Yves here. Biden, whether or not he and his claque are willing to face up to it, is in the blood-in-the-water phase of a fight for survival. There is no way to come out of this alive, in the political sense. The press and pundits are keeping up the drumbeat of demands that Biden must not run in 2024. The criticism, expressed as concern, has hit the level of a legitimacy crisis.
A big element of the campaign to stick the knife in and twist is making it irrefutable that Biden did not merely have a bad night, but has been deteriorating for some time. Tom Neuburger provides some examples from the historically Biden-friendly CNN and influential Politico
To that we can add even more pointed warnings, from the spooks, who were in a position to have close tabs on Biden. CIA whisperer Sy Hersh wrote earlier this week (emphasis mine):
The real disgrace is not only Biden’s, but those of the men and women around him who have kept him more and more under wraps. He is a captive, and as he rapidly diminished over the past six months. I have been hearing for months about the increasing isolation of the president, from his one-time pals in the Senate, who find that he is unable to return their calls. Another old family friend, whose help has been sought by Biden on key issues since his days as vice president, told me of a plaintive call from the president many months ago. Biden said the White House was in chaos and he needed his friend’s help. The friend said he begged off and then told me, with a laugh: “I would rather have a root canal procedure every day than go to work there.” A long retired Senate colleague was invited by Biden to join him on a foreign trip, and the two played cards and shared a drink or two on the Air Force One flight going out. The senator was barred by Biden’s staff from joining the return flight home.
And another data point. Tucker’s giddiness when discussing Biden’s decline is unseemly. But don’t let noise crowd out his signal. Readers in comments and via e-mail have said that the press in Europe and China have been unsparing about Biden’s condition, and thus his debate performance was not as much of a surprise abroad as at home:
MUST SEE: Tucker Carlson discusses the Democrats’ purported surprise following the debate, despite widespread assertions in 2019 that Joe Biden was experiencing dementia, yet no action was taken. #tuckercarlson #biden pic.twitter.com/aWKmSjix3p
— Prince Carlton 🇺🇸 (@_PrinceCarlton_) June 30, 2024
And while on the topic of the foreign press being less circumspect, even allowing for Sky News being part of the Murdoch empire, this fresh clip is pretty pointed:
Now to the main event.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
This will be fairly short for the holiday weekend. I’m staying with one of the week’s two big stories, the press explosion of concern over Biden’s condition after years lockstep denial.
The week’s other big story — what’s going on in the Court and how that relates to the Project 2025 plan — that we’ll reserve for more thoughtful coverage. We touched on it briefly here, but the topic is massive.
Hint: I’m going to veer away from most people’s analysis — in that I’ll be much more specific. This country is not a republic at the moment. But what are we?
Coupling Project 2025 with decisions from Dobbs through Trump gives a strikingly clear picture of where we’re headed, even absent a change of Occupant.
After literally years of close study, I think I finally see how all the Right Wing pieces fit together. It’s different, though just as bad, as what you’ve been hearing. And we’ve been on this path for longer than most of you have been alive.
But that’s for later. Stay tuned.
Links
These links are all of a piece. They add to this earlier piece.
• Carl Bernstein: Sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year(CNN)
This matters since it speaks to the White House cover-up. He doesn’t make clear who knew and who didn’t, exactly, but awareness of Biden’s diminished condition went beyond a knowledgeable few.
Well, these are people, several of them, who are very close to President Biden, who love him, have supported and been among … among them are some people who have raised a lot of money for him.
And they are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed.
And what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the president, are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who who have witnessed some of them.
But here we see tonight [when the president gave prepared remarks], as these people say, President Biden at his absolute best.
And yet these people who have supported him, loved him, campaigned for him, see him often, say that in the last six months particularly there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline and physical infirmity.
There’s more to the interview than this. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it already. Note “including some reporters.” This confirms lies.
File under “Gods, what a mess.”
• ‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate (Politico)
For those who wonder who’s acting as gate-keepers — colloquially, “who’s running the show” — when Biden is indisposed, this Politico piece names several key names. It walks on eggshells to get there, but do read it through.
Over the course of his presidency, Joe Biden’s small clutch of advisers have built an increasingly protective circle around him, limiting his exposure to the media and outside advice — an effort to manage public perceptions of the oldest person to ever hold the office and tightly control his political operation.
