An Inconvenient Victory

Clip and save this comment about Rep. Ocasio-Cortez by former Vice President and thrice-failed presidential candidate Joe Biden for the next time you need a concrete example of how willing men are to make themselves look like idiots if they can put a woman down by doing so.

“That’s what this election is about. I’m happy to debate that issue and all those issues with my friends because guess what, look who won the races. Look who won last time out,” Biden said. “By the way, I think Ocasio-Cortez is a brilliant, bright woman, but she won a primary.”

Pausing here for a moment:

Ocasio-Cortez won the primary, Biden said. True. She won by defeating a more moderate Democrat who had been around for ages and relied on his assumed appeal to the working class and inertia to stay in power, Biden didn’t say.

Had he stopped there with his gloss over the circumstances of her win and a call back to his articulate bright clean good-looking moment, it would have been yet another Biden loves the taste of shoes moment, with a dollop of creepy male obsession with Ocasio-Cortez that makes me want to swab the world down with bleach.

But wait, there was more. Of course.

“In the general election fights, who won? Mainstream Democrats who are very progressive on social issues and very strong on education and healthcare.”

>_<

Who the shit does Biden think won the general election for NY-14?

Or to put it another way, why the entire fuck is Biden even talking about Ocasio-Cortez if she didn’t win the general election?

Yes, I do understand what Biden thinks he was trying to say, but who cares, especially when he is so careful to make it clear he’s not worth listening to at all?

There are a million ways he could have said it that didn’t involve the professional levels of reality dodging involved in pretending that Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win wasn’t a huge upset against a Democrat who is damn near the template for Biden’s definition of the real winners of the midterms, and then pretending that she didn’t win the general election at all.

Men like Biden – and he is in no way rare – don’t care that saying things like this make them look ignorant af. They don’t even care that it distracts from whatever they are trying to say because the audience is either saying ‘What the hell is this dumbass babbling about?’ or adjusting their reality to make his statement true. The sad truth is men like Biden can continue sacrifice coherence because incoherence in the service of turning a woman’s success into failure is seen as a virtue by all of the other men who are like Biden.