Let's Look At The Latest Episode

There's been the usual chatter from the usual suspects over Joe's latest breach of decorum, walking out of yesterday's Medal of Honor ceremony for US Army Cpt Larry Taylor before it had finished. Once again, Sean Hannity, among others, called Joe "dazed and confused", which I didn't see at all.

Joe begins speaking for his part of the ceremony at 2:45 in the video at the top of this post. He's aware of the chaplain offering the opening prayer, and he waits respectfully as the chaplain speaks for over two minutes. Then Joe moves to the lectern and begins his scripted remarks. He's aware of the lectern, the circumstances, and his role in delivering the prepared address, which he reads mostly with some degree of expression. He knows where the teleprompter is, and he reads from it in mostly coherent sentences.

While I'm not a medical professional, as a layman, I don't see him appearing to be unaware of his surroundings or seeing people who aren't there. On the other hand, just for starters, I went to the undergraduate institution that was the model for Faber College in Animal House, and I know a thing or two about functioning in an impaired state and seeing other people who are this way. If I didn't know better, I'd say Joe was drunk at the ceremony, not suffering from some other state of cognitive impairment.

I understand Joe officially doesn't drink. For instance, this statement issued during his 2020 campaign says,

Joe Jr.'s family and neighbors also, inadvertently, taught him about the dangers of alcohol—and it's the reason he doesn't drink, according to him.

. . . Joe Jr. has specifically said why he doesn't drink at all: "There are enough alcoholics in my family," he said in 2008 on the campaign trail.

The problem I have is that, at least to my ear, he in fact struggles to talk as if he isn't intoxicated, not much different from Otter and Bluto. Just take the excerpt that begins at 6:35 in the video:

So when Larryas ordered [pause] uh ayun Larry, as ordered, offered a spot eh to fly in the Fighting First in Viet Nam, he jumped at the chance.

At 8:18:

Overz radio he said "let's get to work!" A flare went up, and the flight -- fight was on. The enemy fire lit up the night. Lt Taylorn is copilot dove down positioning's cobra nearly -- parallel -- with -- the -- Viet -- Cong -- fighters.

There's quite a bit of slurring in the sentences that follow. Those who watch the current On Patrol: Live police ride-along program, or who've watched previous shows like Live PD or Cops know that such patterns of speech are one good potential indicator of driver intoxication. Linguistic studies reflect this as well, for instance:

[T]here is a 2001 study entitled Effects of ethanol intoxication on speech suprasegmentals by Harry Hollien and colleagues.

Hollien, et al., administered controlled amounts of alcohol to a group of young adults, and quantified the aspects of their speech that changed the drunker they got.

. . . The researchers also found a decrease in the subjects’ speaking rate as they become more intoxicated. There seems a specific point at which this slowing of speech occurs: men slow down the most at a blood alchohol level between 0.04 and 0.08; for women, this occurs between 0.08 and 0.12.

Finally, the researchers found that the most striking impact of alchohol on speech was an increase in ‘nonfluencies.’ That is, people stammer, stutter, and trip on their words a whole heck of a lot more when they’ve had a few too many. Just how much does this intensify? The researchers found that in the severely intoxicated, the rate of these ‘speech errors’ nearly triples.

The writer adds,

Something that isn’t mentioned in the study is what I find to be the most salient feature of ‘drunken speech:’ hypercorrection. Drunk people, aware of their intoxicated state, often overcompensate by overenunciating evvvveerrry ccconnnsonnantttt and vowel. Perhaps this relates to the higher rate of stuttering and stammering: when you put such pressure on yourself to pronounce everything perfectly, you’re bound to trip up!

Stammering, stuttering, tripping over words, sudden extra care in enunciation, sudden slowing, and slurring are all routine features of Joe's speech. His defenders have insisted it's a speech impediment he's had all his life, but looking at earlier clips of Joe's speech even while he was vice president suggests the problem has worsened in recent years.

