Yves here. The presidential debate last night is likely to go down as being of historical importance, in the same league as the Kennedy-Nixon debate. But here, instead of demonstrating how the then-young medium rewarded good looks and a confident affect, here it showed two men, which as often happens with the aged, having become even more of who they are, and not in a good way.
There is no way Biden will be in office for a second term after last night’s performance. As blinkered as Biden himself is, too much rides on having at least a semi-functioning incumbent, and voters and donors realize that. Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was not apparent when he ran for a second term and stayed well-hidden. But a big reason why was his strong Cabinet, something Biden abjectly lacks. The members of his top team, in their various ways, are more often than not as weak as he is.
That does not mean Trump will be president. He could choke to death on a burger or suffer a George Wallace or worse assassination attempt. Or perhaps the Democrats will do the seemingly impossible and rally successfully around a last-minute contender like Jay Pritzker or Gretchen Whitmer. But odds considerably favor he will be back in the White House.
I suspect Lambert will cover the panic in the Democratic party and suddenly-perceived-to-be-urgent need to usher Biden out as quickly and gracefully as possible and settle on a viable replacement candidate with a minimum of infighting.
Even though some Twitterati and no doubt other commentators were speculating that party operatives had put Biden up to this debate in order to sink him, that does not appear probable. It appears Biden has surrounded himself with yes-men and bites the heads off those who dare to oppose him. The tweet below was extracted from June 26 New York Times story, Joe Biden: The Old-School Politician in a New-School Era.
They’re calling it the greatest leadership style in the history of the presidency pic.twitter.com/axYdf7jCmV
— ettingermentum🥥🌴 (@ettingermentum) June 26, 2024
So even if the idea of an early debate did not originate with Biden, it seems improbable that he was railroaded into it.
The very end of the debate provided a sad image of Biden’s frailty:
Zoomed in video of Jill Biden leading Joe off the debate stage.
This is insane. pic.twitter.com/RB8Jd6ue7s
— ⚜️🔱☬༒अखण्ड ♥️भारत☬༒ 🔱⚜️ (@choturavan9) June 28, 2024
Yet the Financial Times reports that Biden thought he put in a fine performance. Is this an effect of the meds?
But Biden seemed undeterred, telling reporters at a late-night stop at a Waffle House restaurant in Atlanta: “I think we did well.”
Asked about calls for him to step aside, and whether he had any concerns about his debate performance, Biden — who said he had a “sore throat” — replied: “No. It’s hard to debate a liar.”
In today’s Links, Lambert featured a story from Axios, Democrats may want to replace Biden, but it’s his call. Key sections:
The big picture: Biden already has almost all of the pledged delegates at the Democratic National Convention because of state primaries he has won. Those delegates must vote for Biden on the first ballot unless he withdraws beforehand.
- Democrats plan to undergo their formal nominating process weeks before their Aug. 9 convention, so new candidates would have to emerge before that virtual roll call.
- To win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot, a candidate needs a simple majority of the estimated 3,933 pledged delegates. Biden has well surpassed that threshold.
Reality check: It’s incredibly unlikely that Biden agrees to step aside as the Democratic candidate.
As Betty Davis warned, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Now to the main event.
Update 10:30 AM EDT. Just as this post fired, The Hill published White House, Biden campaign slam replacement chatter after debate. From the story:
President Biden’s campaign aides and top surrogates scrambled Friday to shut down talk he might drop out of the race following a disastrous showing at a debate with former President Trump.
A campaign official dismissed talk of Biden withdrawing, while top Democrats viewed as potential successors to Biden worked to stamp out any talk of replacing the president.
And the Russians are running out of missiles, yes siree!
Biden has to get through a second debate. Perhaps his team still believes in better living through chemistry.
By Mary Kate Cary, Adjunct Professor of Politics and Director of Think Again, University of Virginia and Karrin Vasby Anderson, Professor of Communication Studies, Colorado State University. Originally published at The Conversation
With four months to go until Election Day, the earliest-ever general election debate featured two presidents – one current, one former – and a lot of bitter personal attacks. Joe Biden’s universally acknowledged poor performance surprised and even panicked Democrats; Donald Trump gave a more forceful – if not truthful – performance.
The Conversation asked two scholars, Mary Kate Cary and Karrin Vasby Anderson, to watch the debate and analyze a passage or a moment that stood out to them. Anderson is a communications scholar with a specialty in gender and the presidency, as well as political pop culture. Cary teaches political speechwriting and worked as a White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, for whom she wrote more than 100 addresses.
Karrin Vasby Anderson, Colorado State University Department of Communication Studies
One of the first definitions of good public speaking I learned as a college debater and student of rhetoric came from the ancient Roman scholar and rhetoric teacher Quintilian. In his 12-volume “Institutio Oratoria,” Quintilian said the ideal orator was a good person, speaking well. He was particularly concerned about the danger that a skilled rhetorician who lacked character could pose to society.
A presidential debate ought to showcase ideal orators – skilled speakers who are also people of character. The June 27 debate offered voters an either-or scenario.
Former President Donald Trump was aggressive, confident and disciplined, but he peppered his remarks with a steady stream of lies, half-truths and misinformation. President Joe Biden focused on Trump’s documented record – both criminal and political – but failed as an orator, demonstrating none of the charisma and command on display during his most recent State of the Union address just four months ago.
The contrast was clear early in the debate when CNN’s Dana Bash asked Trump whether he would block access to abortion medication. Trump said that he would not. He then falsely claimed that, in the lead-up to the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and removed the federal protection for abortion rights, “everybody wanted to get it back to the states, everybody, without exception.”
Trump then went on offense, accusing Democrats of taking “the life of a child in the eighth month, ninth month, even after birth.”
Biden’s response was initially clear and resolute: “It’s been a terrible thing, what you’ve done,” he said. And he pushed back against the preposterous claim that “everybody” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, saying, “the idea that states are able to do this is a little like saying we’re going to turn civil rights back to the states (and) let each state have a different rule.”
But the rest of Biden’s response was muddled. After “veering inexplicably” into an anecdote about a woman murdered by an undocumented immigrant, Biden expressed his support for people’s right to choose by saying on three separate occasions that the decision should be up to a doctor, rather than the pregnant person.
Trump closed out the segment by reiterating his blatant lie in stronger terms: “So that means, he can take the life of the baby, in the ninth month and even after birth because some states, Democrat run, take it after birth.” The Associated Press’s fact check of this claim is succinct: “Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has passed a law that allows killing a baby after birth.”
After nearly a decade of exposure to Trump’s habitual misinformation, lies about states murdering babies may not stand out as shocking in a presidential debate. And, certainly, it’s an argument that should have been easy for Biden to refute.
But if the populace must choose between a good person and someone who spoke well, Quintilian would remind us that someone who speaks well but has no integrity is dangerous.
The consequences for the republic could be dire.
Mary Kate Cary, University of Virginia Department of Politics
I think America just saw history being made.
Within 10 minutes, a very hoarse President Joe Biden, was asked about deficit spending, lost his train of thought, and ended his answer by muttering something about “beating Medicare.” It was awful.
There were so many moments when Biden looked confused and unable to process what was happening. I took notes on key exchanges, but the number of embarrassing episodes, unfinished sentences and incoherent phrases by Biden is too long to list. His answer on why he should be president in his 80s somehow veered into computer chips being made in South Korea.
Former President Donald Trump made his own share of missteps, but overall, he was relatively sharp, and restrained when he was provoked. He scored some points on the issues and did much better than he did in their first debate four years ago. Trump did better than I think many people thought he would.
Our assignment tonight was to find a moment to react to and put it in context. I’ve been to multiple presidential debates and watched many more on television over the years, and have never seen anything like this.
Is there any way the Democrats can convincingly argue for keeping Biden as their nominee?
The bottom line: Moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did a good job of asking substantive questions and keeping control of the debate; Trump missed an opportunity to knock it out of the park but got through it; and Biden will most likely have caused a disaster for the Democratic Party.
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So, after all this time, this is what it took for the Dem power base to freak out?
Strangely, yes. Seems they never learned a basic rule:
“Don’t get high on your own supply”
Thank you. That is an excellent observation. The “true believer” mentality reminds me of my mom’s bible banging’ side of the family and the infuriating non sequitur “god works in mysterious ways”, a ritual chant they used to explain away the unexplainable hypocrisies between real life and their beliefs.
