In the latest addition to the ongoing saga of “He still doesn’t get it and probably never will,” ex-VP and current Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden told a Buzzfeed reporter that Democrats shouldn’t be able to amass too much political power because there needs to be a balanced force pushing the other way, and the Republican Party is that force:
...[I]f you hear people on the rope line saying, ‘I'm a Republican,’ I say, ‘Stay a Republican.’ Vote for me but stay a Republican, because we need a Republican Party."
Yes. Despite the fact that conservatives currently control the White House, and the US Senate, and the Supreme Court, and they’re either allowing, or conspiring with, hostile foreign entities to decide the upcoming election, and they’re working overtime to suppress the vote everywhere, and they’re gerrymandering the hell out of any district they can, and they’re busy stacking the courts to give themselves an unfair multi-decade advantage, and they’re deploying the novel tactic of stripping power from any Democrat who does manage to get into office, and they’re rapidly removing as many consumer and environmental protections as possible in the false name of deregulation, and they’re as a party supporting the most venal, corrupt administration in history, and they’re continuing to refuse to address the doom-filled specter of climate change to keep Big Energy money coming in, and they’re intentionally harming immigrants and women and children and LGBTQ people because that’s how they get off, and they’re generally moving toward fulfilling some biblical prophecy of Armageddon—Biden feels they should keep a goodly amount of political power because “we need a Republican Party”.
He later added that he's concerned about what would happen if the Republican Party was totally "clobbered."
"I'm really worried that no party should have too much power," he said. "You need a countervailing force."
In that same piece, he also noted that, while he and Lindsey Graham have some major differences between them, he promised he’d be able to “work things out” with him. Because apparently Biden believes his strength of personality and use of outdated lingo alone will be all it takes to get the clearly compromised Graham to recant every Putin- and Trump-loving lie he’s told, and to start behaving like the sometimes reasonable politician he was before Trump showed Lindsey his big satchel o’kompromat on the fairway a few years ago.
It’s clear by now that Mister “No Malarkey” lives in a world long gone, an America that no longer exists, a nation where both major parties might disagree on many issues, but both nevertheless have the best interests of America and Americans at heart. He doesn’t seem to grasp that this is 2019, when only one of those parties is doing all the destroying, and only one side believes that the two fundamental problems with America are that a) poor people have too much money and b) rich people don’t have enough, and only one side believes that brown-skinned people are The Number One Reason Things Are So Bad In The World Today, and only one side is giving full-throated support to a criminal, corrupt, and compromised nitwit.
So, no, Joe, we most definitely do NOT need a Republican party. At least, not this Republican party. And we don’t need a President who doesn’t know that.
UPDATE: 2019-12-09 00:09:11 EST: Many commenters have stated here that there’s nothing wrong with encouraging Republicans to become Democrats. And I completely agree with that. But note that Biden didn’t do that; he instead explicitly implored Republicans to stay Republican for the express purpose of keeping Democrats in check.
BTW: thanks, everyone, for both the recs and the very thoughtful comments.
