FREDO CORLEONE COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT:
Having Exhausted All Other Options, Obama Invites Biden Paddle Boarding https://t.co/hHYZsu3GSd pic.twitter.com/Cwc7SBxo0i
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 9, 2024
Archive for 2024
July 9, 2024
PAULA BOLYARD: Democrat NBC Neurologist Lands a Death Blow on Biden Narrative: ‘He Definitely Has It.’
[Dr. Tom Pitts, who works with Parkinson’s patients in a clinical setting in Dayton, Ohio] conceded, “We’re finding [word] retrieval doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t know what you want to say. What I cannot comment on is his ability to make good decisions. His motor symptoms are degenerating. He has Parkinsosisms. That is a fact. You know, he has the generation of the brain.”
“Show me the MRI,” he challenged Biden’s doctors. “Show me he doesn’t” have Parkinson’s. “You know, put you put your money where your mouth is. He definitely has it.”
He thinks both Biden and Donald Trump should complete the standard four-hour neuropsychological testing—the hallmark test for cognitive performance (as opposed to the shorter Montreal Cognitive Assessment Trump claims to have passed).
“So, for example, they may have you say, like, say as many words you can in a minute that start with ‘F.'” Patients also do block-building, and a trail-drawing test and complete retrieval exercises. “I may, I may say ‘cup’ and have you recall it three minutes later.”
These are done with a professional PhD in neuropsychology,” he said. “It’s a full day. We tell people, ‘Bring a snack.'”
NBC host Lester Holt asked, “You’re a Democrat, you’re a doctor. You sound like you’re frustrated with what the White House is saying.”
“Well, because, you know, I’m an American before everything. And I look at it and say, when I used to see Russia, the Soviet Union, North Korea, when they just make up outrageous things, you know, like when North Korea can’t keep the lights on, and they say, ‘Oh, you know, it was some faulty power thing.’ I kind of hate that kind of stuff.”
Then he landed a death blow on the Democrat Party: “They had four years. My own party had four years to find—you know, this was a wreck in slow motion. And they had four years to find—out of 350 million Americans—one person that could take [Biden’s] place. And here we are, the day before school, trying to do the homework and replace a guy who’s got a neurodegenerative disease.”
At the beginning of the first Obama term in early 2009, the Washington Post through its then sister-publication Newsweek insisted, “We Are All Socialists Now.” Nearing the end of the third Obama term, is it anyone surprised that our socialist Capitol Hill resembles the Soviet Union of the early 1980s?
JOE BIDEN, CHRONIC LIAR, THE CATALOG, PART II: Issues & Insights (I&I) debunks the claims that the Biden presidency has compiled a record of successes. Au Contraire.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s dirty and dangerous race to become a space superpower.
DAVID HARSANYI: If You Were Duped On Biden’s Cognitive Decline, You’re Too Dumb To Be A Journalist. And if you knew, you were in on it.
The New York Times has now written two editorials asking Biden to drop out of the race. And if the members of the board had only been reading their own coverage, they might not have known that Biden was struggling. Days before the debate the paper ran a piece titled “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts,” which laid out the case that conservatives had been unfairly attacking the president. An earlier piece, “Release of Hur Report Underlines Perils of the Special Counsel’s Job,” did not investigate Hur’s contention, it merely amplified attacks on him, noting that report was “seized upon by Trump supporters.”
The Times editorial page helpfully ran essays like “I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way,” wherein credulous readers learn that the president’s failure to recall the year his son died is probably not a very big deal. The same thing went on at NBC News, where one story’s subhead helpfully notes: “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”
Are there bigger dupes in this country than media-approved “experts?”
Even now, virtually every discussion on the left regarding the president’s fragile mental acuity revolves around his ability or inability to beat Donald Trump — rather than the dangerous position the administration and a pliant press have put the nation in. One suspects that if Biden withstands the pressure and stays in the race, they’ll all go back to covering for him again.
Because, if there’s anything this incident reaffirms, it’s that far too often the first loyalty of the political media is to the Democratic Party.