There are two reasonable explanations for this. The first, which I think is especially likely with Speaker Emerita Pelosi, who also claims not to drink, is that this claim is false. I've posted on her case. Another explanation, which may be more likely for Joe, is that although he doesn't drink, one or another prescription drug, quite possibly used more than recommended, is having an effect comparable to alcohol.

I get the impression that the Overton window of acceptable discussion attributes Joe's problems with enunciation and his frequent breaches of official decorum to age exclusively, but it then declares the subject off limits due to tact. This happened most visibly yesterday in an exchange between Fox's Peter Doocy and Press Secretary Jean-Pierre:

During Tuesday's press briefing, Fox News' Peter Doocy pointed out that Biden, at age 80, is the 'oldest president in U.S. history,' and then asked why White House staff treated him like a 'baby.'

'No one treats the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief, like a baby,' Jean-Pierre answered. 'That's ridiculous.'

But that same day, Joe had stumbled and slurred through his remarks at Cpt Taylor's ceremony, fastened the medal around his neck, and simply walked off before the ceremony was over. As I've felt all along, I don't think this was a result of Joe being unaware of his surroundings or even the requirements of ceremonial decorum. I think he was either drunk or under the influence of prescription drugs used to excess, he felt like walking out, and he could, because Joe is Caesar. Peter Doocy began a necessary process of calling this out.

Both Republican and Democrat challengers to Joe for 2024 need to start bringing this up. As I've been saying all along, I don't think this is a matter of age, or not age exclusively. Joe acts drunk. He acts drunk all the time. It's affecting his ability to do his job, at minimum at official ceremonies. We need to start asking why.

Can They Reboot The COVID Panic?

It's been a long time since I've posted on COVID, but with the uptick in masking recommendations from the usual public health suspects and the reemergence of Dr Fauci, I decided to see what I could do to compare current COVID statistics with those from a couple of years ago. What I discovered was that I can't. As of even last year, there were daily statistical updates locally and nationally. Now, at best, they're weekly, but the California state breakdown by county that's at the top of this post is updated only monthly. The old graphs I used to copy are no longer posted.

Now and then I've done a quick check of how many people are wearing masks at Sunday mass. This would be a population that skews older and more prudent -- prudence is a cardinal virtue among Catholics, after all -- and as late as six months ago, I was gauging it at from 25 to 35 percent. Last Sunday, it was well down into single digits. By the same token, I've seen far fewer people wearing masks outdoors on the street. The old social-distance calibrations and footprint reminders on floors and sidewalks have long since been power washed away, for all the good they ever did.

As of this past April, LA County stopped requiring masks even in hospitals and doctors' offices. But can they make us all go back? In July, 2022, more than a year ago, I posted on LA County moving to the brink of reimposing an indoor mask mandate and stepping back at the last minute. At that time, I linked to a news account:

The threat of returning to the mandate stirred up controversy. Several cities, including Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Long Beach, and most recently El Segundo, had announced this week they would not enforce any mandate.

Additionally, two [of five] members of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors had indicated they opposed the reinstating of a the region-wide mask mandate.

In an open letter, Supervisor Kathryn Barger said “masking mandates lack empirical evidence to back their effectiveness, are unenforceable, polarizing, and take a huge toll on the social-emotional well-being of children and youth.”

I commented at the time,

It appears there was a massive back-channel campaign against restoring the mandate, given Supervsior Kuehl's remark about the "snowflake weepies" who were opposing it. Sounds like the snowflake weepies won the day, and I would guess the supervisors put a lot of pressure on "Dr" Ferrer to decide she needed to look more closely at the data before they themselves would be pressured to vote against reimposing the mandate, which would likely put[LA County Public Health Director Barbara] Ferrer's own job at risk.

Dr Ferrer so far is still choosing to err on the side of keeping her job. As of last Thursday, she announced,

“There’s nothing that’s changed. We’re not announcing new safety measures today,” assured Barbara Ferrer, Director of Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

But, when asked if officials would ever make masks mandatory again, Ferrer was less committal.

