Decency is Worth Fighting For — Why Joe Biden is the Man for this Moment
The President of the United States is a bully. He is a bully in the classic sense. He finds perceived weaknesses, mocks people in public and encourages others to laugh at them. He also encourages physical bullying, at his rallies and in his rhetoric. He will deny this, of course, blame the Democrats, but we know what his supporters are capable of and how far they will go to defend their leader.
From his powerful perch Trump tweets all day long in an effort to keep control of the narrative. He can’t stand it if anyone or anything else takes focus away from him so he throws out cruel bullying tweets that excite and ignite his base, who hate anyone on the Left, and he does it to such an extreme that it shakes us up. That is what bullies do. Bullies gain power by crossing the lines of human decency to shock and intimidate those around them.
Whether it’s mocking a disabled reporter, casting doubt on John McCain’s war hero status, bragging about calling Rose O’Donnell fat, calling Hillary Clinton a liar, he spends his days taking low-class swipes at his opponents when he should be focused on issues as serious as the Coronavirus, the economy, Syria, voting rights in Texas. Instead he’s blathering on Twitter with his limited vocabulary, typos and ALL CAPS, of bullying childish nicknames like Pocahontas, Mini Mike, Crazy Bernie, Sleepy Joe.
We failed to block his degenerate behavior in 2016 at a great great cost. Two Supreme Court seats, untolds amounts of intolerable cruelty on families, whole communities, not to mention what he has done to rollback the fight to roll back climate change. It has been a complete disaster. But Trump can also claim success — which is what makes him dangerous. He can brag about illegal immigration down by 11%. He can brag about the unemployment rate and the economy. But what’s missing is a heart. A soul. Compassion. Decency.
So you might say, decency can’t put on the table. It can’t give me Medicare for All. It can’t bring back jobs from foreign countries. Well, are you sure about that? Doesn’t decency mean we find a bridge between divided people and branches of government to get more done for the people who need it most? With Biden’s decency, he has rallied so many Democrats already to his side to fight for HIM because they KNOW he is a decent person. Can that help us build Democratic power back in the Senate and House? I believe it can.
I believe that decency attracted Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke and Mike Bloomberg. Decency is why Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden, why Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom with DISTINCTION, only the third time in our history that has ever happened. As Obama says about Joe:
“As one of his longtime colleagues in the Senate, who happened to be a Republican, once said ‘if you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem.”
It is easy now to forget how bad things are under Trump. Any of his supporters will tell you that the country is so much better off. But really? We’re more divided than ever and we have a Commander in Chief who advocates bullying while his wife crusades against it with a “Be Best” campaign. Trump doesn’t even try to be kind because that would, to his many supporters and sadly, his family, be a sign of weakness.
I look for Trump’s heart every day. I do not hate all Trump supporters. I am related to some of them. I have friends who will vote for Trump for reasons I understand. I know that on the Left we have become, in many way, intolerant and intolerable and have gone too far in our efforts to purify and build out Utopian vision. That is a natural pendulum shift in a country without a leader, in a land without morality and basic human decency. We can’t survive four more years of this. We can’t. We have to find our heart and soul again. We have to find a way to unite.
Once Jim Clyburn of South Carolina put his full backing Biden, suddenly Democrats had a clear path out of this nightmare. We now have a man — a decent man — who can restore everything we’ve lost in the past three years. He can right the ship. He can be ready Day One to step in and rescue us from the disaster of a second term of Donald Trump where he will only escalate his unchecked executive power.
America needs a leader who will LEAD by example. We need a leader who sets the standard for decency, morality, compassion. It’s been demoralizing to have a crude individual in such a powerful position who uses his power on Twitter to drive the press into a frenzy each and every day by calling them the enemy of the people. He has been grooming us for three years now to see just how much he can get away with. What are you going to do about it, he seems to say. He knows we can’t do anything about it because he holds his position as a duly elected President of the United States, and the only constitutional remedies have been subverted by the complicit Republican Party. Yeah, that happened.
It happened because the age of social media gave us tools that have been weaponized by millions of trolls. It happened because the nation’s first African American president freaked out half the country. It doesn’t matter how it happened.
What matters is that a government beholden to its citizens needs citizens willing to do something about it. For our sanity. For our children. For the world.
It matters because America has no leadership at this crucial moment in history. Our forces on the left in a position to push back have become sharply divided against each other while the forces on the right continue to consolidate. There’s a lack of compassion, and a surplus of hatred and rage. We need someone who can rise up and lead this troubled, divisive, freaked out nation out of darkness or we may never recover.
People on Trump’s side exploit our outrage against him and seem to feed off it. They like to claim that Democrats hate Trump so much that we will do anything to overturn the election, because that way it makes us look as bad as they are. They do this while never accepting or acknowledging what Trump does to terrorize the American people every day, only half of whom he even acknowledges as people.
We’ve all seen the photos of Trump sheltering under an umbrella while Melania and Barron get soaked in the rain. Joe Biden is the kind of guy who takes care to lead his wife off stage to make sure she doesn’t stumble. We know Biden’s the guy who would make sure there was an umbrella over her head. Little things like that are emblematic of the stark differences between two types of men.
In order to undermine Biden’s innate goodness, he’s been attacked for reasons based on absurd unreality. The way the internet has tried to drum up fake stories about how he is “too affectionate” or “inappropriately physical” illuminates two sad realities of our current culture: How we’ve become so disconnected from each other that any sign of physical affection is seen as tantamount to sexual assault. Every kiss with his granddaughter, every hug is seen as perverted because THIS is who we are now. This is what we’ve become in the time since Trump has taken office. We can’t see decency anywhere. Every man is potentially Trump.
I choose to take the word of people who have worked with Biden these last 40 years, those who debated alongside him, and those who have endorsed him — heck, there isn’t even much Bernie Sanders can say about him except that their politics are not the same. But while we observe that Bernie somehow brings out the worst in his worst supporters, we see that Biden will be able to RESTORE decency. He can RESTORE our democracy. He can RESTORE sanity. We can have a better country and a better world as a result if we choose humanity over inhumanity, decency over indecency.
Early in the primary cycle Biden was also falsely accused of being “a racist,” a term the left throws around so casually and carelessly now it has all but lost its meaning. I’ll take the word of Jim Clyburn and Barack Obama over some red-faced shrieking Bernie supporter any day of the week. If Obama chose Biden as his wing man, he can’t be a racist. Unless you think he is a liar. He believes he and his wife Michelle are “honorary Bidens.” The love is real.
In a government run by its people, it is up to US to come together for the greater good.
We are in the fight of our lives against Trump’s billion dollar dark money disinformation campaign, the equally strident Bernie Sanders “revolution,” — and way too many people who have, frankly, had it too easy to be bothered to vote. If you don’t think Trump is “that bad” then sure, go ahead sit this one out. But if you see what I see, a blatantly demented president who thinks he’s above the law, spends his days setting a very bad example for America by spouting cruelty, then you know this is a man who can’t be allowed to drag our country down to his vulgar level for four more years.
It is up to us, America. Hopefully we can rise up and stand up together for decency. It’s an aspiration worth fighting for.
