Well, about half an hour ago, Vice President Joe Biden announced that he will not be running for President. Good. He does not have the judgement to qualify him for the job.

Biden is basically a windbag. Gaffe-prone, can’t stop talking long enough to get his foot out of his mouth. He was so afraid that this would be his last chance to be President, he was almost willing to take the country down to feed his hunger for the job.

Biden had nothing good to offer the Democrats. Hillary had the corner on the establishment mid-Left voters. The only thing he could have done would have been to siphon off enough support for Hillary Clinton so that, either she would end up a further weakened nominee, or the nomination would have gone to Bernie Sanders, who would lose the general election in a landslide. All these starry-eyed people “feeling the Bern” would have had a rude awakening. It’s just amazing how short the American memory is. Then we would be looking at a Republican President and they would be staring into their granola and marijuana brownies and wondering what happened.

Biden ran an ad in the New York Times as a run-up to a potential bid for President, using Maureen Dowd’s well-known hate for the Clinton’s as his vehicle. Trading on sympathy for his deceased son. Oh cry me a river. He is not the only one to lose a son, a middle-aged one at that.

Now that Jumpin Joe is out of the way, we just have to get rid of a pesky septuagenarian, and it’s all systems go for President Hillary Rodham Clinton. Praise be.

That we should be at a political crossroads like this in late 2015 is hard for me to believe. We have revolutionized communication and information technology. As recently as 15 years ago, we still relied on landline telephones, we still had to trek to the library to look up information which is now available to us as close as the nearest computer, handheld or desktop. Self-driving cars are now on the horizon. Yet in this Jetson-type technological explosion, we have a reactionary group of people who want to take us back to the 1930s, before we had a social safety net and worker protection laws.

It’s funny that it seems like the only New Deal program these right-wing radicals don’t disparage is Medicare. Which is, of course, socialized medicine, and it works very well. They don’t dare touch that or they would lose much of their supporters. What they don’t mention is that, if single-payer works so well for the elderly, why not try it for everybody? What do we have to lose, except our reputation as the richest, dumbest, country in the world,

And then we have the gun issue. The stupid pills must have been on sale. The NRA-funded right wing won’t even allow a study to determine the facts surrounding this massive public-health issue. Look at the automobile industry and the billions that have been spent on making cars safer. Studies, reports, research, and automobiles are safer than they ever have been. My family had a 1959 batwing Chevy station wagon. I still remember the horn on the steering wheel. It was a circular metal rod that would, if broken in an accident, certainly be a lethal weapon. So many changes since then. With the gun industry, we are still in 1959. No studies or research funding allowed.

I blog about these issues frequently. It’s because I find them so distressing and maddening. It seems like somewhere around half of the country, give or take, is either stupid or evil or both. I try to be adult about it and think that that could not be true. I should be kinder and more open minded, I say to myself. I just keep coming back to the same facts. No single payer healthcare, no gun safety research, no Medicaid expansion to save lives, no reproductive choice for the poor. The list goes on. I guess the old adage is true: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average American.

I have been watching the candidates for the Republican Party presidential nomination with a mixture of glee and disgust. Glee, because unless Hillary makes a major unforced error (hardly likely) or she is found to have committed a crime (also highly unlikely), Hillary Rodham Clinton will be our next President. The Republicans are making arrogant, angry, misogynistic, oligarchic, nativist fools of themselves. Each and every one, to varying degrees. Ben Carson sounds like somebody I would encounter outside the public library or the Registry of Motor Vehicles. You know, with a folding table and pamphlets and signs declaring that Nazis have taken over America, or some such nonsense. It’s funnier than any reality show that I know of.

One thing that isn’t so funny is that the whole world is watching. I wouldn’t blame them if they thought we were all a bunch of idiots and bigots. We are the only first-world country without single-payer health insurance. We allow less vacation time and maternity leave than any country in Western Europe. We are the only country in the world that, by law, cannot negotiate drug prices for Medicare patients.

I love my country, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with the concept of American “exceptionalism”. That word, to me, is a war cry for the nativist morons that have been dominating the news lately. If anything, we are exceptionally short-sighted and poorly governed. What else could explain the fact that we spend more for health care than any other first-world country, and our health care system is ranked 37th by the World Health Organization. That sounds outright stupid to me. If we want to be equals, let alone exceptional, our country needs to shape up. The right wing, at this time, has the country in a stranglehold. It’s not that the brightest among us don’t know what to do to fix health care and our struggling economy. It’s that they are not allowed to by the right. Single payer health care and a massive government-funded jobs program would put us on equal footing with the rest of the developed world, not lagging behind like some wealthy lunatic.

The Ugly American is perfectly illustrated by the crop of Republican White House hopefuls. At the present time, without a Republican president or a veto-proof majority in Congress, all they can do is stop good things from getting done. If they were to gain more power, they would be able to take our country down. All I can say is to vote Hillary. Sanders is too old and has no interest in appealing to the masses, which he would have to do to be elected President. Biden is a jackass. If he throws his hat in, he might just sweep a Republican into the Oval Office. Hillary has the toughness and smarts and experience to get things done. She knew what she was in for when she decided to run. That alone, to me, shows admirable courage. Now we are seeing, thanks to Republican majority leader Kevin McCarthy, that this whole Benghazi probe that has cost the taxpayers $4.5 million, is just a political hit squad. All this e-mail stuff about the private server will turn out to be the same thing. What normal person really cares about whether Hillary violated some technicality about private servers and public servers? Unless there is some kind of criminality or security breach involved, which is not evident yet after all this time, this is just another Republican sham scam. I don’t know what it will take to get these people out of power, but eventually it will happen. The sooner the better.