“‘Ever’ is not a word I’m comfortable with,” she said. “There’s not that level of certainty with this pandemic. I’m never going to say there’s not going to be a time when we all need to put our masks back on. I am going to say we certainly don’t all need to put our masks back on now. We are at a place where people make their own assessment.”

I think we're also at a place where the population at large has understood that public officials had been crying wolf, and they'd been crying wolf for a number of reasons. One was certainly to increase their budgets, salaries, and prestige. But another was to create an atmosphere of panic that put Trump's 2020 campaign at a disadvantage by ending his public rallies and linking a populist uprising with the idea of an epidemic and the need to fight a social malaise, to "heal our city".

I think one big indicator that this moral panic is over is the counterproductive effect of Trump's indictments: each one has driven Trump upward in the polls and spiked his fundraising. If the general attitude is "fool me once," I don't see a good prognosis. But Dr Fauci's holding on, at least for now:

CNN asks Fauci why the highest quality scientific evidence consistently shows that masks do not work?

"The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 —… pic.twitter.com/GUdGak0AZh

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 3, 2023

In contrast to Dr Fauci, his old sidekick Dr Birx is urging restraint:

"We don't need to mandate," Birx, who was a White House COVID response coordinator, told Newsmax on Saturday.

Birx was responding to an increasing number of hospitals and businesses requiring masks amid an increase in COVID-19 hospital admissions across the U.S.

"We need to actually empower people with the information that they need for themselves and their families because every family is different," Birx also said. "And by the way, outside is safe, and playgrounds are safe.”

How Goes Ukraine's Propaganda War?

From Reuters on Thursday:

Ukraine told critics of the pace of its three-month-old counteroffensive to "shut up" on Thursday, the sharpest signal yet of Kyiv's frustration at leaks from Western officials who say its forces are advancing too slowly.

Since launching a much vaunted counteroffensive using many billions of dollars of Western military equipment, Ukraine has recaptured more than a dozen villages but has yet to penetrate Russia's main defences.

Stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and other news organisations last week quoted U.S. and other Western officials as suggesting the offensive was falling short of expectations. Some faulted Ukraine's strategy, including accusing it of concentrating its forces in the wrong places.

As I've pointed out here many times, Kyiv simply has to wrap up its counteroffensive this year. In fact, Ukraine's early success in 2022 for a time prompted the talking-head retired US generals to predict a capture of Crimea by the end of that year, but certainly in 2023.

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Ben Hodges predicted on Saturday [January 8, 2023] that Ukraine will retake control of Crimea by the end of August.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his "special military operation" on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, hoping for a quick victory. However, the war has exposed weaknesses within the Russian leader's military, such as its difficulties maintaining well-trained troops.

These challenges—coupled with Ukraine's spirited defense effort bolstered by Western military aid—has allowed Ukraine to retake thousands of miles of formerly occupied territory and turn the tide of the war in its favor.

I think Gen Hodges was one of those who'd predicted the capture of Crimea much sooner and was maintaining the happy talk while moving things back to summer. But as of March, Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley had become much more realistic:

“I don't think it's likely to be done in the near term for this year,” Gen. Mark Milley said Friday in an interview with Defense One.

“Zelenskyy has publicly stated many times that the Ukrainian objective is to kick every Russian out of Russian occupied Ukraine. And that is a significant military task. Very, very difficult military task. You're looking at a couple hundred thousand Russians who are still in Russian-occupied Ukraine. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm just saying it's a very difficult task,” the Joint Chiefs chairman said. “But that is their objective. They certainly have a right to that, that is their country. And they are on the moral high ground here.”

The problem for Ukraine right now is not only are they making little progress on the battlefield, but the chief US cheerleader for continuing the war, Joe Biden, is preoccupied, while Trump's current success in the polls makes the prospects of US support after next year's elections less likely. At the same time, the Comer committee's focus on Ukraine corruption and Joe's role in firing the corruption prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to protect the Biden family client Burisma puts Ukraine in a less favorable light with the US public.

