Biden and His Supporters: “Shape Without Form, Shade Without Color”

Who needs Russian interference in the American Presidential race when the Clintons, Obama, MSNBC, CNN, the NYT, The Atlantic and their numerous henchmen/women are covertly and overtly interfering in the Democrat’s Presidential election?

For well over a year now the Democrat leadership (those corrupt and bought dealing/wheeling political bosses and their corporate masters and sweethearts) have been clamoring (and rightfully so) that Donald Trump has to be voted out of office. A parallel theme for the Democrats has been the mantra of electability, a euphemistic incantation intended solely to sabotage Bernie Sanders’ bid for the presidency.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election Hillary Clinton blamed Bernie Sanders for her miserable showing and loss, a leitmotif she sang and supplanted in the minds of her many disappointed supporters. The same narrative is today’s revenge leitmotif in a scorched earth attack on Bernie Sanders. This, even though Bernie’s support for Hillary post the 2016 nomination was genuine, proof of Bernie’s magnanimous character, even after he was given the metaphorical royal Democrat shaft.

If nothing else, give Bernie credit for taking the high road  in 2016 after a concerted, deliberate, and malevolent effort to sabotage his 2016 campaign,

No sooner than Bernie Sanders announced his bid for the 2020 Presidential election, than the same convoluted schemes were thrown in full “electability” throttle. And, as Sanders’ campaign began to gain traction and the polls were telling us that he is a viable and serious candidate, intricate schemes and Machiavellian stratagems were marshalled to sabotage Sanders’ campaign.

Leading the rabid pack, Loser Miss Hillary led the charge as early as last spring; she’s been sowing doubt about Bernie’s electability in repeated telly interviews on any number of news segments and talk shows, as well as newspaper and magazine interviews. Even Miss Chelsea has gotten in on the act.

Taking their cues from The Queen of Chaos (thank you Diane Johnstone for this nomenclature and for a superlative analysis of the Goldwater Girl), many former and current politicians and pundits launched an orchestrated smear campaign. And the more Sanders’ favorability poll ratings were reported, namely, that he would soundly defeat Donald Trump, Biden, Et al., the more vicious the attacks became.

That MSNBC and CNN conspired to present slanted reports maligning Sanders became the norm. Whether it was program hosts, news anchors, or roving reporters, every effort was made to put Bernie and his spokespeople on the defensive, thus robbing the viewers of hearing substantive national and international policy issues espoused by Bernie, issues that affect the working people of this nation.

MSNBC’s  Christ Mathews, the network’s misogynist and verbally abusive Trump clone and a FOXNEWS Sean Hannity wannabe, steered well-planned and concerted ad homonym slanderous attacks to malign Sanders’ positions on issues affecting the very soul of this country and its citizens. The culmination of Mathews’ caustic diatribes was to liken Sanders’ proposed policies to Nazi Germany.

The muted criticism of this character assassination is abhorrent. To accuse a man whose family suffered at the hands of the Nazis of harboring Nazi tendencies is not only a racist comment, but also a hurtful, cold-blooded accusation.

And, because Sanders has not sold his soul (as Trump, Clintons, Obama, Biden, Et al.) to the racist Israeli Zionist  marauders, he’s been shunned by Zionist American Jews for whom Bernie Sanders is a Self-Hating Jew.

And several protracted interviews with James Carville, one of the most enigmatic and acerbic Democrat attack bulldogs, maligned Bernie Sanders’ record and character. Full of loathsome diatribes, venomously passionate rhetoric, and psychotic gesticulation, Carville’s Iago-like character assassination was a detestable shellacking. One acquaintance aptly likened Carville’s sloppy redneck looks, gestures, and speech pattern to a Tasmanian devil.

While Presidential debates are intended to provide the voters with sufficient information about each candidate’s platform, including an articulation of the candidates’ positions on myriad topics affecting the voters (economy, health, environment, national and foreign policy issues), it was obvious that in each of the last four debates the moderators’ questions reflected their networks’ slanted positions on the electability canard, a kind of 1984 Bernie Bad, Biden Good.

