Author Mary McCarthy (“The Group”) famously said of playwright Lillian Hellman (“The Children’s Hour,” “The LittleFoxes”), that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.” The Democrats and their mainstream media minions have just about reached this point trying to not merely excuse the way Joe Biden was unceremoniously dumped from his re-election campaign, but to recast in the public’s mind as some kind of noble sacrifice Biden, which it was anything but. In other words, once again, “it isn’t what it is,” the motto of the New Democrats—you know, the ones who pretend to be defending democracy while they are dismantling it.
Is nobody paying attention? Is everyone devoid of critical thinking skills? Biden went on ABC and told George Stephanopoulos that he didn’t believe the polls, that he was the best chance of defeating that evil fascist Hitler monster Donald Trump, that there was nothing wrong with his brain, and that nothing short of God himself coming down and telling him to quit would make him do so. That pretty much wrapped it, don’t you think? Short of a burning bush’s signature being found in the White House logs, I’d say that it is indisputable that Biden’s decision to suddenly pull out was anything but voluntary.
God didn’t come down to guide Joe, but the nearest thing for Democrats, Barack Obama, might have. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersch wrote on his substack that his sources in Washington DC and the White House confirmed to him that former President Barack Obama pushed Biden out of the 2024 presidential race by telling him that he would orchestrate a humiliating 25th Amendment removal process if Joe didn’t bow out gracefully. “I went over [reports] this week with a senior official in Washington who helped me fashion an account of a White House in complete disarray,” Hersh said. “Obama called Biden after breakfast [on July 20] and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries were reportedly directly involved. “[Obama] had an agenda and he wanted to seek it through to the end, and he wanted to have control over who would be elected.” Democracy! Seymour Hersch’s reputation is a bit tarnished, and so are his mysterious sources, but that version of events makes more sense than the one being peddled by the Axis liars.
The early claims that Biden emulated George Washington by selflessly and voluntarily giving up a chance at a second term because George quit after two was so idiotic on its face that I didn’t bother to comment on it initially, but a friend had the gall to throw that at me yesterday, so some were persuaded by it. To start with, there was nothing selfless about George wanting to go back to Mt. Vernon. He was a natural leader, but he hated being President, and regarded two terms sufficient sacrifice to allow him to retire with his conscience free. Washington also was not an admirer of his likely successors as potential Presidents, notably John Adams (and George was proven right): if he had really been selfless, he would have stayed in office and groomed better successor. Biden, in contrast, regards the Presidency as his career zenith, and like Ned Beatty’s pathetic dementia-suffering judge in a memorable episode of “Law and Order,” he knows that once he’s out of office, he’ll be virtually useless. [Mean joke redacted here].
In addition, Washington knew that he could be President for Life if he wanted to be, which was not Biden’s situation at all. Washington was still overwhelmingly popular, Biden is not (and never was). Biden may have believed that he was the best qualified person to be President, but then, he is also demented, one reason why he isn’t the best qualified and also why he believed otherwise. In fact, it is difficult to find any similarities between Washington’s completely voluntary decision not to be President for a third term and Biden’s almost certainly forced exit from the 2024 election, except that neither decision was courageous or selfless.
Then two days ago, my head nearly exploded, which would have killed my dog, when I heard Pete Buttigieg tell a Fox News interviewer that Joe Biden did what Donald Trump would never do, nobly perform a selfless act of sacrifice for the good of the nation rather than acting in his own self-interests “as he always has.” This is Big Lie of the Resistance #8, “Trump Only Cares About Himself, Not The Country,” in all its glory, proving once again that Goebbels’ favorite tactic remains at the head of the Democratic campaign strategy.
This is an entirely made-up smear without substance, but I keep hearing it from the Trump-Deranged as well as from the more mentally competent. A good argument can be made that Trump has scarificed more to live in the White House than all but a few POTUSes in our history. Unlike many of them, the Presidency was never in his career plans; his candidacy, like everything else he did, was a branding effort. It got out of control. He was a popular celebrity, the Presidency turned him into a polarizing, greatly hated object of derision in most of the media, and got him shot at and prosecuted for being a threat to Democratic Party dominance. The office ended up making most modern Presidents rich or richer; it almost certainly has cost Trump wealth. I ended the description of Big Lie 8 this way more than a year before the 2020 election:
There is no reason to believe that Donald Trump is any less dedicated to his country than any of the men who came before him, and so far, all 43 of them have that one thing in common: as Americans, they have taken on the job of President as public servants and as patriots.
