Op-Ed: A Thank You Note to Joe Biden
By Sam Youngman & Adam Parkhomenko
It’s almost over. Probably.
On Tuesday, Americans will finish voting. Then we’ll try to figure out the winner while inhaling Xanax and Halloween candy as the president bitches and moans and tries to cheat his way to another illegitimate four years in office while his most ardent idiot supporters gear up with machine guns and Viagra and kiss their cousin-wives goodbye before going out to try and turn us into the United States of What The Hell Have We Become forever.
It’s a lot for a Tuesday.
So before that nightmare comes to fruition and we start really freaking out, we wanted to take a second to say thank you to the man who will lead us to victory and the restoration of the American soul — Joe Biden.
Thank you, Joe, for running the kind of campaign that all Americans can be proud of. Trump and his enablers from Fox News to the U.S. Senate threw everything at you but the kitchen sink and they didn’t throw the kitchen sink because it didn’t take bribes and didn’t want to be in the same room as Rudy Giuliani. There were distractions hourly, but you kept the focus on a hurting country and your plans to make things better for us.
Thank you for running your own race. No matter what silly advice you got from pundits or from know-it-all twitter assholes like us, you ran your own race at your own pace. You avoided malarkey like President Obama avoided drama, and it’s the kind of campaign discipline that has allowed us to sleep at night these last few months.
Thank you for bringing us together. The punditry told us that we were too divided as a party to come together and take on Trump. But your former opponents have been some of the best surrogates we’ve ever seen. Our party isn’t as divided as it has been because you listened to the different wings and incorporated their ideas with your own. We’re united against Trump and Trumpism because you made it possible.
Thank you for telling Trump to “shut up.” We’re Democrats so we worry, and we were worried that Donald Trump might try to throw acid on you or breathe on you or fling his own feces at you during your two debates. Instead, you did a great job and won them both. We waited for years for someone to stand on stage with Trump and call him out for lying to us. And we really, really needed to hear someone tell that deranged game show host to shut the hell up.
Thank you for putting together such a kick-ass fundraising team. We were so worried about Trump’s cash advantage early on. But we should’ve known you would figure it out. And we should’ve remembered Trump is the same dumb shit who went bankrupt in the casino business.
Thank you for saying Black Lives Matter. Thank you for saying it when this nation desperately needed to hear it. Thank you for kneeling. Thank you for listening. Thank you for growing.
Thank you for celebrating Pride Month and being a leader on LGBTQIA+ issues. Thank you for being among the first to say love is love and mean it and fight for it.
Thank you for marrying Dr. Jill Biden. She is cool as hell and would bring an abundance of compassion to a job that could desperately use some right now. If she wears an “I don’t care” jacket, she’ll be talking about malarkey.
Thank you for having a COVID plan. Yes, this should be basic 101 shit, but by coming up with a plan to stop the deadly pandemic that has turned our country upside-down, you’ve reminded us what it means to actually do the job of president and you’ve demonstrated that you are ready for that job. We can’t just learn to live with a deadly virus and still be free. Thank you for understanding that. Thank you for not lying to us about it.
Thank you for grieving with us. We’ve lost more than 230,000 Americans in the last eight months. The current president wants us to forget about them, to move on. You want us to remember them and mourn them and celebrate them because you’ve known grief like few others have and you know how important it is to cherish these people and their memories and you know how to lead us to the light.
Thank you for being good and decent. There were moments when we wanted you to cuss Trump up and down like he stole your bike, but that wouldn’t have been you. On days we wanted you to call out Trump’s creepy obsession with Ivanka or Giuliani’s wandering hands, you responded with ice cream and doggies and talked about what’s best about America. When we wanted someone to get down on Trump’s level and give him what for, you were mindful that good presidents have to rise above, especially if they’re going to save their nation from evil forces and deadly division.
Thank you for being a good dad and standing by your son. And before you say this is an obvious one, consider for a second how quickly Trump would’ve jettisoned Don Jr. into a volcano if Democrats talked about his problems as much as Republicans wanted to talk about Hunter’s. Addiction doesn’t just affect a person. It affects whole families. Millions and millions of Americans know this all too well. Thank you for standing by sons and daughters and brothers and sisters who are fighting this fight all over the country.
Thank you for selecting Kamala Harris as your running mate. Not only did you make history with this pick, you made clear that you saw the Democratic Party as it really is and as it needed to be represented on your ticket. Kamala is the kind of brilliant, transformative, inspirational leader who makes us proud to be Democrats. She added depth, fun, perspective, experience and some old-fashioned cool to this race, and we’re hoping with everything we’ve got that we’ll soon be calling her Madam Vice President.
Thank you, Joe, for leading us. We don’t know what’s going to happen. We do know that tyrants who endorse violence usually don’t go quietly. But because of the campaign you’ve run, we have faith that you will never stop fighting for us.
Now let’s finish this thing strong, and next week we’ll thank you for kicking Donald Trump’s orange ass right out of office.
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