La Belle Hogg: I was complicit

Don't beat yourself up too badly, David. With an incumbent president from your party so unpopular, no other Democrat was well-situated for victory this year.

[quote]He admits that when he was granted an audience with Biden this year

OP, what kind of revisionist asshole are you?

Both Biden and Hogg have been on the same side of the gun violence debate and gun control issues.

"Genated an audience" is something that happens with the Pope or trump.

Scranton Joe has meetings with people.

Biden was an imperial President? Oh, just fuck off.

Hogg's punishment should be to just STFU for a while.

If Hogg is guilty in this respect, he's got a lot of company.

[quote] Trumpism returned because Biden embraced an identical parallel political culture to it; more outwardly respectable but it was still the same: an imperial Presidency.

Don’t quit your day job.

He's just worried he might end up in Robert J. O'Neill's liberal twink concubine harem.

Isn't Hogg's 15 minutes of fame over by name ?

R7 The boy would have more fun over at my place.

The thing is those on the left mistake the low wit of the country as also not having common sense. How is that a party that is continually telling us that a certain is individual is unfit to be president and participated in crimes against democracy; yet anyone with eyes and ears can see Biden was not mentally sound. The American public knows these people are smart so it comes across as completely disingenuous if not sociopathic. America dumb is as rocks, lacking critical thinking skills, but they do have common sense.

Hogg thinks he's very important. he's insufferable.

He should not beat himself up about this.

Even if he had spoken the truth at that meeting, the Biden team wouldn't have listened.

They would have patted him on the head, said "okay little boy, whatever you say," and then sent him on her merry little way.

Biden's team would have been very condescending towards David, and in the end they still would not have taken his advice.

The people surrounding a political leader are just as David described them: SYCOPHANTS.

They tell the leader exactly what the leader wants to hear, in fear of being sidelined or even fired.

But most importantly, they want to KEEP THEIR JOB!

I agree with him that it's a good lesson to learn, but he really should not be so hard on himself.

Politics is a dirty game, and his takeaway should be "Always be true to your ideals."

In this end, nothing would have saved Biden's Presidency, or the Democrats from losing this election.

There was a seismic shift in this country, and there was nothing Democrats could have done to stop it.

The only (slim) chance the Democrats had of winning this year went up in smoke with the results of the midterms. Had the predicted red wave had happened, Biden might have taken that as a signal not to run. When it didn't, he thought better of his chances than his polling would have suggested.

What a grandiose prick. Like it would have mattered in the least if he had told Biden the truth.

Biden, campaigning from his basement, going out to support all the Infrastructure building, moving to reduce costs of drugs....

Imperial Presidency?

Methinks not.

R11 He isn’t insufferable. He is a very intelligent, introspective young man. I’ve seen him a couple on Maher, this kid is going places and seems to have a maturity to go along with his intellect.

What would it have taken to get Biden off the ticket from the get-go and allow for primaries?

Really, who could/should have had this conversation with the Bidens RIGHT AFTER INAUGURATION or at least well before the campaign season started in earnest?

Pelosi? Schumer? Jeffries? All of them circling the wagon? It most assuredly shouldn’t be David Hogg’s responsibility.

The debate that ended Biden’s run was not a surprise to the inner circle. How could they have allowed a man that feeble and confused to continue and then engage most of the press to conspire to gaslight people into disbelieving their eyes and ears before the disastrous debate made his condition undeniable?

Harris gets so much blame here, but she did what she could even though her team made some catastrophic miscalculations in strategy.

This loss mostly lies on the backs of the Bidens and whoever was most closely involved in keeping him in when they should have been nudging (or shoving) him out?

This is going to make for one hell of a book.

Stop beating a dead horse.

Nobody questioned whether there was an option to Trump. Why should the Democrats jettison Harris?

We live in a different world.

WHET that other little twink slut from the school, Cameron I think?

Dear God. His delusions of grandeur are cringe-inducing. It was the kind of meeting presidents hold out of courtesy or for purposes of appearances. It’s the tedious side of the position. Biden was probably thinking of what he was going to have for lunch the entire time.

He probably thinks he could have stopped the holocaust if he could just have had a word with Hitler. That’s how important he is.

Again, Biden and Hogg are on the same anti-gun violence page.

Biden was giving him a stage for the platform.

Hate it or not, Hogg is going to be around for a while.

Ms. Hogg, you're not that important.

R19 He's queer, Jewish, and bi-polar. You'd think we'd be hearing more from him.

We're so inundated with attention-seeking virtue-signalers these days that it's really tough sometimes to tell the difference between that and someone who genuinely cares about an issue.

[quote] Again, Biden and Hogg are on the same anti-gun violence page. Biden was giving him a stage for the platform.

Exactly. Biden met with him for appearances—-to promote a cause he supports. Biden didn’t invite him to advise him on his campaign. He was just making conversation.

Piggy

[quote]He should not beat himself up about this. Even if he had spoken the truth at that meeting, the Biden team wouldn't have listened.

Yes, THIS. And OP is being equally ridiculous.

Also, while I respect David Hogg in general, him thinking his *one* decision to not suggest that Biden drop out singlehandedly altered the course of American history is remarkably egotistical.

There is no "one reason" why Trump won. It was the collective effect of myriad causal factors, the biggest one being Americans' misperceptions about the economy. (Inflation died down a long time ago, and Biden kept unemployment rates remarkably low.)

Spending the next four years beating yourself up over "if only we'd..." in response to anything Trump does is absurd. And while I know Americans' memories are short, it remains most likely that Trump will – yet again – implode beginning in his first week in office. (If not sooner. Gaetz was the quickest cabinet-nominee withdrawal ever.)

And some 20-something who is getting a meeting with the president is going to tell him to drop out?

At least can we stop bashing liberals like Maher who think outside box and tell it like it is.

Oh please. David Hogg is annoying and thinks he knows everything as does every other 20-something. He should take several seats.

R29 Maher makes his money being an asshole. He's just as much of a knee-jerk "Hell yeah" armchair quarterback as O'Reilly or any of the others.

What a Time Capsule of the 2020s his post is. He’s brought to nauseating perfection the current fashion of cloaking gargantuan grandiosity in a confession of guilt. “I could have saved the world but didn’t in a fit of good manners.”

We’d be giving him the benefit of a huge doubt if we take him at his word that he honestly feels any guilt at all about this encounter. But he had to go all the way and make it a nightmare that will haunt him till the end of his days.

I can imagine Biden telling his chief of staff, “Put all policy decisions on hold. I’ve got a 2:30 meeting with David Hogg on Friday.”

Hogg’s story is a great example of why someone doing what he does needs a *certified* Leadership Development Coach, I’m talking a master Coach, someone who has coached almost 5 years, 5000 hours, a member of the ICC. He’s young. Most young people would have done exactly the same, and older people would have too, just for different reasons!

I’m sure no one prepared him for what to do if he disagreed with Biden or how/when to voice a concern. Sometimes a leader should just listen, other times a leader needs to act. There were several ways Hogg could have taken action, including writing a follow-up note to Biden expressing his respect AND his concerns if he felt unprepared to say them in person.