I wonder if anyone saw what I saw in the debate. It looked to me like Biden knew the questions ahead of time and had memorized answers. As I recall Hillary got access to the questions in a town hall when she ran against Trump. Biden started out rattling off a string of “facts” so fast it came off as fake – so fast you could hardly follow it. It looked like he had been pumped up with amphetamines. But his face lacked any emotion suggesting thoughtful responses – just memorized answers. And then when Trump went off script, Biden just looked confused – a blank stare. Sometimes his “Joker” smile would briefly appear, then disappear. It looked like he was searching around in the attic through the cobwebs of his brain for something related to say as a comeback — closing his eyes to try to find a thought or response — then bumping his head on the attic beams. But after each question from the moderator – he had a pat answer to rattle off faster than he could possibly think — although on several occasions he seem to trail off at the end or finishing with some unrelated memorized answer. Then things would go off script again and he was lost in the fog. It was really bizarre. And Trump gave the most bizarre and lying performance I have ever seen, but that won’t matter. People won’t recall details of his lies — just that Trump seemed to be alive — and Biden looked like an Alzheimer patient half the time.
I wonder if the debate will boost third Party candidates — or just cause more people to not vote.
It will cause more people to not vote. Which will cause the Core Bases to vote even harder because the Core Bases will be struggling to outvote eachother.
So we will see who has the bigger Core Base in Electoral College terms, because a lot of non-core non-base voters will not be voting for President. Maybe they will still come out and vote for down-ticket people and things.
That’s just pure supposition on my part, to be sure.
Interesting observation!
There shouldn’t be a great advantage in knowing the questions as long as there isn’t anything unpredictable – like the Dukakis wife rape question – which there usually isn’t. These guys should have command over the issues, particularly limited to ones corporate media is going to toss.
Same thought…seemed scripted…
I found it sad. Biden was lost. Trump said nothing new. These clearly aren’t the best people the US could offer. Biden thinking he did well, reminds me of a disastrous interview with Prince Andrew…
Kennedy had an alternative debate. Unfortunately his voice sounded worse than usual to me.
After really thinking about this overnight and all the possible replacements ( again – that may not even be an option as you discuss above ) – I am convinced the only way the Dems can salvage this is to replace Biden with RFK. I strongly believe of all their options he is the only one who has even a chance of beating Trump at this point – and that is based on what I am seeing and hearing in my blue hive. Every single one of the others is fatally flawed in one way or the other.
The chances of them actually doing that are precisely ZERO.
I have never in my life seen such political incompetence as the current Dem DNC crowd. What a complete and totally fraudulent joke they have become
I’m not sure that it’s “lack of competence”; I think the problem is fundamentally “what are the Party’s goals?” The Party very competently suppressed significant challenges from the Left in 2016 and 2020. They can be effective at the things they are most concerned about.
They have done a bad job of preparing a deep bench, but if the goal of preventing the emergence of a politically effective Left is the overarching goal (as has been proposed by various people at NC; the D party keeps the Left down or at bay so that the R party can do whatever it wants), then perhaps the Party has been highly successful at what most matters to it.
The Party very competently suppressed significant challenges from the Left in 2016 and 2020. They can be effective at the things they are most concerned about.
yes to this. They live in a silo and can’t and or are uninterested in others.
The only thing I’d add is in addition to beating back the left, they also intend to insure nothing fundamentally changes. Again, mission accomplished.
Also worth noting, they’d rather fund-raise off Trump for another four years than have to deal with the multiple messes the Biden administration has teed up right now. Even if they had a bench, who wants to jump on this landmine?
Yes. Both parties are nothing more than aged, long-in-the-tooth, private businesses that put on desultory shows of competition, but have otherwise no other goal than to grift off the public purse. Their plan seems to be only: stay in power for one or at best two terms, during which time they sock away private fortunes, insider contacts and leverage they can exploit down the road, and then relinquish control after it becomes clear voters are even worse off now than before. Other than commanding party loyalty, both parties have absolutely no interest in the needs or lives of the public, except as targets of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and division.
I think that we are up for a series of single term (or less?) presidents until people finally effectively overthrow the whole cabal.
I suspect that another important point is that if the high-ups in the Democratic Party lose this election by doing nothing, they will keep their day jobs in the Party nevertheless and will still have their networks of corporate connections which will secure them directorships and sinecures at think-tanks.
Meanwhile, if they challenge Biden and then lose because of his delegates, or successfully replace Biden and then still lose the election, it will be clearly their fault and they will lose their day jobs and perhaps weaken their networks. So they have every possible incentive to keep to the status quo.
I think you are right. To repeat a comment I made earlier in Links, the Democrats have become almost exclusively a party of neoliberal technocrats serving global capital. And this relates to their “bench” problem. It’s hard to find neoliberal technocrats who have mass appeal, especially when anyone who gives the faintest hint of authentic “populism” is ostracized by the party. Republicans, on the other hand, have been appealing to the masses with their fake populist demagoguery since Nixon’s “silent majority” campaign in 1968. Then Trump came along and out-demagogued all the lesser Republican pretenders. Both parties are now reaping what they have sown.
What really disturbs me is the extent to which the Dems are now completely part of the bipartisan Party of War as well as the Party of Wall Street. In their “panic” about Biden’s performance the liberal media narrative is that Trump lied well, while Biden told the truth poorly. But this itself is a vicious lie. Yes, Trump just made up whatever he wanted. But Biden’s lies about Putin in Ukraine are more consequential. I seem to recall many other Biden quips that might be questioned – unless you actually believe that we have “the greatest health care in the world,” the greatest military, etc.
The Republicans have equally been unable to identify a popular neoliberal technocrat since Ronnie himself. Trump is only popular (for some) because he’s not one.
Yes. Though the term ‘technocrat’ implies competence as the source of power. More like kleptocrats or grifters, let’s be honest.
Thanks for posting this.
It looks as if the shenanigans in the UK Labour Party under the leadership of Keir Starmer and his campaign director Morgan McSweeney are leading in this very direction.
It’s one thing to knock the left off the field, but when they are the only section of the party that is creative in it’s thinking, and the potential cabinet is made up of placemen and placewomen of no noticeable merit, the the future brings trouble.
We also have, in the shape of the current shadow and possibly soon-to-be Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, our own equivalent of HRC, but without a “Slick Willy”.
It seems the US and UK centre-left are both in the same boat and equally lacking a paddle.
I fly home from San Francisco back to Blighty the day after next week’s General Election. I sure am looking forward to seeing what images the in-flight entertainment brings!
Dear UK, I write to apologize as I must take a break from following your political cluster***k. Due to an rather foreseeable s**t show of our own, I’ve run out of popcorn.
mrsyk
The DNC and the current Democratic establishments job is to contain the left. That is it. And they do a wonderful job.
Perhaps I’m unduly cynical, but “contain the left” suggests that the “left” is some kind of expanding torrent which must be stopped or it will overwhelm the land.
As far as I can see the “left” in America is a handful of intellectuals, some of them dishonest, a handful of powerless politicians, most of them fakes, and a handful of university students playing Che Guevara on their breaks. (Which last group is not to be despised, of course, but they are not going to influence the election, much less change the system.)
I suspect that “containing the left” is a tactic much more intended to mobilise the right wing of the Democrats than a tactic aimed at any real threat. Which would explain the Republicanization of the Democratic Party.
Well . . . they thought Sanders was a threat to them and they contained that threat.
And Obama specifically thought the Occupy Movement camps could become a threat to the upper class Obamagenda, so he and his Administration and DemParty Mayors co-ordinated the containment of Occupy also.
…..Nailed it!
Yes.
Our owners have things exactly where they want them. It’s the dems with the most potential for change, so it’s most critical for the dems to see no fundamental change will occur. Biden was never a sharp knife, but he certainly had that bit engraved in his memory… it should be on his, and better his party’s, tombstone.
Social media (including professional social media like LinkedIn) have made is remarkably easy to surround oneself w/”yes people,” grifters, sycophants, and nepotism—whether as employees, mentees, or just people to bounce ideas off of.
Both political parties need to implode. In 2008 I thought that it would be the GOP who would spend 15 years in the wilderness (like the UK Conservatives will soon).
the DC Dems. have decided to beat the GOP to the punch and slam into the wall at 160 mph.
I can’t imagine why you’d want to vote for him. RFK Jr. has absolutely no political experience and continues to promote false information, to his substantial personal profit, on necessary childhood vaccinations, causing real harm to the community.
