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Trump and Biden: Equally Awful

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Ted Rall
Front and center in the raging debate among liberals and progressives over whether they should support Joe Biden or opt out of the two-party trap by voting third-party or not at all is the assumption that Biden would do less harm both to the world and to American leftism than Trump. Even many hard-core Bernie-or-Busters accept the premise that Biden wouldn’t be as bad as Trump. They believe the additional damage that would result from a second Trump administration is an acceptable price for teaching the DNC a lesson and building a progressive movement. But it’s not true that Biden wins the harm mitigation sweepstakes. For every respect in which Biden would be better than Trump—or less awful—there is a compelling counterfactual that carries equal or greater weight. If Trump wins, for example, we can count on his uniquely toxic combination of anti-science propaganda and organizational ineptitude to unnecessarily prolong and increase the body count of COVID-19. The WHO says…
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The Only Wasted Vote Is a Vote Not for a Third Party

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Ted Rall
Jesus, Ted. All you ever do, some people tell me, is complain. We get it—you hate both the Republicans and the Democrats. We don’t like them either. But those are the only two parties that have a chance of winning an election. Stop telling us what not to do. Tell us what you think we should do instead. That criticism is fair. If you don’t like something, it stands to reason you think something else is better and you ought to say what it is. In my defense, people will never build a new political system until the old one is dead to them. Che Guevara said that the masses would not risk the violent upheaval of revolution as long as they still believed the old regime capable of addressing their needs and grievances to any significant degree. Although the elimination of the two-party duopoly in U.S. electoral politics does not necessitate violence, the same inertial principle applies: as long…
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Never Trump, Never Biden: the Progressive Case for Voting Third Party or Boycotting the Election

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Ted Rall
Republicans will vote for Trump no matter what. Democrats will vote for Biden no matter what. This column is for progressives weighing the pros and cons of succumbing to the two-party trap, and voting for Biden. Unless you’ve been sucking through a ventilator in a COVID-19 ward for the last few months, you know the argument in favor of swallowing your disappointment that neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren are the Democratic nominee, resisting the temptation to punish the DNC for rigging the primaries, and forgetting Joe Biden’s right-wing voting record and Kamala Harris’ penchant for locking up innocent people of color and throwing away the key: Trump is a monster, his second term will bring fascism to America, Biden will be more amenable to pressure from the left than Trump. Except for the part about Trump being a terrible human being, the call to sell out is all based on nonsense. Reelecting Trump would send a nasty symbolic signal…
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Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential Pick is…ZZZZZ

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Ted Rall
Added 6 pm Eastern 8/11/20: Well, that turned out to be true. Most years, the Super Bowl is a dud. Yet the hype machine keeps pulling in new suckers.             The quadrennial announcement of the Democratic nomination for vice president features an identical Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football dynamic: lots of hype followed by deadly disappointment. And there’s never been more hype than this year.             Not that Joe Biden’s pick isn’t important. If he wins, he will be the oldest person to take the oath of office by a full eight years. (He’ll be 78. Trump, the second oldest, was 70 in 2017.) Even by the standards that the 70s are the new 60s, Joe Biden’s 70s look more like 80s or 90s. His choice has to satisfy several competing constituencies: women, Blacks, and the progressive voters he desperately needs to show up November 3rd instead of sitting on their hands as they did last time.             But…
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Delay the Election? Presidents Often Do Things They Can’t Do

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Ted Rall
The stock response to President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the general election might be delayed because voting during a pandemic would involve a record number of mail-in ballots, a format he argues is unreliable and susceptible to fraud, is that he doesn’t have that power. NBC News is typical: “The president has no power to delay an election.” [Emphasis is mine.] What the president understands, and most mainstream commentators fail to accept, is that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission. That goes double when the powers in question are limited by a document that lies in tatters, repeatedly ignored.             Liberal politicians and news outlets point out that the Constitution assigns the scheduling of elections exclusively to Congress. Republicans tepidly (and troublingly) stopped short of denying Trump’s power to push back the big day, while insisting that the election ought to take place on time. “Never in the history of this country, through wars, depressions…
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It Could Easily Happen Here, Soon

