Thursday, July 11, 2024

"I Sorta Got On My Knees And Begged Him."

It took me some time to connect the dots between two cryptic clips of Joe's remarks surrounding the NATO summit yesterday. It looks as though he was trying to tell some sort of private joke that stayed in his mind over two separate contexts.

The clip above was in a discussion with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, while the clip belolw that more or less explains it was made at the NATO summit itself in a direct exchange with retiring Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg:

Nobody is quite sure what the word was as Joe slurred out "_____ing", but I'm with those who think it was indeed _____. As best I can reconstruct what was going on in the presidential brain, the story he was trying to tell was that he was getting down on his knees and begging, but the person he somehow meant to be begging wasn't Secretary General Stoltenberg, it was the Secretary General's wife, or something like that. Yuk, yuk, huh?

As I said when Joe violated diplomatic protocols at the G7, including forehead-bumping Pope Francis, meetings at that level are intricately pre-scripted, and there are meant to be no surprises, especially not in the public exchanges. Ronald Reagan did not share toidy jokes with Margaret Thatcher no matter how much they may have agreed in their respective agendas.

At the very best, what this suggests is that Joe had basically lost situational awareness: this was a diplomatic summit at which nobody jokes about diddling the wives of other high-level diplomats, but Joe just had to get out a giggly sort of barb that nobody quite understood, but it had apparently been on his mind for hours. In this, he did nobody any favors.

But this turned out not to be the only time sex was on his mind yesterday -- he dropped by an AFL-CIO meeting and came up with this:

As this commentator said, "This is what happens when Biden speaks without a teleprompter." He tells private jokes that either nobody quite gets, or if they get them, it makes them uncomfortable. On one hand, the experimental data that backs up the Dunning-Kruger effect involves people who tell jokes that nobody thinks are funny, but on the other, that a US president would routinely do this sort of thing, especially in a diplomatic context, is worrisome.

Nevertheless,

An embattled President Biden is set to stage a “big-boy” press conference Thursday afternoon — the first since his disastrous debate performance threw his 2024 re-election campaign into utter disarray.

The 81-year-old plans to close out the NATO summit in Washington — an event meant to showcase his leadership on the world stage — with the rare, solo news conference as he scrambles to prove to the American public that he’s capable of serving another four years.

The commander-in-chief is scheduled to take questions from the White House press corps at 5:30 p.m.

Beyond that,

President Joe Biden is slated to participate in a one-on-one interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, as the 81 year old continues to stand defiantly in his decision to remain in the presidential race, despite the pleas of some very well-known Democrats.

NBC’s Monica Alba announced the upcoming interview, writing on X, “BREAKING: @NBCNews anchor Lester Holt will sit down with President Biden for an exclusive one-on-one interview on Monday in Austin, Texas.”

The only thing that comes to mind here is "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Why are Hunter and Dr Jill still putting him up to this? One theory is that Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer have begun to lose patience, and they're telling Joe he's got to do more to prove he's healthy enough to continue. In this scenario, the Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force, and Joe is convinced that all he needs is one good performance to pull it off -- not just to keep the nomination, but in fact to win in November.

Another scenario might be that Hunter and Dr Jill know it's a lost cause, but they aren't yet ready to throw in the towel. Letting Joe do one last press conference, one last interview, maintains the fantasy for just a few more days, and they'll deal with next week when they come to it.

But it's hard to imagine that in the context of June's repetitive disasters, anyone seriously thinks Joe is in a position to rescue his candidacy and turn things around in the next few days, especially given his performance yesterday.

UPDATE: Today's "big boy" press conference has been moved back from 5:30 to 6:45.

posted by test @ July 11, 2024   0 Comments