That is the likely context of this news release:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday praised the effectiveness of long-range weapons after a series of drone attacks damaged multiple facilities deep into the territory of the Russian Federation and a missile strike hit a Russian facility in occupied Crimea.

The Ukrainian government said an indigenously developed long-range missile was used to strike a target 434 miles away.

"Ministry of Strategic Industries reported on own production. Successful use of our long-range weapons: the target was hit at a distance 434 miles," Zelensky posted to Telegram Thursday after meeting with officials.

These drone attacks hundreds of miles behind the front lines are likely insignificant militarily but are intended to produce favorable headlines. This won't work in the face of strategy by the Republican opposition to juxtapose Ukraine aid against US domestic needs:

President Joe Biden is asking Congress to approve $24 billion more in aid for Ukraine, which would bring the total amount of U.S. taxpayer-funded aid to Ukraine since February 2022 to $135 billion.

In contrast, Biden announced Wednesday that he would send $95 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to aid in rebuilding Maui after the nation’s deadliest fire in over a century, which has claimed more than 115 lives, with hundreds still unaccounted for.

I was convinced last year that short-term expenditures at that level were justified if they brought the promised results, namely, defeat of Russia, defined as complete retreat from Ukraine's pre-2014 boundaries, within the initially expected time, roughly the end of 2023. This clearly isn't going to happen. Instead,

The Biden administration is seeking to hammer out a long-term Ukraine aid agreement with European allies in hopes of both preventing Russia from gaining an edge on the battlefield and hamstringing a future president’s ability to scale back U.S. commitments, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

. . . European capitals want to cement support and restrict ways countries could renege on pledges, fearing what might happen during a second Trump administration, according to the WSJ. At present, Western European nations lack the industrial and financial capacity to match the billions in annual military aid provided by the U.S.

The problem is that Western war objectives have never been clearly stated, other than to predict a quick and relatively inexpensive outcome using obsolescent NATO and Warsaw Pact weapons pulled out of NATO reserves. When that didn't work, there was never a clear Plan B, but a consensus default appears to have emerged that NATO countries will continue token support for the war while expecting most of the cost to be borne by the US, its taxpayers, and its contingency supplies of ammunition.

In other words, it's a bait and switch, with the actors more or less hoping the US taxpayers won't notice. But there's been a creeping recognition that a new forever war in Ukraine will include a forever skim of US funding into the pockets of Ukrainian oligarchs -- and how much of that is still being kicked back to the Bidens? (That's a question that so far, nobody has asked.)

Ukraine is under martial law and won't hold elections until that's lifted. On the other hand, both the US and UK will hold elections next year, and Ukraine is likely to figure in both. At the moment, its propaganda war isn't going well.

Joe's Permanent Dilemma

Nobody's mentioned this so far, but given the disclosures in recent weeks -- the 5,000 e-mails sent to alias accounts, the 1,000 e-mails sent from Joe's vice presidential office directly to Rosemont Seneca Partners, and the trips on Air Force Two with Hunter, on some of which his presence was concealed -- Joe can no longer hold a traditional presidential news conference. But from the start of his presidency, he's groomed us to get used to it anyhow. The Washington Post editorialized this past May:

President Biden hasn’t dropped the microphone; he appears to have lost it. Mr. Biden is turning into a news media evader, and it’s harmful to his presidency and the nation. In the past 100 years, only Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan averaged fewer news conferences than Mr. Biden. (A news conference involves the president taking questions from multiple reporters; a one-on-one interview with a handpicked journalist doesn’t count.)

So far in 2023, Mr. Biden has done zero solo news conferences. He did conduct two “joint news conferences” in which the president and a visiting foreign leader faced the media together. . . . Presidents also typically interact informally with the media, answering a few questions on the way to an event. Mr. Biden doesn’t do many of those exchanges either, according to the American Presidency Project tracker.

