The Biden campaign had what they thought would be a clever solution to their fear that the president would lose the New Hampshire primary. They decertified NH and made South Carolina first. Then Dean Phillips challenged Biden in NH. Faced with the prospect that Biden will lose the first primary (even if it’s unofficial), Biden has launched a write-in campaign for the race from which he asked to be removed from the ballot.
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Dear Mr. President,
Won’t you please kill the homeless woman who lives on a bench on the median strip of the street near my apartment building?
She doesn’t bother me. As far as I know, she doesn’t bother anyone else either. The woman who lives in the middle of the street is nice. I like her. Last week, as I was waiting for the traffic signal to change, she beckoned softly from under her pile of soiled blankets, asking for change, and I gave her a ten-dollar bill. I’m not usually that nice. She’s that sympathetic.
I pitied her. I’ve watched her decline since spring. As six months dragged by this probably-fiftysomething-year-old woman has deteriorated from “how did someone so normal become homeless?” to talking to herself to severely sunburned to “this person will die this winter.”
It was in the high 30s last night and it will only get colder and it is not a question of when or how she’ll die—the answers are (a) this winter and (b) hypothermia—but whether the usual circle of votive candles and $5 bouquets of flowers will be placed by her bench or on the southwest corner of the intersection near the other one.
They say that dying of cold isn’t that bad. That you feel warm, cozy, disoriented.
I don’t believe them. Whatever the physical sensations, dying from cold a hundred feet from a couple hundred housing units so overheated that many New Yorkers keep their windows open all year long has got to be one hell of a lonesome suck of depressing. The nice woman who lives in the median deserves better than drawing her final breath while staring at the glow of a laptop screen through a frosted window pane the opposite side of which, under different circumstances, she would live inside.
So, Mr. President, won’t you please kill this lady? You’d be doing her a favor.
I know this isn’t your fault, sir. In a different world, you could allocate the tens of thousands of dollars needed to provide my outside neighbor with emergency shelter, transitional housing, permanent rehousing, substance abuse and/or mental health treatment. In reality, that money is tied up. The government’s budget is stretched thin. You have a massive deficit to think about.
Plus you have big expenses. For example, you’re asking Congress for $106 billion “in funding for Israel, Ukraine, countering China in the Indo-Pacific, and operations on the southern U.S. border.” These are, obviously, all very important needs. Before she succumbed to schizophrenia, the woman who is going to die in my New York neighborhood wouldn’t dream of suggesting that her desire to live indoors ought to come ahead of countering China in the Indo-Pacific.
I understand. If she hadn’t gone crazy, she’d understand too. Defense is one pot. A big pot. Anti-poverty is another pot. A very small pot. Like the tiniest pot in the smallest dollhouse ever. Everyone knows—you can’t “just” move money from one pot to another pot. That’s not something we even want to think about.
All that military spending got me thinking, though. Although Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan clearly need fighter jets and tanks and drones and ships and cyber weapons and missiles and bombs and light arms and bullets in order to kill as many Russian and Palestinian and Chinese people as possible, will they really miss…one?
Euthanizing a homeless New Yorker wouldn’t require anything as fancy as one of the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems we’re sending to Ukraine. This lady isn’t worth $1.5 million. Not to mention, one ATACM would take out a whole block or two—including my place!
I’m thinking something more modest, along the lines of the Switchblade 300 “suicide” drone, another gizmo we’re providing to Ukraine. As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. President, the AeroVironment Switchblade is an expandable loitering munition so small it can fit in a backpack. You launch it from a tube. Then it flies to and crashes into its target, where its explosive warhead detonates. Like the homeless, it’s expendable. And it’s only $6,000!
Come on, Mr. President: We both know the Ukrainians and the Israelis and Taiwanese don’t need all the weapons we’re sending them. The Ukrainians don’t; they’re selling the extras we send them on the black market and the dark web. I only need one. One!
I know—“operations on the southern U.S. border” address an existential threat to America. What if an illegal terrorist migrant were to sneak past the border wall and make his way to New York and then were to kill the homeless woman on my street who would otherwise die of exposure this winter? Of course, that would be OK.
Still. It’s not like you can’t let $6,000 “accidently” fall out of your budget for “operations on the southern U.S. border.” Send that drone. Please blow up the old lady.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Related: Biden Sends Billions Overseas As Americans Starve (Short Video)
Devastating new polls show that voters have decisively turned against President Joe Biden, and that if the election were held today, Donald Trump will defeat him handily. The main reason voters oppose him is that they think he’s too old. Unlike other issues, this one is impossible to reverse.
Polls keep saying the same thing: voters think President Joe Biden is too old.
