A Note on Recent Contretemps

I confess a bit of surprise by the vitriol on the threads about Biden and his potential replacement by Harris. I think a few points are fairly obvious to me:

1. Every single person here–front pager and commenter–sees the terrible situation the nation is in and is desperate to do the right thing to hold off the forces of fascism for another four years.
2. Joe Biden’s debate performance was a disaster. If you are still denying this, I don’t really know what to say to you.
3. The media is absolutely never going to let this go, despite whatever evil Donald Trump engages in.
4. There should be serious concerns about the mental and physical capacity of anyone in their 80s as president. It’s not ageism to note the natural decline of the elderly. We are all going to go through it if we get that far.
5. Given that we are desperate to hold off fascism, this election is incredibly important. If the narrative is that Biden is too old to do the job–and I am talking about swing voters here, who are inherently idiots–then we have to take that seriously, regardless of what Donald Trump represents, his age, etc.
6. Therefore, it might make sense for Biden to step away for someone younger.
7. The only logical person that could be is Kamala Harris. Any talk of a contested convention or some such nonsense is indeed that.
8. People can reasonably disagree whether Biden or Harris should be the nominee at this point
9. It is not “pro-Trump” to talk about this. It is dealing with reality.
10. Again, we all want the same thing here–for Democrats to win and for fascism to be forestalled.

People in comments have said things I think are crazy, like this is worse than 2016 or that they are going to stop reading the site. I don’t understand any of this at all. We are trying to work out a very bad situation. None of us created that situation.

So I hope we can have reasonably civil exchanges about an emotional issue that is really out of our control anyway, but which does need to be worked out. Either way, we are all going to support Biden if it is Biden in the end and we are all going to support Harris if it is her.