But inside the White House, Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate, with the senior team’s management of the president growing more strictly controlled as his term has gone on. During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”
That’s the opening. Notice the switch in the second paragraph, from the focus on the “senior team’s management of the president” to, inexplicable, the president’s temper: “people are scared shitless of him.”
Clearly, Politico wanted to drop this second idea into the opening paragraphs, and do it without saying why. They’re not the first, by the way, to comment on Biden’s temper.
As to who might be running interference and, perhaps, acting as occasional Biden regents, Politico spreads the answer through the second half of the piece (emphasis mine):
No one has done more to keep the president isolated — and shielded from tough conversations — than his wife, first lady Jill Biden, and sister, Valerie Biden Owens.
[…]
A Democratic operative in frequent communication with the White House and the campaign said suggestions can be quickly dismissed. “If I’m talking to Anita [Dunn], and I say, ‘what about X?’ She’s quick to say, ‘The president’s not going to do that. No chance.’ It shuts off options, yes, but it also [lets] you move more quickly because they know him so well.”
[…]
From the earliest months of his term, Biden was carefully managed by senior adviser to the first lady Anthony Bernal, deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini, [Ron] Klain and others. After a campaign spent largely inside his Delaware home, the president remained in a protective bubble at the behest of senior staff and family, who believed it was the best way to manage the president’s health given the ongoing Covid-19 risk and his reelection chances, according to five people familiar but not authorized to publicly discuss internal decisions.
Bernal and Tomasini, in particular, have grown particularly close to the president and first lady. […]
In my research, the names that come up the most as the curating crew are Jill Biden, Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini. But as Politico and Bernstein point out, a great many others knew what was going on.
File under “The public should also be told. Right? Right?”
The Fall of Athens and Rome
Two points before we conclude:
• When the Roman Republic fell, it wasn’t a one-day job. It took place over time, several generations, starting with the Gracchi reforms and murders in the late second century BC, through Marius, Sulla and Caesar. Over time, the institutions themselves were changed, both by the people and leaders in deadly contention.
We’ve walked more than half of that path already ourselves. We were a republic. We’re now in transition from that. Bush v Gore is not the original Original Sin, but it’s one of them, and that has been embraced. Bush, you recall, was the author of our modern Surveillance State, which was never rolled back.
We’re not a republic, though many are denying that fact. What are we today? Stay tuned.
Those who have access to the Great Courses “History of Ancient Rome” by the excellent Garrett Fagan should listen to the story of the transformation. Start with Lesson 20. You’ll see what I mean about changing institutions from with no path to return.
• The lesson the Athenian Empire learned in its (literally) ill-advised war with Sparta was simple: You can’t be have an empire abroad and democracy at home. Just can’t be done. Plato despaired of democracy, having witnessed its fall, one reason he wrote the Republic.
Music
Some soothing Dave Brubeck. This piece grows from a delight tune he wrote called “Brandenburg Gate.” (YouTube can serve up a few live versions of that.)
This version is “Brandenburg Gate Revisited”, played by quartet with full orchestration. Did you know Brubeck was classically trained? He studied under Darius Milhaud. It shows in this piece.
Click the image to play, or use the link above. Enjoy.
https://www.justice.gov/elderjustice/prosecutors/statutes/
“The federal government, states, commonwealths, territories and the District of Columbia all have laws designed to protect older adults from elder abuse and guide the practice of adult protective services agencies, law enforcement agencies, and others. These laws vary considerably from state to state.”
It was obvious that his decline was at least starting in 2019 when there were even leaks that Obama had tried to talk him out of running.
Seeing him speak live in Manchester, NH at the state Democratic Convention that year the contrast with all the other candidates was shocking. He kept coughing from the effort of speaking, and even though he was reading off a paper copy, he seemed to lose his place at times–this was an extremely important speech, they had all rehearsed extensively for it and the other candidates seemed like Broadway actors and barely looked at their notes. But watching the video of it now, it is shocking how much worse Biden has gotten: https://youtu.be/K7toXXGBJ4w
Contrast with Bernie’s speech at the same convention, not his best work but still the contrast is obvious: https://youtu.be/PuVV6ue2qrU
Julian Castro was probably the best speaker: https://youtu.be/FOWWPW4z8KQ?feature=shared
I said for awhile that Biden was going to be in trouble in 2024 because he couldn’t campaign from a basement. Some of that was based on the historical evidence that Biden’s charms are and were limited and that he was a terrible campaigner. But it was also because he was clearly dropping screws left and right, even before the basement. I was amazed that they were able to use “misinformation” to undermine the almost exponentially growing evidence of that deterioration from his appearances.
