Biden's Current Problem

Biden's handlers are clearly taking note of recent polls, and I assume other internal surverys are showing a perception that he's isolated and out of touch. So we see him getting out of the White House, in this photo with sleeves rolled up and jacketless (and I assume his greeters were informed of this dress code prior to his arrival), on the go.

The problem is that when he does this kind of thing, there's always the off key note -- in this case, the cheat sheets in his back pocket, in the Delaware dignified transfer op, the compulsive watch checking. And his eyes are always just slits.

He has Hillary's problem, the more people saw of her, the less there was to like. In his statements from the White House over the past week, he's been angry and callous, mostly refusing to answer questions. Apparently next week, he's going to start haranguing us about COVID again.

It isn't enough just to make him more visible when even the photo ops go wrong.

In early August, I was noticing that nothing was happening, maybe because everyone was on vacation. That changed in a hurry. Over the past few days, I've noticed we've been back to nothing happening again. I don't think I should get too comfortable with that.

Kabuki

Pardon me if, in the current atmosphere of false narrative piled on false narrative, I'm just the least bit skeptical of what's going on. We're being told via The Hill:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Democrats should hit "pause" on President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending package, firing a significant warning shot at his party’s top legislative priority.

Manchin, during remarks this week at a West Virginia Chamber of Commerce event pointed to concerns about “runaway inflation,” the delta variant of the coronavirus and a botched withdrawal in Afghanistan to float slowing down what is the centerpiece of Biden's economic agenda.

. . . "I know they're going to go nuts right now ... because what I said is going to all my caucus in Washington," Manchin added, referring to his Democratic colleagues. "But I'm thinking of it from the standpoint of where we are as a nation today."

He restated these views in, of all places, a Wall Street Journal op-ed. But he already knows "they're going to go nuts right now."

And AOC predictably went nuts:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York slammed Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia after he came out against the price tag of a $3.5 trillion social spending bill and urged Democrats to slow down its passage.

The congresswoman tweeted that "'bipartisan corruption" and "fossil fuel bills" are "killing people."

But a web search this morning suggests that Speaker Pelosi has had nothong direct to say, and Sen Schumer is vague:

Speaking Thursday from a New York City where hours before rainwater had poured into subway tunnels and paralyzed public transit, Schumer called it “imperative” to pass the infrastructure and climate bills.

That story also says,

Democrats have also appeared to acknowledge they will need to write a bill smaller than $3.5 trillion in order to push it through the Senate. Lawmakers have said they want to hike taxes on corporations and the wealthy and increase IRS enforcement of existing tax rates, among other measures, to offset the spending.

I don't trust anyone. If Manchin were really not with the program, he'd simply switch parties. He's getting far more baksheesh playing the role he's got. That goes for AOC and the Squad as well.

False Narratives

An opinion piece from John Solomon makes a productive point:

The long saga of the Russia collusion scandal — during which law enforcement, media, political operatives and intelligence assets manufactured a two-year illusion of a Trump-Russia conspiracy that did not exist — raised questions about a new era of political warfare in which false realities could be foisted upon the American public.

The bungled, bloody U.S. exit from Afghanistan now has some fearing the Biden administration practiced deception by omission and commission to create a two-month false narrative that misled Congress and the American public by making the situation in and around Kabul look better than it was.

That Solomon should mention the Trump-Russia false narrative brings to mind two other ongoing false narratives, in addition to the one just discredited, that the Afghanistan mission was succeeding:

• The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a success
• The January 6 US Capitol demonstration was an insurrection,

So far, it's plain that Speaker Pelosi is simply ignoring calls from Republicans for a congressional investigation into the Afghanistan fiasco, which given recent revelations is metastasizing into a story of months-long coverup of the actual situation. Meanwhile, she's continuing to promote the investigation of the January 6 events, with the cooperation of two turncoat Republicans who are now facing the potential of expulsion from the House Republican Conference.

The overall problem with the false narratives is that they aren't credible, and so far, the mainstream media hasn't fully signed on. The actual numbers are too hard to ignore:

[T]he one thing Biden has been bragging about as his supposed great success was actually a colossal failure as well. The airlift may have gotten out 120,000 people total, but those were not mostly Afghan allies who we had sworn to protect.