No wonder “The Media Want the Flaming Wreckage of the Biden Campaign to Explode — to Cover Their Tracks,” as Jeff Blehar wrote on Sunday:
It’s easy to get lost in bleak humor (or score-settling) and lose sight of the sheer magnitude of what it is we are living through: The president of the United States is an empty shell of himself mentally. His praetorian guard has been keeping his near-complete mental collapse a secret for possibly years now, and the media engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” (Nuzzi’s words, not mine) to conceal it from voters, out of reflexive (in the truest sense of the word) partisan and professional self-interest. Very Smart People tell me that my sense of complete betrayal and abiding disgust is a feeling peculiar only to Republicans and political anoraks — chumps who care too much, in other words. Perhaps so.
But the question Charlie Cooke posed last week should be the same one you hang on to as well: If the media claims it has been lied to about the state of Biden’s health for all these long years, then maybe they should investigate that? How that happened? How much did Kamala Harris — Biden’s almost certain replacement, should he step down — know? When did she know it? A real media would start from the premise that she is just as disqualified by helping to conceal Biden’s collapse as Biden and his people themselves are, and force her to prove otherwise. A real media wouldn’t play a balancing game in its head, saying, “Let’s not push her too hard, we don’t want to help the Other Guy.” This is not a real media, however, so I will invoke Betteridge’s Law by answering the question Charlie merely posed in his headline: Will the media seriously investigate how they were “misled” about Biden’s health? No. That would mean investigating themselves.
And the guild always protects its own. Always.
FUSION POWER WOULD BE BAD BECAUSE OF . . . “JUSTICE AND EQUITY” AND “INDIGENOUS PEOPLES.” Fusion Is Coming, But Are We Ready For The Problems It Could Cause?
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Are there more solar flares than expected during this solar cycle? “In terms of sunspot numbers, Solar Cycle 25 (our current cycle) has exceeded the sunspot levels of Solar Cycle 24 (which peaked in 2014). With higher sunspot numbers, we’d also expect higher flare counts. This is the case, but the difference is far from what some would have you believe.”
21ST CENTURY “JUSTICE:”
They fined Donald Trump 2x more for accurately appraising the market value of his home than Boeing got fined for killing people. https://t.co/jhfbrI7DZy
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 8, 2024
ASK DR. PRESTONE: Unlocking the Secrets of Ice With Antifreeze and Advanced Microscopy.
“HOMELESSNESS”-AS-STATUS IS AN INVENTION OF ACTIVISTS IN THE 1980S: Are camping laws regulation of “conduct” by homeless people or the “status” of being homeless?
Note, too, that the notion of laws banning camping in public spaces as discrimination against a discrete group run afoul of the more recent PC term, “people experiencing homelessness,” which certainly makes homelessness sound more like an activity than a status.
BUT FOR YEARS THEY ACTED LIKE IT WAS BAD FOR YOU: Coffee a ‘miracle’ drink with many health benefits, experts say.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Trump Tuesday: You Won’t Believe What the Commies Did This Time.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Now They’re Coming for Your Food.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: EF ECOFLOW Portable Power Station DELTA 2. #CommissionEarned
BUNKERTIME: Biden rebels in Congress see their revolt crumbling. “One House Democrat who was in both meetings said: ‘Most of our caucus is still with him … meaning he’ll stay in. Which sucks for our country.’…Another described the mood as ‘pretty much unanimous’ that Biden has ‘got to step down,’ adding, ‘There were actual tears from people, and not for Biden.’”
WHAT DESPERATION LOOKS LIKE: The Latest Spin: Blaming the Gun Store for Hunter Biden’s Illegal Purchase.
STAY SAFE: DocSafe File Box Fireproof Document Box with Lock. #CommissionEarned
DON’T GET COCKY: ‘Mini-primary’ poll shows Biden losing it all.
ROGER KIMBALL: Despite defeat, Le Pen’s party has made steady progress.
There is perhaps a silver lining to yesterday’s election. Although Le Pen did not prevail absolutely, her party has been making steady progress. As Glenn Reynolds reports, citing a friend, “When Mr. Le Pen made it into the second round of the presidential election in 2002, he got 18 percent of the vote. When his daughter made the second round in 2017, she got 34 percent. When she did it again in 2022, she got 41 percent. They are persuading, just very slowly.”
