Month: June 2020

Election Predictions

I don’t see Trump winning reelection.  I just don’t.  His main argument for reelection has always been that the economy was doing so well that it didn’t matter that he was an often clueless vulgarian.  But the pandemic has revealed his glaring weaknesses as a leader and I don’t think the economy is going to recover enough by November to convince people to give him another shot.  I see Trump losing in November and I see him losing big.  I see him taking down a lot of Republicans with him.

Joe Biden will be our next president.  He’ll be a terrible president, though I imagine few people will be willing to admit it until after he’s out of office.  Many people in the media seem to be assuming that, at the age of 80, Biden is suddenly going to become some sort of inspiring progressive visionary.  Biden’s been running for President since before I was born.  There’s a reason why he needed a once-in-a-lifetime crisis and a uniquely flawed opponent to win.

As far as the protests go, a lot of Democratic leaders have fooled themselves into thinking that the protests are about Trump as opposed to the system that Joe Biden has spent his entire life protecting and promoting.  Those who assume that Biden’s election will magically bring an end to all the strife are fooling themselves.

Like Obama, I see Biden coming into office with a huge Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate.  I also see him squandering that majority, in much the same way that Obama did.  The Republican Party will be pronounced dead in November just to come back to life in 2022.  Will Biden run for reelection in 2024?  Many are saying that he won’t but I have a hard time seeing someone who has been running for President for as long as he has just voluntarily walking away.

My main election prediction right now is that we’re all screwed until at least 2024.

Moving Forward

I’m still here!

Where have I been for the last two weeks?  Busy.  I’ve been busy with work.  I’ve been busy writing film reviews for Through the Shattered Lens.  I’ve also been busy thinking about what I want to do with this blog.  Even though the name of this blog is “Pop Politics,” I ever meant for it to be anything more than a personal blog.  Even when this blog briefly went viral last year, it was an accident.  The only reason I broke the news about Mad Magazine shutting down was because I thought everyone else in the world already knew.  If I had known no official announcement had been made, I wouldn’t have written a word.

Going viral and suddenly having thousands of people looking at this blog and my twitter account (even if it was for only three days) was not as pleasant an experience as you might expect.  In the first few hours after I posted the news about MAD, I had a lot of strangers accusing me of making stuff up.  Even worse were the people who seemed to blame me for the news.  And then there were the actual journalists who were pissed off that I (“some rando with a blog” as one of them put it) scooped them, even though that was never my intention.  For someone like me, that was a lot to deal with.

So, if this blog isn’t a political blog or a journalism blog, what is it?  It’s just a personal blog.  It’s a place for me to write about my day and record my thoughts.  If people want to read, that’s fine.  If they don’t, that’s fine too.  Not everyone wants or needs to be famous.  Not everyone is trying to build a brand.  Some of us just want a place to express ourselves.

This is my place.