And so it has come to cross.
United States President Joe Biden has dropped out of this 12 months’s presidential race, bowing to strain from fellow Democrats who feared that his prepare wreck of a efficiency within the June presidential debate with Republican candidate Donald Trump – amongst different episodes – would render the octogenarian lower than interesting to the US citizens.
A lot for Biden’s decree that solely the “Lord Almighty” may persuade him to withdraw from the race. Or perhaps the Lord had a hand in it, in spite of everything.
To make certain, Biden’s Democratic colleagues did have a degree – not that Trump or another possibility, Republican or Democrat, is preferable in a dedicated plutocracy the place poll selections typically vary from the transparently sociopathic to the much less transparently so.
However Biden’s current verbal gaffes – together with such assertions as that he’s the “first Black lady to serve with a Black president” within the US – did counsel that he was maybe not correctly positioned to proceed because the commander of the worldwide superpower, linguistically or in any other case.
Objectively talking, too, his operate in the course of the previous 9 months as abettor-in-chief of Israel’s genocide within the Gaza Strip is decidedly lower than charming. However in his July 21 presidential race withdrawal publish on the social media platform X, Biden most popular to look on the intense facet, assuring his “Fellow Individuals” that the US had “made historic investments in rebuilding our Nation, in reducing prescription drug prices for seniors, and in increasing inexpensive well being care to a file variety of Individuals”.
This can be information to many Individuals nonetheless battling medical payments and overpriced prescribed drugs. One in every of them would have been my very own father, a Texas-born US citizen who died of prostate most cancers within the nation’s capital Washington, DC, in August 2023 on the age of 72, after being lured into profitable chemotherapy remedies by his docs which did nothing however speed up his demise.
My dad had moreover been prescribed the prostate most cancers drug Xtandi, a medicine that had been developed with US taxpayer cash however not for the aim of, um, “reducing prescription drug prices for seniors” – as was evident from my dad and mom’ invoice of at least $14,579.01 for a single month’s provide of Xtandi.
Anyway, that’s US capitalism for you – which regrettably isn’t something that may be cured by way of a democratic electoral charade.
Biden’s possible substitute within the presidential race is his present vp, Kamala Harris. Whereas pundits debate her deserves on mainstream media, the one important query is exactly what is going to turn into of the entire cash raised on behalf of 1 plutocrat somewhat than one other.
As an Al Jazeera article printed within the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal notes: “With no precedent for the present state of affairs, questions have swirled over the destiny of Biden’s warfare chest. Within the US, in spite of everything, election spending can run into thousands and thousands, if not billions, of {dollars}”.
With so many thousands and thousands and billions swirling round, then, there may be clearly not a lot probability for literal democracy. This regardless of Biden’s sentimental declare in his X publish that “none of this might have been completed with out you, the American folks. Collectively, we overcame a as soon as in a century pandemic and the worst financial disaster because the Nice Melancholy. We’ve protected and preserved our Democracy”.
Whereas Biden is retreating from his re-election bid, he isn’t stepping down from the workplace of the presidency. He has made clear that he considers serving the remainder of his time period to be “in the most effective curiosity of my occasion and the nation” and that he will likely be specializing in his “duties as President”.
Amongst his high “duties” that presently require fulfilling is receiving on Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the White Home – since genocide is definitely within the “finest curiosity of my occasion and the nation”.
As Individuals course of the entire electoral switcheroo, they’d do properly to ponder the plutocratic panorama of their nation.
In his goodbye missive, Biden signed off with the phrases: “I consider in the present day what I at all times have: that there’s nothing America can’t do – once we do it collectively. We simply should keep in mind that we’re the US of America.”
And that’s what everybody ought to bear in mind in the long run: that the US is the US regardless of who’s on the helm and there may be “nothing America can’t do” when it comes to inflicting world agony.
Biden could also be out of the race however American “democracy” – that’s, plutocracy – carries on.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