It's generally acknowledged that Joe is inarticulate, he slurs his speech, stumbles over words, and utters gaffes. His handlers do all they can to shelter him from opportunities to do this. On the other hand, communication skills have always been thought necessary for political success, but up to now, Joe had been able to rely on backroom deals in the tight Delaware political enviornment or demographic convenience in his selection as Obama's vice president to rise.

In 2020, he was able to rely on the manufactured COVID crisis to avoid too much public exposure, while his allies in the Deep State could run interference over potential scandals like Hunter's laptop or the firing of Viktor Shokin by calling them Russian disinformation. While there have been initial efforts to restart a COVID panic or deny Trump access to state ballots, it looks as though there will be changes to the 2024 electoral landscape that will give Biden fewer such advantages.

Joe's strategy so far in response to the growing scandals has been simply to utter one-or-two-word dismissals to shouted questions from the press, as he did on Thursday:

President Biden tried to laugh off a question Thursday about whether he will comply with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s request for his bank records ahead of a possible impeachment inquiry into his role in first son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.

“Hee-hee-hee,” the 80-year-old president chuckled during a gaggle with reporters at FEMA headquarters in Washington after discussing the impact of Tropical Storm Idalia on Florida and nearby states.

“Let’s talk about why I’m here,” Biden deflected.

For the time being, he can dodge such questions because he's Caesar, and he'll push that as far as he can. But it's plain at this point that even a legacy-media Serious Journalist like Lester Holt would be expected to pursue questions about Hunter's trips on Air Force Two, the 5,000 alias e-mails, and the 1,000 Rosemont Seneca e-mails in any one-on-one interview, with the additional problem for Joe that any dishonest answer would be quickly found out and would be worse for him than a straightforward answer that acknolwedged some responsibility.

Indications are starting to arise, though, that Joe is preoccupied and losing interest in the day-to-day political job of president. On Thursday, as he dodged questions from the press, he also avoided meeting with New York Gov Hochul over the immigrant crisis:

President Biden didn’t meet with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul when she visited the White House on Wednesday to discuss the Empire State’s flood of migrants because there was “a lot going on” and he “has a lot on his plate.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday justified Biden blowing off Hochul, who last week demanded that he do more to address New York’s migrant “humanitarian crisis” — though the 80-year-old commander in chief had a seemingly non-time-sensitive meeting Wednesday afternoon with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

I'm inclined to agree with the analysis of Newsmax's Greg Kelly as reported by Newsweek:

During the segment in which he teased the release [of a potential smokling-gun tape], Kelly claimed that Biden knows "his time is up" because he has recently been engaging in leisurely activities, like going to the beach and biking.

"It's all about himself now. It's all about survival and planning his life after the presidency and trying to protect himself as much as possible," he said. "The country? We are not on Joe Biden's mind."

It's certainly been observed that Joe's 2024 campaign is off to an iffy start, with Trump doing much better in the polls than he did in 2020. Whether Joe is losing interest because he knows his number is up, as Greg Kelly thinks, or Joe simply feels he doesn't have to work that hard because he's Caesar, or he's just tired, doesn't make much practical difference. There's the same set of visuals with a few possible explanations, none of which so far augurs well for Joe.

Space Aliens And Queering God

I want to make clear from the start that I'm subscribed to, and a daily watcher of, Fr Mke Schmitz's Catechism in a Year series from Ascension Presents on YouTube. In general, I'm a big Fr Mike Schmitz fan. Still, in the video above, which may not have been subject to the same editorial rigor as the Catechism in a Year series, I think he makes some remarks that open a door he may not have intended to open. At about 2:45, he says,

Could it be possible that God has made other beings? Well, yeah. He has made angels. Those aren't really, technically speaking, aliens. The same God who created human beings also created angels. He created human beings with an intellect and will and bodies, and he created angels, with an intellect and a will, with no body. Who is to say that God couldn't continue to create? . . . God is infinitely creative. . . . So -- would it make sense that He would create and then just stop?

