The line Joe Biden used to put into nearly every big speech — “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future” — is a long way from what he says in private now.The line Joe Biden used to put into nearly every big speech — “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future” — is a long way from what he says in private now.

These days, multiple people who’ve spoken to him over the last year say, Biden often punctuates conversations with: “You think we can actually come back from this?”

The 83-year-old Biden continues to feel out a post-presidency that may prove to be one of the shortest in history and is already one of the most complicated.

There are days when Biden is heartbroken, indignant or in disbelief about what is happening as President Donald Trump — the man he defeated in 2020 — returned and moved not just to tear down his accomplishments, but to dig in with petty insults like the autopen photograph he put in Biden’s spot in the “Presidential Walk of Fame” installed at the White House.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    52
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    16 hours ago

    I guess letting Trump run out the clock on justice was the voters fault too, then, eh? Even when Biden was literally handed a way to prevent Trump from running on a silver platter by the Supreme Court that basically ruled that anything a President does is part of Presidential Duties. He and the entire apparatus around him including twerps like Merrick Garland has so many fucking options to stop this. The courts, the department of justice, the President, all of them had taken an oath to protect democracy and that oath doesn’t disappear because the voters are stupid. They all bend over like grass under a push-me-pull-you lawnmower going “oh for fucks sake” and deciding that fighting corruption was too hard and too risky for themselves personally. People whined about judges getting death threats and that’s why they were hesitant to play hardball… Are you fucking kidding me? Like they thought that would protect them or anyone else? Now fascism is boldly kicking the fucking doors in and those people and their families are in more danger than they were back then, except now the whole country is in just as much danger. They bent over because their pussy asses thought they could and should save themselves instead of fight fascism and asshats are all like “it’s the voters fault!” when Trump legally shouldn’t have been allowed to run for the Presidency at all for a litany of reasons and nobody with any real power did anything to stop it! Sure, it’s our fault, not a system that allowed it to happen, fuck me, give me a break! The people in charge abdicated their responsibility to justice and then said it’s the voters fault, get the fuck out of here.

    Stop rewriting history. In a country where laws actually meant something and mattered he would have been in prison for 34 felonies and not allowed to run due to being an insurrectionist and guilty of treason for stealing and selling state secrets. How the living fuck is that the voters fault? The system failed the voters before the voters failed the system.

    • borkborkbork@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      6 hours ago

      here’s something that still fucking rankles me:

      think about all the billions of dollars, year after year, we put into the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, and so many other intel orgs - and what good did it do when a treasonous pedophile came knocking?

      What’s the fucking point of it all if this is the outcome?

    • SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      23
      ·
      16 hours ago

      If the voters and non-voters hadn’t voted him back in the wheels of justice would probably kept turning slowly as they do.

      Do you want to establish the precedence of a president demanding the DOJ arrest their opposition?

      Because I’m not sure that’s a great idea.

      • Scirocco@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        edit-2
        14 hours ago

        Merrick Fucking Garland was a poor choice in the first place, a sop to ‘the other side’ and he performed exactly as expected.

        Bernie Sanders would have won against Trump all three races, if we just had to have an old white guy.

        Biden was earnest, but he did not, and does not have the balls required in these modern times

        Can we come back from this?

        What a joke. Biden himself had the opportunity and the authority to start that process, and his entire administration farted around for three full years.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        27
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        16 hours ago

        Well, it sure seems to have worked without taking so long that the assholes who already broke the laws came back into power like in South Korea and Brazil. Those systems didn’t go “whoopsies we ran out of time, I guess they can take power again!”

        A system that allows this to happen and places the blame on the voters instead of fighting for a better world is a system that was always going to end up this way.

        A system that can just have the clock run out on justice is always going to be gamed like this, stop lying to yourself.

        • SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          14
          ·
          16 hours ago

          To be fair the voters and non-voters have a large share of the responsibility for this situation that’s how a democracy works.

          • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            12
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            13 hours ago

            Yes and we voted in people to represent us by upholding the law and following their oaths to office and they failed at representing our interests, upholding the law, and following their oaths miserably.

              • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                10
                ·
                edit-2
                15 hours ago

                After voting in Obama, who didn’t want anything to do with prosecuting Bush & Cheney for warcrimes, and then Biden, who didn’t want anything to do with prosecuting Trump, obviously. But I guess those times don’t count for whatever fucking reason??

                American reluctance to hold powerful figures accountable isn’t a good thing and we’ve literally just left the question of whether you can prosecute a President at all dangling since we allowed Nixon to resign and fly away. That’s qualitatively a bad thing. We have had decades of chances to fix this problem and it doesn’t matter who we vote in, no one is dismantling the horrific things that are created in the meantime.

                For example, instead of questioning why the TSA and it’s security theater exists or whether or not the DHS was a good idea at all, we have people going “Oh but the TSA agents aren’t getting paid!” They miss something like 60% of illicit items anyway, and if someone wanted to kill a mass amount of people they would just have to set off a bomb in the long security lines leading up to the airports. It’s been security theater since the fucking Bush era, but it’s become so normalized we’re whining about people who are violating the fourth amendment against unlawful search and seizure by choosing us at random for an unlawful search of our bags not getting paid! Boo hoo! These people who helped throw the fourth amendment out the window two decades ago now aren’t getting paid! Cry me a fucking river.

                We voted, numerous times, as a country, to hold this kind of corruption to account and numerous times the people in charge failed us miserably, all the way back to Nixon.

                  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    12
                    arrow-down
                    1
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    14 hours ago

                    Holding Presidents accountable is a detour? Violation of constitutional norms is a detour? No wonder we’re in this position, because apparently history and things that led to this outcome don’t matter!