The Effort to Demonize Joe

As regular readers of this blog know, I occasionally dip into the right wing media, just to see what the other side thinks. Does that make me a masochist, or just someone who likes to be informed? Maybe some of both. I will ask my dominatrix.

In any event, on my occasional forays into the fever swamp that is the right wing mediasphere (wearing a hazmat suit and Dräger rebreathing apparatus), I have lately been struck by a new and worrying phenomenon.

The Virtues of Moderation (Sorry Barry)

During the early phases of the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden took a lot grief in progressive circles for being too moderate, too uninspiring, too boring, too old school — too old full stop — too white, too male, etc etc. There was some credence to those complaints.

But lucky for us, it turned out that that was exactly what the American electorate wanted after four years of a screeching, racist, pussy-grabbing, rabid weasel in the Oval Office, especially in the midst of a global pandemic that cried out for sane, reassuring leadership. Biden was human comfort food who fit in nicely with 44 of the previous 45 POTUSes on a schoolroom chart. He was non-threatening enough to appeal to centrist voters — even some disaffected, anti-Trump Republicans — while still retaining the Democratic base and its core of…