Op-Ed: Joe Biden Is Going To Be Nice, So Some Of Us Are Going To Have To Be Nasty
By Sam Youngman & Adam Parkhomenko
Joe Biden is a good person who wants to unify the country and focus on leading us through tough problems instead of settling scores or getting revenge.
Damnit.
Yeah, Joe is bringing dignified leadership back to the Oval Office, so there won’t be anymore talk of heads on pikes, government officials won’t double as twitter trolls and there’s next to no chance the words “dumbass daughter-fucking orange piece of shit” make it into the inaugural address.
Damnit.
Don’t get us wrong. After four years of criminality, corruption, cruelty and just plain stupidity, we’re damn glad to finally have a president who cares about the important stuff and won’t spend his days live-tweeting what Fox and Friends thinks about school lunches.
America deserves a president like Biden, someone who actually cares more about them than he does winning cheap Washington battles. But many of us can’t forget. Many of us don’t want to.
That’s not to say Joe will either. We have to believe that the people around him won’t be so forgiving about Republican efforts to disenfranchise Black voters, we assume he’s not going to hand out free passes to whomever Trump doesn’t pardon and scumbags like Putin and Kim Jong-Un are once again on notice.
But America is in pain, dying from a virus and torn in two by uncaring Republicans and a fatally inept president. Joe doesn’t have the luxury of focusing on the fighting in the trenches because we elected him to see the whole battlefield.
Trump only cared about the combat. Joe cares more about bringing people together and solving problems, so some of us will have to care about the combat for him.
We can start in Georgia. Republicans have made clear over the last two weeks that they don’t believe in democracy, don’t care if Black people’s votes are counted and really don’t care that more than 250,000 Americans and millions more are unemployed and hurting because of the Trump flu.
So we have to get nasty and finish the job we started Nov. 3. We need to dig deep, elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and make sure Mitch McConnell joins Trump in the loser club.
And then the real work starts.
If there is one positive to come out of four years of Trumpland, it’s that millions of Americans who took things like democracy and competent leadership for granted are now painfully aware of just how fast we can lose it all.
Though the votes are still being counted, we know that 80 million Americans voted for Joe Biden and against Donald Trump. Before this election, no candidate had ever passed 70 million. While Trump gave life to the racists, the sexists and the rest of the deplorables, he also awoke a sleeping giant and reminded generations of Americans that this country and its ideals have to be forever defended.
So we can’t go back to sleep. We’ve got to stay awake. And we’ve got to stay nasty.
We’ve got to get Joe’s back when he pushes legislation, making calls to Capitol Hill the same way we made calls to voters. We’ve got to focus on the midterms like it’s 2020 all over again, or else we’ll get the same shit they did to President Obama. And we’ve got to never ever forget for one hot second all the crimes and abuses that Trump and the rest of his crew pulled or that they’re itching to get back in there and do more damage.
We understand Democrats being a little concerned that Joe might be too nice to hold Trumpland accountable for its misdeeds. But we also remember that by deferring to a truly independent Justice Department, Joe is bringing back American ideals that were scuttled by a tyrant.
And there’s reason to believe Team Biden isn’t going to be all sunshine and puppies.
On Tuesday, Biden tweeted out a video of his campaign attorney, Bob Bauer, blasting Trump for lying about the strength of his legal challenges, trying to overturn the will of the voters and refusing to concede. Warriors like Elizabeth Warren have already made clear they’re more in a fighting mood than a forgetting mood. And we know Kamala will fight for us and fight for what’s right every day.
That doesn’t mean we’re going to forget. Or forgive. And if Democrats try to wipe away the abuses of the last few years, then we’re going to be screaming like Kayleigh whatever-her-name-is just started lying to us again.
That’s our job. We the people. We hold our leaders to account. And when they fail us, we raise hell.
And as the orange guy with the eviction notice will tell you, we’ve gotten pretty damn good at it.
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