Moreover, as soon as he was whispered to by AIPAC, he instantly changed his view on the Zionist revenge massacre going on in Palestine. To his credit, he’s been very good on the Ukraine war, the oligarchy and freedom of speech. But the antivax grift is a huge disqualifier for me.
The point is not that we support his policies but that he is potentially capable of winning.
“I have never in my life seen such political incompetence as the current Dem DNC crowd. What a complete and totally fraudulent joke they have become”
Same thing going on with the conservatives in Britain. Parallel worlds, same language.
Same thing going on with the alternative capitalist party in Britain too. As in the US, both uni-parties are equally, contemptible, capitalist, fantasist, jingoistic and incompetent.
I totally agree!
Biden stopped Sanders. This was the goal. This is what Obama came out of retirement for 1 phone call to achieve.
Howls to the contrary, I still think Democrats would prefer another Trump presidency to Sanders.
This article explains it quite well, written in 2015 but the same applies this ‘election’ cycle.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary
Biden stopped Sanders and contained Hillary. He’s always been a bit of a hot head and I don’t think his ego would tolerate a strong VP, so giggly Harris over Gabbard. My money is on the party giving Biden the hook, some way some how.
The DemParty doublecrossed and betrayed Gabbard so thoroughly that she resigned from it.
I don’t think she will ever run for anything under the DemParty label ever again.
She’s been auditioning for Republican acceptance and general support. If she has any self-preservation sense, she won’t serve in any capacity of any sort anywhere in a Trump Administration or anything even adjacent to it. Instead she will quietly study the terrain for possibility of a political future in a post-Trump Republican Party, if there is one.
The bigger question is who has the authority to press the nuclear red button.
If it is Biden, then, well….
If someone else can do it without the president’s conscious agreement, then who gave the person(s) in question that authority?
Oh, and it is actually, based on what is available as public information, not at all a cognitively trivial task to launch the nukes. It involves several layers of codes and verifications. The person in front of the camera yesterday absolutely does not seem capable of going through such a procedure.
Does that then mean that the US cannot launch the nukes in case it is attacked given that the president has to authorize it, and the president is not mentally/physically capable of doing it?
If not, then we are back to the issue of which person(s) that are not part of the established chain of command can do that, and why they are allowed to have such power…
I suspect there is a protocol for the military officer holding the nuclear football to press a “duress code” in the case the president is incompetent. There are a number of human in the line to actually shooting the missiles.
At this point in history, the U.S. should not have nuclear arms, given last night…..
How far from cluster bombs on a beach in Crimea to h bombs on DC?
They would rather lose with Biden than win with RFK, just as they had rather lost with Clinton, than had won with Bernie.
And also, would rather have lost with Biden than won with Bernie the second time. It just so happened that they happened to win with Biden, but they would have preferred Trump Term Two as against allowing Sanders being their nominee and maybing getting elected.
They prevented Sanders from being nominated twice in a row. They were competent enough to do that.
And since that was the core competency their funders demanded of them, their funders consider them competent enough for anti-New Deal work.
If they can’t stop a Renew-The-Deal Party from emerging and taking over large chunks of political and geographical territory, then the funders will drop the DemParty like a blue-powder-covered moldy orange.
But not till then.
We’ve come a long way since “Vote for Betty Ford’s husband” which was a hint of an admission the candidate choices the US gets weren’t so great.
I posted the pic of the leaders of France, UK, South Korea, Canada, Germany, Biden, and Eurocrats which itemizing poll numbers and lost/losing elections showing intense voter disapproval which the comment “Russian leaders sport 80% public approval. How do Western leaders rate?” on PMC stronghold Linkedin.
It got more views of anything I posted, until I posted Simplicus’ “Ruling Class Finally Awakens to the Reality of America’s Decline” which received even more hits.
The secret is out. The even among the PMC class, I’ve encountered a number who perk up when you mention US following in the footsteps of the collapse of the Roman Empire or related thinking.
Would you have a link to the full version of that Simplicus article, by chance?
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/ruling-class-finally-awakens-to-the
If America is following the footsteps of The Roman Empire, which part of America will be the Western Rome which falls, and which part of America will be the Byzantium which survives for another thousand years?
At one part of that debate Biden decided that it would be a fine idea for him to go down into the mud with Trump and sling accusations at him. Big mistake. When Trump was telling one of his lies at Biden, Biden could have instead replied ‘I will not dignify that lie with an answer. It would not be Presidential.’ That would have been a zinger of an answer but of course Biden went down to Trump’s level instead. As they say, ‘shoulda coulda woulda, didn’t.’
Biden is right that it is difficult to debate a liar.
I think that perhaps JRB would have been well-served to have employed a bit more ad hominem, but within the bounds of civility and accuracy.
Occasionally JRB got in a telling blow, and it was with brief, precise, valid thrusts, like “he is such a whiner.”
My suggestion: “The man’s a firehose of falsehood”. It’s doubly alliterative and, most importantly, it’s defensible.
“a loquacious liar”
The are probably many others that could be devised.
“a used car salesman” … if it weren’t so All-American.
yeah, well one thing Trump got right, at least in regards to the fraud Joe Biden (a fraud his entire career) was about those who thought the individual states should have final say on abortion:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/07/19/fact-check-1982-biden-voted-overturn-roe-v-wade/7799548001/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/politics/biden-abortion-rights.html
Biden… meh…
“pompous prevaricator”
I kind of like it, but there are too many syllables for use in normal discourse.
It might, however, do nicely as the 2nd line of a haiku.
let’s try:
loquacious liar,
pompous prevaricator:
our next president
evokes spiro agnew
People keep bringing up Trump’s lying, but what about Biden’s? He lied profusely as well, and has for his entire career, but I keep reading about Trump’s lies today. Have people completely forgotten who Biden is and has always been or is this more TDS?
Maybe people have decided that Trump is the more liarly lying liar and that Biden’s lies don’t sanctify Trump’s lies by comparision. Maybe people dismiss using Biden’s lies to sanctify or at least excuses Trump’s lies as just-so-much MAGAsbara for Trump.
pompous prevaricator
gold fish impersonator
real smooth agitator
overcooked potato…
Sade:
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=sade+smooth+opeator&&mid=B45C6B2E95D9B8C3EAFDB45C6B2E95D9B8C3EAFD&&FORM=VRDGAR
If Biden is so concerned about debating a liar, perhaps he ought to stop doing it himself first.
A parable about motes and beams comes to mind…
It certainly was for Sanders, when he asked Biden in their debate about Biden repeatedly trying to cut social security, and Biden just kept reiterating that it wasn’t him. Sanders wouldn’t call him a liar. Oops.
That’s when the scales fell from my eyes and I knew it was over for Bernie.
Biden is right. I actually feel bad that Trump had to go through that.
For those of you who watched the debate, can it be plausibly held that Trump lied more than Biden—or so significantly more that he can be called the “liar” as opposed to Biden’s “fool”? I am no fan of either, but I have noted a tendency among some to pretend as though Trump were uniquely mendacious, when in fact I find Trump in general to be no more mendacious than most other presidents and presidential candidates.
Trump is not so much a liar as a bullshitter (see Harry Frankfurt).
Trump lies on at least two levels. One is to state false truth claims. The second is to steadily insist upon a theory of the world in which single factors are given grossly exaggerated power. When he talks about how “immigration has ruined the country” we’re just a short hop from saying it is evil, or the Devil, that’s to blame, and we all know how powerful he is. Who cares about manufacturing jobs being sent overseas, financialization, etc? Focusing on those factors become an act of indiscipline, disloyalty to the redemptive forces that are being gathered. It’s become a matter of proper faith to be monocausal.
Again though, how can anyone say this is unique to Trump?
It is not unique to Trump.It is unique among those aspiring to the presidency. Trump is a bullshitter (as above see Harry Frankfort) Truth, falsehood, plausibility are irrelevant. What matters it will it sell? Will it persuade? Other candidates shade the truth, tell lies. I have been listening to candidates since Harry Truman. Among that crowd Trump is unique.
Would work better if Biden himself could manage to make it longer between his own falsehoods.
Is Trump smart enough to lie?
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember the story.
Same for Biden only he may have been….
BTW, the experts Trump has are sure of the tale.