The latest comes from some outfit called “The New York Times.” According to these “Times” people: “An overwhelming 71% said [Biden] was ‘too old’ to be an effective president—an opinion shared across every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including a remarkable 54% of Mr. Biden’s own supporters.” Just because he’s 80.
Almost 81.
If the election were held today, the poll monsters go on, “Trump would be poised to win more than 300 electoral college votes, far above the 270 needed to take the White House.”
On paper, where things get printed, it looks bad. “Even Kamala Harris—no political juggernaut so far—fares a bit better than Mr. Biden, trailing Mr. Trump by three points in a hypothetical matchup, compared with Mr. Biden’s five-point deficit,” the Times says.
Fortunately for Democrats, Biden doesn’t live on paper. Our commander-in-chief is a skeletal flesh-and-bone human being. And he has the answer to these so-called “polls”: “I don’t believe the polls.” Exactly so, Mr. President. Anyone who takes the $8 billion-a-year public opinion and election polling industry and its thousands of highly-educated analysts seriously is plainly a poltroon and a malarkey-peddling pony soldier!
Ooo, look at us with our 95% accuracy rate, we’re soooo smart!
Democrats have got to get the president’s message, whatever that is, out there. Otherwise voters might listen to Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota, the 54-year-old twerp challenging Biden in the Democratic primaries. “83% of Democrats under 30 want a different nominee. You know, a lot of politicians lie, but the numbers don’t,” Phillips says. Phillips loves Biden and voted with him literally 100% of the time; his only beef with the prez is the age thing.
Like how James Carville famously said “it’s the economy, stupid” and that somehow got Clinton elected president, Biden needs to tell someone loudly and proudly: “It’s not about my age, even more, stupids!”
Studies prove it with 95% accuracy: when people are thinking about one thing, they’re not thinking about something else. So, if we want voters to stop focusing on Biden’s age, we need to seduce them into obsessing over a different subject entirely.
For instance, Biden might run attack ads pointing out that, at 77, Trump is no spring chicken his own self. Ad copy first draft: “If Biden is too old, Trump is almost as old as he is so at bare minimum he’s almost too old too!”
Or, for heterosexual male voters, we could just show and talk about women’s breasts. Age who?
But really, because this is politics and it’s supposed to be about policies, Democrats should migrate the focus on age over to the president’s handling of the economy. Well, they’ve been trying that. The problem is, the voters hate Bidenomics. The thing about voters is, they don’t respond well when you remind them why they hate you.
Why do the voters hate Bidenomics? Because people are psychologically selfish. Rich people and the stock market are doing great but the voters are broke and so are unappreciative. “Whatever stories Americans are told about the strength of the economy under President Joe Biden, they are not going to be persuaded to look past the issue of their own living standards,” liberal economist James Galbraith writes. Ingrates!
Never mind the economy. Which is an awesome economy, no matter what your wallet tells you. And another thing—why is your wallet talking? Are you on fentanyl? If so, why can you afford fancy opioids? Bidenomics, that’s why!
Pivot, pivot, pivot! Maybe Biden should focus on young people. They were a key part of his coalition in 2020, dropped away from Democrats during the 2022 midterms and are expected to stay away in 2024. Let’s get them back.
Biden’s ace in the hole: come out as trans. Trans-young! Biden will announce that he now identifies as a 33-year-old. Not as the racist 33-year-old SOB he was in 1975 when he ran for Congress in Delaware while opposing court-ordered school desegregation and supporting pro-apartheid senator Jesse Helms’ attacks on bussing. As a cool modern one with, like, a goatee.
Trans-young Biden will dump the birthdate he was assigned at birth in favor of his lifestyle birthdate, 1990. It’ll even be on his new driver’s license, assuming he’s able to get the old one back after Hunter took it away along with his car keys.
As a dude who retroactively came of age in the 2010s, he’ll be underpaid, overworked and totally unable to repay his college student loans—just like the young voters who are mad at him because he didn’t forgive their student loans.
Common ground!
Maybe we should talk to Kamala.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Hi. Joe Biden here, asking for more money for Ukraine and Israel.
Many Americans are asking: why, while millions of Americans are unemployed and getting evicted and starving and homeless, should we ignore our own people and send billions of dollars to foreign countries instead? The answer is: democracy. We have to defend democracy.
Ukraine and Israel aren’t just democracies. They’re special democracies.
Very special democracies.
Ukraine, for example, is the kind of democracy that doesn’t hold elections for local offices. There were supposed to be parliamentary elections, this month, but…yeah. There weren’t and there won’t be. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly legal because after the war with Russia started in February 2022, martial law was declared and the Ukrainian Constitution doesn’t allow elections under martial law.
