day (9/29), Meadows observed Trump looking positively ill. Writes the now-disgraced, then-White House chief of staff (as quoted in The Guardian), “the dark circles under his eyes had deepened. I could tell he was moving more slowly than usual. He walked like he was carrying a little extra weight on his back.”
And in his bloodstream. Like it or not, report it or not, he predictably exploited the CPD’s “honor system” (quoting Chris Wallace); in effect, the CPD’s gullibility looks to have lulled Biden into unwittingly sharing the stage with a known, documented, habitual, daily liar- who also happened to be an unhinged, hectoring, arguably volcanic spewer of horrific germs who, at times, had styled himself an unmasked marvel.
The upshot is unspeakable. But let me try. Freely as you please, Trump looks to have blindsided Biden with what can be closely compared to biological warfare. Against the self-proclaimed “Chosen One” (not to say superspreader at White House events and campaign rallies), Biden’s diligence and valor cannot be overstated.
Not to mention the Commander-in-Cheat’s all-too-communicable disinformation wars. For the hoi polloi (far outside said “circle”), Trump hawked such supposedly anti-Covid hooey as subcutaneous light. Injected household cleaner. And the ever-popular horse dewormer.
Perhaps a quart low on horse sense himself, Kennedy has had no small truck with Trump. In an interview in the 8/21/17 Children’s Health Defense, he acknowledges having been slated to chair Trump’s “Vaccine Safety Commission” (which, appropriately enough, seemed to vanish into thin air). Recently, he helmed a “roundtable” that boasted an osteopath who claimed that Covid shots can make keys and dining utensils stick to one’s skin.
So. Maybe personal magnetism isn’t Biden’s forte. But still. At least he’s given a wide berth to science-flouting nonsense. In our ever-more-fraught, demon-dunted dystopia, he has endured. Persevered. Trumped Trump (so far). And (for now) enabled the nation to survive.
With all due respect to Bobby: rather than switch to what may prove to be a Trojan horse-in-midstream, let’s stick with Joe.
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