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Ted Rall
You don’t want to lose your job. How would you feel if getting fired would mean that you would spend the rest of your life in prison? You would do anything to keep working. Anything. That’s the position in which Donald Trump finds himself. The president is the target of a myriad of congressional, state and federal investigations into his business practices. Trump could resign in exchange for a deal with Mike Pence to pardon him as Ford did for Nixon, or hope for a victorious Joe Biden to do the same in the spirit of looking forward, not backward. But a presidential pardon wouldn’t apply to the biggest threat to Trump’s freedom: the New York-based inquiries by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, New York’s attorney general and the Manhattan D.A.’s office into hush payments that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen made to Playboy model Karen McDougal and the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels, violations of…
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Trump Tries to End the Afghanistan War, Democrats Want to Keep Killing

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Ted Rall
Pollsters have observed a consistent enthusiasm gap between supporters of President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Any factor that dampens Democratic turnout could contribute to a second come-from-behind victory for the GOP.             Adding to liberal voters’ ambivalence over Biden is a rarely-discussed aspect of Trump’s presidency. Trump’s skepticism of foreign military entanglements places him to the left of mainstream Democrats like Biden. His foreign policy aligns more closely to those of the progressives who are licking their wounds from the primary defeat of Bernie Sanders—and who are considering whether or not to vote at all.             In 2016 Trump upended traditional right-wing politics by campaigning against the Iraq War—during the Republican primaries, where candidates usually compete to look tough. This year the surprise dove can take credit for extricating the U.S. from its longest war, the 18-year-old meatgrinder of Afghanistan. Not only was Trump the first post-9/11 president to hold direct talks with the Taliban, he concluded…
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10 Reasons I Won’t Vote for Biden

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Ted Rall
My vote is a personal endorsement. It says, “I, citizen Ted Rall, approve of Joe Biden’s career in public office.” I do not. Voting for Biden would be a retroactive endorsement of his vote to invade Iraq, which killed over 1 million innocent people. Voting for Biden would be a retroactive endorsement of his long history of racism, beginning with his disgusting opposition to court-ordered busing. Biden has never apologized for his numerous right-wing policy positions, such as writing the fascist USA-Patriot Act and the 1994 crime bill that expanded mass incarceration of Black men. Biden’s refusal to apologize indicates that he still believes he did the right thing, and that he would do them again in the future. Why should I forgive him? He has never asked for forgiveness. Joe Biden lies a lot. He falsely claimed to hold three bachelor’s degrees and to have graduated at the top of his law school class with a full scholarship. He…
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Like Trump, Biden Would Be a Right-Wing President

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Ted Rall
            What would President Joe Biden do? His supporters are making it hard to read the tealeaves.             They say he’d appoint a great cabinet. But he won’t tell us who would be in it.             They say he’d be progressive. Yet his “unity platform” doesn’t include a single major policy position endorsed by Bernie Sanders.             As they warn in those investment company ads, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. But there’s a reason Wall Street analysts pour over historical data—past performance is a strong indicator of what a stock will do next. So if you want to know what kind of President Biden would be, it’s smart to study his record, which has been consistent over 44 years in public office.             With a few exceptions, Biden has always positioned himself either at the center or to the right of the ideological 50-yard line of his party at any given time.­ When he has written or…
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On Foreign Policy, Joe Biden is Worse Than Trump

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Ted Rall
            Trump is terrible. Biden is just as bad. In some ways the Democrat is worse.             You shouldn’t vote for either one.             Trump is erratic and unpredictable, which is dangerous. Even so, Biden is worse than Trump on international relations. At the center of the president’s worldview is a deep, admirable and prescient skepticism about foreign interventionism. Trump began criticizing the Iraq War soon after it began, when the U.S. invasion was still popular. His critiques continued during the 2016 primaries—have you known of another Republican to campaign against militarism? As president-elect Trump told a room full of service members: “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” Trump signed the first peace agreement with the Taliban; he plans to bring home the last American troops in Afghanistan before Election Day—even sooner than required under the deal. He refuses to be goaded into a new Cold War…
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