Archive for 2024
July 12, 2024
THE BBC HAS NOTICED THE DIMS HAVE A PROBLEM “CAN BIDEN BE REPLACED AS NOMINEE? NOT SO EASILY”: Can Biden be replaced as nominee? Not so easily.
OUR BRAIN ISN’T READY TO COPE WITH IT. NOT IN FOOD, NOT IN INFORMATION: Glut.
AND HE DID IT ON THE ADVICE OF HIS COMMANDER IN CHIEF: My main takeaway from this press conference.
July 11, 2024
JOE BIDEN’S ‘BIG BOY’ PRESS CONFERENCE IS A DISASTER FOR THE DEMOCRATS:
On Thursday evening, Joe Biden held what was widely dubbed his “big boy” press conference. Originally scheduled for 5:30 pm ET, it was delayed an hour, before again being pushed to 7:00 pm and then 7:15 pm.
It was a rough start, for sure. Biden sounded hoarse at times, coughed quite a bit, and sounded like he had cotton in his mouth and nostrils. But, it was a campaign speech through and through. He repeated the same old stump speech lines that we’ve heard over and over and that haven’t resonated with the public.
Of course, the speech was irrelevant. The questions and answers are what matter, and it didn’t go very well.
For starters, his “big boy” press conference was made up of pre-approved reporters.
The press conference, which closed out the NATO summit in Washington, was the latest make-or-break moment for his presidential campaign. Frankly, the entire thing was a losing proposition for Biden, as even White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby were calling it the “big boy” conference.
More: Biden Strikes Defiant Tone in Bumbling Press Conference with Political Future at Stake.
Asked whether it would harm his legacy if he were to lose to Trump in November, he challenged the premise of the question, saying “I’m not in this for my legacy.” He subsequently explained why he abandoned his “bridge” candidate pledge instead of anointing a successor.
“What changed was the gravity of the situation I inherited,” Biden said, citing the economic turbulence and geopolitical crisis of his first term. “My long time in the Senate equipped me to have the wisdom on how to deal with the Congress to get things done.”
Biden did acknowledge his need to slow down and his staffers’s desire to add events to his schedule, a tendency he said angered First Lady Jill Biden.
“I love my staff, but they add things. They add things all the time. I’m catching hell from my wife,” Biden stated.
At times, Biden gave long-winded, rambling answers on foreign policy, going into detail about working with world leaders and cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. During these stream of conscious answers, Biden repeatedly lost his trains of thought and stumbled over his words, repeating “anyway” and “the idea” as verbal crutches.
Asked about how he would fare at the end of a second term, Biden maintained that he’d be ready to deal with the leaders of hostile countries.
“I’m ready to deal with them now and three years from now,” Biden said of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin, America’s two most powerful adversaries.
As usual, Biden’s ego and reality are inhabiting two extremely different planes of existence:
Reporter to Biden: Is Your Noticeable Decline Hurting America's Standing In The World?
Story: https://t.co/dLCUCtnfRr pic.twitter.com/2oS9qhyJVd
— RCP Video (@rcpvideo) July 12, 2024
One of the single most incredible things about Biden is that he really does view himself on foreign policy as a combination of Metternich, Bismark, and Cardinal Richelieu, not as a guy who screws up everything he touches
— Noah Pollak (@NoahPollak) July 11, 2024
Of course, you’d think that too, if your staff, such as Biden’s deputy press secretary, was blowing this much smoke up your fundament:
UPDATE: Past performance is no guarantee of Trunalimunumaprzure:
Fifty seconds apart. pic.twitter.com/Hps1XkhjIQ
— MAZE (@mazemoore) July 12, 2024
MORE: Biden’s “mixed” NATO presser wasn’t enough for Capitol Hill.
I’M WITH ELON: Thermonuclear Blasts and New Species: Inside Elon Musk’s Plan to Colonize Mars.
As Robert Heinlein (PBUH) said, Earth is too fragile a basket to hold all of humanity’s eggs.
Flashback: The urgency of space colonization.
Also: James Fallows: The Coming Age of Space Colonization. Now that Elon is a Designated Party Enemy, The Atlantic probably wouldn’t give this topic such a sympathetic treatment, but this was in 2013.
