The <gasp!> apocalyptic news was the New York Times posting an editorial board statement telling Biden he has to go “for the good of the country.” Of course, the Times can’t be expected to accept a share of responsibility for saddling the U.S. with Biden by burying the credible account of a staffer who claimed he raped her, hiding the Hunter laptop story until the success of Joe’s basement campaign was cinched, and generally serving as an uncritical Democratic Party cheering section when it counts. The Times also let the completely discredited Lincoln Project take a typical shot at Trump in its op-ed pages. And a silly one: the Project’s mouthpiece said that Trump botched the debate because he didn’t “lay out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure” (Sure he did: get Joe Biden out of the White House! Works for me!) and reverse himself on abortion, saving “young girls” from having to “endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations.” No woman is in danger of ever being imprisoned in the U.S. for having an abortion. Dumb prosecutors will do dumb things, but that’s no reason to ignore the critical issue at the core of the abortion problem: the delicate human lives abortion enthusiasts want to ignore. In the debate, Trump focused on that. It wasn’t a mistake.
As for the Times board, it dutifully parroted the official DNC talking points about Trump’s lies and “lies,” as if Biden wasn’t spitting out whoppers himself when it was possible to figure out what he was saying. The Times also used the latest trope from the Axis: Republicans should consider replacing Trump. Sure, that makes sense. If Biden was a complete vegetable and still beating Trump in the polls, is there any chance that Democrats would replace him as their nominee? Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!
More:
- Is this remotely funny? Bill Maher decided to do a riff ridiculing Biden:
“So you know Joe, he famously loves trains, but apparently not of thought! I mean. It’s just all night, confused and halting and trailing off. I’ve seen beauty pageant contestants answer questions better.I don’t want to say he shit the bedroom but his new Secret Service name is Amber Heard! I mean come on this guy is bad. And it wasn’t just what came out of his mouth, you know? I mean, the look on his face the whole night. It just looked like somebody just thought he left the stove on, you know? The last time CNN covered something this lost, I got to go back to that Malaysian Airlines plane that went down. And here’s the most ironic part. The Republicans were so afraid that Joe was going to be beating expectations. Remember that all last week they were like, he’s going to be jacked up. They put out all this crap about he’s going to have a secret earpiece in. Really? Who was on the other end of it? Jimmy Carter?”
What occurred in that debate was a personal and national tragedy. I’ve never been a Joe Biden fan, but he’s been a public servant most of his life, and he doesn’t deserve to be humiliated at his most vulnerable point in life. He is also our nation’s President, and his humiliation is our humiliation. If a comedian is going to try to get laughs out of a tragedy, what he comes up with better be brilliant, or else he should shut up. This wasn’t only not brilliant, it was cheap, cruel, and lazy, ending with a shot at dying former President who also deserves more respect.
I’ve been saying and writing this for almost 30 years, and it’s still true: Maher is an asshole, and any one who appreciates him is also probably an asshole.
- More on Maher: In the same episode of his HBO series, Maher brushed aside any concerns that the Democrats passing over Kamala Harris would be a “big problem.” Not only that, he agreed that Gavin Newsom, one of the whitest men on Earth, would be just perfect as Biden’s replacement after they kicked the DEO VP to the curb. (Pssst, Bill: Gavin is a lousy governor, California’s a mess, and he’s even unpopular there.) Why does anyone pay attention to Maher? He’s smug, nasty, and politically unsophisticated.
ADDED: Over at Fox News, resident libertarian wit Greg Gutfield issued the Ethics Quote of the Day, tweeting: “Remember: the media Democrat complex is reacting in horror over Joe’s condition not because they saw it – it’s because you saw it.”
Bingo. As I have noted elsewhere here today and many times before, one silver lining of these catastrophes is that they inevitably lure the corrupt and biased mainstream media to reveal its true nature. I’ve threatened to start banning commenters who come here and deny that the mainstream media is biased. I haven’t done it yet, but I am rapidly regarding the obdurate insistence that “it isn’t what it is” as either such deliberate dishonesty or evidence of such complete brainwashing that it disqualifies someone from being taken seriously on Ethics Alarms. The mainstream news medias reaction to Biden’s debate performance is as throbbingly unequivocal evidence of their corruption as anything they’ve let out of the metaphorical bag before.
As for Gutfield, I’m not especially a fan (he’s too smug for me, and smug isn’t funny), but he’s a lot more witty, perceptive and quick on his feet (Okay, I’ll just say it: He’s smarter) than Bill Maher.