The question is whether the cultural confidence that is necessary for civilizational survival will progress quickly enough to stave off disaster. No one’s crystal ball, I suspect, is far seeing enough to say. But the fact that everyone in the flaccid, low-testosterone corner of the punditocracy dismisses Rassemblement National with the epistemically empty epithet “far right” suggests that the battle, or at least the war, is not yet over.
In the meantime though, the French left seem determined to finish off their nation once and for all: The left-wing French coalition hoping to introduce 90% tax on rich.
SORRY, I’M LOW-CARB: Researchers predict new phase in neutron stars that favors ‘nuclear pasta.’
NEO: Is there a lever long enough to move Joe Biden?
Archimedes is purported to have said: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
I’m glad I’m not a Democrat right now. They’re engaged in looking for a lever long enough to dislodge Joe Biden’s stubborn grip on the 2024 nomination, and so far it eludes them. Will they find it in time?
Of course, they may not need it if they can commit enough fraud to win the election even with Biden at the helm. There is zero pretense that they care about the effect his continuing to occupy the office has had, and will have, on the fate of the country and the world. It’s about one thing only: winning. That’s why Joe was chosen in the first place in 2020 – not because he’d be a good president, but because he could be presented to the public in such a way that he would be the victor. And whether this occurred through rigging, fraud, or fair and square, it hardly matters to them, as long as it could be accomplished.
Related: Is This Why Biden Is Digging in So Aggressively Regarding Staying in the 2024 Race?
Why is Joe Biden clinging onto his presidency like grim death? It’s a point of pride, ego, and a burning desire to prove his critics wrong again. The president sees the internal voices of opposition as those who advised him not to run in 2016. They did so again in 2020, but he ran and won, thanks to the party elites he now loathes. A top Democratic Party donor and operative, Dmitri Mehlhorn, expounded on Biden’s deep intransigence over his 2024 nomination (via Drop Site News):
The key thing to understand about Biden’s resistance to dropping out, Mehlhorn said, is that Biden believes he should have run in 2016, but let himself be talked out of it—and won’t make that mistake again. “I want to just go a little bit deeper into the decision-making process of Joe Biden,” Mehlhorn told me. “Joe Biden is haunted by the fact that in 2016, he listened to these arguments. And he’s right. We were all wrong. If he’d run in 2016, we would not be here. A lot of people—not us as much this time—but a lot of people made those same arguments to him in 2020 and he stubbornly, stubbornly resisted all of them. And he saved us.”
Mehlhorn said the reverse was true in 2020. “So all of these arguments came at him in ’16. He listened, the world suffered grievously. All of these arguments came at him in 2020. He refused to listen, the world benefited tremendously,” Mehlhorn said. “America now has the strongest economy of the world, we are powering the world economy, we are leading the free world against Russian aggression because he refused to listen to these arguments. So right now, who is he going to listen to? I believe that fundamentally, he is going to listen to voters.”
If you honestly believe Biden “saved us” economically, and successfully “leading the free world against Russian aggression,” that’s some seriously potent hallucinogenic substances you have access to, perhaps along the lines of whatever John Gill is ingesting these days:
Why, if that is the case – are we sending billions to Ukraine?
Putin is shut down – like talk of Joe being replaced has been "shut down". https://t.co/QSS7Yz9AV3— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) July 6, 2024
In any case, Joe believing he knew better in 2016 than those who insisted he not run is classic Joe believing he’s smarter than anyone else in the room:
TRUMP’S DISCIPLINE THESE LAST TWO WEEKS HAS BEEN REMARKABLE: Dems Scrambling to Find a ‘Plan B’ After Effort to Make the Race About Trump Nosedives.
NOT YOUR DADDY’S LABOR UNION ANYMORE: A congressional subcommittee heard from witnesses today about the explosion of anti-semitism in labor unions, especially those on campus like the MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU), as well as representing government workers, medical personnel and teachers.
National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorney Glen Taubman told the subcommittee his phone has been “ringing off the wall” since the October 7 attack by Hamas in Israel. The calls are coming from Jewish members of unions that are openly supporting Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel.
“They are attacked in their workplace and that is the reality I am seeing. And unfortunately, I cannot say to all these people ‘exercise your constitutional right to get out’ because under the National Labor Relations Act they cannot get out, they are forced to be part of a bargaining unit and forced to pay dues to a union or be fired,” Taubman said.