STRAIGHT, NO CHASER: A Trump NATO? The 3% Solution
If you want peace, prepare for war. The maxim is attributed to Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who defeated Hannibal — but Plato mulled the idea.
If they want peace, for the next 10 years NATO nations and their Pacific allies must spend 3% of GDP on defense. Current U.S. defense spending? About 3%.
I wrote this essay Tuesday. As for Biden’s press conference this evening, he lied about his strong support for Ukraine. Recall Biden thought Russia would blitz Ukraine and he wanted Zelenskyy to flee. Zelenskyy replied to the effect, “I need ammunition, ‘not a ride.” Will the mainstream media call him on his lie?
OPEN THREAD: Yo, baby, yo. Good to go.
LOL, JEN RUBIN:
How is she a real person?
— D.E. (@tkdylan) July 12, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese commercial rocket firm suffers 4th launch failure.
It’s okay to blow up rockets, so long as you learn from each failure.
HERE WE GO: House Oversight Subpoenas Biden’s Handlers.
RUNNING VS. WALKING: Does Walking to Work Burn The Same Calories as Running? Here’s The Science.
SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND DURING THIS EVENING’S PRESS CONFERENCE:
Plot twist: Hunter Biden took millions from the "f***ing spy chief of China" and has now become the "acting chief of staff" at the White House pic.twitter.com/1uGMJMh6f2
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) July 10, 2024
The country is in the very best of hands.
THE NEW SPACE RACE:
If you have to deny it… (that means you are already planning for it).https://t.co/hNMRJj6bht
— Jim Meigs (@jamesbmeigs) July 11, 2024
ERIC COWPERTHWAITE: Observations During The Late Republic: Lawfare Part Deux.
THE PJ MEDIA CREW IS LIVEBLOGGING BIDEN’S 6:30 PM EASTERN PRESS CONFERENCE: Biden Faces the Nation at Post-Nap Presser.
I don’t know about everyone else but Kevin Downey Jr made himself a Manhattan and I just started into a martini.
UPDATE: We’re certainly having fun over there… blogging a press conference that is now expected to begin an hour late… if then?
Link was wrong before — sorry! Fixed now.
“ANTI-DISCRIMINATION:” Seven GOP-led states sue to block Biden’s new anti-discrimination healthcare rule.
ED MORRISSEY: Dems, Media Begin Captain Louis Renault Award Contest Over Declinin’ Biden.
Get the Visine ready, because the eye rolls you’ll do in reading this suddenly lengthy list of Joe Biden red flags will require medical attention before you get to the end.
CNN did a deep dive earlier today on Democrats’ effort to win a Captain Louis Renault award for being the Most Shocked, Shocked by Biden’s cognitive decline. Why, they had no idea how poorly Biden performed of late until the debate! Clearly, Biden’s White House snookered them and the media all along!
Come on, man …
On September 29th of 2020, William Voegeli of the Claremont Institute published his column headlined “The Weak Leading the Woke,” in which he wrote:
After so many years of saying so many weird things, Biden has come to receive a benefit denied other politicians: being graded on a curve, a phenomenon journalist James Lileks has termed the “soft bigotry of Joe expectations.” Even so, [the New Yorker’s Eric Lach] predicted last year that Biden’s nomination would mean Democrats “will be in for months of apologizing and explaining things away.”
However, in the Q&A style of his column, Voegeli eventually asked what we were all thinking that year: “Is Biden still, you know, all there?”
It is especially hard to gauge the cognitive decline of a public figure whose cognitive peak was neither recent nor lofty.
* * * * * * * *
That said, and despite campaign efforts to limit and script his public appearances, it certainly appears that Biden merits the assessment made of many people in their late seventies: he has good days and bad days. The detours that Comey noted are increasingly frequent, often occurring within a single sentence—or, rather, freeway pileup of sentence fragments. Worse, rather than heading in a new, unexpected direction, they don’t really go anywhere at all. In September Biden answered, after a fashion, a question about the coronavirus: “COVID has taken this year, just since the outbreak…has taken more than 100 years. Look. Here’s. The lives. I mean, just…you think about it. More lives this year than any other year for the past hundred years.”
