Warning: rant.

This is unhelpful: politicalwire.com/2025/…

"For months, party activists have felt[...]incensed at the leaders who first went along with Joe Biden’s decision to run again."

That was the default decision, and it's water under the bridge. But at least these are unspecified people expressing their feelings privately or not for attribution. What's really fucked up is this kind of second-guessing: politicalwire.com/2025/…

I'm glad he's the -outgoing- chair. It's understandable, though in exceedingly poor grace and showing bad judgment, for Biden himself to say he made a mistake bowing out and would have won. While it's impossible to know exactly how many additional voters would have voted for him because he's a white man and not a Black/Asian woman or how many additional people would have voted against him or stayed home because they blamed him for inflation or thought he was not capable of functioning as president, it's very unlikely he would have won and he should have shut up about that. But anyone else publicly second-guessing his decision to bow out should in my opinion never have a position of leadership in the party. And a word about some other activists: politicalwire.com/2025/…

"The final forum of candidates running to lead the Democratic National Committee was derailed at numerous points by climate protesters"

What the fuck is wrong with them? Trump is trying to end the constitutional system, the independence and professionalism of the civil service, governance, alliances, and trade relationships, and create chaos, the Democrats are out of power, and instead of unifying, these imbeciles are disrupting a meeting of the party that's out of power in Washington and is the one that believes in science and is actually trying to do something to deal with global warming. Do they understand the immediate threat of fascism, at a time when Trump is trying to unilaterally revoke the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of people living and working legally in the U.S. and empowering ICE to detain American citizens on mere suspicion of being undocumented immigrants?

And about the political commentators who are sanctimoniously pronouncing Biden's presidency a dismal failure, clinched by inflation in an inflationary worldwide recovery from a pandemic the likes of which hadn't been seen since 1919, his supposedly electing Trump, and then his unwise remarks after the fact about Harris and his having made a mistake bowing out: You are part of the problem represented by the huge media corporations that just can't wait to give Trump multi million-dollar bribes as "settlements" for frivolous lawsuits by Trump and kiss his ass every which way.

But you're also missing the point. We can talk about unpatriotic Republicans, subversion by foreign powers and probably even greater subversion by domestic-based oligarchs (not all of them citizens), timidity and slowness by the Justice Department, egregious sabotage by the courts, successful delaying tactics by Trump, political commentators and reporters who are incentivized to pretend that merely imperfect Democrats should be treated with at least normal confrontation and disrespect but Trump should be

treated as if he were a normal politician and/or to treat politics as a bloodless game even after seeing the blood on worldwide TV, and we can acknowledge that eloquent and impressive speeches were never Biden's forte, though he wasn't elected for that, and that his speaking deteriorated in the last 4 years, leading to what I think are false beliefs about his being incompetent to execute the office, whereas he continued to do great things till the end. But all of that ultimately misses the point.

So who is to blame for Trump and the Republicans being given the keys to the country again? Ultimately, though plenty of other people have acted deplorably, only one group is fundamentally responsible: a plurality of Americans who voted. Say what you want about all the others, but the voters knew what happened when Trump and the Republicans had a trifecta before, and they said "We want more of that!"

And if the human race survives the ravages of global warming, historians will treat Biden very differently, as the last opportunity the American voters took to avoid driving the country into collapse. And don't try to claim I'm "catastrophizing": I'm not saying the collapse will happen within the next 4 years, but I do think this election marks the final step likely to ensure it. Only time will tell, but never forget who is really to blame. History won't.