Two bad hands
Do you want to know the truth? It's coronavirus season, and it's election season, and my wife's disinfecting all the doorknobs in the house every night, and all the candidates for president stink. Yeah. We're forted up in our house with a lush supply of canned food and bottled beer, and outside, the prospects of saving the nation are dimmer than Donald Trump Jr.
We're lucky. We don't need much. We're the children of people who never owned a new car in their lives, and we can live contentedly on beefaroni and beer. The rich people can flee to their remote gated communities and refuse to let the landscapers in until they're tested. We will survive in our unfashionable multifamily housing, dollar store, tattoo parlor world. Like the unsightly but adaptable cockroach, we're gonna make it through.
Of course, that's just the virus. That's easy. Surviving the next four years of whoever gets elected may kill us.
First of all, incumbent Donald Trump is an awful candidate, and would not have won in a country sure of itself, strong and blessed with trust in its own institutions. He's a flag-whoring baboon, and an incipient president-for-life who will then, a la Haiti, saddle us with his son as the next dictator, to be known as "Baby Trump." I'm gonna need a lot of beer to get through that -- if they let us have beer after the revolution. Q Don't worry. They'll let us have beer, and weed, and heroin. They're gonna have to let us swallow the whole drugstore if they want us to believe surrendering to the Taliban means we're great again.
Which leaves us with Joe Biden, who is Hillary Clinton in a suit, and Bernie Sanders, who should be running for city council in an industrial northeastern city in 1934.
Without a really strong and radical union vote to back him, Sanders is back there in 1934, preaching the WPA to unemployed pick-and-shovel guys named "Mack."
But the unions are gone because Pres. Ronald Reagan, a drooling old oil can, started dismantling them during his vicious platitude-laced time in office.
What Sanders missed was that working-class people don't hate rich people anymore. Working-class people hate poor people now. If giant corporations pay no taxes, no one cares, but working-class people are outraged if some welfare mom's out-of-wedlock brat gets a free bowl of generic corn flakes at school. Anyone who can't figure out rich people can hurt you more than poor people is probably too damn dumb to vote. The stereotypical list of a poor person's vices -- crack, heroin, gang fights, cheap malt liquor -- are all things that kill the poor people themselves. Mookie the crackhead hardly ever dumps several hundred thousand gallons of toxic swill into the ocean.
The one clear thing about Biden's campaign is that he wants to be president. So do I, but I don't run because wanting to be president isn't a good enough reason. Biden has two planks in his platform. The first is that he's not Donald Trump. The second is that he's not Bernie Sanders. So, who is he? No one knows.
Oh, yeah. We're gonna live through the coronavirus. But we may not make it through four more years of Trump, or at least we may not make it through and still have a free press and the right to vote.
Joe Biden is uninspiring, hard to listen to, featureless, friendless and idea-free. He is as much an institutional man as a guy who just did 30 years in federal prison. In a healthy country, he'd be scrambling for a seat on the water board in Black Ankle County. And he's still a better deal than Donald Trump, who is one step away from wearing fatigues and a holstered .45 at all his campaign appearances.
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