In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Several pieces turned up over the weekend showimg polite opinion moving through the final stages of grief over the potential November outcome. A major theme is that, even with five months still to go until the election, Joe has run out of time to turn things around. At Roll Call : The Biden 2020 campaign strategy was simple: portray himself as a seasoned centrist who would bring the country together and return the White House to normalcy. After three-and-a-half years governing with liberal policies to appease his base, that direction for Biden is no longer an option. Independents, who won him the election, now overwhelmingly have an unfavorable view of both the job he is doing and him personally. The majority coalition that elected him is gone, as those critical voters no longer view another four years of Biden as a positive. So another strategy has emerged, almost by default given Biden’s limited options. It is one that seems oddly familiar, as it mirrors Hillary...

Let me say that I do accept, at least for now, Snopes's fact-check of Joe's awkward pose at the D-Day commemoration. But it's worth pointing out that this is at least the third allegation, no matter how far-fetched, that Joe has done this, from an episode at the Vatican on June 21, 2021 , to this one last month on the White House driveway: Anyone who has parented a toddler knows exactly what's going on here pic.twitter.com/6J2QZBwFMt — L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) May 5, 2024 Someone posted this post's title on Twitter, but it raises a bigger question. Whether Joe has been pooping his pants at all, these episodes all catch Joe in awkward moments that suggest he is simply not a well man. And this leads to Jim Geraghty's point that I linked in yesterday's post, that at some point in the future "we will ‘learn’ something like, ‘the president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klai...

Over the past week, I think there's been a major shift in polite opinion, prompted in part -- but not completely -- by the Wall Street Journal piece that simply gave everyone permission to admit what people had been seeing for months, if not indeed years. The other factor is that Trump's conviction in the New York "hush money" trial gave him, if anything, a slight boost in the polls , but it also fed $400 million in donations in the week following the verdict. This brings to mind the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think we can say that polite opinion in the wake of these developments has moved entirely past denial. A week ago, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict and beginning to recognize that calling Trump a "convicted felon" wasn't going to change a thing, Harold Myerson got mad in The American Prospect, calling Trump The Martyr of Mar-a-Lago: The political consequen...

Yesterday I referred once again to the UK constitutional crisis of 1936, when rumors of Edward VIII's intent to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson were all over US, Canadian, and Australian papers, but there was a taboo against mentioning it in the UK press -- at least until some remarks by an obscure Church of England bishop were interpreted as the Establishment giving "permission" to bring it up publicly, although it had been a full-blown crisis behind the scenes for months. Edward abdicated within a week of the UK papers finally picking it up. Greg Gutfeld, one of the most insightful commentators lately, referred last night as I did yesterday to the Wall Street Journal story of Joe faltering behind the scenes as a "permission slip" to talk openly about a smiliar constitutional crisis . At 4:30: Now, is it news that Biden's a mess? No. We hear it every time he opens his mouth and the moths fly out. The White House doctor can pump him f...

Lately, I've been looking at Greg Gutfeld as one of the more insightful commentators. Here was his take on the Wall Street Journal's headline yesterday about Joe showing signs of slipping (at 0:30): The Wall Street Journal revealed that Joe Biden may be suffering cognitive decline. Talk about breaking news. Nice work there, Wall Street Journal! I wonder what stocks your financial section will be recommending. Perhaps those little-known startups like Apple and Micsrosoft? Tucker Carlson is even closer to the point . He brings up the backlash against former White House physician Ronny Jackson, who was publicly reprimanded by Barack Obama when he posted on Twitter during the 2020 campaign that Biden should undergo a cognitive test when he said in a speech, "My name is Joe Biden, and I'm a Democratic cndidate for the United States Senate." Tucker went on to say that Jackson was given the uniform command of the people who run the Democratic P...

It's remarkable how quickly the Trump hush money trial and conviction have faded into the rear view mirror -- by the weekend, legacy media was gloating that Trump was ahead by as low as 0.6 points in the meaningless RealClearPolitics popular vote average, but as of this morning, he's back up at 1.1, basically no change from before the verdict. So they've moved on to Hunter's gun trial, which is soap-opera clickbait with a juror getting weepy during Abbe Lowell's opening statement . But I can't resist posting on one footnote. Kevin Morris, Hunter's "sugar bro", attended at least the first day of Hunter's trial on Monday to support him, although as I posted here , after spending at least $6.5 million to pay Hunter's lawyers and fund his lifestyle, he's said to be out of money. I've been increasingly skeptical of the conventional Morris narrative -- he's a "Hollywood lawyer" who stopped practicing law 15 years ago, and...

As a successful comic, Gutfeld has an instinctive insight into humor, but standup is also a peculiarly American institution, part of our popular culture. For the last several days I've been talking about Trump's relation to the popular culture superhero paradigm, in which a reactive superhero consistently improvises to escape the elaborate schemes of an intellectual, deliberative supervillain. We see this when Batman fights the Joker. but we see it even more clearly as we watch the Road Runner foil the elaborate machinations of Wile E Coyote. Gutfeld made a very similar point in last night's monologue . At 3:28: So the saga of Donald J Trump continues. Really, what did we talk about before him? . . . But have you noticed the reaction to the Trump conviction? It's more muted than my TV during Jesse's show. Of course, there are the usual nut cases where anything related to Trump is cause for incontinence. [Switches to clip of Joy Behar on The View talking about...