In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

As I mentioned yesterday, I''ve been gnawing for days over the question why, among other things, the Biden campaign came up with the ides of a June debate. In fact, let's remember, this was one of several non-negotiable terms Trump had to accept if he wanted to debate at all, incluiding muted microphones when the other guy was talking. Trump accepted all those terms right away, even though it's generally thought they put him at a disadvantage. Why? I might be the only person besides Chrlamagne tha God who's asking why the Biden campaign ever thought this up . I think the answer is that the Biden people had a plan, and they're sticking to it. According to their plan, the debate is going to be the final blow that puts the election out of Trump's reach. In fact, they selected the June debate not to give the Democrats time to find a replacement if Joe performs badly, but to give the Republicans time to replace Trump at their own convention when he falls...

In yesterday's post I found myself scratching my head about key decisions Joe's handlers have made leading up to Thursday's debate. The biggest puzzle was why they made Trump the take-it-or-leave-it offer for the historically early first debate in June, when debates have normally taken place much later in the campaign. This will have the effect of tiring Joe out months earlier than would normally happen, but they also scheduled the debate for just two weeks after exhausting trips to Europe for the D-Day commemoration and G7, items they were fully aware of before offering the June 27 date. But I also noted that the handlers seem deliberately to have set up Thursday's video scene of Joe shuffling from Air Force One to Marine One en route to his debate prep at Camp David, when two months before, they'd made the decision to have White House staff escort Joe on those same walks to Marine One and surround him to shield the view of precisely his same shuffling gait. I...

Something bothered me about the most recent video of Joe, the one where he shuffles from Air Force One to Marine One at the Hagerstown airport en route to his derbate prep at Camp David. As Jesse Watters puts it, Joe Biden is seen shuffling at the speed of an elderly man with a poor memory as he gingerly makes his way across the tarmac to Camp David. There is a longer version of the same video, which Fox has edited for this segment. In the longer version, Joe is descending the stairs from Air Force One actually displaying basic physical competence, and as he reaches the tarmac, he returns the salutes of the marines there. But in the segment on the Fox show, he tires visibly as he crosses the 50 yards or so to the helicopter, and by the time he reaches the steps, he's clearly too tired to return the salutes of those marines. This is visible in the Fox edit. (I checked the protocols for presidents returning military salutes -- civilians in general do not salute, includin...

The feature of this year's presidential campaign that I've found most remarkable is how early key events have been taking place vis-a-vis campaigns in the past that I think are similar. Nobody saw Reagan's landslide over Carter coming in 1980 -- at least nobody in legacy media. George H W Bush's come-from-behind victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988 came only after he called Dukakis a "liberal" at the Republican convention, and it was cemented only by mid-October when Dukakis rode on a tank. Dubya's more predictable victory over John Kerry in 2004 nevertheless wasn't tacitly acknowledged in legacy media until the Bush campaign's windsurfing ad in late September, after which anonymous Democrats began leaking their complaints about the Kerry campaign. As I've been noting here, though, prominent Democrats have been complaining about the Biden campaign, both anonymously and for attribution, since late last year, and if anything, there have been ...

As of two weeks ago, and even up until this morning, plans for Joe's debate prep leadingup to the June 27 debate were vague. Here's a June 10 story from AP : After back-to-back trips to Europe, President Joe Biden plans to head to Camp David next week to prepare for his first 2024 debate with former President Donald Trump, hunkering down at the woodsy Maryland hideaway that has hosted many similar cram sessions in the past. .. . A person with knowledge of the president’s plans, who insisted on anonymity to more freely discuss them, suggested Biden could spend the better part of a week at Camp David getting ready for the first debate. But others involved in the planning said Monday that details were still being worked out, including how many days Biden would devote to prep. They said exactly where he’d be doing it, at Camp David or elsewhere, had not been finalized. But now we know! As of this morning, according to ABC News , With a week to go until the fir...

Ever since the G7 "cheap fake" vignettes, outlets across the board have been spitballing new strategies to replace Joe on the November ballot. Via the UK Daily Mail , [I]t seems no matter how much cold water the Biden campaign or Democratic Party throw on this raging fire of speculation, Americans will not be put off the Great Joe Biden Replacement Theory. It's the idea that somehow, some way the President will be swapped out as the Democratic Party's candidate ahead of the 2024 election. But the obstacle is always Kamala, who is the other horn of the dilemma. The Daily Mail points this out: [The substitute] would not be Vice President Kamala Harris, according to sources, who observed that Harris has already had to fend off a push to replace her on the ticket. 'It doesn't just become Kamala. Kamala only becomes the nominee if Biden dies,' one blunt consultant said. Another Democratic political insider believes that Harris has failed so badl...

YIKES: Watch Joe Biden incoherently babble at his Hollywood fundraiser as Obama looks on in SHOCK. This is so bad… pic.twitter.com/W7WsF74zvM — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 17, 2024 The conventional wisdom, even before the 2024 presidential debate dates were set, has been that Joe's handlers will be able to prep him well enough for the first debate, now a little over a week away, that he'll surpass a low-bar standard and "win" the debate against Trump simply by avoiding major embarrassments. For instance, Biden’s performance at his State of the Union address — which went over largely well and led to many public reconsiderations of whether he was too diminished to run for a second term — is very much on the minds of some Trump aides. They expect that Biden’s team will get him into similar shape ahead of the debate. As of now, even though I'm a contrarian in any case, I have serious doubts about this. The CNN story at the link was written l...