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The Heritage Foundation says it is laying the groundwork to oppose any effort to replace Biden on the ballots of states where it’s too late to try it. Good. When the Democrats get in trouble these days, their first instinct is to cheat. This is ridiculous: the party locked-in Biden as the nominee, had no debates for challengers, lied about his condition (some of them are still lying about it), demanded a “Presidential candidates” debate, and when their dictated choice got smoked, the debate suddenly became just an audition. I presume if Joe bails, Trump will announce that the only one he’ll agree to debate in 2024 is Joe Biden. “We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside, either now or before the election, and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated,” Executive Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project Mike Howell said in a statement. “We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are followed.” That would be nice…
- NOW top White House aides are telling the media that President Biden only has a window of about six hours during which he is “dependably engaged” and not “absent-minded,” “slack-jawed,” or prone to “miscues.” What? I thought Joe was supposedly playing championship Go while arguing about economic theory in Esperanto as he bounced on a pogo stick, and that any video suggesting that he acted like a declining old geezer was a “cheap fake”!
- Once upon a time, MSNBC fired Martin Bashir by saying that someone should defecate in Sarah Palin’s mouth. Today, MSNBC’s Joy Reid compared voting for Trump to eating “poo,” then joined with her guests in mocking the GOP presumptive nominee for liking steaks well-done and with ketchup. Class act.
- ADDED: Ann Althouse was on a roll yesterday. Reacting to the accounts of the Democratic party high command meeting to decide if Biden needs to be replaced and how to accomplish it, she wrote,
“These people who want to oust Joe Biden — we don’t even know who they are. They seemed to think they could stage a coup in 5 minutes, using CNN commentators in the immediate aftermath of the debate. Are these people not enemies of democracy? Do they not deserve the epithet “dictator”? And if they are the same people who have worked together to hide Joe Biden’s incapacity from us, who exercise power through or instead of him, then the answer to those questions is even more emphatically yes.”
And yet I can’t quite believe she will take the obvious step, having correctly discerned this, of voting for Trump. She may well vote for someone else, or not vote at all. Yet if Ann has finally come around to the Ethics Alarms conclusion (of long-standing) that the unacceptable alternative to a ridiculously flawed candidate is a totalitarian party—and it is—then this will be an irrational course for a pundit who celebrates her fierce rationality.
Ethics Alarms 
I believe his best 6 hours when he is most engaged, are from midnight to 6A, when he cuddles with his blankie and pet unicorn and Jill reads stories to him after checking his Pampers and getting him into beddybye.
This is not funny, folks, its frightening, we know of some of the damage he has done to this nation, inflation, open borders, etc, but what else has he said or done that we are not yet aware of? Has he given the Army to Hamas, or whispered nuclear keycodes to Iranian spies? God help the USA, with this sad old shell of a man, …… with power!
Regarding Maher’s blockhead suggestion that the Democrats should just install Newsom as the nominee and all would be fine and dandy: this morning Ed Morrisey went into detail about why Maher is deluded.I thought it was so obvious that I didn’t bother with the details, but Ed’s explanation is still worth reading:
“The progressive Left doesn’t want to win elections — they want to rule by force.
That brings us back to Maher’s proposal of simply handing the nomination to the nearest white male while overlooking Biden’s current running mate, the black woman Biden selected to be the next in line. The center-Left part of the party might — might — go along with that idea out of desperation. The progressive Left, as Matthews astutely points out, would go into an utter meltdown. Harris’ allies don’t want to win by giving up any power at all.
And in a real sense, they’d be correct to oppose it. Harris may not have been on the primary ballots this year, but Biden won 99% of the delegates with Harris explicitly remaining on the ticket. Newsom never even bothered to enter the race. If Biden pulls out, those delegates may be released in a legal sense, but Harris and her progressive allies have a very good argument that primary voters endorsed her as well as Biden. And you’d better believe that the same progressives that are conducting Occupy operations on college campuses and highways to support radical jihadi terrorists in Gaza will show up in much more force if Democrats pull a back-room switcheroo that leaves Harris without a seat when the music ends.
And you’d better believe the center-Left knows it, too.
The irony of this, of course, is that Harris might be an even worse candidate to run than a senile Biden. She’s less popular than he is, she’s worse on the stump and in interviews, and Harris doesn’t even have the excuse of senility to explain her pointless word salads and inappropriate chuckles. But progressive Left identity-obsessed activists won a hard battle to get her on Biden’s ticket four years ago as the promise that they would take power in the party through her, and they aren’t going to give that opening back. Any attempt to sideline Harris, especially for Newsom or even Gretchen Whitmer, would produce an instant and likely violent backlash….
Another point: Dems can’t do anything unless Biden withdraws. Biden owns the delegates and will sail to victory on the first ballot. Having been president for the last three-plus years, Biden’s team likely controls the DNC to boot, so there won’t be a last-minute rule change in the offing. But even if they were inclined to try a hostile takeover of the convention on behalf of any other candidate, to do so would be to make their voters entirely irrelevant. Is that how one “saves democracy” — by having party insiders reject the elected nominee in favor of someone that the elite clique prefers? And that problem will exist even if Biden does withdraw, unless they have a completely open and fair convention fight to determine the next nominee … which itself will create party splits that won’t have time to heal before early voting starts a month later.