According to NBC News, around 20,000 Afghans who had worked with the US government had applied for SIVs, and that was back in May. No doubt the number skyrocketed as it became clear the Taliban would prevail. When you add in their families, that number jumps to almost 75,000. In the end, we got out around 8,500, a tiny fraction of those we made promises to.

The difficulty increases when, if you recognize that only 8,500 legitimate visa holders were evacuated, the rest of the 120,000 were unvetted, something that's gradually being acknowledged, while it's also slowly being acknowledged that at least 100 Americans, and likely more, were also left behind. All of these represent the potential for bad headlines going forward.

The Biden-Pelosi strategy continues to be to rely on paper-thin congressional majorities to stay on course day to day, while hoping Afghanistan blows over and something or other can work in their favor. But going into the Labor Day weekend, which has traditionally been just the crowning event of the end-of-summer silly season, things don't look propitious for this approach.

Seriously, Where's Kamala?

What nobody's much noticed is that, with daily news items that call Biden's fitness into question, Kamala Harris's profile has gotten lower and lower.

Kamala Harris may have crashed and burned as a 2020 presidential candidate, dropping out well before the first votes were cast in Iowa. But Biden chose her as his running mate anyway. It’s not clear exactly what Harris brought to the ticket outside of checking off a few demographic boxes.

Now,

Harris has been taken off the field almost completely. Last week Harris was sent to Vietnam and Singapore amid the chaos in Afghanistan. When that trip was over, she stopped off in Hawaii to visit Pearl Harbor. Any Americans who wanted to hear why Harris supported the decision to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan last spring would have to wait, because the press was blocked from the event.

. . . Last year, then-Vice President Mike Pence held dozens of press conferences as the head of the White House coronavirus task force, taking tough questions on an almost daily basis from the onset of the pandemic.

Since Harris took office, she has yet to hold even one formal solo press conference. Not one.

This story covers Harris's standing among swing-district voters in the Philadelphia area. In one interview,

[A 69-year-old retiree] worries Harris’ political growth has been stymied by a series of no-win assignments from President Biden and that Harris cannot overcome the country’s sexism.

. . . Two men told a reporter outright that a woman should never be president; a third said she “cackles” too much; a fourth called her “a joke,” who was put in her job as “a trophy.”

. . . “I can’t think anything of her because she hasn’t done anything,” said Adam Osborn, a 45-year-old Trump supporter who works in the advertising sign industry. “She’s not in the news in a way that portrays her positively, and she’s not in the news period. She’s in the shadows of the administration.”

But based on what we're beginning to understand about Biden himself, I don't think Harris's current position is any sort of tactical move to forestall efforts to remove him. Serious political observers rule out even an impeachment vote with Democrats controlling the House, but even after a putative Republican congressional victory in 2022, the odds of finding 67 senators who'd vote for removal are also slim. Biden understands this. Whatever her qualifications, which are nevertheless minimal, fear of a Harris presidency isn't the chief reason Biden will likely remain. It's just baked into the situation.

I'm thinkng more and more that he simply chose her from the start as the figure least likely to outshine him. It was probably an instinctive decision based on his decades of experience surviving as a mediocrity. That she should not yet hold a solo press conference looks to me like a policy decision from Biden's handlers, implicitly endorsed by the big guy himaelf, irrespective of any developments like the Afghanistan fiasco.

Nor would she ever have the gravitas within the administration to rally the consensus needed to invoke the 25th Amendment, again likely a factor considered in the 2020 selection process. The big guy's been way ahead of us!

Fate could intervene in other ways, of course, and the lizard people might yet devise a set of moves a la Spiro Agnew's resignation and replacement by Gerald Ford that could make Biden's removal more palatable. But to have a complete non-entity as vice president was almost certainly the intent of Biden and his handlers from the start, and let's face it, it's working so far.

