Archive for 2024

THE MEDIA’S QUANDARY: What Do You Do with a Failed Coup? Biden’s refusal to succumb to the media’s demands for his ouster reminds Dave Seminara of  failed coups against African leaders that he monitored during his career at the State Department.

Of course, being the president of a democratic country, Biden doesn’t have all the tools these authoritarian leaders have at their disposal. He can’t singlehandedly rig elections, shut down independent media, imprison enemies, and terrorize the populace like a proper dictator. And yet, repression wasn’t the key factor that enabled these dictators to survive coup attempts and cling to power. Each was able to retain the loyalty of people who mattered—rank and file soldiers, party leaders, tribal elders, and so on. Biden has sagely done much the same during his five decades in politics. The media has deserted him, but key Democrats and Democratic constituencies (unions, the Congressional Black Caucus) have not.

When I was the State Department’s desk officer for Chad, French diplomats made many overtures to Idriss Deby, offering significant incentives and soft-landing sinecures to try to convince him to retire. He wasn’t interested, largely because he enjoyed being in power. President Biden is the same. He thinks Trump is beatable (and he is) and doesn’t want to be a one-term president. In the same way that Third World tyrants disregard public opinion, Biden brushes off polls showing that close to 80 percent of the country thinks that he’s too old to be president. That’s not what our polls say, Jack.

Unless something changes — like a whistleblower leaking evidence of a Parkinson’s diagnosis — journalists will need to adapt.

The media thought that they could take Biden down, but it’s becoming clear that he’s not stepping down just because armies of polyamorous, Brooklyn-dwelling sub-editors have soured on him. The question now is: In the wake of their failed coup attempt, how will the media go back to shilling for Biden? It seems like an impossible pivot, but somehow I’m confident that the same lying, dog-faced pony soldiers who told us the president was as sharp as a tack will return to business as usual. That is to say, after a brief hiatus, they will go back to promoting the perceived interests of the Democratic Party, hoping that voters forget all the mean things they said about Joe Biden during the brief, heady days when it looked like the coup was on.

Read the whole thing.

 

WHY WASN’T THIS NEWS TWO YEARS AGO, CHUCK? NBC host Chuck Todd makes explosive claim Biden cabinet secretary told him TWO YEARS ago that Joe ‘can’t run again.’

Related: Reporters Congratulate Themselves on Being Shamed into Doing Their Jobs.

Today’s journalists as a class are the worst they’ve been in our country’s history but watching four years of their coverups come back to bite them — and the party they serve — has been a real joy.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Forbidden Fruit and the Classroom: The Huge American Sex-Abuse Scandal That Educators Scandalously Suppress. “Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.”

The press has an anti-religious axe to grind; it doesn’t have an anti-public-school axe. Quite the reverse.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Fly The Plane.

SCHLICHTER PULLS NO PUNCHES:

I’m not sure which would give me more joy — seeing Biden forced out in an even more humiliating way than LBJ’s comparatively graceful 1968 exit or humiliated at the polls by Donald Trump — for all the reasons Kurt just listed.

But Biden isn’t just the worst president since Carter or maybe Buchanan, he’s almost certainly the worst person to serve as president, period.

GO ON AND TAKE THE RED PILL ALREADY: ‘The Law Has Failed Me’: Union Anti-Semitism Causes New Wave Of Support For Right To Work Laws.

“I’ve tried to use the law as it exists and at every turn, the law has failed me,” MIT graduate student William Sussman said. The computer science doctoral candidate cited numerous examples of MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU) staffers occupying buildings, being arrested, and passing a “ceasefire resolution” that did not mention the words “hostages,” “Hamas,” or “peace.”

“The blood had not yet dried when my colleagues at MIT declared ‘Victory is Ours,’”’ Sussman said, referring to a student group sharing an advertisement of an anti-Israel rally one day after Hamas’s massacre of more than 1,000 Israelis on October 7.

The “Confronting Union Antisemitism: Protecting Workers from Big Labor Abuses,” hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions comes amid unions across the country engaging in anti-Israel political activism including passing one-sided resolutions, organizing protests, and persecuting Zionist members.

According to Sussman, he was denied a request to have a religious accommodation that would use his compulsory union dues to fund a charity instead of the union’s political activity.

Previously: US universities including Cornell, Harvard and MIT raked in $13B in ‘undocumented contributions’ from foreign donors. “A sizable portion of the funds were said to be donated from authoritarian regimes around the globe including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China and the UAE, the report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) claimed.”

LET’S: Biden Said to Judge His Performance at the NATO Summit. Let’s Do That. “Some might argue that Biden didn’t majorly flub his appearance at the NATO summit on Wednesday, but he didn’t help himself either. If you’re a Democrat who is concerned that Biden can’t handle the next few months of the campaign, his performance here doesn’t give you any reason to feel confident in him once again.”

CHANGE: