Monday, July 8, 2024

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON - Bidengate and the Doom Loop

 The more Biden avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent.

The entire 2019-20 Biden candidacy and subsequent presidency were predicated on a rotten Faustian bargain. A hale Joe Biden would feign his aw-shucks, Joe from Scranton schtick. And an ossified working-class Joe’s camouflage would get the hard left elected—especially thanks to the changes in balloting laws that often saw only 30 percent of the electorate voting on Election Day in key states.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/08/bidengate-and-the-doom-loop/

In exchange, the two narcissistic Bidens would bask in the power and attention of the presidency. From the start, Jill and the media would orchestrate deep cover for Joe’s escalating dementia as well as the true intentions of the now-in-power radical Democratic Party with its neo-socialist agenda. The former Obama acolytes would get their long-dreamed-of third presidential term. And this time they would enact a truly radical agenda while their string puppet mumbled to everyone that he was just old, familiar Joe working for the middle class.

The problem, inter alia, with the ruse was that it was based on a complete lie to the American people. Joe Biden was nowhere near cognitively competent. He could not campaign “normally” in 2020. And it would be impossible for his dementia to go undetected even in the ceremonial duties of the presidency for four, perhaps even eight, more years.

And there were plenty of other problems that transcended even Biden’s mental confusion.

First, the new Obama agenda—hyperinflation, open borders, woke crime theories, destroying deterrence abroad, green extremist mandates—was further to the left of the American people than in 2016.

And worse, it was nihilist and destructive. By the August 2021 Kabul withdrawal humiliation, Biden would never again win 50 percent approval from an increasingly exasperated public who felt they had been had by the mannequin Scranton Joe and his false 2020 calls for “unity” and “healing America.”

Second, Joe Biden, senator, vice president, quid-pro-quo sudden multimillionaire, was never a “nice guy.”

His (brief) 1984, 1988, and 2020 presidential runs were characterized by assorted gaffes, plagiarism, and racism (the first “clean” and “articulate” black presidential candidate, “junkie,” “you ain’t’ black,” and the corn-pop sagas).

He always displayed a short-fuse, mean streak (cf. his 1988 angry and falsified defense of his law school and stump speech plagiarism) and bullying (his 2020 slurs of “fat,” “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” etc.).

Biden’s scowls and outbursts grew as he seemed to come alive only when slurring and slandering half the country as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” deplorables. So, in the recent debate, Biden at least admitted that he had written off half the nation that voted for Trump.

Third, if Trump was an exaggerator, Biden was a long-time mythologist, fabricating his bio, family history, and Trump’s record (from the yarn about cannibals eating his uncle to inheriting a completely unvaccinated country and 9 percent hyperinflation in 2021).

Fourth, there was a creepy side to Joe Biden—from stories of swimming nude in front of female Secret Service agents and the Tara Reade days to his 2020 apologies for sexual buffoonery and his fixations with pre-teen young girls, expressed by embarrassing crowd call-outs or blowing and touching “inappropriately” their hair, shoulders, and necks. Most Washington women knew in advance to avoid Joe’s too-long hugs and bizarre air blasts on their hair and ears.

In short, there were plenty of reasons why Joe Biden never got far as a presidential candidate, given he was a blowhard, cruel to people, a fabricator, of questionable ethics, and eerily interested in young girls—a far cry from ol’ Joe from Scranton, who, in a debilitated state, was supposed to offer the moderate veneer to a Jacobin agenda.

And now? Biden’s dementia has become so overt and so impossible to hide that the entire “crooked deal” has blown up. As a result, in the eleventh hour, there are very few pathways to salvation—as there never are when everything is birthed on a lie and its media-assisted cover-up.

Bidengate is far worse than Watergate. The media this time around was not exposing the wrongdoing of a conservative president but instead serving as a force multiplier in deceiving the very American people it was supposed to inform. “Democracy Dies in Deceit” is now the Washington Post’s de facto motto.

Remember, the left is worried only that Biden is so challenged that he cannot win an election. But they are not bothered that he has no business continuing in his dementia as commander-in-chief and putting the country in real danger each day he occupies the oval office—a bitter paradox that is beginning to infuriate the American people.