What I don't Understand About Alex Berenson Is His Business Model

Alex Berenson, who apparently prefers to be called a "former New York Times reporter", but whom I would probably call a sometime COVID skeptic, was permanently banned from Twitter this past weekend for the post at right. As I've been pointing out here, his wording is actually a fair summary of recent public remarks from figures like Drs Fauci and Walensky: in fact, they've made statements themselves that the vaccine stops neither infection nor transmission. News reports routinely cite individuals who've been hospitalized after the two jabs, and regional masking rules have been reimposed on the clear principle that vaccinated people can transmit the virus.

Various figures have urged Berenson to sue Twitter, but I think this is incredibly bad advice. If he were to do this, he'd be sinking millions of dollars into a doubtful, years-long process of negotiations, injunctions, verdicts, and appeals that would divert his energy from any other projects. Even if some lawyer would take the case pro bono, just being the plaintiff is effectively a full-time, highly stressful job. For what?

Twitter isn't a serious platform, but Berenson does represent himself as a serious guy. Twitter is for posting zingers, and serious people like the late Rush Limbaugh have called it a "behavioral sewer". Jack Dorsey is doing Berenson a big favor, whether either recognizes it or not. But Berenson isn't taking the lesson -- he's simply moving from Twitter to an equivalent forum, Substack, and continuing just to post zingers.

Other than Twitter and now Substack, plus media appearances, his other COVID related effort has been just a four-part, self-published pamphlet, Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns. You buy these online through sources like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Frankly, I can't imagine that he makes more than latte money by selling these. You can subsidize his Substack tweets if you join his channel, but again, I can't imagine he can even fill up his car's gas tank with that money.

Why is he doing things this way? The words I would use for his project might be "desultory" or "inchoate". This allows legacy media to discredit him, when as far as I can see, events are continuing to prove him right. Last spring, The Atlantic published at hit piece, The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man, that claimed

Berenson has a big megaphone. He has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter and millions of viewers for his frequent appearances on Fox News’ most-watched shows. On Laura Ingraham’s show, he downplayed the vaccines, suggesting that Israel’s experience proved they were considerably less effective than initially claimed. On Tucker Carlson Tonight, he predicted that the vaccines would cause an uptick in cases of COVID-related illness and death in the U.S.

Except that, well, since then, his statements on Fox have been borne out. Israel's experience post vaccines has in fact resulted in a case rate that suggests vaccines had no effect:

The US also experienced an uptick, as Berenson predicted:

The CDC's response has been effectively to acknowledge that vaccines have proven far less effective than originally proclaimed, now recommending an indefinite regimen of boosters.

Berenson's problem is that he's using a gadfly strategy with people who won't hesitate just to swat the gadfly. Berenson has no platform -- even just a blog -- where he can articulate his arguments in a consistent, accessible location where people can find links to his data and see his predictions without having them mischaracterized by his opponents.

And as far as I can see, even if he ran an unmonetized blog on a platform like Blogger, he wouldn't be out all that much money, though he has options for monetizing even there. Maybe the problem is he went to Yale. It's a shame to see real ability going to waste.

No, It's Not Cognitive Decline

The most recent controversy (or by now, the second-most recent, which I'll get to) over Biden is the allegation that he fell asleep in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Mainstream media fact-checking has countered, correctly I think in this case, that photos and video clips have been edited to focus on several seconds where Biden's head is lowered. Conservative YouTuber Brandon Tatum, also of the not-asleep school, makes the point that, although Biden's eyes are slits in the sequence, close examination suggests that they aren't actually closed.

However, I also agree with the UK Express that calls the sequence "bizarre", asleep or not. Biden's body language often demonstrates incongruous affect, like the even more recent photo of him checking his watch during the transfer of the Kabul service members' remains in Delaware yesterday.

I think the bottom line is that he either doesn't give a flip how it looks -- after all, he's king -- or it's even more or less deliberate. Consider that Prime Minister Bennett is a supplicant in this situation. Israeli media made the point that the visit was to cement relations with the US, and Bennett's remarks emphasized the historic ties blah blah blah. Biden's reaction was to pull the slit-eyed lizard move, just days after shafting another US ally.

The same applies to checking his watch -- searching the web for commentary, I found that this seems to be a fairly common Biden tic in inappropriate situations, including debates. Given how we're getting to know the guy, I think it's a fairly honest indicator of what he's thinking. He's king, and he doesn't give a flip. Deal with it. It's a natural reaction, if we see something like this, to look for the most charitable explanation, so we're inclined to wonder if he's a little off. Afraid not.

