Archive for 2024

ROGER KIMBALL: Joe Biden Ushers in More Uncertainty by Stepping Aside: Here we have a party that really is preparing to disenfranchise voters.

The kicker is that Biden’s incapacity has been known to honest observers for as long as he has been president, indeed from before he was president. I have made a hobby of pointing out Biden’s porous relation to the English language for years.

What now? The Democratic convention is less than a month away. His letter thanks Kamala Harris but stops short of endorsing her (that came in a follow-up tweet just after: she was then backed by Bill and Hillary Clinton though not, curiously, Barack Obama). What about the 14 million people who voted for the Biden-Harris ticket in the primaries? One of the many things that Jack Smith was prosecuting Donald Trump for was attempting to disenfranchise voters in the 2020 election by questioning the election.

In fact, Trump did not seek to disenfranchise voters, merely to call attention to irregularities in the election process. But here we have a party that really is preparing to disenfranchise voters, all in the name of holding on to power.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has said repeatedly that any effort by the Democrats to slip in another candidate now would probably face legal challenges in some states. Biden was the clear and undisputed winner of the party’s primaries — and all those votes cannot simply be tossed out.

It’s been an interesting week. A nutter tried to murder Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Biden returned to his home, apparently with Covid, indisputably to huddle with his puppet masters to work out an exit strategy. What was he offered to walk the plank?

What could they have offered a man with terminal dementia?

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

A (VERY) SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Campus Protests Led to More Than 3,100 Arrests, but Many Charges Have Been Dropped. The same sons and daughters of the elite who go on about how America’s justice system treats rich and poor differently are benefiting from the fact that America’s justice system treats rich and poor differently. It’s two-tier justice in an increasingly two-tier society.

JIMMY CARTER SAYS YES: Howie Carr: So long, Joe Biden, the worst president, ever.

The. Worst. President. Ever.

When do you think they’ll let Dementia Joe know that he’s officially dropped out?

Who could have ever imagined that Biden would be dumped before Bob Menendez?

The Deep State has been telling us for four years about those 81 million ballots, er votes, that he got. But now his own comrades throw him under the bus like he’s… Andrew Cuomo or Sam Brinton.

For once, Obama was right: “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to bleep things up.”

It’s hard to know who’s going to need grief counselors more: the mullahs in Tehran, the greed-crazed oligarchs in Ukraine, or the Red Chinese butchers.

Quick, someone grab KJP’s belt and shoelaces. She’s going the way of Claudine Gay, for sure.

National Panhandler Radio has begun playing an endless loop of the Funeral March, like Radio Moscow when Joe Stalin stopped breathing in 1953. It’s what the apparatchiks do.

The biggest difference between Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden was that Carter was at least trying to do the right thing by the United States of America.

Everything Biden’s handlers conspired to accomplish was designed to subvert not just American society, but western civilization in general.

Exit question: There’s a hidden message in Biden’s humiliating withdrawal letter that should terrify every American. And the shaming question: Who on earth is running the country?

That’s a topic that Daniel Greenfield recently attempted to answer in depth: Who’s Running the Country?

Related: Why Biden finally quit. “Senior Biden aides were bracing for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who’d worked behind the scenes to encourage others in the party toward the kind of collective action that might finally push the president to end his campaign, to go public this week and possibly even disclose Democratic polling clarifying Biden’s dire political straits. ‘Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,’ said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. ‘She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.’”

(Classical reference in headline.)

WELL:

HIDDEN HAZARDS: Digging Holes At The Beach Can Be Deadly. “Digging holes in sand might seem innocent, but if the hole is deep enough and collapses on a person, it is extremely difficult to escape. In fact, research suggests more people die from sand burial suffocation than from shark attacks.”

SHE IS NOT WRONG:

If I were Trump, I’d see if I could get Tulsi to follow Kamala around.

MAKES SENSE:

IN A NUTSHELL:

MARK STEYN: The Coming of Kamala. “If anyone thinks this is the last plot twist, you’re forgetting we’re in the final seasons of Dynasty here — the Fallon-abducted-by-space-aliens Moldavian-massacre phase.”

