"The Speaker Is Burning Down The House On Her Way Out The Door"

These remarks by Leader McCarthy on the occasion of the House censuring Rep Gosar for posting an anime indicate that at least some people are beginning to catch on to what's happening. The Speaker's world is effectively coming to an end. This ties in with another guiding principle I've been relying on in recent weeks, Stein's Law, That Which Cannot Continue Must Stop.

If we begin with the question of Speaker Pelosi's future, we've inevitably got to come to the question of President Biden's plans. My view continues to be that he isn't suffering from dementia, and thus he must have some understanding of his political predicament. This story gives some suggestion of what that predicament is and what must be effective cooperation with his handlers:

We reported Wednesday on the embarrassing story of how President Joe Biden’s handlers had scrapped a so-called “Three Amigos” press conference that had been scheduled to take place today between him, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after meetings in Washington, D.C.

That traditional press conference would be scrapped in favor of allowing the reporters to shout questions that the president might or might not answer. Speculation followed a question from a Bloomberg reporter on Tuesday, ". . . you guys had to clean up not only this Olympic comment but his comment on the timing for the Fed and his Taiwan comment, is the worry that you don’t want the President taking questions?"

Unfortunately, the update to this story just makes it all so much worse. CBS News White House reporter Kathryn Watson, who has criticized the White House in the past over accessibility issues involving Biden, noted on her Twitter feed this morning that unlike Biden, Trudeau would be holding a presser later this afternoon[.]

. . . And in a report she filed, Watson noted that Biden bailing on the scheduled presser would mean he would get to avoid some potentially uncomfortable questions about the border crisis and his handling of it[.]

If Biden didn't want to go along with this, he wouldn't. And if he didn't have some clear idea of what the program was, he wouldn't be following his cues -- he'd just be wandering around the room holding disjointed conversations with whomever, visible or not. That's not the big guy, at least not so far. He functions, just not very well. This goes again to my view that he's impaired, not senile.

The question is how much longer this can go on. Has he lost the New York Times?

His crumbling public approval rating must be troubling to President Joe Biden. But can it possibly compare to learning that the liberal mainstream media is turning on him as well?

On Tuesday, the New York Times sent an email to its morning update subscribers with the headline: “Who’s to blame for inflation?”

“It is dragging down President Biden’s approval ratings and fueling discontent among Americans,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin. “How did we get here? Who is to blame?”

We fully expected the Times to make excuses for Biden. And at first, it looks as though that is what Irwin is going to do, writing that “presidents have less control over the economy than headlines might suggest.” But then he adds that “the current situation is an exception to the rule.”

. . . But the fact that any one of these “news” outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out “fact checks” that aggressively slapped down any such claim.

I note that over the past few days, the conventional wisdom has been shifting from "Biden plans to run in 2024" to "Despite what he's said, he may not run in 2024". I think it's increasingly likely that he may not even make it to then. The problem is that he isn't senile, so the 25th Amendment probably can't be used to get him out. I would imagine that his closets are full of Agnew-style skeletons, but impeachment has been reduced to a feckless exercise, and he's a very stubborn guy who won't easily be led into a Nixon style resignation, especially if Harris can't be eased out herself.

The difficulty I continue to see is that as the border, inflation, and COVID continue as very serious problems that Biden can't solve, something worse is sure to come along. But if this happens, finding some way to put a different, competent handler behind the scenes or directly forcing both Biden and Harris out a la Nixon-Agnew would require a major change in political alignment following the 2022 midterms, still a year away. We have challenging times ahead.