I know this is Nelson’s second visit in less than a week, but it’s still the most appropriate reaction.
This news just came to me from the New York Times. I have a gift link for you here, to get you past the pay wall.
The quick version is that the party was counting on the Biden family to sit old Joe down this weekend, tell him they love him, and convince him to drop out of the Presidential race. Instead, sayeth the Times (which itself had issued a panicked call for Joe to leave)…
“…President Biden’s family is urging him to stay in the race and keep fighting despite last week’s disastrous debate performance, even as some members of his clan privately expressed exasperation at how he was prepared for the event by his staff, people close to the situation said on Sunday. Mr. Biden huddled with his wife, children and grandchildren at Camp David while he tried to figure out how to tamp down Democratic anxiety. While his relatives were acutely aware of how poorly he did against former President Donald J. Trump, they argued that he could still show the country that he remains capable of serving for another four years.”
Amusingly, Hunter is reported to be the most adamant that Biden stay in the White House until they carry him out. Of course! Joe is his meal-ticket. Without him, Biden’s black sheep son is just another junkie.
Again, I feel nothing but pity and embarrassment for our President (and contempt for his selfish, irresponsible family), but as for the chaos this development inflicts on the Democrats, good. They deserve every bit of it and more. The party’s self-made crisis is what George Will used to call “condign justice.”
Ethics Alarms 
Counterpoint: no they aren’t.
Sweet Baby Jeebus. Bring back the smoke-filled rooms.
I had a very nice dinner tonight, all local ingredients of the summer. Four or five grafs into the Times story and I was ready to deposit it on my keyboard.
I have been blessed to live through much of America’s greatness, and for the first time in my life I’m grateful that (actuarially speaking, that is, for I’m still healthy) I’m not going to be around to see the Republic in its death throes. If I’m lucky, that is. I’m afraid that it’s now inevitable.
As the bumper sticker says: GIANT METEOR 2024.
Hey. Everyone says we’re in Julius Caesar phase. We haven’t even hit Gracchi phase yet.
A fair, if depressing, point.
Given the progressive desire to end the Electoral College and make the President an office filled by direct election counted across the nation; and no longer a system wisely distributed across the several states and removed from direct contact with voters COMBINED with the progressive hysterics over the end of Chevron should lead EVERY single citizen concerned about our republic and separations of powers to conclude that Democrats just want a technocratic dictatorship at worst or “enlightened monarchy” at ‘best’.
“God, he thought, never let me outlive my wits.”
~Jack Aubrey, HMS Surprise
By Patrick O’ Brian
..if you have not read the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O’Brian, you have missed some of the greatest literature ever written, and the joy of sailing and fighting with the British Navy. Jack Aubrey’s quotes are priceless. This quote comes to mind, thinking of Biden.
My oldest and best friend has read all of them.
Get the audio books, they are delightful for listening, the language and beauty of O’Brian’s style, wit and knowledge just strike you thoroughly…..get comfy, and prepare for an amazing series of voyages…
My dad has read them all as well. He LOVED them. He’s also read most/all of the C.S. Forester “Hornblower” series.
Bernard Cornwell is another good one for entertaining historic (and sometimes not) fiction, a good bit in the same Napoleonic wars period as O’Brien’s work, some in the era of the formation of England as a country, and a bit different Arthurian trilogy.
I posted this in one of the other pieces, but it bears repeating here:
A good friend texted me one of those photo memes that are so popular. It reads: “President Biden doesn’t need a cognitive test. His supporters do.”
I think Nelson’s laugh doesn’t quite cut it for this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChNvG6K75sk&list=PLKMCsqjSNmWHUV7B0qkMmLTac_0nbqxG1&index=102
Like Carter before him, Biden is largely a creation of the media combined with a special circumstance.
As I described at some length in another post, prior to 1976 Carter was an unknown governor in the south and not someone anyone would have thought of as presidential timber. In fact, when he was first put forth as a candidate that year, most of the reaction was “Jimmy who?” The one thing he had going for him was that he was not among the Democrats who could be blamed for the disaster that was the 1972 election.
Still, the media had wanted for a long time to bring Richard Nixon down, not just out of office, but behind bars. Unfortunately, in 1974 he dodged their grasp due to his successor thinking it better to close the book on Watergate than keep it open with a trial. So they decided to target his successor instead, building up Carter as this honest Southern Christian who would never lie to the American people, not like Tricky Dick. At the same time they made Ford look like a fool. Because it was so close to Watergate, the American people did not trust government at all and certainly didn’t trust the Republican party. The rest is history, but I will say that Carter turned out not to be up to the job, and left Ronald Reagan with a pretty big challenge.