So, can Joe Biden just press ahead, sleep more, and fulfill his Faustian obligations? Or is he not in a doom loop? The more he rests, sleeps, and avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate, one-quarter president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, interviews, press conferences, debates and town halls, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent to the public. So, his handlers haggle over the choice between an ensconced virtual president versus an all-too-real, obviously senile one.

Some House liberal presidential historians cite a failing FDR in 1944 who was visibly ill during the campaign and from a variety of serious ailments. They chirp in that Roosevelt nevertheless mocked his critics, got reelected, and entered his fourth term on January 20, 1945. But they forget; the end of the story negates their very point. FDR dropped dead in office, as his critics feared, just 11 weeks later, and as historians seem to pass over.

What if Biden does an FDR, ignores critics and runs—and likewise somehow wins?

Unlike a failing Biden, had FDR not given into intense pressure from the Democratic donor class, the big-city machine bosses, the Southern segregationists, and the liberal print media, and thus had he not removed then-current Vice President Henry Wallace as his running mate, then the wartime commander-in-chief overseeing the Okinawa campaign, the Potsdam Conference, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, and dealing with an ascendant Joseph Stalin and the postwar Soviet Union monster would have been socialist/communist President Henry Wallace.

But unlike FDR, Biden still has no plans to remove Vice President Kamala Harris. Most certainly, then, soon the next president of the United States in 2025-6 will be an unelected and more incompetent successor: President Kamala Harris. And that thought terrifies seasoned Democrat donors, insiders and politicos as much as it did in 1944.

More realistically, Biden is far more cognitively challenged than FDR was in 1944. The chances that he will stay cogent for the next five months and win the election are quickly vanishing. Even the Biden-inspired, now discredited lawfare campaign against Trump has not just failed but boomeranged by increasing Trump’s popularity.

And if a stubborn Biden stays on the ticket and more likely loses, he will destroy what is left of the vestigial Democratic Party of the once triangulating Clintons. He will forever discredit the old-boy hierarchy and final obstacle to the full and overt manifestation of a Democrat, woke European-socialist party of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Squad, and the DEI caucuses.

Note Biden has already taken down with him most of the Washington-New York media, who only now confess they participated in suppressing real evidence of Biden dementia—and this from the same “journalists” who used to insidiously shout “25th Amendment”  during the Donald Trump years.

Biden and the apparat that presses on with the current farce might well lose more than the presidency—by losing both houses of Congress and ensuring Trump an unobstructed legislative trajectory to implement a complete reversal of the Obama-Biden years.

Yet, if Biden should step down voluntarily, pundits have run through the endless ensuing problematics. They are considerable: will his successor be on the ballot in all 50 states? What will the Party’s leftist base do if the identity-politics-selected Harris is pushed aside (and what will it do if she is not and steps up to the presidency?).

And how would a successor to Biden emerge in a free-delegate luche libre at a Chicago carnival convention, with chaos both inside the convention hall and a more violent “Death to America!’ bedlam on the streets outside?

So given all these nihilist alternatives, the two Bidens’ choice for now is to bark at the public. They will insult their own toadish media and deny the obvious. They will put the country’s interest dead last and connive that Joe can scowl, scold, lie, and yell at his critics—with not a care that our enemies abroad will conclude this is a golden Biden moment to do something stupid that may not come again.


The Left Play By a Different Set of Rules, and They Want You to Know It


On a mild night in late May 2020, the streets of New York City erupted. Motivated by the death of George Floyd, thousands took to the streets to rally for "social justice," and it wasn't long before the "mostly peaceful" protest turned into a full-blown riot. 

Buildings were ransacked as violence broke out, and pledges to go after the police moved past rhetoric and into action. One participant in the chaos was Pakistani immigrant Urooj Rahman, a lawyer by day and deranged far-left psychopath by night. In one text message, she told a friend "I hope they burn everything down." 

“Set a police car on fire,” she said in one. 

“My rock hit someone. A cop of course,” she added in another and included a smiley face emoji, Richardson said. 

“Molotovs rollin’,” she added in another. “I hope they burn everything down. Need to burn all police stations down and probably the courts too.”

Within hours, Rahman had used a Molotov cocktail to torch a police car. That was after she admitted to committing assault by hitting a police officer with a rock. 