I refused to watch the so-called “debate” (which I described to a friend as akin to being forced to listen to a cat being strangled with an accordion), but what amazes me in the aftermath of this train-wreck is how many of my acquaintances were gobsmacked by Totenkopf’s zombie-like performance and by the failure of the moderators to call-out Dummkopf’s stream of lies and misleading assertions.
People who have been reliant on CNN, the NYT, The Guardian, or their chosen Twitter/X lanes were clueless about the reality of the situation before us. They are this morning rending their garments and wringing their hands when they have only their own gormlessness to blame. Bernie Sanders’ cowardly failure to call-out the DNC for the way that they strangled a fair and open primary process in 2016 and 2020 is also a yuge factor in this catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the looting of our rudderless ship of state by the Military-Finance Complex and Our Billionaire Overlords is certain to continue unabated for another 4 years. Which is precisely what the current political party leadership cabals intend (talking about you, Mrs. C).
Well-said, and the vocabulary and the imagery was icing on that very nice cake:
Gormlessness. When’s the last time you saw that word in circulation?
” a cat being strangled with an accordion”. Oh, if only….
And the last part about 4 more years of accelerating and ever-more-humiliating decline is … about right. This is going to be sooo awkward.
In conversation with my wife last night, I wondered aloud whether this might a be good time to extract from the public scene, and re-allocate that attention here in my own household, where I have at least a modicum of influence, and things are occasionally rational.
There is a mini-public and micro-public scene, such as blogs like this one, where one can have influence with well-placed high-information comments. People can take the information in those comments out into their own meat-space analog reality-sphere lives and do something real and effective with it.
“a cat being strangled with an accordion”. masterpiece.
On the internet, you just know that a statement like that cannot go unrebutted.
As a cat owner and accordion player, there is a very real risk of dropping the accordion on the cat; accordions can be surprisingly heavy and awkward (some would say that applies equally to how they sound) and a cat always seems to appear just as you’re trying to heave the instrument out of the case.
From one of the Prairie Home Companion’s old “Joke Show”s: Definition of ‘perfect pitch’–When you toss a banjo into the dumpster and it lands on top of the accordion.” :)
I do love my Maine Coon and I’m a big fan of Flaco Jiménez…
Speaking as a cat-lover and a They Might Be Giants fan, I think a concertina would be a more effective feline assassination system.
But that was indeed a brilliant image which deserves to be carved on the tombstones of both candidates.
If possible, by close of business today.
I am at a public library computer right now, so I can’t hear anything on you tube, but I have heard some of the most high-detail amazing accordion playing under the category of ” Serbian Accordion”.
I can’t hear it, but these look like a couple of nice guys and fast-fingered accordion players, for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCrNORbMuR0
NC, a few months ago, posted an interview by a Gentleman who had interviewed the attorney who had filed suit on Sanders behalf. That interview really was surprising and I believe relevant to what we are witnessing today. I wish I could remember the name of the gentleman who provided the interview. It certainly was very informative and rather blunt and really struck at the core of what we believe to be true versus actual reality in today’s political landscape.
Can anybody link to this?
This is not that interview, but there’s another interview with the attorney(s) in question (Jared and Elizabeth Beck) on Sabby Sabs’ YouTube channel from about a year ago. Perhaps you’ll find it useful.
Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be able to link to it, but you can find it on YouTube if you’ll search there for Sabby Sabs and Jared Beck. The title is “DNC Fraud Lawsuit Lawyers Speak Out.”
Hope this helps!
HRC is the path of least resistance. Reality is even more bizzarro than the most dystopian 70’s movie.
Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. She still quite literally owns the DNC. Then she can lose to Trump twice, because most voters will see right through her machinations and refuse once again to turn-out for her.
I’m sure Clinton is working that angle.
That said I don’t think she has a shot of winning. And I say that not just because of her obvious shortcomings.
At this point a lot of people who both trusted the press and their political leaders have to have realized that all those so-called fake right wing videos had a basis in fact and that a large number of people were either hiding his condition or were deluded about him as well. Neither of which engenders trust. Clinton stuck her finger in the wind and played good apparatchik giving Biden her full support and calling out the people claiming he had problems.
Right now people are focusing on the obvious issue, Biden is not fit to run much less be President. But as the shock wears off the betrayals of trust will become increasingly obvious to them. And there is going to be fall out for both the press and top Democrats. I may be giving the public too much credit, but imo the fitness of the President to govern and to run is too vital for politics for most of the population. This is not going to be pretty.
Pat:
The thing that truly causes the mind to seize up is that Clinton is the leading warmonger in the U S of A. She’s never seen a war that she didn’t approve of.
She’s a thorough mediocrity. I am reminded how Hannah Arendt kept pointing out how thoroughly mediocre Eichmann was.
And she has no power base, other than upper-middle-class white chicks, so 4 percent of the populace. That weird tic of hers, of mentioning “when my husband did blah blah blah,” shows that she’s like RFKJr, trading on some fading dream of the New Deal that they wrecked.
But I’ve seen odder things happen than a new nomination for Hillary. It takes a Hillary to save the village, right?
The difficulty with “shock” and “betrayals of trust” is that in a fast decline, one thinks that one has hit bottom. There turn out to be many more bottoms to fall through.
Arendt’s work on Eichman was severely flawed and widely attacked as such by both the judges in the case, and many of her contemporaries. Eichman was not “mediocre” he was a confirmed anti-semite Nazi. This article covers the reaction to her work, and the many flaws in it:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390334198d9Ezra.pdf
Another self-hating Jew??
There are self-loving Jews who don’t hate themselves. They just hate all the other Jews and resent being somehow considered somehow related to them. Henry Kissinger was one of those.
https://newrepublic.com/article/177334/did-henry-kissinger-hate-jews
The phrase ” self-hating Jew” has been weaponized as a handy go-to accusation, along with “antisemitism”. But just as antisemitism is still a real thing, self-hating jews were a real thing. I don’t know how many of them there were, but here is an example of one such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Weininger
Then again, if you type the phrase ” self hating German Jewish philosopher” into the Yahoo search engine ( I don’t use Google so I don’t know what that would bring up), you get a bunch of entries illustrating and demonstrating the political uses of the weaponised ” self-hating Jew” accusation.
DJG, regarding HRC’s chances. Kindly remember that the results are not necessarily the will of the voter. Which candidate’s backers’ combination of cheating and lawfare will decide the outcome. I would say her chances are good.
Well, as Morpheus said in that Matrix movie . . . ” there is no bottom.”
It is what it is! But to me, the solution seems obvious. First, let Gavin
Newsom give the nominating speech at the Convention. Second, if
you’re worried about cognitive decline in the next term for Biden, dump
Kamala and put in a woman who is sharp and attractive for VP. That way
a) a fresh face and fresh energy for the Party b) In case of the worst aged-
related emergency during Biden’s second term in office, the Veep will be
in place to take over, and a historic precedent would be set for a woman President. The Prophesy of Power is Enthusiasm!
Affirmative action hires are unfireable
I wonder if Trump will prepare to meet the Affirmative Action-hire DemParty VP nominee head on by making Candace Owens his VP running mate?
( If he picks Tulsi Gabbard, and if she is unwise enough to accept, I will have to wonder about the quality of her ability to judge the character of people. Why would Trump treat her better than he treats any of his other designated disposable underlings? )
She’s pasty, cranky and ready! (Plus, it’s still her turn!)
Priceless headline about exactly this from The Onion, posted around the time of the debate last night (“CNN Cuts To Black As Hillary Clinton Rushes Debate Stage”): https://www.theonion.com/trump-charged-with-37-federal-counts-in-classified-docu-1850530808
Real link
Argh, thanks! I did that 3 times and the URL at the onion kept switching on me. I thought it right on the third try. I’m glad you caught it and posted the correct link.
Those who only listened to the 1960 debate thought that Nixon had won…
You’d never get that idea listening to Biden yesterday and not seeing him, he sounded incoherent and frequently ran out of time to make his point, leaving broken syntax all over the place.
It is important to remember that Trump and Biden are not the real problems. They are symptoms of the problem that is the cause of the failure of the American government. At the center of the problem is the two political parties collaborating to maximize their profits. This includes that Hillary Clinton and Obama have been leading the push for Biden all along, in spite of what they had to know. Their reputations should be ruined,
You are mistaking the courtiers for the truly powerful, the ownership class. That class owns both political parties and this is just theatre. From Reagan to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden did anything substantive get done for the working people of America? Or did the rich just keep getting richer and the security state strengthened?