Another recent story gives a better idea of how his mind works.

Boris Johnson has been warned that Joe Biden “holds grudges” after members of the British government questioned his mental fitness following “completely mad” press briefings on Afghanistan.

The warning follows a report in The Sunday Times that a British government minister said President Biden “looked gaga” while speaking to the press, with a government aide describing the American as “doolally” and the newspaper noting that “Such thoughts are normally never whispered in Whitehall, let alone briefed.”

“Doolally” is an insult with a strong pedigree in Britain, stemming from the name of a town in India where a sanatorium for soldiers rendered temporarily deranged by fever were sent in the 1800s.

U.S. sources have indicated that the 78-year-old Democrat is unlikely to appreciate the rich history of this description of his mental state, however, telling The Telegraph — which is close to the British government — that he is emphatically “not ‘gaga’” and in fact has “actually picked up his game quite a bit since the [election] campaign.”

“The Brits have their view. But they should be careful. What’s been said is offensive and he will remember it. He actually has a long memory,” the source warned the right-leaning newspaper.

I don't buy the bumbling grandpa bit. I lean much more to the slit-eyed lizard.

"Devout Catholic"? Forget his policies on abortion. How can a guy who goes to mass each week act this way at all?

While We've Been Distracted By Kabul,

They've been moving the goalposts yet again. The CDC website still carries the categorical statement,

COVID 19-vaccines are effective. They can keep you from getting and spreading the virus that causes COVID-19.

But for months now, we've been hearing the opposite from the same public health authorities. Elsewhere on the same CDC site, we read:

On July 27, 2021, CDC released updated guidance on the need for urgently increasing COVID-19 vaccination coverage and a recommendation for everyone in areas of substantial or high transmission to wear a mask in public indoor places, even if they are fully vaccinated. CDC issued this new guidance due to several concerning developments and newly emerging data signals.

. . . [N]ew data began to emerge that the Delta variant was more infectious and was leading to increased transmissibility when compared with other variants, even in some vaccinated individuals.

So the vaccines will keep you from getting and spreading COVID, except when they won't, so we have to go back to masks.

But now, er, maybe the vaccines don't last very long anyhow. Dr Fauci has been easing into this for some weeks. On August 12, he told NBC:

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said Thursday that “inevitably” everyone will need booster shots for the COVID-19 vaccine eventually because like any vaccine, its protection won’t be “indefinite.”

. . . “Inevitably, there will be a time when we'll have to give boosts. What we're doing, literally, on a weekly and monthly basis is following cohorts of patients to determine if, when and whom should get it.

“But right now at this moment, other than the immunocompromised — we're not going to be giving boosters to people," he continued. "But we will be following them very carefully and if they do need it, we'll be ready to give it to them."

But that was August 12, two whole weeks ago. We've been following other fiascos since then -- silly us. Just this past Friday, "not indefinite" has turned into "five months", and "just the immunocompromised" has turned imnto "everyone".

"We're going to start mid-September," Biden continued, noting America's scheduled booster program launch date of Sept. 20, previously set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. "But we're considering the advice [Israel gave us] that you should start earlier. This is promising."

"Pending the FDA and CDC, the question raised is, 'Should it be shorter? Should it be as little as five months now?'" the president added. "That's being discussed. I spoke with Dr. Fauci this morning about that."

So I got my shots last spring, but it looks like I'll need to get at least one more jab this fall, and as far as I can see, I'll have to keep getting jabs at cattle-pen "vaccination sites" every five months for the rest of my life. And oh, by the way, wear a mask. And whatever else.

One problem with this is the message it sends that the vaccines simply aren't very effective. It actually vindicates the holdouts and the hesitant -- they can say I never thought this was a good idea, and now just one or two shots isn't enough? Every five months i've gotta spend weeks trying to get another appointment? Get real.

But we've had months of prevarication from Biden on Afghanistan. Now it looks like we'll be getting more "15 days to flatten the curve" on vaccines and boosters. People will put up with this only so long.