What was her punishment? Despite laws allowing anywhere from decades in jail to life, Rahman found herself before a sympathetic judge who described her as a "remarkable person who did a terrible thing on one night." In the end, she was sentenced to just 15 months in prison. 

What made Rahman "remarkable?" Perhaps the judge was enchanted by her immigration status, seeing her as a tale of American exceptionalism. Whatever the reason, Rahman was let off with a slap on the wrist, and the message was clear: The left plays by a different set of rules. 

The moral of the story is simple. If you're a normal person, the full force and weight of the legal system will come crashing down on your head if you dare step out of line. Meanwhile, if you're a member of the far left, you can do just about anything and be praised by the judge on your way to dodging the harshest consequences of the law. Social justice demands it, after all.

Sure enough, Rahman is back to being an "activist." She was recently spotted shouting vulgarities at Jews during a pro-Hamas rally on the Fourth of July. 


You'd think that in receiving such leniency, far-left activists would at least fake some contrition going forward. Maybe cut back on the rioting a bit and stay out of the spotlight. They feel no pressure to do that, though. It's not enough for the left that they play by a different set of rules. They want to rub it in your face in the process. 

Rahman has no fear that she'll draw renewed legal scrutiny by appearing on camera supporting terrorists, and why should she? She's already proven that a judge will kiss her feet after committing felonies. Backing off on the often illegal activism would defeat the purpose anyway. The left doesn't just want special treatment. They want to destroy everything you care about and parade around with the ashes. They want you to know that they are in charge. 

The sad fact of the matter is that they are right. At least for now.



X22, And we Know, and more- July 8

 




President Trump’s Pro-Growth, ‘America First’ Platform Emerges a Week Ahead of GOP Convention

 The document is short, pithy, and right to the point.

https://www.nysun.com/article/president-trumps-pro-growth-america-first-platform-emerges-a-week-ahead-of-next-weeks-gop-convention

Forget the Biden circus — the real headline story today is a pro-growth, “America First” Trump platform a week ahead of the Milwaukee convention.

At the moment, the major press frenzy is whether President Biden is going to drop out of the race. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he will.

In Mr. Biden’s words, “The Lord almighty is not coming.” Let me add: you can bet on that.

All this Biden speculation, though, should not be permitted to obscure the fact that the Republican National Committee, a week ahead of the Milwaukee convention, has just adopted and released President Trump’s 2024 Republican Party platform.

This is today’s real headline story. The platform carries the same kind of message that Trump has been successfully talking about for the last several years.

It’s pro-growth and pro-opportunity, aims to close the southern border and restore an “America First” standing in the world. Peace through strength.

The document is short, pithy, and right to the point.

Some of the highlights include worker tax cuts and no tax on tips. Stopping Bidenflation. Restoring energy dominance. Ending unfair trade deals. 

Keeping the dollar as the world’s reserve currency — this is especially important for high growth and low prices — Wall Street, will you finally listen?

Restoring America’s status as the dominant world energy producer and canceling the electric vehicle mandate. Cutting all costly and burdensome regulations.

Sealing the border, stopping the illegal migrant invasion, and deporting illegals.

Keeping men out of women’s sports, and radical, racial, and sexual woke policies out of schools.

The platform also states, and I quote, “unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success.”

These are the message points that have proved so popular on the campaign trail.

These are exactly the themes that Trump has used to organize a working-class coalition of Black Americans, Hispanics, Asians, young people, and women.

These were policies to successfully build on Trump’s first term as President. Policies that Art Laffer, has called one of the best policies of any first term president.

Tax cuts, deregulation, energy independence, superb Supreme Court picks, good trade deals, strong national security — including the Abraham Accords.

Today, amid 20 percent Bidenflation, we have an affordability crisis with falling real wages and high mortgage and credit card borrowing costs, the nationwide crime and public safety ravages of Mr. Biden’s illegal immigration catastrophe, and raging fires overseas — most folks know that they were better off four or five years ago.

That’s Trump’s message. Success is the best uniter.

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.

