Though old and semi-demented, Biden continues to play a treacherous role in US politics. A sworn (but underhanded) enemy of social security and Medicare, two programs the ruling class has been trying to defund and destroy for generations, Biden is now happily putting the fox in the chicken coop. It’s what Democrats do. (Repugs are no different, of course, but worse at pretending.)
Joe Biden recently appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel late night show for an interview that lasted nearly 20 minutes but must have seemed like twice that to anyone watching and waiting for the President to express himself clearly and succinctly without fits and starts or rambling incoherently. At one point Kimmel even felt compelled to interrupt the President and throw to commercial just to put a temporary stop to the cringe. Jimmy and his panel of The Dive’s Jackson Hinkle and American Comedian Kurt Metzger review Biden’s performance and how well Kimmel was able to cover for the increasingly doddering President.
NBC News has conducted a detailed analysis of the Hunter Biden laptop, which was once derided by mainstream news outlets as a “classic example of Russian misinformation,” offering further description of the President’s son’s business interests in China and Ukraine. Biden apparently earned more than $11 million between 2013-18, much of which was frittered away as a result of his spiraling drug abuse. Jimmy and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald discuss the truly scandalous way intelligence agencies and mainstream and even independent media outlets worked together to quash the Hunter laptop story prior to the 2016 presidential election.
Nina Turner is challenging incumbent corporatist Democrat Shontel Brown in the race to represent Ohio’s 11th Congressional district. With the primary coming up soon, Turner tweeted that the GOP is working to prevent her victory. Jimmy tweeted back at Turner, pointing out that not even the Congressional Progressive Caucus was supporting her, so any alleged GOP’s opposition was the least of her worries. And with that, Turner blocked Jimmy. Jimmy and podcaster Sabby Sabs discuss how the onetime darling of the progressive left has embraced the Democratic Party that has never wanted to have anything to do with her.
CHRIS HEDGES—The belief that the Democratic Party offers an alternative to militarism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the triumph of hope over experience. The disputes with Republicans are largely political theater, often centered around the absurd or the trivial. On the substantive issues there is no difference within the ruling class. The Democrats, like the Republicans, embrace the fantasy that, even as the country stands on the brink of insolvency, a war industry that has orchestrated debacle after debacle, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, is going to restore lost American global hegemony. Empires, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, eventually “destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible.” The self-delusion of military invincibility is the scourge that brought down the American empire, as it brought down past empires.