The discussion in the comments, though, wandered off somewhat predictably. One commenter said,

One thing I've thought about at times, and speculated on: What if beings on other world's didn't fall like we did on Earth? Would they be so advanced as to be indistinguishable from angels? They may very well be. However, I don't know to what degree (if at all) God would allow them to interact with us at this point in time.

And this goes to the bigger question, can God create an alternate universe? Because that's something like what we'd have if there were a Planet Bltsfx with unfallen beings, sort of like the houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels, but Swift is actually hinting there about the difficulties that arise from that whole idea. An unfallen being like a houyhnhnm wouldn't be human and wouldn't be in God's image, unless God created an alternate universe in which the houyhnhnms would be in God's image. But this runs against the idea that God is one, and beyond that, that while God could contradict Himself, He doesn't.

So I'm just not sure about Fr Mike's idea of whether God can just keep creating, and in the process, by implication, create some new type of being, Being X, that has an intellect and a will but isn't human. But his language here isn't precise, and the forum in which he's talking won't let us interrogate his remarks with greater precision.

But this brought me to a homily I heard in my Episcopalian days, in which a curate addressed a hypothetical question from a hypothetical elderly Episcopalian lady: "What about the scriptural condemnations of gay sex, like the punishments of Sodom and Gomorrah or 1 Corinthians 6:9-10? How do we justify gay sex in light of those?"

To which the curate roared in his homily, "YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL!!"

In other words, there must be a God who is bigger than that one, the one that gave us scripture. There must be a God who's bigger than that, like the one that can just keep on creating whatever new orders of beings he chooses -- but this runs up again against the problem that God is one. And it's interesting that the idea of a God who is bigger than God is actually common in queer theology. For instance,

The University of Chicago’s 2023-2024 course catalog includes a religious studies course on “Queering God,” applying LGBTQ+ ideology to different religions and examining the ways gender is being reimagined in theology.

“Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking? Is God queer? What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies,” the course description reads.

This theme frequently occurs in queer theology, that there is effectively a different God or a better-understood God who sanctifies Queer:

There’s little to fear from a queered approach to talking about God, because it’s about nothing more or less than setting God free to be God. By implication, if we are to be bearers of the image of God, called into the likeness of Christ, it’s about setting us free, too. Queer theology offers a way of unearthing what is already present—the fact that God is, by any stretch of the imagination, queer—and helping humans to inhabit that reality. It is the best kind of skewed God-talk.

. . . Althaus-Reid talks about how so many traditional ways of talking about God “closet the divine.” The church wants to force God’s abundant and life-transforming outrageousness into hiding. As a Latinx Catholic growing up in Argentina, Althaus-Reid witnessed the garish campiness of festivals in which statues of the Blessed Virgin, the Queen of Heaven, were processed through streets. Yet for all her sense that this was something that held the possibility of queering our imaginations, she came to see that the authorized church version of the Mother of God was sanitized: Mary was presented as a rich white woman who never walked. The divine image was made bland, and the unruly facts of actual cis and trans women’s lives were erased.

As Galileo put it, there's a book of nature and a book of scripture, and as Fr Mike puts it, they don't contradict each other. But when he speaks to people asking him if aliens exist, I think his answer, "they could", is misleading. Lots of things "could" exist, starting with bigfoot and proceeding down through unicorns and phlogiston. The problem is that so far in the book of nature, we've neither seen them nor any remotely credible hints of them.

On top of that is the logical problem that given the size of the universe, even considering the billions of planets that might or might not be friendly to life, in most parts of the universe, an advanced society could rise and disappear without the remotest possibility that even if we somehow read a message from it, so many eons would have passed since it was sent at the speed of light, we couldn't send them an answer that would get back to them, much less travel there. Thus we have the logical difficulty that even if space aliens did exist, as a practical matter, they would be irrelevant.