Finding out that Jill and her team were able to establish a virtual basement and thought it would be enough to keep Joe functioning and viable would be amusing if it weren’t so delusional. More shocking and scarier, is that people who are supposed to be a check on that clear abuse of the system were so scared or disgusted by Trump they went enabled it.
While I sincerely believe that Biden should have lost the primary in 2020, that isn’t what happened. OTOH I not only fervently believe that Joe Biden should have been removed from office years ago, I am appalled that we are discussing an election four months away rather than starting the process for his removal immediately. And heads rolling at every level, including the press, for covering it up. The kick to the stomach is that won’t happen.
***lots*** of unflattering B-roll footing in the C-SPAN archives that goes well beyond gaffes and harmless brain hiccups.
I’m curious when the first observation of Biden’s cognitive status showed up in the NC comments….the Commentariat wasn’t fooled!
People are gaslighting themselves because “I’m too smart to be conned….look at all my degrees! (never mind that I wired Elizabeth Holmes lots of money).
For sure there were multiple comments about old Joe being unfit for office back in 2019 and I think that Lambert yesterday saying that he said so too. But old Joe wandering off to ga-ga land is only half the problem. The more serious one is that it is now possible to cocoon a sitting President, who is unfit for office, in a sort of bubble and not only will the political establishment cover for him, the media in particular will cover for them as well and will harass anybody that says different. This time it is a President with dementia but what about next time? A President that is paranoid? One that is verging on being certifiably insane? One who loves actually being physically cruel to people? All sorts of possibilities. So down the track it may be that people will be saying of old Joe that it was only dementia that was the problem. By then it may even sound quaint.
“I’m curious when the first observation of Biden’s cognitive status showed up in the NC comments…”
Well, I was well aware late in 2019 or very early in 2020 and have been talking about it ever since*, so I’m sure others here were, as well.
*There’s a cost to this. It has made me unpopular with friends and family.
I’m curious when the first observation of Biden’s cognitive status showed up in the NC comments
Petal was onto it in 2019
Yes, I was going to bring this up. Hopefully petal will chime in with more details, but she attended a talk Biden gave back then sometime and wrote up a report for the NC community a day later.
I found this Caitlin Johnstone article from September 2019 “Biden’s Brain Is Swiss Cheese And It’s Creepy That We’re Not Talking About It”. I’m sure it’s not the first, just a quick one to find. Not technically in the NC comments but she is frequently linked to and in line with a lot of the NC commentariat.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/09/16/bidens-brain-is-swiss-cheese-and-its-creepy-that-were-not-talking-about-it/
Unless one just awoke from a coma 20 minutes ago, there’s no reason to act surprised.
CBC News · Posted: Feb 08, 2024
‘Diminished faculties,’ ‘faulty memory,’ ‘significant limitations’: A damning report on Biden’s mental state
Special counsel report exonerates president legally — and ravages him politically
“The special counsel report released Thursday paints the 81-year-old president as suffering from mental decline. And it points to several examples from Biden’s hours-long interviews with investigators.
They include Biden struggling to remember what years he was vice-president and being way off when discussing the year of his son’s death.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/special-counsel-faculties-biden-analysis-1.7109811
For the proles, willful blindness was required. For the media, it was less innocent than that.
What’s most infuriating would be all those reporters who say they kept mum because they didn’t want to give Fox the satisfaction. All those so saying should be fired immediately.
In my dreams of course. The media are the problem along with their attitude post Watergate that they are somehow running the political show. Arguably this was the worst outcome of Watergate.
In Sonoma County, CA we had a similar case involving dementia in an elected official.
From August 24, 2009
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/senators-decision-acknowledges-concerns-about-her-health/
“Concerns about her ability to focus and her grasp of complicated issues were heard prior to the 2006 election, and they have increased as constituents, journalists and others witnessed bizarre behavior. At times, she doesn’t appear to recognize people – even shortly after they introduce themselves.”
“In the Capitol, Wiggins is accompanied almost everywhere by loyal aides, who serve as both legislative assistants and bodyguards, guiding her away from encounters with reporters.”