CONRAD BLACK: Neither France Nor Britain Made an Ideological Shift, and All Parties Will Be Pitching Toward the Center

 In Britain, the roadmap back to office need not be lengthy for the Conservatives. In France, as always, it is more complicated.

https://www.nysun.com/article/neither-france-nor-britain-made-an-ideological-shift-and-all-parties-will-be-pitching-toward-the-center

The two important European elections are easy to misunderstand. Neither constituted the apparent ideological shift that appeared to occur and that had been anticipated in both the United Kingdom and France. The British had to defeat the Conservatives — for the first time in British history, the same party had put up five prime ministers in eight years and they had all failed.

David Cameron led Britain to an all or nothing referendum on remaining in the European Union, and he lost. Theresa May interpreted the narrow Brexit vote to depart the European Union as being, in effect, a vote to remain within Europe while claiming to leave it, with the inevitable result that after three years she had no support from anyone.

Boris Johnson efficiently accomplished Brexit but so offended his own party and the entire country by his buffoonery and, in some cases, lack of integrity that his government fell in underneath him, and he was rusticated by his own party, to the loud cheers of the opposition.

Liz Truss gained the premiership on a return to Thatcherism and produced a brilliant Thatcherite budget of reduced taxes and incentives to economic growth, but gave an unconvincing summary of how the program would be funded, and she was driven from office with the record-breaking celerity of 45 days.

Rishi Sunak followed but was completely incapable of producing an innovative program to deal with Britain’s stagnant economy and other problems and has led the conservatives to the most overwhelming defeat in the country’s nearly 300-year history. Margaret Thatcher’s achievement in remaking the Red Tories into an authentic conservative party, and Tony Blair’s accomplishment in making Labour a center-left party have both been substantially rolled back and squandered.

The lopsided result of last week’s election, though, does not imply any thundering acclamation for the victorious Labour Party despite its huge parliamentary majority. Its share of popular support remained practically unchanged at 34 percent but approximately a third of the former supporters of the Conservative Party deserted it, either to the moderate left liberal Democrats or the unambiguously populist conservative Reform Party.

That knocked conservative vote totals beneath Labour in scores of constituencies, producing labor pluralities in almost 200 constituencies where the Labour Party’s vote had scarcely, if at all, increased from the 2020 election. After 14 years of generally incompetent Conservative rule, that party simply had to be punished.

It has been, but the roadmap back to office need not be lengthy or complicated. There is no indication whatever that Labour has the answer to the country’s principal problems, and its leader, Keir Starmer, has given no indication whatever that he has the remotest idea of how to relaunch the country’s economy, improve national services, staunch the unpopular inflow of not easily assimilable immigration, and make the most of the potential that Britain’s departure from Europe opened up for a more prosperous relationship with America and the senior members of the Commonwealth, especially Canada and Australia.

After World War II and the disintegration of the British Empire, the United Kingdom has attempted to make a coherent political bloc of the Commonwealth, then to plunge headlong into Europe, and then to place its bets on the special relationship with the United States that had its great moment of glory with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt and a partial revival with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Neither Sir Keir nor any member of his new government have so much as hinted about how they might tackle these problems, and there is every reason to fear the worst. If the Conservatives choose an authentic conservative and competent leader they will probably be back in four years,

In France, as always, it is more complicated. The three principal parties in Sunday’s legislative elections were all political formations that have not existed under the same names for even ten years. The apparently leading group is the coalition of the left comprising the communists, socialists, greens, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far left Marxist party, France Unbowed, that regards the French communists as insufficiently zealous in their views. 

President Macron’s supporters, who have made a reasonable effort toward responsible centrist government, came a narrow second, and the much reformed and house-trained National Rally has come in a close third. The last remaining approximately ten percent belongs to the traditional Republicans, a responsible center right group. Mr. Macron has saved, at least temporarily, the French pension system by raising the retirement age to 64. The NR proposes 62 and the left-wing coalition 60. Neither alternative is affordable. 

The possibilities for government going forward are that Mr. Macron will try to assemble a nonpartisan technocratic caretaker administration and apart from that, govern by decree from the presidential office until the next election, in which Mr. Macron himself cannot stand, comes around again in 2027. The alternatives are that the president’s party could attempt to find common ground with the leftists and put some sort of hybrid program through, but it is almost certainly unlikely to be successful.                                

More promising would be if the RN leader, Marine LePen, continued her long march toward the center from the far right and managed to agree on a sensible program with Mr. Macron’s party. This is not mentioned at the moment as a serious alternative by anyone, but it is the only option that makes any sense at this point. 

