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In recent encounters (because of course we are keeping score. Did anybody think we weren’t keeping score?) Biden told one person she was listening to Bernie Sanders to much and another he should go ahead and vote for Trump. Today, speaking to a room of maybe 40 or 50 people in Iowa, he went off again, calling a voter a ‘damned liar’ and saying he was ‘too old to vote for him’ which makes no sense at all because if Biden didn’t have old voters, he’d have no voters. He also called the man fat.
The man’s question had to do with Hunter Biden, who worked for a Ukrainian oil company, Burisma, getting a ridiculous salary for no apparent reason except for being the son of the vice-president of the U.S. Joe Biden did, indeed, pressure the Ukrainian government to fire the investigator who was investigating Burisma at the time. This was no big secret even at the time, there’s video of Joe Biden talking about it and having a big, old laugh. The comical part about Donald Trump’s pressuring the Ukrainian government for dirt on Biden is how unnecessary that was. The dirt is totally available. on-line.

Anyway, Biden decided to seize on the phrase ‘set your son up for a job’ and said ‘You’re a goddamned liar.’ He could have, if he had the political poise and grace under fire of someone like, for instance, Bernie Sanders, said ‘You are mistaken. I had nothing to do with my son getting hired.’ which still may or may not be true, and it’s way beside the point, but it would have got him neatly off the hook.
Instead he said what he said. It might not force him from the race, it’s pretty incredible what that takes recently, but he certainly didn’t win that man’s support, or likely any others.
And he doesn’t have all that much to start with.

History’s sorest loser, Hillary Clinton, went on the Howard Stern show (Howard Stern? Are feminists O.K. with Howard Stern now? My, how times change) to moan and bitch about how Bernie Sanders cost her the election.
Which is sort of ridiculous, because if Sanders had been the candidate, Democrats would have won the election. Of course, as my Hillary supporting friends point out, there’s no actual way to prove that, just the way you can’t prove the South would have won the civil war if they’d had airplanes and nuclear weapons.
There are, however, polls, trends, demographics and a whole bunch of other things under the heading ‘political science’ which indicate it would have been so.
What you can prove is that Hillary was a ridiculously bad candidate. She picked a vice president who didn’t appeal to anybody who wasn’t supporting her anyway, and maybe not even some of them. She failed to even make campaign appearances in several key states. She insulted large swathes of people she needed to vote for her. She offered no policy that anybody wanted.
But “He hurt me, he really hurt me,” she said to Howard Stern.
In sports, in politics, even in Hollywood I don’t believe I have ever heard anything more pathetic.

Do not get me wrong. I am absolutely, 100% a Bernie Sanders supporter. He has by far the longest history of progressive activism of any candidate in the race, he’s pretty much a dead on match for me on the issues, he’s the undisputed leader of the political revolution that is going to change the world.
But tonight, this glorious night, belongs to Tusli Gabbard, and she deserves all the praise and plaudits in the world. Kamala Harris has left the race. Now, don’t expect the MSM to fall all over themselves giving her credit. I read 3 articles, and neither the New York Times, Politico or CNBC mentioned Tulsi at all.
Nonetheless, anybody who is following the race and has any access to social media at all has their exchange during the 2nd debate burned into their psyche.
I remember predicting at the time that Harris would drop out, although I expected it way before this. In any other election year, Buttigieg and Biden would be gone by now, too.
Yes, Tulsi did this, and it’s a mark in her favor. If the primaries were qualifying rounds in a gladiatorial tournament (as, metaphorically, they kind of are) she has established herself as somebody who can take an opponent out.

I was accused by a blue-no-matter-who plonker the other day of ‘living in a bubble’ because I said Bernie was ahead in Iowa and New Hampshire, and it did piss me off a bit.
But that’s just because blue-no-matter-who people tend to seriously piss me off. How many millions of times do we have to tell them no, before they will believe we mean no?
He is at least partially correct, though, about living in a bubble. Don’t we all? If you are reading this, you are within the bubble of people who speak English, the bubble of people who use the internet, and maybe within the bubble of people who actually know me.
But, I know what he meant. I like Bernie, so I get Bernie news. Blue-no-matter-who people live in a different bubble, one in which, apparently, Bernie Sanders is not taken seriously.
But, here’s a couple things everybody should know about the Bernie bubble. For a bubble, it has a great amount of surface tension and cohesiveness, cause by the elemental bonds among its members. Pretty much everybody within the Bernie bubble is for universal health care, a $15 an hour minimum wage, immigration reform, and end to private prisons, legalization of marijuana, switching to a green environment, raising taxes on the rich, eliminating homelessness and guaranteeing everyone a job, and getting money out of politics. It’s a truly impressive number of things to have so many people agree on. So, it’s a very thick skinned bubble, and not likely to burst.
Second, for every new person who enters the bubble, three things happen. Our bubble gets one person larger. Some other bubble shrinks. And that new person is immersed in the warm and cozy glow of the Bern. Which feels good.
Come, all you bnmw people. Join our bubble. It is not too late.

It seems like ‘No Malarkey’ is Joe Biden’s new slogan. It’s written, big and bold, on the side of his tour bus, which is large enough to do a major rock group proud and probably holds almost half the number of people at any one of his given rallies.
If he was a candidate I liked, I would probably think it was a fine slogan, and I would not bother to mock it, but he’s not, so I will.
First off, for all the flak the boomers are getting, Joe is pointing out that he is a pre-boomer, born before 1945, back before anybody thought you had to give each generation a name, back before Rock n Roll music, back before television even. Malarkey is the kind of thing my parents said a lot, and I’m 65. So, it’s the slogan of a very limited, and dying demographic.
Also, consider the meaning. Malarkey is like bullshit, but it’s O.K. in polite company. It means you haven’t got any argument, so you’re just going to wave your hand, say ‘Malarkey!’ and consider the argument finished.
So, he’s trying to appeal to Trump voters.
By far the greatest problem with this slogan, however, is that Joe Biden is absolutely full of malarkey. There was that rambling story about a soldier at an awards ceremony where it turned out pretty much every detail was wrong. There was that time he got confused about which decade Robert Kennedy was assassinated in. Then there’s those times he was caught plagiarizing other people’s speeches. Not to mention he’s full of malarkey when he says that he and his son have done nothing wrong in their business dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian oil company.
When Joe Biden says ‘No Malarkey!’ that’s a bunch of malarkey. You can be certain of that.