Mother Jones Says Biden is the “Monster of 2024”

Apparently at the end of the year it’s a tradition for the staff of Mother Jones to “round up” the heroes and monsters of the past year.

National Correspondent Tim Murphy decided to write essentially what amounts to Joe Biden’s epitaph, excoriating his decision to run again in 2024 as the consequences of our current predicament.

A few quotes from Murphy’s article:

It would perhaps be more forgivable if it were just denial. But Biden, who positioned himself as the defender of the nation’s “soul,” continued to act as though only he could win the election, when in reality, he was tanking the Democratic brand so severely that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to stage an intervention.

By staying long past his expiration date, Biden did more than ease Trump’s path to victory; he was the apotheosis of an entire gerontocracy that brought us to this point.

The last photo I saw of Biden before I started writing this was of the president leaving a bookstore in Nantucket, clutching a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It felt like a haunting epitaph for an entire era of liberalism—stopping in to do some Black Friday shopping while staying at David Rubenstein’s estate and walking away with a book that the author himself said Biden should have checked out years ago. Biden stuck around past the point that he could deliver for the people who needed him to. And now the world is stuck with the consequences.

Other “heroes and monsters” who made the list for Mother Jones included Richard Nixon and Dean Phillips.

Nixon and Phillips were in the heroes column, sort of.

Hero of 2024: Richard M. Nixon — A half-century later, the Supreme Court made clear that he was right all along.

Hero of 2024: Dean Phillips, kind of. — At least someone tried to say Joe Biden was too old before it was too late.

Monster of 2024: Cars, Again — I wrote about cars as a monster before. This year, they suck again.