I’ve studied these men; I study them still. There are great perquisites to being President of the United States, of course, and there is that guaranteed place in American history too. No American wants to be remembered as an unsuccessful President, much less a bad President, or one who didn’t do the best he could for his country. Narcissists like Trump especially want to be seen as good Presidents. Super-villains do not become President. Our system and culture don’t permit it.
Becoming President is a sacrifice for Donald Trump, as it has been for every President. The proposition that he is using his office to enhance his business is ludicrous. He doesn’t need the money, and the political controversy that being President naturally generates is bad branding and ultimately bad business.
Never mind that, however; what matters is that every bit of evidence and historical precedent indicates that Trump as President, like all the others, wanted to do the best he could do for his country in the limited time he had to do it. Claiming otherwise is a particularly vicious and unfair piece of defamation, designed to make it more difficult for him to achieve that goal, as he defines it.
In contrast, it is Joe Biden who is desperately trying to hold on to power even as it should be obvious to him tat he can’t do the job any more. That is selfish: his fragile ego cannot accept that he is no longer up to the task, if he ever was. Either he is now a complete puppet POTUS, doing the bidding of his radical, unelected “handlers”—Democracy!—or he believes that even in his demented state, he is more competent than Kamala Harris, whom he has endorsed, maybe at gunpoint. How ennobling.
I know George Washington, I’ve studied him, George Washington is a hero of mine. Joe Biden is no George Washington.
Ethics Alarms 
As I said before, the Ministry of Truth has its hands full. We have to make sure the citizens fully understand that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
At some point, we don’t know what is and what isn’t a lie. We know that Biden claimed he was in for the long haul, and yet he stepped down, and some are saying it was completely voluntary. If it was voluntary, then Biden lied about about his commitment to his campaign. It certainly doesn’t look that way from my vantage, but I know I don’t have all the information. Maybe this hot story of how Obama engineered Biden’s withdrawal is itself the lie. The scary thing is that it doesn’t matter which is the lie; what matters is that the lies are so prevalent that all reports have become suspect.
So now it is alleged that President Obama has committed extortion to force a sitting President out of the 2024 campaign. And that’s what it is: extortion.
How would you distinguish this from Nixon’s forced resignation?
Once Nixon knew that he had lost the support of his party and that he would be impeached, he stepped down.
I don’t think Biden was threatened with anything other than the legitimate process to remove him. If Biden were competent, he could have fought the 25th Amendment process. But, he knew he was not competent and that he would lose.
-Jut
The main distinction is that a bi-partisan impeachment was a certainty. Goldwater and the other party leaders weren’t threatening Nixon with anything, just telling it like it was. They may have even promised that he would be pardoned, though that is pure speculation.
I would think that bi-partisan removal of Biden under the 25th Amendment would have been a certainty, as well (though some Republicans have suggested that they wanted to keep him in office to highlight his incompetency and help Trump win (I think that is irresponsible for any sort of patriot)). They could have legitimately invoked the 25th Amendment against him and so, here too, I think they were telling it like it is.
Now, where the Democrats are irresponsible is that they are letting him serve out his term. If the 25th Amendment would remove him, they should not let him stay in.
-Jut
There at least 25-30 certifiable wackos in the House. I think there are Machiavellian GOP members who would vote to keep Joe in office, and other weirdos like “The Squad” that might vote to keep Joe too. If Biden opposed the 25th effort, it would be a big mess, and one Democrats would hate hate hate. I’m inclined to think that Biden would win in the House.
In Nixon’s case, officials – which were elected by the people – went to Nixon and told him needed to resign because the impeachment process was going to convict him and remove him from office.
President Obama is not an elected official at this point. He a private citizen and it seems he is using his power – much like a mob boss – to organize the removal of President Biden. Had elected officials gone to President Biden and simply invoked the 25th Amendment per the provisions of the Amendment, that would be no issue.