Ukraine is so democratic that it doesn’t even need to have presidential elections anymore. Martial law again. And who declared martial law? Why, it’s that sly rascal President Volodymyr Zelensky—make that President-for-Life Volodymyr Zelensky. We’re so dysfunctional here in the U.S. that House Republicans can’t agree with themselves who should be Speaker. But Ukraine is streamlined! The guy who would be running for reelection this spring won’t have to, because he personally said so! That’s a very special democracy.
Under “martial law,” a term that no one has ever managed to define, Ukraine is a kind of democracy in which “conducting referendums, organizing strikes, and holding public demonstrations and other mass gatherings are prohibited.” Special!
President-for-Life Zelensky points out: “according to the [martial law] legislation, it is forbidden to hold elections.” Legislation that he signed unilaterally, of course. He is so committed to the rule of law that he refuses to unilaterally cancel a law that he unilaterally created in order to cancel the rule of law.
As everyone knows, you don’t need to hold elections to call yourself a democracy. Aside from martial law, there would be some big logistical challenges to holding an election right now. Like, Zelensky could lose! In the last poll of Ukrainians before the war, 53% of voters disapproved of his job performance and 38% approved.
Also, an election without other candidates and parties isn’t much fun. Ukraine has banned all left-wing parties, and also banned 11 other parties, including the biggest one, whose leader is under house arrest. Better not to bother.
Even if there were other parties and candidates to run against Zelensky, which there are not, they wouldn’t be able to campaign because “conducting referendums, organizing strikes, and holding public demonstrations and other mass gatherings are prohibited” under martial law. Who needs campaign rallies, because who would report about them anyway? His Excellency the President-for-Life has imposed state censorship on newspapers, shuttered opposition websites and shut down all opposition TV outlets and consolidated them into his own state TV platform. He calls it a “unified information policy.” No more channel changing! Save on monthly subscriptions to media apps!
The U.S. spent over $14 billion on the 2020 election. Ukraine is a very efficient democracy. They’re spending nothing at all! We must defend this penny-pinching beacon of freedom.
Israel, I like to say, is “a safe, secure, Jewish, and democratic state.” OK, not that safe. But, like Ukraine, it’s a democracy. Israel is a very very special kind of democracy.
In a democracy, the right to vote is one of the most fundamental privileges accorded to a citizen. The trouble is, sometimes people vote incorrectly. And in a democracy, all you need to do to be considered a citizen is to be born and live in the country.
To fix this problem, Israel has decided that only its very best people—the 9.6 million residents of Israel “proper”—can be citizens. The 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza or the 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank are, as the vernacular goes, S.O.L. (The 500,000 Israeli settler-colonists squatting in the West Bank are, however, fully vested voters.)
Of the 9.6 million Israelis in Israel proper, 2.0 million are Israeli Arabs and 500,000 are neither Jewish nor Arab. If they and the West Bank settlers voted alongside their fellow 5.1 million Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank in a unified Israeli-Palestinian state, there would be 7.6 million Jews almost tied with 7.1 million Arabs.
Too much democracy.
On the other hand, 5.1 million Palestinian citizens of their own viable nation-state in a two-state scenario would present a different problem. The Republic of Palestine would have a seat at the United Nations, embassies and consulates all over the world, foreign news bureaus. Journalists and tourists could freely come and go. Palestinian citizens would talk. They’d complain, even about Israel. I mean, they do that now—but people might pay attention and—God forbid—care!
So Israel has an à la carte democracy. They lock the Palestinians away in Gaza and the West Bank, out of sight and out of mind, stateless and hopeless and voiceless, under Israeli occupation but without the right to vote. The Jewish “majority” of Israel enjoys the Middle East’s only thriving democracy.
Imagine how cool it would be if we could do that here! Turn the flyover “red” states into an occupied stateless concentration camp without voting rights. The remainder, the coastal “blue” states, would become a liberal paradise. No more Trumpies. Abortion rights—back. E-vehicle charging stations everywhere.
Israel has biggified democracy!
So, my fellow Americans, please join me in supporting Ukraine and Israel, these two very special, very expensive democracies.
While you’re still allowed.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Daniel McAdams – Executive Director, Ron Paul Institute
At first, it seems like a good idea for President Biden to speak up in favor of democracy. But then you think about his own behavior. He is in a proxy war in favor of a country, that jails opponents and cancels elections. His party sues to keep rival political parties off the ballot. He refuses to debate challengers. He insists on running, even though most members of his own party don’t want him to. Democracy begins at home, Joe.
In a history-making act of performativeness, President Joe Biden appeared at a UAW picket line. But he didn’t picket or offer meaningful government support.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says there will be a formal impeachment inquiry to look into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and elsewhere in order to determine whether Joe’s involvement rose to the level of an impeachable offense.
Groups are suing Secretaries of State across the nation, invoking the 14th Amendment to try to get Trump kicked off the ballot.
