I am a citizen in a democracy. I get to vote in presidential elections! I exercise that power. I believe as a reasonable man that my opinion on public occurrences is as informed, within a standard deviation or two, as that of the next imbecile, and I am generous in sharing my opinions. I even have a public forum for my opinions! I publish them to eight followers and comme ci, comme ça 1,500 daily readers (also known as lost wayfarers on the information highway).
All of my adult life I have had the responsibility of making decisions of near life and death over others. I was a criminal law trial attorney, you see. I took that responsibility very seriously indeed, and I have carried that responsibility over into writing on the weightiest public occurrences in this here blog.
In Public Occurrences, I make decisions as if my decisions get actuated as they were in my practice of law. I take what I write here very seriously and I have adopted a decision-making construct that I actually used as a lawyer. I divide non-trivial decisions into the "difficult and the hard". It's confusing to everyone, drawing a distinction between the difficult and the hard, but I know what I mean and it works to organize my approach to a decision. The fullest recent explanation I have given of my construct is here, on February 5, 2024:
I have always divided non-trivial decisions into the difficult and the hard. The distinction in near-synonymous terms works in my mind. The way that I think, a difficult decision is one where the right decision I must make is clear and easy to understand, but is nonetheless difficult for me because it causes me or people I care about some level of pain. A hard decision to me is one where the the right decision is not clear and I have to study the question to divine the right answer. A hard decision is not painful. Each kind of decision has to be made. The difficult decisions I make with alacrity. The hard decisions I make the moment I see the issue clearly. I am a pragmatic man.
I have used this approach to the "Joe Biden Decision,” which for the reasons aforesaid I feel a responsibility as a reasonable citizen with a reasonable citizen's minuscule blog to bloviate upon.
The Joe Biden Decision is in my hard category of decisions. It is the hardest public decision I have ever felt compelled to give opinion to. I was emotionally wrought by the debate Thursday night, in a state which I recognized was not ideal for rational decision-making. I have read, and exchanged with, other reasonable normal citizens and their opinions almost non-stop for 48 hours and these interchanges of opinions have illuminated the path to the decision that I make, which is that President Joe Biden should stay in the presidential race.
A hard decision to me is one where the right thing to do, otherwise interchangeable for me with the moral choice, is difficult for me to identify. This hard decision is harder for me than any other decision on any other public occurrence that I can remember. Nested within the first of the moral decisions is a difficult one, that is, one that causes me pain: I have concluded that Joe Biden is unfit to lead the United States as president for four more years.
You can see the tension in the decisions I have reached.
But that does not end the moral decision-making, for there is another, the fitness of the other, Donald Trump, in this binary choice that I and all voting Americans must make. On Trump's fitness I conclude that he too is unfit.
That then led to a comparison of unfitnesses that was a first impression for me. I concluded with alacrity that Trump was the unfittest, in fact, the unfittest in the history of our Republican democracy, and going even further, Trump would end America as we know it, as he nearly did but for his administrative incompetence as illegitimate president from 2016 to 2020, and the truncating of his illegitimate, destructive presidency by abject defeat to Joe Biden in November 2020.
So the moral had to be teased out one unfamiliar step further but it was clear to me and I have made it: Trump is uniquely unfit and uniquely dangerous in the history of the American Republic.
Then, "I am a pragmatic man", I had to consider who in an opponent to Trump gave America the best chance of surviving. This was a pragmatic component but one that maddeningly was twinned with the moral. This twinning made even the pragmatic calculus the proximate cause of the moral component of the decision. That is, the decision of who, President Biden or some other, had the best chance to save America was a moral decision too. A friend adopted an Anybody But Joe position. The New York Times Ed. Board said there were numerous Democrats that were more fit than President Biden and could as easily defeat Trump the Antichrist.
That's bullshit, to use impolite patois. In this most momentous of practical decisions that is also the proximate cause of the existential moral decision, to not even suggest a NAME for a substitute is abdication of public service, which the august New York Times feels is their singular role as conscience and steward of the nation's opinion. The unwieldy, 14-member, McDonald's commercial, editorial "collective" of old and young, seasoned and not, insiders and outsiders, comprising every race, color and creed is the perfect body to task with creation of a horse and to produce a zebra.
We face a binary choice, we voters do, which is in fact a Hobson's choice. There is no alternative. It is Joe Biden. On both moral grounds there is no choice, it is Joe Biden. On the pragmatic issue, would Fantasy Candidate X have a better chance of beating Trump, they can't say, we can't say, nobody can say because there is no such real live person with the name of Senator Fantasy Candidate X, nor one with the mysterious initials of ABJ. Finally, there is no clear mechanism, where an actual real substitute candidate is identified by name, for him/her to get the Democratic nomination. When the ABJ'ers and the Warren-Klobuchar recommenders get their heads out of their collective ass and give us a name, we can take a stab at the practical merits or demerits and compare them with President Biden's. In the meanwhile take your heads out of your asses unless you were born with that particular arrangement, lie down and take a powder and when you are revived to a semblance of nervous equilibrium, grin and bear it and support wholeheartedly and enthusiastically the reelection of President Biden.