In a CNN interview earlier this year, Biden repeatedly looked down from the camera to his desk while saying, “You know, there’s a…during World War Two, when Roosevelt came up with a thing, that was, you know, totally different, than a…than the…it’s called, he called it, you know, he had the war, the War Production Board.” The moment was excruciating in ways transcription doesn’t capture. Journalist Glenn Greenwald subsequently tweeted, “I’ve literally never seen one person—until Joe Biden—who had to read from notes to answer questions from a cable TV host. And even with that, he often gets lost.”
For years, my recurring headline for Joe’s innumerable gaffes was “Super Gaffe-O-Matic ’76,” a takeoff on Dan Akroyd’s classic Saturday Night Live TV commercial parody. But it was obvious by the 2020 election cycle that the pilot light was beginning to dim on Biden, which is why I retired that headline and started going with “Trunalimunumaprzure!”, with my first reference to the word on October 31st, 2020, in reference to this infamous moment, in which brain, mouth and teleprompter reading skills all failed miserably for Biden.
Assuming Kamala replaces Sundown Joe, the media will coalesce lockstep around her, just as they did during Obama’s rapid rise to power during the 2008 election cycle. As Jim Treacher wrote last week:
I don’t normally do predictions, but here’s one you might not like: Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee, and she’ll defeat Donald Trump in November.
I said what I said.
Think about it: What Democrat in good standing is gonna sit at home on Election Day, when they’ve got a chance to stop Trump and make history by electing the first woman president? A multiracial POC, to boot!
Plus, she’s not bad-looking for a woman her age. For most Americans, that’s all they’ll see. They don’t know anything about any of the issues. They’ll just see an attractive, youthful person of color against a grouchy old white man they really hate.
It’ll be 2008 all over again.
No, she doesn’t have Obama’s skills. She doesn’t have anybody’s skills. But she’s a warm body who can keep Trump from getting back into the White House.
That’s all Biden was. And hey, at least she can still walk down a flight of stairs.
All the journos panicking today about Kamala taking over the ticket will flip in an instant when it happens. If they were willing to lie to you about Biden’s brain melting out of his ears, do you really think they’ll tell you the truth about her?
Look how quickly they’ve turned on Biden. They can start boosting her just as fast. They can pretend they never wanted another old white man to get reelected. That was yesterday. Never happened.
Nobody wants to be the reporter who put Trump back in the White House.
I’m not stating a preference here, dear reader. I’m just thinking it through. A lot of MAGA-heads are going to wish Biden had held out long enough to lose in November.
But look on the bright side: Every political prediction I’ve ever made has been wrong!
Yes, Steve Hayward postulates that the Dems are “Facing the Abyss Inside the Abyss:”
In the immediate moment, she’d be inheriting Biden’s White House staff when she becomes president. They know better than anyone how terrible she is. Would she try to bring in her own White House staff in short order? Maybe, but that is a recipe for chaos, and Kamala already has a reputation as someone who leaves chaos in her wake the way PigPen trailed a cloud of dust in Peanuts.
She’d be inheriting Biden’s campaign apparatus. What happens the first time she doesn’t like a speech or campaign message the staff produces? More chaos, leaks, backbiting, resignations, firings—and a landslide loss at the polls in November.
But she’ll have a newly galvanized DNC-MSM ready to break out Will Smith’s memory erasing tool from the Men in Black movies en masse about their coverage of Biden, and ready to declare everything Trump and whoever his veep is to be “raaaaaaacism!!!!” when they attack her. Will that get her across the finish line? We may know soon enough.
KRUISER: NY Times: Biden Campaign Is ‘Quietly’ Looking Into Harris vs. Trump Polling. “There are various and sundry alternative Biden replacement theories, most of which are acid-trip fantastical. For any of them to have the slightest chance of being put into motion, the Democratic National Committee will have to give Madame Vice President a chance to fail. It’s a bit much to immediately leap to a scenario where the party that’s all in on diversity casts aside the historic first black and female VEEP.”
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Hamilton Beach Dual Breakfast Sandwich Maker with Timer. #CommissionEarned
IT WAS A SUPER SHORT TRIP FROM RENAMING FT. BRAGG TO LABELING PRO-LIFERS TERRORISTS. You look at the slide and think, “maybe it’s just random pro-life clipart?” Nope, it’s in the text. Along with “Row [sighs in lawyer] v. Wade.”