This is the Kamala Conundrum, about which I began writing last year, created by Democrats insisting on preventing primary challenges to Biden. They could have avoided this by allowing for this debate to take place ahead of the primaries so voters could weigh in on the question, but it’s too late for that now. If Biden can’t answer the call now, Harris is the only other option for Democrats, and she’s arguably worse. Ironically, Tulsi Gabbard also appeared on Real Time last night as part of this conversation — who depantsed Harris not once but twice in primary debates in 2019 and exposed her as an utter lightweight. But having anointed her as capable of being One Heartbeat Away in not one but two presidential cycles now, Democrats can’t just toss her into the garbage now. How do they explain her being competent enough to be Biden’s backup but not to run in his place?
By the way … would all of these Biden/Harris delegates choose someone other than Harris, even in an open convention — while she’s the sitting VP?
All of this explains why the spin machines have been turned up to the maximum over the last two days. While some media outlets are calling for Biden to withdraw, Democrats have stared into that abyss and decided it’s better to just keep gaslighting Americans about the obviously senile Joe Biden. Suddenly, Biden just had “one bad night,” ignoring all of the evidence that they earlier called “cheap fakes” in their previous gaslighting. Maybe Biden can’t string together two minutes of coherent extemporaneous thought, but he can do the job! And so on.
Because in the end, that’s their only chance of winning at all: lying and propaganda, abetted by the Protection Racket Media.
Ohio makes this even a bigger conundrum for the democrats. They can’t wait to the convention to decide to eject Biden. The republicans there decided to throw a wrench in things, predicting this was coming by moving the date up to finalize the nominee prior to the scheduled convention. The actual convention is just a sham convention, the real one is a virtual convention before hand.
If he’s only alert 6 hours a day, who the hell is running the country!?
This is the point everyone is overlooking. Biden is and has not been wielding the power of the Presidency. He is not and has not been capable. Did you see him on stage with Jill Biden? Who spoke? Jill did. Joe stood their while she said “You did good Joe! You answered every question like a good boy. Whose a good boy? You’re a good boy! Who wants a biscuit?” OK, maybe not QUITE like that, but you get the picture.
Who has been acting as the President of the United States? No one has that right except the elected president. NO ONE. If the president is incapable of acting, he must step down and it goes to the dictated chain of succession. That hasn’t happened. when you take over the executive branch, THAT is an insurrection. Who has committed it? Do you know? I don’t. Don’t you think we should know who is the acting president? Shouldn’t these people be found, arrested, and jailed? You know that won’t happen because they are Democrats. Laws are for Republicans and little people.
Maybe they’ll nominate Jill.
You are correct. This is not funny at all. Because the Bible tells us to pray for those in authority over us, we prayed for the President last night and I prayed this morning that his advisors will be men and women of integrity who will give him wise advice.
As for what happens next, if the so-called Resistance gets over the contrived shock of Thursday night, I am wondering if they might just come up with another rationalization moving forward. Remember how, during the Trump administration, they would annually question the relevance of the State of the Union address? They’d point out how a television address wasn’t how it was originally done, how the President didn’t originally address Congress and how a letter sent over was the traditional way of handling things (as if they actually care about tradition or the way things were done in the past). All of that was designed to find a way to undermine President Trump’s SOTU. This happened all of the time.
I would not be surprised if, as part of the wagon circling that’s being done here, they came upon the idea of saying, “Look, the American people know that the President is really more of a manager. He’s not really the one running the country. We all know that an experienced bureaucracy is in place, the Cabinet and Presidential advisors and others close to the President who know what he would have wanted who can take care of the heavy stuff and he can just sign his name. Really, how important is the President to the actual working of government anyway? He’s really just a figurehead, right?”
“Look, the American people know that the President is really more of a manager. He’s not really the one running the country. We all know that an experienced bureaucracy is in place, the Cabinet and Presidential advisors and others close to the President who know what he would have wanted who can take care of the heavy stuff and he can just sign his name. Really, how important is the President to the actual working of government anyway? He’s really just a figurehead, right?”
Sadly, that is EXACTLY why people voted for Biden in the first place. No one really believed that Biden was going to run the country. They wanted the bureaucracy to do it. That is why they hated Trump. Trump tried to be president and that was a stated impeachment point. He tried to take foreign policy away from the ‘inter-agency consensus’. If you wonder why 33% think Biden won the debate, look above. He is capable of being a Democratic ‘president’, as CNN pointed out, because he was able to stand up for 90 minutes. That is all they want, someone who can stand up and read the prepared talking points from our unelected ruling elites.
Ugh, I meant a television address wasn’t how it was originally done.
(Fixed it!)
