I am hardly right-wing! I'm a socialist, or maybe social democrat, living in the Netherlands but unfortunately still taxable in the US.
You wrote this: "I’ve followed his career ever since. [...] he seemed like a genuinely decent guy who deserved my sympathy. He’s proven me right."
This is only true if you consider non-American lives to be valueless.
The last forty years of US foreign policy have been one genocide after another, based on delusion and paranoia alone. Millions of innocent people have been killed for nothing, tens of trillions of dollars wasted.
Biden was one of the "leaders" who made that happen. He strongly advocated for the Iraq War - hundreds of thousands of innocent people died in a war based on transparent, obvious lies, lies that had been exposed long before the war started by the UN weapons inspectors.
Biden saw the plans for the war before it started - the ludicrous, childlike plans which assumed that there would be no resistance at all, that the war would take a couple of months and a few tens of billions of dollars, when in fact the war took over ten years and cost two trillion dollars, with well over half a million in excess mortality, over a million seriously injured or left homeless, a whole country set back a generation.
Biden shares moral and ethical responsibility with all the other leaders who led America into this massive, incredible, inconceivably horrible fuckup. Where's the accounting for this huge pile of bodies?
If Biden had spoken out against the Rape of Iraq, like only one Senator did, then half a million people might still be alive - including more Americans than 9/11.
Bin Laden was apparently warm and personable, but no one says that Bin Laden was a genuinely decent guy who deserves anyone's sympathy, because he helped organize 3000 murders.
Biden helped organized some 500,000 murders.
In the American viewpoint, half a million people died, but no one gets any responsibility. Lawmakers like Biden or Clinton were only going along with it - what do you expect? Just because they give speeches advocating the war, and voted for it every time, doesn't mean they have any responsibility for their actions at all, so goes the argument.
And Bush, well, he's a guy you could have a beer with! He said some bad things about Trump, and is good friends with Michelle and Ellen, so all is forgiven!
Half a million people dead, a completely fucked-up and competent war based on lies, and yet none of these grossly powerful and overcompensated leaders gets any blame at all.
And this happens generation after generation and yet it's considered rude ever to even mention all these non-Americans murdered.
The only reason you find Biden to be a genuinely decent guy is, like Biden, you consider non-American lives to have no worth at all.