This was pretty close to the same deal. The media saw Trump as a patsy, the weakest possible opponent that they could build up and put against Hillary, guaranteeing her victory. Except that’s not how it played out. Trump dared to run and he dared to win. The media never forgave him for that and they did their best for 4 years to undercut him. Even with all that undercutting, Trump would have walked to re-election in 2020 except that China unleashed a deadly virus on the world and a lifelong petty criminal died at the hands of a crazy cop in a non-racial incident. The left turned the former into a hammer to crush the economy with and the latter into a race war that only one side was permitted to fight in. In turn, the media built Biden up as a grandfatherly moderate who would finally bring peace and stability back to this nation. There was probably some dirty dealing in terms of the votes, but the fact is that too many people bought this lie.
It was pretty obvious from jump that Biden was not up to the job, and anyone who followed his career from 1970 would know that. Again and again he was on the wrong side of every decision, most notably the successful operation Neptune’s spear, which killed bin Laden. His thought was that Obama should not go through with it because if the raid went sideways, he had no one else to blame. That alone should tell you all you need to know. Biden put being able to blame someone ahead of getting justice for the victims of 9/11 and taking out a terrorist mastermind.
Year after year, and decade after decade, Biden’s primary priorities have been avoiding accountability and lining his and his family’s pockets. He is not and has never been a great leader, even Obama once said not to underestimate his ability “to fuck things up.” He not only had the media and the situation on his side, he had the luck of being the best or the most electable in a field of Democratic candidates who were uniformly awful. He only got nominated because James Clyburn decided to back him instead of Bolshevik Bernie.
Since the election, the media has done nothing but cover for Biden and his bad ideas, bad policy, and increasingly fragile mental state. Unfortunately, reality finally got so bad that no amount of media coverage or spin would cover the problems anymore. It was beginning to slip as it was, with the White House insisting that every clip and every piece of news that made the president look bad was just a cheap fake or a republican hit and a good chunk of the legacy media becoming tired of not just spinning but out and out lying for the president.
Now everyone saw Biden stand there with his mouth open like a fish in his pallid face struggling to find words, sometimes not finding the right words, sometimes saying the wrong words, sometimes telling meaningless lies, sometimes telling some real whoppers, and and sometimes just standing silent with nothing to say because he couldn’t find anything to say. This was supposed to be Biden after a week of intense prep and plenty of rest. The fact is that the man has dementia and is fairly advanced. All the prep in the world will not make him better. Everyone now either knows this or knows this but doesn’t want to believe it or acknowledge it.
This frankly has put the Democratic party in a worse position than almost any political party ever has been in in an election. They can’t invoke the 25th amendment because they don’t have the support in Congress and to do so would be admitting that they foisted an incompetent upon the American people. This would also leave them with Harris, who is even less popular than Biden and probably less effective, which is saying something.
They can’t otherwise force Biden out with procedural chicanery, because to do that would be to disenfranchise their own voters who voted for him in the primaries. Let’s put aside the fact that they just ran a poll that showed that neither Gavin Newsom nor Gretchen Whitmer nor any of the other names that have been floated to replace him would do any better against Trump. The fact of the matter is the only way they can do any of this is if he decides to drop out of the race on his own.
That hope just evaporated as his family did the opposite of convincing him it was time to hang it up, which is what the Democratic party was counting on. Why should his family try to convince him to hang it up? They have benefited for years, in some cases decades, from his political influence.
His wife now has the greatest prize of being first lady. Her gamble of divorcing her husband and marrying a known sleazy senator who has a roving eye and a disturbing interest in young girls paid off. She isn’t about to give that up. Hunter does not want him to hang it up, because if he hangs it up, he’s going to jail, probably for a very long time and will go down in history as a junkie who hid behind his father. Why should everyone else give up the benefits that they could reap from four more years of him being in the White House and continuing to throw largesse their way?
The only way that Biden gets replaced on the ticket now is if he dies. I don’t think most of the Democratic party is going to go as far as out and out murder. I think the best they can hope for is for Biden to lose, Trump to get his second term, which will then take him out of the political scene for good, and try again in 2028 with whoever.
Carter was a special case. After Watergate, Nixon and Johnson, a disillusioned public decided that it didn’t want a President any more, just a trustworthy pal. That’s what Jimmy tried to be, stripping himself of the President’s most valuable gift, the image, history and grandeur of the office. I said when he got out of his car in the inauguration parade that he just didn’t understand the Presidency, and he would regret this, among with sitting down in shirt-sleeves with farmers. When he needed to wrap himself in the mantle of Washington and Lincoln, it wasn’t there, because he had misplaced it.
So then, as usual, the public completely reversed course and elected Reagan, who knew how to play POTUS the old fashioned way. Deep down, Americans don’t want weak leaders. How can Biden possibly appear as anything but weak?
