Abiding Biden

...I'm sure twenty-five thousand people before me have done that exact wordplay, but in my defense, I refuse to check.

I do want to say: I don't think Biden is a bad person. I mean, as far as I know. Who knows what dark secrets anyone hides? But, yes, okay, he has some questionable votes in his past, and the Anita Hill thing was pretty bad, and even if the Tara Reade thing isn't true (and anyone who claims to definitively know one way or the other is purely basing their opinion on what they want to be true), he definitely has problems with boundaries. And he's habitually lied about his past.

Okay, look, I realize the above makes it sound like I'm doing a "Brutus is an honorable man" thing here, but I'm really not. Everybody has their faults, I don't think someone's past should automatically absolutely define their present, and I do think we have a tendency (like a Sith) to deal in absolutes: this person did this thing, and therefore it's a defining act and now we can one hundred percent condemn everything about them. And while there are some cases where that may be true, I don't think that that happens a lot, and I don't think you can do it with Joe Biden. Let's be reasonable.

I think the truth is this: Biden is a mediocre old white guy like many others. He has some capacity for good and some capacity for bad, not overall, he's just kind of...not notable. The kind of person absolutely nobody would remember a hundred years from now if not for the twists of fate that led to him becoming Obama's VP and then sleepwalking into the situation he now finds himself in.

And yes, granted, mediocrity is a shit-ton better than what we have now. But honestly, it's just painful how not-appropriate-for-this-situation the man obviously is. I seem to be the only person who cares about this (obviously that's not true, but I sure haven't seen a lot about it online), but I can't help being hung up on the whole "cops should shoot protesters in the legs instead of the head!" thing as just perfectly emblematic of a guy incapable of reading the national mood and realizing that things have to change very radically if this country is to have the remotest chance of surviving in a non-fashy way. Obviously, he's not going to make kinder, gentler police brutality an actual policy. But the fact that his brain works that way...ain't great.

Maybe it doesn't make a difference one way or another; we may be doomed regardless. But...yeesh. Biden is able to convincingly read a speech, I'll grant you that. He has some good speechwriters, even! But all the positive arguments for a Biden presidency seem to boil down to "people around him will do good things!" Well, I hope so, but that is not an argument in favor of choosing the most mediocre candidate. This seems to be saying that the specific individual is basically irrelevant, and that's hard for me to swallow. Sure I'll vote for him and hope against hope that his administration can fix shit, but when I hear resistance-types talking about how Presidential he is and this is what a REAL leader sounds like...well, it's just deeply embarrassing. Cut it out.