It wasn’t so much that Biden was hoarse, his voice was just old man weak.
Exactly, as a retired nurse I this saw this all the time…it was always sad to hear and see the downward spiral of old age…but at least my patients were looked after and protected not put on show for all to see.
Thanks for this. Haven’t seen the term “veal pen” in a while. But that’s what comes to mind after reading the delusional conclusions on the debate of the democratic party media cheerleaders. I thought I might have been dematerialized into a different reality. Thanks for beaming me back down to terra firma.
The question here, I think, is not what the “cognoscenti” conclude (or are able to rationalize), but, rather what the typical voter will decide. Quintillian aside, the man of good character was a disaster beyond belief. Trump was his usual blustering, lying self. But at least one could understand what he was saying.
I didn’t see anyone of good character up there, including the commentators.
Dana Bash’s husband was one of the 51 Intel people. That sound byte was news to many. What a small world around DC.
Goodbye, Joe, he gotta go, me oh my oh
He gotta go, price of gas & vittles up the wazoo
His Ukraine sleaze smothered in pleas, me oh my oh
Hunter’s his son, laptop revelations up the wazoo
Don’t run in ’24!, the internet is buzzin’
Demo kinfolk come to see Kamala by the dozen
In Donkey Show style they go hog wild, me oh my oh
Sum of all fears, she’ll end his term on the Potomac
Kamala & VP Pete and mumbo jumbo
Joe’s gonna be my Chernenko
Har de har they’ll both be stars any day oh
Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun deciphering the mumbo jumbo
Settle down far from DC town, get him in his Corvette
And he’ll catch all the ‘hey-nice car’ looks in Delaware
Swap him historically with Hoover, you bet
Hunter’s his son, he’ll have big fun riding shotgun
To the tune of classic Hank Williams. Brilliant!
“….So even if the idea of an early debate did not originate with Biden, it seems improbable that he was railroaded into it…”
Could you please stop using that word “the idea”, it has a bad connotation in my mind since last night debate.
This is outrageous, I demand to have two new candidates – these geriatric freaks are the same two as last time, how boring! We got ripped off with retreads
How about two younger, more handsome (or two lovely ladies) that are mentally-sharp and have good comedic skills. We plebs demand a better, more quality freak-show.
How about some chariot-races, or a gladiator show? Is Mel Brooks still around?
Since the best the US can do is silly, superficial, spectacle – I want better entertainment!
Why was I hit with the images of Julia Louis Dreyfus and Jane Lynch or Niecy Nash while reading this???
(Do any of the actual female politicians have good comedic skills?)
Perhaps having Kathy Griffin ( complete with prop ) debate Trump would work.
Mel Brooks is still with us and it looks like today is his 98th birthday. I bet he’s still sharper than either of the two on stage last night.
Heh heh, I’ve been much tempted to quote from his work today.
@JonnyJames, 11:07 am
We had a close call in Canada re your wishes for the US. A handsome well-dressed (best dresser in Parliament!!) Maxime Bernier was a Conservative Member of Parliament – a libertarian who had a shapely biker moll girlfriend who wore revealing dresses to political functions. Sadly Bernier had to resign as Foreign Minister in 2008 after he left NATO documents lying around her apartment.
He came back soon after and a number of years later almost won the Conservative Party leadership in 2017 with 49% of the vote. His economic policies would have crashed the economy and he had worrisome thoughts on diversity issues. Nonetheless he opposed the Iraq war, had serious reservations about Afghanistan and was supportive of gay and individual rights. He was also the only political leader to denounce Vice-Prime Minster Chrystia Freeland for holding up a Bandera flag (“a Nazi flag”) at a pro-Ukraine rally.
While I never would have have considered voting for him he was quite entertaining compared to the vast majority of drab nonentities sitting in Parliament.
I’ll talk to Gavin about it. He was patiently waiting his term, but he might not have
a Democracy to run for later.
Couldnt the fact that Congress continually refused to codify Roe vs Wade into law be interpreted as wanting the states to decide? Biden’s own response highlights this. Civil rights were codified into law by Congress. His own argument works against him
A very interesting point.
A very good point.
There was a few times I could swear I saw Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in Joe’s countenance, and after the break his eyes resembled Marshall Applewhite, of Heaven’s Gate infamy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4MKRLF1r3Mw&pp=ygUhcnVwcmVjaHQgbWF5IGkgZ28gdG8gdGhlIGJhdGhyb29t
Yep. He probably did do it last night.
“here it showed two men, which as often happens with the aged, having become even more of who they are, and not in a good way”
Many thanks to Yves Smith for this insight into the political and personal situation. This sentence is something that has to be said.
It is hardly complimentary. A less charitable version is the saying, There’s no fool like an old fool.
mrsyk June 27, 2024 at 11:08 pm
This is the worst version of King Lear I’ve ever seen
(twitterverse gold)
I very much appreciate this observation by mrsyk. I recall seeing a production of King Lear in Chicago in which the actor playing Lear entered screaming. Where does one go from a bellow? Two hours later, I was ready for his death on stage, with no regrets.
The sooner that Biden and Trump understand that Ripeness Is All and then make their exits, the better the U.S. populace will be. Here from the comparatively tranquil, and definitely better fed, Undisclosed Region, I feel as if I am peeking into a mad house.
Henry Moon Pie is our local expert on the Dao. This chapter (number 60) has been going through my brain often these last few days. What is to be done, brethren and sistren?
Fish.
Meaning: “Govern a large country in the same way you would cook a small fish; you must be delicate.
Let the spirit of the Tao govern the land, and evil spirits will have no power.
Not that the evil spirits will depart, but the effects they have on the people will be insignificant,
and the effects of the Sage on the people will also not be burdensome.
Since the spirits and the Sage do not cause harm, all will be in balance.”
— Translated by Rivenrock, Chapter 60
As to the article, Anderson is emerging from some parochial world where the word abortion gets thrown around but no one every gets around to protecting women, encouraging women to unionize so as to have a structure of economic protection, or enhancing health care with a focus on outcomes for women (which also means infant / maternal mortality). Funny about.
And Cary, well, Yves Smith’s comment that I quote up top is way, way beyond the observations that Cary has to offer.
[As is so often the case, Yves Smith’s and Lambert Strether’s headnotes are better than the articles offered. Complimenti!]
I wish I could properly credit the author of that tweet.
Democrats and women? Nah. They’re too busy telling us that men are women if they say they are and that women have no right to single-sex spaces, including prisons, or sports. Women who object are today’s witches to be, if not burned at stake, cast out and accused of bigotry and transphobia. “Woman” can be a state of mind in a man’s head, merely a regressive stereotype. A woman can’t even call a man a man in a public library. I can’t believe this is happening.
Au contraire, as I get older I endeavor to not be the jerk my first wife married.
Some wines age well, some not.
Thanks for the shout out, DJG, but no expert am I. Chapter 60 is in accord with this passage which is always brought to mind for me when watching the geniuses who would mold public opinion, and who have spent the last four years trying to convince us that Joe is just fine:
Tao te Ching #57 (Le Guin rendition)
Taibbi/Kirn talk about it live right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duuQ3OxZihQ
Wow…as not a watcher of MSNBC….
Joe Scarborough’s monologue is straight up 100% neocon and pro-Biden; and Scarborough is an ally of “progressives”?
And wow, (as not a reader of Friedman anymore), Tom weeped in his hotel room? lol, ok.
Joe Scarborough is a cranky not fun version of actor Jimmy Neutron. His hair makes it impossible to watch with any kind of seriousness while his dour foil sits nearby audibly knashing her chiclets.
That was really good. Maybe a recorded version will be made available.
The sum up would be Kirn saying it’s probably too late for the Dems to save themselves and a wind up saying that Trump is a shrewd politician who plays off of his opponents hatred (whatever Trump’s faults ethically or as a thinker). And also that this election and Trump’s very historic success is about concrete material benefits or the lack thereof. Our two pundits must have been reading Lambert.
Looks like a playable version is available at the same link.
thanks for sharing.
nice to hear the perspective of a (relatively) old-school beat reporter (Walter).
Walter just needs to subscribe to a better tier of internet speed, and/or tell his wife to stop streaming Netflix during a live stream
Joe’s performance can be explained though, apparently a paratrooper landed in the debate studio off camera, and Biden was distracted for 90 minutes,
Wasn’t it Francois Mitterrand?