When, during the last debate, Sanders was expounding on the funding for his health care plan, Preppy Pete’s boorishly meaningless and incessant vulgarities were disruptive and rude. How I wish that Sanders had asked the wet behind the ears mayor to stop his uncouth hectoring. Better yet, why didn’t one of the moderators ask Pete to be quiet to allow Sanders to finish his remarks instead of allowing him to whine for the duration of Sanders’ allotted time?  And one is left with the impression that in addition to being ganged on by the other candidates, the moderators’ leading questions were intended to embarrass/discredit Sanders and to put him on the defensive.

Much to the other candidates’ delight, Mayor Billionaire Gonna Buy the Election with My Dollars accused Sanders of being a communist, to which Sanders politely responded: “This was below the belt.”  I fault Sanders for having taken the high road in all of the debates; not only should he have nipped the attacks in the bud, but he should have also countered with a quiver-full of attacks on Biden and Bloomberg.

During an early January debate Elizabeth Warren charged that Sanders had told her that a woman “cannot be elected [President] in 2020,” a charge Bernie denied. I am of the opinion that by making this charge Warren shot herself in the foot and opened the door for others to take their cheap shots at her and at Bernie Sanders – this, at a time when he had the most “favorability” ratings.

I also have some serious doubts about the results of the Iowa caucus. How could the newbie mayor of a small Midwestern city garner such results? Was there an attempt to sabotage Sanders’ campaign? One report stated that so far there “has not been a full accounting of the Iowa caucus. A bit of sleuthing reveals that many of the people who have identified themselves as Shadow [computer programmer/vendor] employees on LinkedIn previously worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.”  Another report stated that “Among Shadow’s larger clients is Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for ‘software rights and subscriptions,’ according to public disclosures.”

Why has there not been some serious investigative reporting on this egregious Iowa caucus meltdown?

Why, for example, was Mike Bloomberg not asked a question about the possibility of his becoming the first Jewish President (and the moving of the U.S. embassy)  when Bernie Sanders  was pressed hard on the same questions? Were the questions intended to have Bernie state his displeasure at Israeli Apartheid and his antipathy towards Netanyahu and the Zionist regime and his assertion that Palestinians are living under dire conditions? Bloomberg, Biden, Et al. were spared these questions lest they reveal their Zionist proclivities and ardent support for the occupation. Ironic it is that none of the other candidates were asked questions about Israel/Palestine or the ongoing wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, wars in which hundreds of thousands of darker skinned men, women, and children are daily offered as human sacrifices in the service of politicians, corrupt sheiks, and petro chemical corporations.

For the record, Joe Biden has not only voted for every single one of the above cited wars (and, or supported), but he has also been an ardent supporter of the Zionist entity in Palestine, lavishing praise on Israeli leaders (more like kissing their butts), supporting the Settlements Project, and helping, with his buddy Obama, establish a guaranteed annual 3.8 billion hard-earned U.S. dollars as a free gift to a client and rabidly racist entity.

Whether it is Trump, Biden, or 95% of American politicians, on the Palestine/Israel question, there is absolutely no difference in America’s one-sided money-bought policies.   If this is not a bipartisan Quid Pro Quo, then what is it?

And, were the Mathews Nazi/Bernie comment and the moderator’s “first Jewish President” question not a form of anti-Semitic canard? Were the questions intended to drive a wedge between Bernie and the more liberal and tolerant American Jewish voters, thus eroding support from the more fair minded and liberal members of the American Jewish community?

It is my hope that in the upcoming two-man debate Joe Biden is asked the following questions: Why did you support all the Petro-Dollar Wars?  Why did you not “personally apologize” to Anita Hill?  Are you willing to release your medical records? Will you tell the voters why, during a CNN town hall meeting, your left eye appeared to “have blood” in it, and is this a lingering residual from your aneurism? (Fair question in view of Bernie’s having to account for the release of all his medical records.) Will you come clean on the Crime Bill and your support for private-for-profit prisons? Are you willing to take responsibility for NAFTA and other trade deals that shipped jobs overseas?

And finally, Joe Robinette Biden, do you expect us to believe you when you tell us that you “knew nothing about” the Burisma Bonanza on which Hunter Biden was cashing in, in a very big way?

Just for the record, Trump’s attempts to scavenge dirt for personal political benefit is an outright criminal act.

I’d like to close with stanzas I, III, IV, and V from  T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem under the title “The Hollow Men:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow.

Raouf J. Halaby is a Professor Emeritus of English and Art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener, and a peace activist. halabys7181@outlook.com