Now officially
President Biden is now officially the 46th president* of the United States of America.
*Only 45 people have been president, Grover Cleveland counts as both 22nd and 24th.
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 20, 2021
Tip Jar
President Biden is now officially the 46th president* of the United States of America.
*Only 45 people have been president, Grover Cleveland counts as both 22nd and 24th.
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 20, 2021
Our long national nightmare is over. Unfortunately, I suspect there will be repercussions. Nonetheless, I intend to enjoy it while it lasts.
Congratulations, President Biden and Vice President Harris. Especially congratulations to our first woman VP; it is indeed a historical day.
Congratulations.
Coming soon: Warnock and Ossoff.
I’m bored already. I’m ok with that.
But what will we talk about at the dinner table?
I’m not American, and I feel quite tearful watching the inauguration.
I’m happy for you and your country. You’ve managed to mostly correct a terrible national mistake and now the world feels like a slightly safer place than it was.
I’ll be watching progress avidly from over here in the 19th century.
I was too.
It is possible that the gods have ordained that every 60 years or so the world has to go through the trial of a 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis or equivalent. First time as high drama, second time maybe as farce, but an existential crisis none the less.
First time through the gods chose an expert crisis manager to run it, one JFK; iron for all souls. Second time through, they chose for MC an overgrown toddler with, according to some scientific commentators, a narcissistic personality disorder.
Play-dough for all souls, and whether they needed it or not.
Also not American. Also quite tearful. My tears started when they anounced Lady Gaga and I have no idea why.
It’s great that Trump is out of office, definitely a sigh of relief, but a bigger relief is that all his twitter accounts are now defunct (along with some other outlets) and we won’t have the entire media landscape wading through his vitriolic psycho-sewerage day after day. It’s like the sun has finally come out.
Good riddance Donnie Dipshit, we don’t want to be in your head anymore, and now you are so irrelevant we don’t have to. :P
And the quieting of his Twitter accounts may be part of the explanation for the fizzled protests.
At the risk of bursting a few bubbles – I think back to 2009 and The Audacity of Hope Americans felt when Obama was elected. While the hope may have been audacious, Obama failed to deliver. Obama had Dreams From His Father, but he left America as a still Promised Land, not one that had fulfilled its promise.
“Obamacare” was a good start, but the pursuit of Ed Snowden for revealing the surveillance state as it was, and how it expanded far further and faster than Americans appreciate. He did not, as I believe he promised to, end “extraordinary renditions”, close Guantanamo Bay. He authorised the Keystone XL Pipeline, widely expanded the use of drones, and thus the murdering of foreign civilians, and he failed to hold the banks to account for almost destroying the financial system they profited from.
I cut Obama some slack because we all knew that “Presidenting While Black” was a huge task and that many on both sides of the aisle would judge him for his skin colour and not the content of his
characterpolicies.In short, Obama was a President like all before him, he talked nicely, used big words, but when push came to shove, he always pushed for the wealthy and shoved the poor out of the way.
Oh yes. I haven’t said anything about big hopes for what Biden will get done – it’s going to be all undoing some of what Trump did, at first, and even when it’s not it’s not going to be anything remarkable. I never wanted him to get the nomination, and anyway I long ago learned not to expect Dem presidents to do much. We have a choice between conservatives and reactionaries; that’s it, that’s the menu.
And that’s been the problem for most democracies since the Reagan/Thatcher years. It’s all about “the centre”, but the right keeps going further right and the left moves to the “new centre”.
We need a resurgence of true left-wing politics, one that doesn’t appeal to “the centre”, but strives to educate people about the issues and how to be progressive is to be for the people.
I don’t expect Biden to shake up the status quo very much either, which could be a good thing for now. A decent human being in that office will be a refreshing change, and not having to pay attention to what kind of shenanigans the president is up to will hopefully reduce stress and toxicity levels. I’m still put off by Harris’ pronouns too, hopefully she will see how misogynistic that agenda is, or how it helps sustain the patriarchy. She appears to be pretty smart, so maybe she’ll figure it out. There are a lot of other concerns for her to address that could make that a blind spot. Also I was pretty put off with Biden’s religious overtures, but I have to remember that I’m not in that target audience, and there are plenty of folks out there that are. There seem to be a few nits left to pick. ;)
Roj, indeed.