I confess to being confused about how states could decide before the convention who would be a party’s candidate. Yes, we know who the presumptive nominees are, but isn’t “presumptive” a key word here? It’s fine for there to be a debate now, but that could presumably happen between any two people at any time on any subject. Indeed it does, on a regular basis: there are dozens of such events on college campuses every year.
But excluding the candidate selected by one of the major parties because it appeared that somebody else would almost certainly be the nominee? How can that happen, either legally or ethically? What if, as certainly could happen, no candidate had enough delegates to win a first-ballot nomination? (I know this hasn’t happened in a long time, but it could.)
As Garland v. Cargill demonstrated, words matter. Technicalities matter. No, a device that transforms a semi-automatic weapon into a de facto automatic weapon but does so through a different means than was specified 90 years ago is not illegal.
The results of the last presidential election weren’t official until the electoral votes were certified; that’s why January 7 was the date of the Grand Kerfuffle.
You don’t get tenure at a university until the Trustees rubberstamp the administration’s decision… as faculty at the New College found out when the newly appointed DeSantis minions on the board didn’t do what every other board does as a matter of course.
And so on.
I close by noting that I am not a lawyer, but… (well, you finish the sentence).
“I confess to being confused about how states could decide before the convention who would be a party’s candidate.“
Ever since the Ohio ballet conundrum, I’ve been puzzled by this same state of affairs myself. I’m anxious to see some replies to this.
States set what they feel are reasonable deadlines for a candidate to be on November’s ballot. The Democratic National Convention was scheduled absurdly late this year, and I have no idea why. Since the Democrats specifically blocked any realistic chance of Biden being challenged, all of the delegates are committed to him, unless there no majority after the first ballot, whereupon the so-called superdelegates come in. The last contested nomination at a convention was 1974, half a century ago. Now conventions are just ceremonial formalities (you know all this) like the official certifying of the electoral votes.) This is why the conventions aren’t covered “gavel to gavel” any more on TV. So if all the delegates are locked up, and the nomination is fait accompli,, there’s nothing wrong with treating the “presumptive nominee” as the de facto nominee, and thus “the nominee.” This is reasonable and safe, unless, just to pick a wild example, there has been a massive fraud on the public.
Yeah, but…
The convention may be absurdly late this time around, but it’s still well over two months before the election. Any elections official who can’t get ballots prepared in that amount of time should be replaced by someone who can… like the average high school stage manager.
But doesn’t early voting start pretty soon? The states don’t have to get ballots printed by election day, they have to get them printed in time to start mailing them out to folks who request mail-in ballots, at least for those states where that’s a thing.
I don’t know what the relevant dates are for Ohio, but it has got to take a week or several weeks to set up the ballot, have it proofed (I sure hope this is a step everywhere), and then send the final ballot to be printed. Not an absurdly long time, but still…
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Totally off topic for real, but it really annoys me that when I click on the reply button, it doesn’t position the cursor in the block where I’d be typing. I frequently just start typing, with sometimes spectacular results on my screen. Ahhh, WordPress.
Pennsylvania and Kentucky will send out the mail-in ballots by September 23. Ohio sends them out 29 days in advance.
Slip of the keyboard. January 6, of course.
Here’s a humdinger of an article. Even DNC insiders are getting the “It isn’t what it is” treatment.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/private-call-top-democrats-fuels-011541312.html
OT, but to me, this was a surprise: Tulsi Gabbard Says She ‘WOULD BE HONORED’ To Be Trump’s Running Mate
PWS
Not so much off topic as you might think. If Trump were to pick Gabbard (or Haley for that matter), I think that would measurably increase his chances, even if Biden get replaced.
Certainly the comparison between Gabbard and Harris would be stupendous. I think there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t agree with her about, but I’d have no problem with her succeeding Trump if it came to that.
Paul, very interesting. Gabbard supporters haven’t forgotten how the DNC treated her last time out, and a Harris/Gabbard debate would be a real treat…for Republicans.
I know we’ve discussed who Donald Trump could select as a VP in this arena…have we discussed who he should select?
“Harris/Gabbard debate would be a real treat“
Agreed, either Gabbard or Haley would wipe the everLUVin’ floor with Harris; it’d be MUST SEE T.V.!
PWS
I’m going to question if we saw Joe in his six best hours? I figured one of the things they did in their six day preparation exercise was to flip the president’s sleep schedule to wake up around 6 PM so he was only awake 3 hours at the start of the debate.
It seems that two things have become abundantly clear. First: From inauguration day, Joe Biden wasn’t the one in charge, someone else was running the country. Second: The democrats are stuck with Biden, and the only way to oust him would be if he voluntarily steps down. Then we’ll see the infighting begin over Harris, Newsom, or any others.
A good friend of mine just texted me a hilarious meme (I wish to pete I would have made it up):
“President Biden doesn’t need a cognitive test…his supporters do.”