Jimmy Carter was all an act. He was a manufactured persona even moreso than John Wayne. Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer. Reconcile that with your image of Jimmy Carter. Nuclear engineer focus tested poorly with Democrats because they don’t like smart people. That is why they made Jimmy Carter a ‘peanut farmer from Georgia’. Now, I will admit we couldn’t have had a better president to deal with 3-Mile Island than Jimmy Carter.
In defense of John Wayne, he was a very intelligent performer who set out to embody an American ideal, including its flaws and complexities, over the course of a 4 decade career, and he accomplished his mission. John Wayne the Icon was distinct from the real man, and he never pretended otherwise, as a chess playing, well-read guy who preferred blazers and slacks to Western hats when he wasn’t filming, and accepted a deferment from the draft in WWII, which he always felt guilty about. (FDR, among others, said that Wayne served his country more effectively projecting the image of the American soldier in dozens of wartime films that he would have by being overseas, and that is certainly true.) He never represented “John Wayne” as anything other than a character he created over his career. It was an important character, and it endures, as it should.
John Wayne is still my favorite actor and I got a bit emotional reading that.
My kid says I’m on the autism spectrum because I have so many obsessions. The Duke, his career and his cultural impact is one of them.
Many obsessions and hobbies is actually a sign of genius. A love for John Wayne’s role in shaping the American landscape doesn’t make you a genius, but you can’t be one without it.
Ever notice how much Dr. Jill now resembles Alice Cooper? Should she have an appropriate theme song…Welcome to my Nightmare? Billion Dollar Babies? I Love the Dead? ……..?
I’m eighty-one
And I don’t know what I want
Eighty-one
I just don’t know what I want
Eighty-one
I gotta get away
I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it.
Why has “the Biden family” been designated to decide this? The most greedy, grubby, sycophantic collection of multi-generational grifters and substance abusers in the country? Can you imagine the media’s reaction if “the Trump family” were designated to decide whether Trump should do or not do anything? Don’t these people see how consistently and spectacularly hypocritical they are? Did the Nixon family ever huddle around Richard Nixon? To decide something? No. Mrs. Nixon was portrayed as a feeble wreck. And Doctor Jill is Wonder Woman. Jesus H. Christ.
The meme I saw covering this said:
“A father who showers with his teen daughter. An uncle who has sex with his niece. A man who sleeps with his dead brother’s wife while also carrying on an affair with her sister and impregnates a stripper. A family that controls hundreds of shell companies with no products, no visible services, but hundreds of millions in revenue. The Biden Family.”
Yes, THOSE are the people who decide the fate of the country. Look at the state of the country. Makes sense, huh?
The other perhaps prescient meme about the situation portrayed Hillary Clinton preparing 2 documents. The first was an acceptance speech and the second was Biden’s suicide note. Of course that is ridiculous. However, I won’t be surprised if Biden is found dead in his bed and has a rushed Zoom autopsy like Scalia.
That’s funny. Are the Dems really going to roll out Hill for another defeat? I guess I wouldn’t put it past them. I suspect if Hillary ran again, even the Dem’s mighty ballot delivering mechanism wouldn’t be able to make up for the general populous’ contempt for her. It would sputter and poop out.
Hillary, Michelle—all pipe dreams.Oprah! Taylor Swift! RuPaul!
I just wonder what happens if Trump gets 120 million votes and [insert generic Democratic candidate here] gets 121 million votes. I bet anyone who questions where all those votes came from will be labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and a ‘MAGA extremists’. They will just claim that [insert generic Democratic candidate here] is the most popular president in history.
What do you think he is, a pope?
I was going to make a similar list about Biden in response to a comment from one of the commenters banned or likely to be when he or she wrote that Biden is better human being than Trump. I am not at all certain of that, and there’s much evidence suggesting otherwise.
Joe Biden is one nasty son of a bitch. He’s not kind. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the people of America. He’s basically an Irish mobster. Who are these people fooling who say he’s kind and upright and decent and thoughtful. Baloney. Pure gaslighting.
Irish mobster? For certain. But Biden has been fortunate enough – and dare I say, just savvy enough – to cultivate that “Lunchbucket Joe” image for many and many a year.
If you’re from the northeast, you might be aware that half of South Boston loved Whitey Bulger – an Irish mobster – and the other half was afraid of being murdered by him. Bottom line is that if an incurious public WANTS to believe that a guy with power (however ill-begotten) is a sweetheart, they’ll believe it.
At this point, a rather strong case could be made that Biden – and those around him – are even MORE amoral than Trump. But that doesn’t matter a bit to those who don’t want to hear it.
Dementia and Dunning-Kruger are a bad combination.
I wonder how the Chinese, et al., are hedging their bets on slipping funds to Hunter these days? On the one hand, SloJo looks like a lost asset; on the other, if he does get back in, he would be even easier to manipulate.