THE EV BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: Change of Plans: Ford Will Build Super Duty Trucks Instead of EVs in Canada (With a Twist). “Ford announced today that the Oakville Assembly Plant in Ontario, Canada, will assemble Ford Super Duty pickup trucks starting in 2026. The move is a bit of an about-face, as the Oakville plant—which until recently had produced the Ford Edge (and before that, Edge-related vehicles) was supposed to build EVs. In April of last year, Ford announced with some fanfare a major investment in Oakville to create a next-generation EV campus, which was intended to build EVs starting in 2025. That isn’t happening, not by next year, and possibly not ever.”

YEP:

OUT ON A LIMB: Biden’s media sycophants are the biggest losers of him stepping aside.

The losers are equally obvious. The Biden family, which held on to power in an attempt to white-knuckle it to the end, was ultimately rebuffed. Dr. Jill Biden, Hunter and Ashley will not get their way and will be headed to the White House exits soon enough. And Biden’s allies who stuck through til the end look all the worse for deluding themselves about his capacity. The obvious question, already raised by multiple Republican voices, is how he can possibly remain as president if he cannot even withstand the rigors of a political campaign. The pressure on Biden’s team will be immense and not just come from the right of center press. Having been lied to for so long, the media will not just accept the White House’s excuses as gospel.

Yet perhaps no one is a bigger loser in this scenario than Joe Biden’s media sycophants, who continued to publicly maintain over the past three weeks that everything was just fine, or even if it wasn’t, that Biden represented the one great hedge against the anti-democracy forces of the right. Clearly, in the end, not even Biden himself believed that to be true — or he was incapable of convincing the donors, activists and party leaders that it was the truth. Only the likes of Joe and Mike, Joy and Sunny, Maddow and O’Donnell and the cohort of late-night hosts not named Jon Stewart or Bill Maher were there with Biden at the end of all things. They deserve to be laughingstocks — and they will be.

Lots of performance art this afternoon: Woke media goes into meltdown as CNN’s Van Jones CRIES on air and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow shares utter disbelief after Biden steps down.

Viewers were stunned while watching Jones’ tears on television. One person tweeted: ‘Van Jones is crying on CNN because of what Biden selflessly did for his country.’

Another wrote: ‘Van Jones crying on CNN is pathetic. Grow up man.’ While a third added: ‘Van Jones crying on CNN again. Get this guy OUTTA HERE.’

Last month, MSNBC host Maddow said she fears that Trump will put her in an internment camp in the event he is reelected this upcoming election season.

In an interview with CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcey, Maddow was asked about her concerns about being personally victimized by the Trump administration if he is to be winner of the 2024 presidential election.

‘Trump and his allies are openly talking about weaponizing the government to seek revenge against critics in media and politics, with some of his extremist allies even talking about jailing their fellow Americans,’ said Darcy. ‘You’re one of his most notable critics on television. Are you worried that you could be a target?’

Maddow replied: ‘I’m worried about the country broadly if we put someone in power who is openly avowing that he plans to build camps to hold millions of people, and to ‘root out’ what he’s described in subhuman terms as his ‘enemy from within.’

Morning Joe — if Comcast and/or NBC management allow it air — should be astonishing tomorrow.

HEH:

DOWNFALL: Biden’s White House and campaign aides learned about Joe dropping out from his Twitter announcement, according to Politico:

President Joe Biden’s announcement stunned White House and campaign aides, who up until this afternoon were insisting that he would stay in the race. Many of them, including some senior aides, first found out that was no longer the case by reading the letter that Biden posted on X.

“We’re all finding out by tweet,” said one Democrat familiar with the immediate reaction. “None of us understand what’s happening.”

In a sign of the abruptness of Biden’s decision, the campaign blasted out a fundraising email for “Joe and Kamala” at 1:54 p.m. — eight minutes after Biden announced he was stepping aside.

Exit question: “Was this a planned social-media campaign or a haphazard response to the bullying that Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and her allies, pummeled Biden with last week? Probably should’ve scrubbed some of the tweets posted mere hours before Biden announced his withdrawal — posts in which he doubled and tripled down on his intent to run in November.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Conspiracy Theory Update: Did some staffer just send this out in his name, then they told him later it was his idea?