Joe biden

Despite telling a Michigan auto worker to his face that he was ‘full of shit’ about gun rights and lampooning some weapon called an AR-14 (which is an assault rifle used by fake country the Republic of Surea and not the beloved, American semi-automatic sporting rifle, the AR-15) earlier Tuesday while campaigning, Joe Biden soared ahead in the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders in states Sanders swept from under Hillary Clinton in 2016. Michigan, and Biden’s victory there, is perhaps the only interesting primary story we'll see this election cycle and reveals more about the 2016 election than it does 2020.

Twitter announced last month it would start flagging content the company and moderators decided was manipulated to deceive their users. The fear at the time was that this would of course be applied as Twitter deemed fit — decisions would be based solely on the personal opinions of the moderator or moderators. That fear now seems real. Twitter flagged a video clip of presidential candidate Joe Biden stumbling over his words at a recent campaign rally. Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media manager tweeted out a clip of the speech, which Twitter flagged as ‘manipulated media’. The trouble is, under the definition of what manipulation is and how that applies to video, the clip Twitter flagged was not manipulated. Instead Twitter is simply flagging context.

The results of Super Tuesday show that while Joe Biden can’t be described as coherent, the Biden campaign has found a coherent message. It is not a message bristling with policy detail. It is not a message that swears fealty to intersectional dogma. Certainly, it is not a message that has much appeal to anybody under the age of 30. Instead, what Biden offers is a strange vision of a nation restored to a pre-Trump summer of the early 2010s. ‘We have to correct,’ Biden says in his speeches. The correction is not aimed at what those on the left perceive to be enormous structures of injustice and inequality. Biden rarely talks about systems.

If there ever were a theme to emerge from the Trump era it is this: hypocrisy. We're all guilty, we all change our minds and contradict ourselves on occasion. So it is that we come full circle during the ascendancy of Joe Biden and observe that the very same commentators and pundits who once suggested that Donald Trump was mentally unfit for office find themselves enthusiastically endorsing one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. for president. There's something especially egregious about declaring Trump intellectually incapable of governing while supporting the candidacy of a man who often forgets where he is and the office for which he's running. In the spirit of the time we find ourselves living in, let's name and shame the worst offenders.

Was I wrong, or only early? After Joe Biden’s win in the South Carolina primary, I wrote that his victory 'will not, as some pundits are claiming, "resuscitate" or "breathe life" into the ailing former vice president’s asphyxiating campaign. That ship has sailed, as we’ll all see on Tuesday when Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg divide up most of the delegate cake.' Biden certainly performed better than I thought he would, Bernie a little worse, and mini Mike, despite all his money, was nowhere to be seen. (Neither was the unpleasant female who is senior senator from Massachussetts, but that is another story, beside the point in a column about the race to secure the Democratic nomination for president.

Joe Biden doesn't have the organization that Bernie Sanders has behind him. He doesn't have the money that Michael Bloomberg has. But he does have 'Joementum' and that could be all that matters. It's been more than enough for him on Super Tuesday so far. Having had his campaign written off in almost all media quarters, Biden suddenly finds himself with the kind of 'comeback narrative' energy that wins elections. Bloomberg's expensive experts can only look on jealously: Bloomberg has. Bernie Sanders had invested quite a lot of time and money in Virginia, the first state to announce results. But with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out, it seems Biden has hovered up the vast majority of their support.

Perhaps the intense wave of establishment Democratic party consolidation around Joe Biden over the past 48 hours isn’t a concerted conspiracy — no smoke-filled rooms, no corrupt deals, no villainous blackmail schemes. But the Democratic party establishment (which we’re often told does not exist) is clearly making every effort to give the appearance of something conspiratorial going on.Take yesterday, for instance. Pete Buttigieg meets for breakfast with 95-year-old Jimmy Carter (?), ensures the visit is well-publicized, then heads home to South Bend and pulls the rug out from under his campaign. Wait, what? Is this the same Pete Buttigieg whose aides just a few days earlier released an elaborate memo detailing his surefire path to a formidable delegate acquisition?