Op-Ed: It Won't Always Be Easy, But We've Got To Have Joe's Back
By Sam Youngman & Adam Parkhomenko
Joe Biden called Mitch McConnell Tuesday.
A month after the election, after Moscow Mitch finally acknowledged the election results and the will of the American people — a few hours after Vladimir Putin had done the same — Joe called up McConnell to “thank him for the congratulations.”
Joe called Mitch. It wasn’t the other way around. And when he did, he didn’t tell McConnell to eat shit. He didn’t ask him how it felt to have the deaths of 300,000 Americans on his head. He didn’t call him an enemy of democracy. He didn’t even call him a turtle-fucking turtle.
Sigh. We’re afraid Joe is serious about this whole unifying the country stuff.
And that’s probably a good thing. It’s probably why Biden-Harris got more than 81 million votes. And it’s probably what a broken and hurting country needs right now.
It’s also going to be frustrating as hell.
After four years of being attacked, insulted and crapped on by knuckle-dragging dumbasses, we’re in the mood for revenge. We want to chant “LOCK THEM UP!” and then we want to see them locked up. They broke the law, they sold us out and they did jack shit while our friends and family members and neighbors died preventable deaths. Someone needs to pay.
And maybe someone will. But it should be clear by now that if the criminals of Trumpland are held accountable, it won’t be because Joe Biden led a crusade to make it happen.
And yeah, it’s pretty damn infuriating.
It’s also exactly who Joe is and what he ran on.
While we conjured fantasies of accountability, Joe ran on bringing the country together. He promised over and over again to be a president for all people, whether they supported him or whether they were cousin-humping Trump lovers who would happily drink whatever the fuck was pouring out of Rudy Giuliani’s face. Ok, so he didn’t put it exactly like that.
Biden is a good man. He wants to be a good president. He doesn’t want to spend four years thinking about Donald Trump, and frankly neither do we. We have to trust that he will pick an attorney general who believes in accountability and will pursue justice. We have to trust that state attorneys general who have been investigating Trump will continue to do so. And we have to trust in Joe.
And be warned: Joe’s refusal to cuss Republican traitors up and down is not the only time he’s going to frustrate us.
His cabinet picks are already rubbing some Democrats the wrong way, and there will undoubtedly be compromises with Republicans that make us want to punch a hole in the wall.
And you want to know the most frustrating part? No matter how aggravated we get, we’re going to need to have Joe’s back.
It took a month for Republicans to acknowledge Biden’s win after several laughable but troubling coup attempts and even then a shocking number of them were still plotting for a way to overturn the will of the American people. They’re already lining up to go after his son. Again. They want a special counsel to go all Ken Starr and make Biden’s life hell.
If Republicans hold the Senate, we’ll see endless idiotic investigations as McConnell and his henchmen do everything they can to hurt the country so voters will blame Biden. The same senators who pretended not to know what twitter was for four years are suddenly screaming about transparency and principles. And while you could choke on their shameless hypocrisy, it’s worth noting that one of the things that helped Trump endure these last few years was the unity of the Republican Party behind Trump.
Now we’re not suggesting we turn into a cult of dimwits like the human garbage you see at Trump rallies or at his Washington hotel. But we are suggesting we present a unified front as much as possible.
That starts in the Georgia Senate runoffs. Republicans are spending like mad to keep those seats, and we’re watching seriously gross and clearly racist attacks as they scrape and claw to try and keep McConnell in the leader’s office.
If we want Joe to succeed, then we need to work now to help Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff succeed. And then we’ve gotta keep going.
There will be times when we need to speak up and push back on something Biden is doing. That’s what is expected of American citizens. He works for us. And while some orange asssholes and the people who kiss up to him might think so, it’s not the other way around.
But we must always be mindful of the enduring threats to our democracy and just how close we came to losing everything. They haven’t gone away.
We can’t get bogged down in bitter, expensive or damaging intramural fights like we might have in the past. We just don’t have that luxury right now. The monsters under the bed are real, so we can’t go back to sleep.
So let’s pick our battles. When the times call for tough love, then that’s what we’ll bring, emphasizing the love while still being tough.
But beyond that, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are our champions. They are the only thing standing between us and Dictator Don. So we’ve gotta have their backs.
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