In today’s NYTimes both Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman urge Biden to drop out. I rarely agree with either gent, but today they both spoke truth. Any comparison with rats leaving a sinking ship is of course in the eye of the beholder.
Gurgle gurgle, squeak squeak . . .
If the ship is going down, can we keep the rats from escaping?
Reposting this link I had seen on a comment on Lemmy and posted on last night’s live blog here – it shows the google trends for “open convention” massively spiking as the debate unfolded, with the concentration of queries coming from Washington, D.C.: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=US&q=open%20convention&hl=en
Lawrence O’donnell of MSNBC said before the debate that it all was just stupid. Decisions are not made by debate and certainly not in 2 minutes. It’s done by listening to a variety of opinions, discussing the options, then making a decision. Unless you are Trump, then it’s all based on a gut feeling and who ever sucks up the most.
It seems possible that Mr O’Donnell had a premonition/advanced warning of the upcoming slaughter. Here’s a tweet from the 28th on how completely invested in a Biden nomination he is.
Lawrence O’Donnell
@Lawrence
Washington was filled with panic talk of replacing the Democratic nominee at exactly this time in 1992.
Gallop poll June 1992
Perot 39%
Bush 31%
Clinton 25%
10:46 AM · Jun 28, 2024
·
133.9K
Views
Ah, you’re rubbing salt in old wounds there, mrsyk. 1992 was the first election I really paid attention to, and I was a big Perot fan. Everything was pointing up for the folksy Texan until he abruptly pulled out of the race right around July 4, claiming that G.W. Bush was threatening his daughter’s wedding.
Lee Atwater was still around back then, IIRC, or at least his spirit had taken hold. I am not sure old Ross was just being paranoid. “Dirty tricks” were pioneered by the first Bush campaign – remember Willie Horton?
By November Ross was back but the damage was done. By 1994 Clinton had betrayed the middle class with NAFTA.
How different would the country look today if Perot had won, NAFTA and GATT never passed, and the Clintons political careers aborted?
Ross was right about that giant sucking sound!
Now that’s a “what if” worth considering. The Clintons put in as much or more work than anyone wrecking our country.
Your last sentence looks to me a bipartisan practice, no?
I saw that about 5 million watched the uncensored debate on X and I thought that RFK jr. was the clear winner, though like the other two there were questions he left unanswered veering off topic. I thought it is hopeful that he even gave a reasonable response to the Israel conflict. Not the response I would be excited about, but a much improve position from where he has been. I feel some of this weird behavior might be due to early on Israel supporters threatening his wife, but either way I think he’ll be better on this than the other two.
https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1806462171892895808?
RFK does get into the weeds in a very long winded fashion.
revisiting some puzzling words: “we beat Medicare”
Are there any theories of what might have been the real-world correlate of this vocalization?
Perhaps it was incomplete — “we beat [back Progressive aspirations to expand] Medicare” (referring to the suppression of the Left and its “M4A” agenda in 2016 and 2020)?
He was about to say “We beat Medicare for All”, but had a moment of lucidity.
Thank you; that makes perfect sense.
Perhaps the lack of a live audience contributed to this near admission — just looking into a camera, one might be more concerned about what the big money donors are thinking, and one suspects that many of them are very happy that M4A was suppressed.
m4a would save the corporations hundreds of billions every year. Those premiums really add up.
In retrospect, it’s a huge shame that JRB didn’t complete the thought (granting your highly plausible suggestion that this was the intention), “We beat Medicare for All.”
It would have been a wonderfully clarifying moment. The mask dropping in the sight of the entire world.
And DJT’s response would have been illuminating, too. IIRC back in the early days of his administration, in one of the endless fruitless meetings to determine how to get rid of the ACA, DJT was reported to have asked, “Why don’t we just enroll everyone in Medicare?”
He could still run on that, me thinks, though with opponents like JRB, he won’t need to.
Could be a fab insight.
Think of our elites mental issues… you’ve got your private actual goals as instructed by our oligarchs and then you’ve got your stated goals and positions that you need to have publicly to get elected. But then senility slowly seeps in and you might get confused, especially in an important, high pressure pres debate. It’s easy to imagine a near slip of the tongue.
To me it seems clear, he can’t get Covid and Medicare untangled in his response. He was supposed to say:
We finally beat Covid
as the strong rhetorical close. A lie, but he was supposed to send the message.
Trump then took it at face value and whacked him with it. This confused people. Both Trump and Biden accidentally spoke the truth. Very disconcerting.
I thought he meant “We beat covid”. It’s a phrase he’s used before. Medicare (for all) just as plausible. Who knows. . .
So if Biden is in non compos mentis, and after last night even the NYT/CNN crowd have to admit he is, who is really running the show. It doesn’t appear that anyone is asking the question. Is such an observation jejune, does everyone know this is theater, we all accept there is a permanent bureaucracy and/or hidden elites really in control?
Are you not all entertained yet?
https://youtu.be/ZtyjY6VjF9Q?si=RZKa9wR6ufQqwPK9
we all accept there is a permanent bureaucracy and/or hidden elites really in control?
As a foreigner, I don’t really grasp the structure of the US government but I don’t think you have a permanent public service or civil service in the way that some country like Britain or Canada does. What you seem to have is a bunch of floating bodies who circulate in and out of the government depending on which party is in power.
In some ways this may be the equivalent of a permanent civil service but without the institutional knowledge and experience that a true permanent civil service brings to the table.
As to who is running the country, I was very impressed by Aurillian’s comments a couple of years ago where he described the shifting alliances between various power groups in the US government. I can’t remember the details at the moment but I think he was saying that the CIA was in alliance with the justice department but with the new president they were forging a new alliance with the state department or some such nonsense.
I think we can say that given that everyone in the government has a least a general agreement with where the US is going, there is no one source of direction, it depends on which of the competing departments and political groupings went out as you keep in time but as President Putin’s has put, at least in the international stage, presidents come and go but the policy remains the same.
I will say I think that the current policies in Ukraine as a result of a small cabal in the state department, Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan, and a few others but it’s really hard to tell. Clearly Biden is not deciding policy but whom is doing it overall very difficult to know.
Some of the Biden Administration’s initiatives, things such as dealing with conglomerates and monopolies seems suggest that some of his internal people are very different from the ones that we see in the State Department.
I guess, as an outsider, my opinion would be the US is is responding to a large number of interest groups, essential needs and who knows what else with the US president basically sitting on a bucking bull and pretending he’s in control.
We do have a class of civil servants in the various Agencies, Bureaus, Departments, etc. They are the CS-(grade whatever) people. People like . . . meat inspectors, USDA agricultural researchers, National Park Rangers, etc. etc. BLM land managers, stuff like that.
The senior-most 50,000 or so of them is what Trump would strip of Civil Service protection if re-elected, so he can threaten them with firing if they don’t follow his Administration’s political orders.
And if fired for resisting, replaced with political commissars and economic commissars.
This reminds me of a Kliban cartoon which I could only get “close too” by search-engining. Here is a link to a whole bunch of cartoons. I picked the one I wanted. It’s very own URL did not show it. So I will offer the link to the whole bunch of “images” and hope this one comes up the way I picked it.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrFFXK2hYBmKA8LIs9XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?p=kliban+cartoons+the+mind+grows+dim+the+body+rots+who%27s+watching+the+store&fr=sfp#id=0&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.coldbacon.com%2Fpics%2Fkliban%2Fbkstore.jpg&action=click
My impression is that while civil service exists, political appointees can override their opinions and advice, and they do. For example, State Department must periodically certify that recipients of US funds do not violate human rights, and Israel gets such a blessing with clockwork regularity, in spite of wide dissatisfaction among civil servants of DoS. OTOH, there is a strong probability that majority of civil servants are opportunists who defer to whoever is in charge of the department of to a clique from Deep State.
So, just had CNN on, and another person was talking about how Biden should pull out, because, if Trump wins, Democracy is in great peril. Right. A democratically elected candidate is a danger to democracy. I hear it over and over.
Hilarious, they say the same tired BS every 4 years. “Our democracy in danger” “historic elections” “most important elections in a lifetime” Any knuckle-dragging mouth-breather can simply repeat the same nonsense but these sycophants get paid millions a year, so they must be very “intelligent”
I find it darkly hilarious that they say things like this and in my view, the main reason they stuck with Biden is to avoid actually running a primary and allowing voters any kind of say in which candidate got the Democratic nomination. Someone needs to get that meme of to identical Spider Man characters pointing at each other out.