Mr. Macron is a dedicated Euro-Federalist, an impassioned believer in the more radical climate change theories and official remedies, and is a curious mélange of a reasonable bourgeois conservatism and an unlimited commitment to contemporary faddish ambitions. He is barred from seeking a third consecutive term and as his party was just founded by him seven years ago and has been renamed and reconfigured a number of times, it has little durable definition apart from its support for the president wherever he may lead. 

As there is no mandate for a lurch to the left or the right nor a sufficient mandate continuing in the center, the immediate future course of France would allow ample reason for worry, except the French in their cynicism, don’t take politics too seriously and rarely inflict significant damage on themselves.

The future may rest largely in the hands of young leaders of whom we do not know much, including Mr. Macron’s prime minister, Gabrielle Attal, 35, and Madame LePen’s would-be prime minister, Jordan Bardella, a precocious 28. The French are now awakening from their customary world-weary disdain of politics to require action on the Islamic issues within France and the inadequate performance of the economy of this fundamentally rich and highly sophisticated country. 

These and other questions will require that President Macron be succeeded by a person of at least equivalent stature. Such good news as there is, is that all of the major political movements will be pitching to the political center. In the end, Madame Le Pen should be more capable of that than the pantomime horse of the left.


Tom Klingenstein: Donald J Trump’s Virtues


Play this at the opening of the RNC convention!

“Now that Former President Trump is the Republican nominee for President in 2024, it’s time for Republicans, including those who doubt him or even can’t stand him, to get behind him. The times demand it.”



Comer Reveals White House Doctor Was Involved in Biden Business Deals, Demands He Testify


Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

It just keeps getting better and better for Joe Biden. That is, if by "better," we mean "disastrous."

Think about it. 

There was mumbling Joe, bumbling and fumbling along, ever propped up by the flying monkeys of the liberal media who were always on the alert to knock down any accusation or negative story about the dazed and confused 81-year-old president. Then, on June 27, the debate debacle hit the fan. 

Since then, Biden's campaign and what's left of his dumpster-fire political career have swirled down the toilet faster than Michael Moore could inhale a sack of Quarter Pounders with Cheese. 

On Sunday, that swirl might have started swirling even faster.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) dropped somewhat of a bombshell when he revealed that White House Doctor Kevin O'Connor has been involved in Biden family business dealings, and as a result, Comer is demanding that O'Connor appear before Congress to answer questions about Joe Biden’s "declining mental state." 

Comer sent a letter to O’Connor on Sunday seeking to question the physician, given his "connections" with the Biden family, about whether he is in a position to provide accurate and independent reviews of the clearly declining president's "fitness to serve."

After a concerning debate performance by President Biden against former President Donald Trump on June 27, journalists have rushed to report on what Americans have seen plainly for years: the President appears unwell.

[...]

Given your connections with the Biden family, the Committee also seeks to understand if you are in a position to provide accurate and independent reviews of the President’s fitness to serve.

The Oversight Committee is concerned your medical assessments have been influenced by your private business endeavors with the Biden family.

At issue for Comer is whether O'Connor's medical assessments of Biden have been improperly influenced by his work with the Biden family and the company Americore Health, LLC, along with the president’s brother, James Biden. 

Incidentally, as a political pundit, I increasingly find myself shaking my head as I write about the stench surrounding all things Biden. Donald Trump might not be a choirboy or a moral leader, but he ain't got nothin' on the apparent corruption that runs deep to the core of the Biden administration.  

Comer pointed to an increasing number of Americans questioning Biden’s "ability to lead the country," saying his committee has been investigating circumstances surrounding O’Connor’s February assessment of the president in which O'Connor wrote Biden "is a healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male, who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency." 

As Comer noted, O’Connor did not recommend that Biden take a cognitive test. 

Comer also noted that public reporting indicated O’Connor participated in a meeting, along with Hunter and James Biden, with the president of a hospital being purchased by Americore, saying in the letter:

The Oversight Committee is concerned your medical assessments have been influenced by your private business endeavors with the Biden family.

Comer is seeking all documentation O’Connor has about Americore and James Biden. He requested the White House Doctor contact his staff by July 14.

What are the chances that will happen?