Even if everything you say is true, I am not convinced.
First off, while Obama is a private citizen, Biden was his Vice-President. As much as they may hate each other, Obama and Biden would likely claim publicly that they are friends. Biden could probably claim that Obama is a “trusted advisor” or confidante.
Secondly, Biden and Obama are both in that rarest club of being the President of the United States (okay, dictator of North Korea is a rarer club, but you get the idea). Jack could probably speak to this better than I can but, with the recent exception of Trump, there is a certain level of comradery in that group that can even cross party lines. Obama is one of the few people in the country that can relate to Biden’s role. We certainly should not discourage or disparage such relations.
Yeah, just like a mob boss–but he has a decent cover story.
-Jut
i think you underestimate Democratic ruthlessness and also their intelligence. The leadership and most of the electorate knew damn well that whatever Biden said, his polls were tanking and there was a very good chance he was going to lose. That couldn’t be allowed to happen, come hell, come high water, or come the democratic process. The Democratic party has an agenda to complete, and that can’t be derailed by Trump. So they pushed Joe out, how they did it really doesn’t matter, the official line is that he graciously stepped aside like Washington.. That’s their story and they’re sticking with it.
At this point it’s no longer about what happened behind the scenes, it’s about pushing Kamala Harris HARD and moving the needle. Got to keep that fascist felon and rapist out of the white house, and this brilliant black woman of color is just the person to do it.
I saw an article rehabilitating LBJ just so they could favorably compare Biden to him.
All of a sudden turning Joe into the greatest thing since canned milk is pathetic. The entire AUC can turn on a dime like a school of fish or a flock of birds. Frightful symmetry.
George Orwell was a socialist and it’s his people doing exactly what he predicted a totalitarian government would do.
In a recent issue of AMERICA, a magazine produced by the Jesuits concerning Catholic matters, there was an article comparing the nobility of the “voluntary” resignation of Pope Benedict and President Biden. The word “noble” was frequently used.
Neither Benedict nor Biden have done noble acts. Both have run from situations they could not a handle.
George Washington was also going broke as president. His hired managers weren’t doing a good job running his farm. In contrast, Joe Biden’s family business depended on his influence as president to make them rich.
Everyone realizes that we were within an inch of effectively not having a presidential election, right. If Trump had been assassinated, both the candidates on the ballot would have been chosen by Republican and Democratic Party insiders who are, essentially, indistinguishable. That would leave the American people with essentially no choice of their own in the election of the president. One of the big unanswered questions is why did the Democratic Party refuse to allow a ‘real’ primary when they knew of Joe Biden’s cognitive issues, yet allow him to debate, which would reveal what they had hidden. If you assume this was the plan all along (including Trump’s successful assassination), it is a pretty good plan.
I would disagree. The vast majority of GOP delegates were Trump delegates. I dare say that most of them were Trump believers and a decent chunk some of the real MAGA supporters. If Trump had been killed, I would imagine they would have been out for vengeance in selecting a nominee. I don’t know who, but it would likely have been disastrous.
I’ll give you another scenario. Suppose Trump were not killed but incapacitated — a real life 25th amendment type scenario? What the heck happens then?
Here’s another brickbat. Suppose Hersch is telling the truth but Obama was lying? That he did not, in fact, have Harris’s approval (and presumably a majority of the cabinet).
It is really fun watching you all scurry around finding dark, sinister reasons for Biden taking himself out of the race. Of course he didn’t want to withdraw. He loves power just like everyone else who’s run for or held the office. And of course Nancy Pelosi, Obama, etc., wanted him to drop out, because they want to win. And they knew he couldn’t. What was brilliant about this whole evil plot was that they waited until after the Republican convention and Trump nominated that idiot, J.D. Vance. I have no idea if the momentum will last, but like I said, it sure is fun while it lasts.
I don’t know which you are referring to, but the biographies of the Presidents don’t support that contention. The agenda of “I want to make the country better, stronger and moe successful” is not in conflict with “and I’m willing to break some traditions and skirt the Constitution to do it.”
(It was Michelle, not Barack, who implied that she loathed her country.)