But seriously…. how about The Gaviner (Gov. Newsom) D, and Gov. Kristi Noem, R? I hear many ladies find Gavin quite handsome, and many men find Noem very attractive.
They might be just two more mendacious and morally-challenged politricksters, but at least they aren’t senile and they are superficially attractive – that’s all that counts. And they will both support the Genocide of Palestine and the Proxy War on Russia and China. What’s not to like?
I have to wonder…if AIPAC wanted Biden gone would he be gone?
Yup. I’ve been mulling this point over while pushing the reel mower around the yard (rather ineffectively, that mower demands some focus if one wants it to work well.) I’m thinking Biden took Brutus’s blade last night, and within your comment perhaps lies the motive. Time for a fresh face with fresh reasons for aiding abetting the slaughter in Gaza? Was Joe getting unsteady in his support? There is no friggin way that that performance wasn’t allowed with intent. The AIPAC angle presents one (admittedly not well sussed out) reasonable motive.
Things Ukraine maybe catching up with him as well/instead?
I must admit that I’m not seeing any substitution candidate that AIPAC wouldn’t be fine with, so maybe it’s a simpler take which would be team blue getting their preferred candidate in place without the odious task of performing democracy.
Or, the simplest case, everybody’s high on long covid, and team blue thinks they won the debate.
Pass the popcorn. And the whiskey.
Excellent tinfoil. Why dump him now after keeping the corpse alive for so long? The Thelemites are in control.
Thank you. Im long tinfoil.
Even the CPSU leadership in the early/mid 1980s was wise enough to ensure that the ailing Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko were stage managed such that they did not have to answer questions or do anything other than read carefully prepared scripts (in outsize font for Brezhnev), and then were kept in appropriate seclusion when Andropov’s kidney failure and Chernenko’s emphysema became too advanced.
You would have thought that DNC managers would have taken more care, and would have avoided ‘elder abuse’ this kind.
The *only* reason why GenJo has been wheeled out for another term must surely be the paucity of credible/popular alternative candidates. When Newsom is about the least implausible ‘eligible’ alternative, the party must surely reason it has a serious problem.
Froghole: The *only* reason why GenJo has been wheeled out for another term must surely be the paucity of credible/popular alternative candidates.
No. It’s not the only reason, though it’s a big one.
You’re in the UK, I believe. Others here have alluded to this: a big — perhaps bigger — reason is the vastly larger money involved in US politics. If Biden can’t be wheeled out for another term, then all the people in Biden’s machine — the handlers, the campaign strategists, all the rest — are going to be substantially less wealthy, may indeed have their careers ended and have to sell their fine homes in DC and go back to wherever they may have come from.
Washington is Hollywood for ugly people and psychopaths, as one American saying has it
It was the same thing in 2016: the massive animus in DC against Trump in 2016 was no small measure driven by the many people in Washington who’d expected to punch their ticket when Hillary rolled into the White House and didn’t get to.
Reagan’s first debate performance with Mondale in October 1984 raised serious questions about his mental fitness. At best, he looked confused. He lost a big chunk of his huge lead in the polls afterward. He looked better in the 2nd debate (“refused to make Mondale’s youth and inexperience an issue”) so the first effort was memory-holed.
Aha, thank you for that correction. I was of voting age but not paying close attention.
That was the election where Reagan got 535 electoral votes, and Mondale only won Minnesota (his home state) by .18% So yes, at the end of the day that debate did not change the outcome.
Speaking of which–viewership for this debate was down 35% from the first debate in 2020. It was the earliest one in “modern times”. The rule of thumb/trope was that “low-information” voters don’t start paying attention until Labor Day. So possibly this debate was too early to make a big difference?
I’m old and jaded but even so I couldn’t stomach “the debate.” It was sickening. In a world blowing itself up, stealing, lying, murdering, torturing, polluting everything from air to water to our sense of Justice and moral obligation, we offer up this shit? This goddamn crap? Are we trying to be meaningless? Absurd? It is unbelievable that we allow these sick, stupid people to lead us. Clearly Marx got the sequence backwards because we have been living out a farce for a good century and it has finally turned into tragedy. Kind of a galloping, headless tragedy.
What does it say about people that vote for either of these lying narcissistic assholes? Nobody is forcing them to.
If you vote for someone, you indicate you want that person to lead you. Many want either Biden or Trump to lead us. And here we are.
A lot of people vote “for” someone strictly to prevent the “other” someone from leading us.
In 2016 I voted “for” Trump. That doesn’t mean I “wanted” Trump to be President. It means that I wanted Clinton to be President EVen LESS. Plus I wanted revenge for NAFTA.
( The person I WANTED was Sanders. But the DemParty wouldn’t let me have my Sanders. So I wouldn’t let the DemParty have its Clinton).
Skeksis, all of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCCtFEX7U1k
When I played this, my wife commented from across the room, “Oh, is that from the debates?”
I’m sorry, but this was the lie of the night and it isn’t close:
In what cognitive world could he have even come up with something so declarative as this? The debate should have been stopped immediately and his cabinet should invoke the 25th, b/c he has no credibility to be commander-in-chief.
Copying Trump?? Just lie, no one notices or cares.
Trump managed a couple of truths last night. They were regarding covid. This is noted only for accuracy.
Biden lies quite well on his own.
I would not be surprised if a “medical emergency’ happened that forced Biden out.
I’ve never been a big fan of Sanders — but I now wonder how many Democrats now wish that Obama hadn’t got on the phone and conspired with all the other Democrats running to drop out to prop up Biden in the last election?
Probably a few more than say Pennsylvania voters lamenting Dr Oz. Never the less, people do like to “what if”. Pretty sure we’d be in a similar spot to where we are now. Or worse, thinking about that four year break HRC had to take on “Project Ukraine”. We could all be nuked right now.
I’m going to step out of my asbestos suit for a moment and just say it. In a strange, sad, sick way I feel that Trump’s heart is in the right place (relative to the competition).
I didn’t always feel this way, back in his hotel & The Apprentice days, I really couldn’t stand him. But what he said in the debate about the tragedy of so many lives wasted in Ukraine — I think he actually believes that, he’s one of the very few mainstream characters that says it.
But then he Trump’s-out and doesn’t answer easy questions like “What would you do to ease the burden of childcare” and “How would you help people fighting opioid addiction”. Four years of being president, four years of practising what to say, four years to just sound presidential, and he couldn’t do it. If this was ice dancing or gymnastics, questions like that are just the compulsories, we don’t care about the answers (we do, but) we just need to see you do them. Even: “I don’t know the answer to this terrible, terrible problem, but let me tell you how, as president, I will find an answer …” Something. Anything.
For me, that’s when I really just shook my head and flushed the last few ounces of benefit-of-the-doubt for either candidate (can’tdidates) down the toilet.
On a bright note (now safely back in my asbestos suit) I really, actually, liked the format and thought the CNN moderators did a good job asking both sides fair questions with calm, orderly moderation. I wouldn’t mind seeing more like that I have to say.
not sure that “heart in right place” is the best interpretation. DJT seems to be good at noticing truths that, when attention is called to them, make his opponents look (justly) bad. IMO he has a good sense of “political utility”.
Or maybe it’s a keen sense of innuendo. Calling attention to the tragedy in Ukraine, that he rightly points out was unnecessary, kind of makes JRB look like a monster for not preventing it (again, IMO rightly). I don’t think there’s actual compassion for the sufferings of the people of Ukraine; it’s politically useful rhetoric.
Didn’t the the Trump administration arm Ukraine?
Yes, it did, and it also unilaterally broke the nuclear INF Treaty with Russia. None of that was played up however, since it contradicted #McResistance dogma about Russiagate.
Great bit but I give you 4/5 for being overly verbose
This is the Biden debate performance I had expected in his one-on-one debate with Bernie in 2020. Four years and three months too late. Sigh.
Bernie could have forced it to happen, but Bernie was just too nice to Biden to back him into any cognitive corners.
Bernie never did have what it takes to win the PrezNom. He is just too nice a guy for national level politics.
Here is a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie discussing ( in another context) what it takes to win a fight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yid-CW-O9Qw
You have to be willing to take your tied-up opponent out onto the Courthouse Square at High Noon and pour gasoline over him and set him on fire. And you have to enjoy it. I don’t have what it takes to go into politics so I never went into politics.