Pat Wiggins was slated to run again, but locals pushed hard for her to step aside.
Her staff pushed for her re-election.
About four years later Pat Wiggins died:
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/late-state-senator-pat-wiggins-memorialized/
“Wiggins died after a long illness on Aug. 15 (2013) at an assisted living facility in Forestville. She was 73.”
When one looks for the beneficiaries of promoting election of a diminished candidate, the obvious candidates are the unelected staff and family members who enjoy the trappings, power and possible wealth enhancement of more time in office.
What I’d like to know is which of the grifters knew and took advantage…there has to be a lot…
slava griftopia!
They say ukraine is the most corrupt country in europe, we’ve (the usa) probably got a lock on the rest of the world…
The USA used to have a ‘lock’ on the rest of the world. Unfortunately for those in power today, the world is picking that ‘lock.’
Looks like the administration’s Covid policy is having an unexpected payoff. And now we’re moving to a Russian-style presidential system.
It’s been amazing to watch. Even more amazing is all the reactions. There are still plenty of people who are having a tough time coming to grips with this. I have PMC friends who still don’t believe anything is wrong with him. They want him to run and think it was just one bad night. They blame the press, they blame Fox news, they blame the voters for not being on train Biden, they blame every thing and everybody.
One of the current excuses I hear is the media wants Trump to win so they are abusing Biden to get him to drop out because Biden would beat Trump. That’s pretty out there – even for these people.
Of course, even a few months ago, if you said Biden isn’t what he used to be they would lose their mind, and then of course, end the conversation with something something Trump.
I’m guessing the rest of the world is laughing at us, and they should be. This place is seriously F’ed up.
I have some friends equally determined there’s nothing wrong and will go nuts if I suggest anything outside of their fixed world view. I finally decided that this is like a religion in their thinking, and I never criticize someone’s religion. So when they get going on politics I nod and smile and try to change the subject.
Thanks for including the Carl Bernstein CNN clip in the post.
If the MSM wonders why people stopped watching them it’s because the MSM editors and managers decided pushing a narrative was more important than straight reporting the story, imo.
I think someone referred to narrative pushing by reporters as courtier-ism instead of reporting.
The only way Jill Biden gives up the presidency is to take it from her cold dead hands!
As much as I esteem Thomas Neuberger’s contributions here, I remain skeptical. This isn’t an isolated incident. Further, I do understand his thinking that the republican form of government is in crisis, but comparisons to Rome and Greece don’t cut it. Augustus ushered in some forty years of reforms and stability, ironically. Sparta didn’t glow for long–Epaminondas of Thebes defeated the Spartans disastrously and famously freed their slaves.
Yet: This isn’t an isolated incident. So Joe hasn’t had two firing synapsis since 2019. How many people stood to gain and are now, suddenly, shocked shocked shocked? Blinken and Sullivan. Hillary Clinton. Mayor Pete, who was frontrunner after his pseudo-victory in Iowa but somehow, somehow, fell on his sword a few days after…
Yet: The war in Ukraine started in 2013 or 2014 with U.S. planning for the coup. For how many years has the war been run on “auto-pilot”? By Victoria Nuland out of her cookie shop in the lobby of the State Department? By Blinken? By Sullivan?
Yet: The Israeli occupation and terrorizing of the Palestinians have been going on for how many years? And Joe has been, what?, keeping the invincible aircraft carrier of the Middle East on auto-pilot? Or has the U.S. government just been shoveling money into Israel the way it shovels money into Ukraine?
Yet: An Italian commentator pointed out that the Italian parliament may have its load of poltroons (Matteo e Matteo, ahinoi), but the U.S. congress and cabinet are inhabited by people of a level even Silvio Berlusconi didn’t quite bottom out at. Many sub-bunga-bunga types. I’m thinking of slithery U.S. politicians like Nancy “Stock Options” Pelosi, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Tammy “Loves Me Some Wars” Duckworth, Lindsey Graham, Steny The Nonexistent Hoyer (yes, he’s still there). Recall, if you can, the oleaginous Eric Cantor.
Joe Biden is just one inguinal bubo that has burst.
Watch for others, imminently.
Is it the end of the republic?
Ironically, it may not be the end of the republic if you withhold your consent from the MonoParty of Property and let them collapse. There are other parties out there. Neither Trump, nor Biden. Get creative. As Lambert Strether has written, power is lying in the street for the taking.