Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Joe's Health And The Metastasizing Crisis

Last night, as I sometimes do, I woke up with a start and asked a question that had been developing in my mind all the prior day: why were Obama and Pelosi so anxious to replace Joe with Kamala, who at best is no better a presidential candidate than Joe, and is potentially worse? The received versions of how Joe came to withdraw from the race differ. Yesterday I cited a CNN version that has Joe meeting with key advisers who simply told him he no longer had a path to 270 electoral votes. A competing version outlines a sense of increasing urgency from Democrat leaders in the weeks following the June 27 debate:

Pelosi, a Dem California rep and former House Speaker, had tried a different tactic before Biden finally bowed out of the race Sunday.

. . . She ended up all but threatenng to rake Biden over the coals if he didn’t drop his campaign, the source said.

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” a source told Politico. “It was about to be the hard way.”

The one thing we know absolutely, positively, for sure without the slightest doubt, is that the decision had nothing, no, nothing at all to do with Joe's health.

Joe Biden’s brother, Frank Biden, told CBS News that Biden’s declining health played a considerable role in his decision to drop out.

. . . There was a ‘funeral-like’ feeling to Frank Biden’s statement to CBS News.

He suggested Joe Biden is terminal.

Frank Biden told CBS News that he wants Biden back to “enjoy whatever time we have left.”

. . . They threw Frank Biden under the bus after he said the quiet part out loud.

“Frank Biden suffers from alcoholism and hasn’t spoken to his brother in weeks. What he said. . . is completely untrue,” a source ‘close to the Biden family’ (probably Nurse Jill) told CBS News.

But as of yesterday, rumors were swirling among the less fully housebroken of the right-wing aggregators:

KSNV-TV reported last Wednesday that a Las Vegas hospital was put on standby to treat Joe Biden for a medical issue. Biden cut short a campaign trip to Nevada after reportedly being diagnosed with COVID and returned to Delaware. . . . A pool reporter reported Air Force One flew back so fast “the plane shook.”

The story links to the report:

Law enforcement and medical teams gathered outside the University Medical Center trauma room entrance on Wellness Way in case the President of the United States arrived after he canceled an appearance at the Unidos US Convention in Las Vegas due to testing positive for COVID-19.

. . . Due to the hospital being the only Level 1 Trauma Center in Nevada, that's where the president will go during a medical emergency.

[Hospital CEO Mason] Van Houweling said the hospital was alerted around 2:15 p.m. about a possible medical issue with the president.

. . . He said the hospital team immediately took action while working with local and state law enforcement to secure the perimeter and also protect patients inside the building along with the president, in case he was brought to the medical center.

. . . Van Houweling said the hospital remained in communication with President Biden's security team about the evolving incident. Law enforcement and staff did not start to clear the area outside trauma and inside the hospital until after Air Force One departed Las Vegas.

Initial reports that Joe had some sort of medical episode on the flight have been throughly fact-checked out of existence:
Once he returned to Delaware, he canceled nine trips he was to make this week:

President Biden has canceled nine trips that were scheduled for the next two weeks after suddenly dropping out of the 2024 race, The Post can reveal.

Biden was scheduled to leave Monday for the West Coast, where he was to make stops in California, Denver, Houston and Austin — but all those trips have been canceled, a White House source told The Post.

Biden, who has been isolating with COVID-19, was set to leave his home in Rehoboth, Del., on Monday, but extended his stay until Wednesday after announcing the end of his campaign the night before.

In addition, he canceled a scheduled meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming meeting with President Joe Biden has been canceled as the president continues to focus on recovering from COVID-19, according to multiple reports.

The Israeli leader was slated to meet with Biden, 81, on Tuesday to discuss the future of the war in Gaza, but officials in Netanyahu’s office said the meeting has been called off, The Times of Israel and other outlets report.

The decision comes after Biden has remained out of the public eye after testing positive for COVID-19 while traveling in Las Vegas last Wednesday.

As of yesterday, the report was:

President Joe Biden’s “symptoms have almost resolved completely” from COVID-19, according to his physician, as the president on Monday remained out of public view for the fifth straight day.

. . . The White House says Biden plans to return to the White House on Tuesday afternoon.

The president's daily schedule does have him returning from Rehoboth this afternoon. Whether Joe will in fact meet with Netanyahu after all is still uncertain:

As he is recovering from COVID, Biden announced Monday in his first public remarks since last week that he will be “out of people’s hair for the next three-four days,” ruling out what a source in Netanyahu’s entourage said was a tentatively scheduled meeting for Tuesday.

However, the White House later updated Biden’s schedule to show he would return Tuesday afternoon to Washington from Delaware, where he has been quarantining, and a US official told The Times of Israel that the administration “expects” he will host Netanyahu for a meeting on Thursday. Netanyahu is currently slated to return to Israel on Thursday evening after giving his speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday afternoon.

The White House's record on transparency and the constantly changing narrative over this week's schedule suggest that Laura Loomer's interpretation of events can't be completely discounted: Because I have some background in the crisis management field, I keep returning to each day's news from a crisis management perspective. The Biden-Harris administration's current problem is that up until Sunday, there had been no visible crisis manager, in considerable measure because it had been ignoring the crisis. For reasons that still aren't clear, Joe has been forced to withdraw his November candidacy.

If this were anything like a normal crisis response, we'd see a crisis manager spokesman appointed corresponding to James Kallstrom's role with TWA 800. We could at least envision someone like John Kirby performing that function, giving for instance full details of Joe's COVID diagnosis and treatment, along with full details of the staff meetings that led to his withdrawal as a candidate, or perhaps full details of when the tentative meeting with Netanyahu will take place.

The problem is that these are precisely the things the administration doesn't want discussed, and that leads to the suspicion that Joe's health is a bigger problem than they're letting on. So the de facto crisis manager is, of all people, Kamala. Well, she has the biggest interest in continuing the coverups -- a new face like, say, Gavin Newsom, might do things like fire Secret Service Director Cheatle in an effort to restore credibility and salvage his candidacy.

That would make him a loose cannon, as would pretty much any outsider inevitably become.

posted by test @ July 23, 2024   0 Comments