11:22 Seattle, Fri. 28 Jun 2024
Just woke up from a long nap, day 6 of this ‘mild’ covid.
A quick skim of the comments reinforces a thought that slammed into me before the nap.
It is all going perfectly!
A week after the Dem-0-RAT$ convene in Chicago, in Aug, it is Labor Day & the race to election day & The Casa Blanca. That leaves 6 ish weeks of hand wringing and brow furrowing and finger wagging and Hard Anal-is and Cold Reality & the usual uproar over some obscure rule blah blah
And Deus Ex Machina!
And out comes The Emergency We’re-Inna-Tough-Spot Approved $avior
[and ignore the stench Wall $treet & the MIC & the bandaid MIC & the energy kleptocrat$ & $ilicon Valley Bandit$ …]
rmm.
Heh heh, waiting for the “state of emergency” play come after Labor Day (imagine if team blue declares a state of emergency, the reason being covid!).
Sorry about your covid, btw. It’s a fun new part of living’ the dream, I guess.
The Fog … need to edit again!
11:22 Seattle, Fri. 28 Jun 2024
Just woke up from a long nap, day 6 of this ‘mild’ covid.
A quick skim of the comments reinforces a thought that slammed into me before the nap.
It is all going perfectly!
A week after the Dem-0-RAT$ convene in Chicago over 19-22 Aug, it is Labor Day & the race to Nov. election day & The Casa Blanca !!
From today, minus the 4th of July, that leaves 6 ish weeks of hand wringing and brow furrowing and finger wagging and Hard Anal-is and Cold Reality & the usual uproar over some obscure rule blah blah before 19-22 Aug.
And out comes The Emergency We’re-Inna-Tough-Spot Approved $avior
And Deus Ex Machina!
[and ignore the stench of Wall $treet & of the MIC & of the bandaid MIC & of the energy kleptocrat$ & of the $ilicon Valley Bandit$ …
Duelin’ Dotards
-Kim Jong Un
Funny headline considering that I was listening to the BBC news hour this AM where they interviewed Jaime Harrison and he said, “this will not define his presidency”
Yes, yes it will. Complete reality denial.
“The president struggled at times in a televised debate with Donald Trump that was marked by personal attacks”
Googling that sentence which was the beginning of the report gets results within the BBC domain, but clicking the link gets you a page without that sentence.
Technology is wonderful
On the world stage, the winner was probably Putin, who is lucid, coherent, and logical in his own manner. Biden – obviouly feeble. Trump – an unabashed liar. If these are the best and brightess in the USA, the USA is rudderless no matter which. Even if somehow, a replacement for Biden was engineered, unless that individual can address policies, e.g inflation, the southern border, a genocide in Gaza, and a fiasco in the Ukraine, everything is the same. Sad, two pathetic old men in the arena slinging mud at each other. My concern is wondering exactly who exactly, at the moment, is running this country.
The problem isn’t finding someone with the wherewithal to address these problems — the real problem is that policy decisions, spending, etc., are not made for the benefit of most Americans, but by and for the few: exceedingly wealthy individuals, families, corporations.
An entrenched bureaucracy, Wall Street, the MIC, private equity, Big Pharma, Big AG, FAANG, Big Health, etc., it’s a long list — but most Americans ain’t on it, not as owners anyway, only as wage slaves. Putin himself has pointed out that who is America’s president matters little. The US is not rudderless, but exactly who is steering the boat is not evident to those outside the wheelhouse. And our current course (Ukraine, Gaza, immigration, inflation) must be one that benefits them in the immediate term, otherwise it would have been changed to suit. Our current status isn’t an accident: billions in “contributions” haven’t been spent without clear-cut expectations.
We can’t make real progress unless America’s public institutions are released from oligarchic control, and that means reversing changes that have occurred over the past 30-40 years, most critically the current system of legal bribery.
My hope is that most Americans realize at some point that a political system serving 330+ M people producing such absurdly weak choices is broken, and cannot be reformed from within.
Biden has 40 years of mendacity to consider and at the policy level of our corrupt government, yet somehow the distinction offered for the two of them is that Biden is “feeble” while Trump is a liar.
I do not support Trump and will not vote for him (nor for Biden) but attempts to paint Biden as the honest one, despite his dementia, is bullshit. His lies, as do the lies of all politicians, began at day one of his “service to the community” and never stopped.
Cue up the predictable headlines from the likes of a Tom Friedman…Joe is a good man and a good president… vomit.
Let’s run a poll…who has greater responsibility for the private for profit prison complex, among the living, than Biden…just an example from multiple examples.
Trump lies….but that is an upfront known issue to question the BS from the casino and real estate self determined “billionaire mogul”. OTOH, most elected politicians spending decades in DC and the halls of Congress are truth tellers of course…\sarc
Caitlin Johnstone gets right to the nitty gritty in her article today
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/28/caitlin-johnstone-biden-not-running-the-show/
It wouldn’t matter if a labrador retriever were elected, the Washington Consensus will prevail, as always
The infamous Roman emperor Caligula was said to have named his horse as Consul, so I think Caitlin has a point: let’s name a dog to be pres.
It’s a tough choice but, I will write-in Golden Retriever as my first choice, or Great Pyrenees? I’ll have to think about it carefully.
Belgian Tervuren. Tough, devoted, smart, always needs a job to do.
When God invented Amendment 25 Section 4, I can’t help thinking that She had the possibility of a President Joe Biden in mind. The question is, are any members of the present candidate capable of understanding that this is the occasion for which it was created? Maybe a President Kamala will have the wit to talk to President Putin and come to an arrangement satisfactory to both the Russian and the American people, and force a rapid retreat from the insanity of supporting the settler colonial regime in Palestine and let the region sort out the problem. That way there might be a chance that she, or some other Democrat, will make it through the November election.
What we learned from the debate is that Biden is old and Trump lies. I think I knew that going in.
An observation from my daughter.
My daughter was on a zoom call with a friend. My daughter had the sound down low and the closed captions on. Her friend had sound off and only the closed captions. After the debate, the friend did not understand why all the talking heads thought Biden lost.
It seems like Kennedy/Nixon – presentation over substance. Those who say Kennedy/Nixon on TV thought Kennedy won. Those who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon won.
Let’s all follow the pathological liar over the cliff, and believe his reality. Stormy Daniels is a figment of our imagination. We can fly with Trump!
Did Trump lie when he said that there were more Covid deaths under Biden? Let’s not fool ourselves, it’s over the cliff either way.
It may be two different cliffs. If one cliff allows for survival after falling and the other cliff does not, does one vote for the cliff which allows for survival after falling?
Or does one say . . . ” Better an end with horror than horror without end” . . . ?
choose wisely, young Padawan.
Bernie said he would run if Biden dint, now Biden did run and Bernie endorse him. Now there is high chance they will replace Biden and Bernie like a loyal servant will endorse the new candidate lol. I dont get people like he knew Biden was too old but he still endorse the man
Because he was more afraid of a President Trump. And if the Dems do a PrezNom transplant, Bernie will support the new transplanted head like a loyal servant. Because he fears a President Trump worse. Is his fear wrong? Maybe. But his fear is sincere.
What the debate revealed is that Biden should have retired at least a year ago. It’s not possible that in the midst of two wars and potentially a third with China, and rumblings about the economy and Covid, Biden should remain as president until January 20, 2025.
As second and third in line for the WH, Harris and Speaker Jeffries, would have had some time warming up in the bullpen before the November election.
The debate also revealed the failure of the msm who knew or should have known about Biden’s condition, and the damage caused by their omission to the people who depend on the legacy media.
It’s also truly remarkable that in a country with 330 million people we can’t find two people that are better than Biden and Trump.
Imo most of us define ‘better’ differently than do those that own.control the duopoly.
I’m getting a bit annoyed with the unequal treatment Trump and Biden get on the subject of telling the truth.
Biden told some absolute whoppers during the debate and was given a free pass.
The debate will go down in history as a major turning point in the decline of the US empire, as not just the ’emperor’, but his court as well, were all seen with no clothes!
They can’t hide anymore, the nasty dirty truth is out there on display. No amount of lying by White House or campaign minions is going to convince anyone. Even the mainstream media has given up the gaslighting and effectlvely declared him mentally unfit, and there is no return from such a damning public verdict.
The Biden regime is over, and perhaps like the UK Conservative party, the Democratic party is about to go into freefall collapse. The neocon globalist era is nearing its end.