RICH LOWRY: The Real Biden Presidency Emerges.

The best case for Biden was that he could ride in the slipstream of good economic growth and a receding pandemic, beaten back by the vaccines that began to be administered before Biden took office. Instead, the labor market is still rocky and the Delta variant has surged, leading to headlines about overstretched health care systems that most people assumed that we’d left behind in the spring of 2020.

With his honeymoon gone, with Trump less of a factor, with economic conditions and the state of the virus not as favorable as expected, Biden had been stripped down to a more natural level of support and sliding in the polls since around June.

Then, he made the first major, historic decision of his presidency, and completely botched it. Biden has tried to deflect responsibility for his exit from Afghanistan onto Trump and his execrable deal with the Taliban. Yet, the decision to quit when he did and how he did was all on Biden.

He hasn’t shown a hint of doubt or regret. The notion of leaving Afghanistan is popular in theory; the way Biden did it is radioactive in practice. The White House may tell itself that Biden’s decision will come to seem farsighted, and its possible that the harmful political effect will wear off over time.

Leaving Americans behind in a foreign country after an enemy of the United States swept to power and chased us out with our tails between our legs, though, is not likely to be forgotten, certainly not in 2022 or 2024, if ever.
The prime directive for any president is, to the extent possible, to seem in control. Biden failed this test repeatedly during the evacuation crisis. Events moved faster than he did and his rationales for what was happening had to be constantly revised, until he settled on the explanation that it is impossible to end any war in good order.

Or to put it another way, unexpectedly:

HMM: Is the New York Times Protecting Biden by Not Updating Its Polling Page?

DISPATCHES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH: China erases billionaire actress Zhao Wei from history.

Zhao’s name won’t be immortal. Her entire internet existence has been scrubbed.

All serials and chat shows featuring her have vanished from major Chinese online streaming sites. She no longer even appears in the online credits for the movies she appears in.

Discussing why is being censored on social media.

Winston Smith, call your office:

HIS TRACK RECORD IS GOOD: Dick Heller Sues District of Columbia Over Ban on Home Made Firearms and ‘Ghost Guns.’

COLLUSION: Covering up Fauci’s role in COVID leak.

INDOCTRINATION NOT EDUCATION: College textbook blames COVID deaths on Americans who oppose lockdowns.

LIVE AT 3:30PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, Preston, VodkaPundit.

NORTH CAROLINA: One state Supreme Court case could destroy the court for years to come.

In an astonishing and unprecedented power grab that will overturn 200 years of case law and prior precedents, Democrats on the state Supreme Court are preparing to disqualify and remove two duly-elected Republican Supreme Court justices from a case so they can nullify voters’ decision to amend the Constitution.

The case is NAACP v. Moore and the state Supreme Court’s Democrats are trying to remove two Republican members from the bench, so a new temporary four-to-one Democrat majority can erase two constitutional amendments – the cap on income tax, and the voter I.D. requirement – which were overwhelmingly passed by more than four million votes.

In a plan already underway, Democrats Anita Earls, Robin Hudson, and Mike Morgan would conspire to remove the justices while allowing Associate Justice Jimmy Ervin to vote AGAINST the move because he is the one Democrat currently on the court who will face re-election in 2022.

Our “democracy” is sacred to Democrats except when it isn’t.

RIP: Michael Constantine, star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Room 222, dead at 94.

I WAS HOPING FOR BETTER THAN THAT: Tomorrow’s AI Will Reason Like Humans, IBM Watson Developer Predicts.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why Isn’t the Attack on Larry Elder the Biggest Story in America?

A white woman in a gorilla mask threw an egg at a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of our largest state, and the media shrug.

Do a search for Larry Elder and gorilla on the New York Times website, and nothing comes up. CNN? Same result. Washington Post? Zilch. According to our nation’s media leaders, it’s not a story that a white person wearing a gorilla mask attacked Larry Elder, a black man seeking to become the first non-white governor of California, by hurling an egg that touched his head.

If Elder were a Democrat, the attack would have been instantly and with good reason dubbed racist. It would not only be front-page news, it would be just about the only news you were hearing about today on CNN and MSNBC. Charles Blow, Perry Bacon, and Jamelle Bouie would each be writing the first in a series of angry columns about it. So would Gail Collins, Jonathan Capehart, Jennifer Rubin, Michelle Goldberg, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Dana Milbank, and Ezra Klein. We would be treated to multiple news analyses about the history of the usage of gorilla tropes against blacks. Joy-Ann Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Don Lemon would be doing hour-long broadcasts on the attack, convening panels discussing just how the attack pulls the scab off racism in America, and proves we have so much work left to do in dealing with the problem. Vox would commission a series about California’s grim history of racism dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Asian-American and Latino writers would hasten to explain that California’s historic hostility to all sorts of persons of color is as traditional as its Tournament of Roses parade. Three-thousand-word essays about the brutal, unknown history of lynchings in the Golden State would be published in The Atlantic and/or The New Yorker. Al Sharpton, exhibiting a combination of exhaustion and despondency, would be a guest on half a dozen cable TV shows.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the memory holing of this story makes perfect sense.

As Dan Crenshaw tweets:

Evergreen:

MAYBE BECAUSE IT’S DIFFICULT TO CYA WHEN ESCAPEES CONTRADICT YOUR LIES AND YOU’RE HOPING IT’LL BLOW OVER BY THE TIME THEY DO FINALLY MANAGE TO GET BACK: Why Did the State Department Want to Keep Private American Citizens From Leaving Afghanistan?

FASTER, PLEASE: Development study reveals origins of inflammatory bowel disease.

GLEICHSCHALTUNG : Google Is Teaching Employees That Listening To Ben Shapiro Leads To ‘Genocide.’

TIM BLAIR: “Let the great Goody Two-Jabs Twitter hunt begin.”

Related: Pursuing ‘COVID Zero’ Has Turned Australia Into An Authoritarian State.

SPOILER: IT WON’T. Energy Dept. plan says 40% of U.S. power could come from solar by 2035. You want electric cars and lower carbon emissions by 2035? Start building nuclear plants now. The rest is bullshit.

DON’T GET COCKY: Dem strategist: Our party better brace for a wipeout in 2022 midterms.

BRYAN PRESTON:Clint Eastwood Returns in ‘Cry Macho,’ Continuing a Legendary Career That Began With a Film That Shouldn’t Have Worked at All. “Eastwood later said it was the Kurosawa aspect that first drew him to Leone’s production, that and a free trip; he was already a fan of Yojimbo. ‘This thing will either do really well or it won’t do anything,’ Eastwood says of his expectations at the time. ‘Probably the latter.’ He thought it might ‘bomb out’ but he would get a trip to Italy and Spain out of it, so he signed on to star, provide his own wardrobe, and keep track of his own props. ‘You all can go to Hell,’ Eastwood might as well have been saying to Hollywood, ‘I’m going to go shoot a weird, low-budget Western with an Italian director in Spain.'”

CORRUPT AND INCOMPETENT, AT BEST: Team Biden’s lies pile up as Taliban hold abandoned Americans hostage.

HMM: Experts: Increasing global COVID-19 vaccination rate could slow variant spread.

Related: To Defeat Delta Variant, Experts Recommend Doing All The Things That Didn’t Work The First Time.

WHERE’S BIDEN’S AFGHANISTAN HOSTAGES WOG? Great question, Issues & Insights. The chief executive has a “Whole of Government” (WOG) approach for protecting abortion, why not one for rescuing Americans stranded and at the mercy of the Taliban terrorists?