So I think the idea of space aliens invites just about anyone to construct a sort of science-fiction religion that inevitably includes unfallen beings of a new order, of whom it follows implicitly that they will land on this planet and straighten us out. (Remember that Gulliver's Travels is just an early variant of Star Trek.) I think priests answering questions about this informally tend to feed this assumption when they say something like "maybe"or "it could" or "can't rule it out", or in the account of one commenter, "God is great!" But God doesn't contradict Himself.

In fact, I think the idea of enlightened/unfallen space aliens who'll one day land on earth isn't too far from the queer theologians' idea that one day we'll be able to free God to be queer, and LGBTQ+ will be created in queer God's image, a special sanctified class above the traditional Christian saints. This is basically fantasizing a whole new book of nature that will supersede the old book of scripture -- but the problem is that in this universe, the two books don't contradict each other. I think a better course for priests when asked about science fiction religion is to be more precise in speech and emphasize "probably not".

More Teasing That Franklin Foer Book About Biden

It looks like I missed the developing buzz over the past couple of weeks about Franklin Foer's new book on Biden, The Last Politician. Foer, it turns out, is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic whose views appear to be as predictable as we might assume given that background. According to Axios ,

Frank Foer of The Atlantic worked 2½ years and spoke to nearly 300 people for his forthcoming opus on President Biden's first term, the author tells Axios.

Why it matters: In "The Last Politician," Foer concludes that Biden provides "an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation. Unheroic but honorably human, he will be remembered as the old hack who could."

Driving the news: The 432-page book, out Tuesday, "dramatizes in forensic detail the first two years of the Biden presidency, concluding with the historic midterm elections," per the publisher.

Foer's work "includes thrilling, blow-by-blow insider reports of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the White House's swift response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine."

It sounds as though it's timed to coincide with the start -- or at least, the putative start -- of Biden's reelection campaign, and the buzz is part of the prearranged buildup. But the book's insider accounts conclude with the 2022 midterms, which lets it simply finesse the whole Hunter story.

It's also worth noting that the market for a 432-page $30 doorstop presidential hagiography is thin. My sketchy understanding of the publishing industry is that library sales, a sure thing, will drive the publisher's profit, although educated ladies of a certain class will buy it at bookstores as well. But the problem is that the project has been in the works, as the Axios puff piece says, for 2½ years, and events have a way of moving faster than that.

Yesterday, Real Clear Politics carried an essay by Charles Lipson, What if Biden Backs Out of the Race?:

President Biden has declared he’s running for a second term, but it’s far from certain he actually will. His infirmity and low poll numbers raise serious doubts. His physical decline shows when he walks or climbs the stairs of Air Force One. His cognitive decline shows when he refuses to hold press conferences or answer even the simplest questions, like how he feels about the devastating fires in Maui.

I checked Charles Lipson on Wikipedia. There's not a whole lot there:

Charles H. Lipson (born February 1, 1948) is an American political scientist who is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.

. . . Lipson attended Yale as an undergraduate, where he studied Political Science and Economics. He received a Master of Arts degree and a doctoral degree from Harvard University.

While studying at Harvard, Lipson won the Chase Prize for the best essay on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace.

He sometimes makes guest appearances on radio shows and writes op-eds, which is what he's doing here. As far as I can see, his views on any subject are utterly conventional. But they're in sharp contrast to Franklin Foer, who sees Joe as a confident, experienced steady hand. Prof Lipson:

Biden’s dismal poll numbers form a somber backdrop for his reelection campaign. That backdrop is even darker now that his health problems are so visible. . . . The biggest “tell” is that Biden is avoiding the very things active candidates do. He’s not campaigning. He’s not attending a lot of small events with big donors. He’s not running ads. He’s not using the White House’s bully pulpit to address the nation on our challenges and his response to them.

He concludes, as any properly dressed Ivy Leaguer who's won a prize for an essay on world peace should, that we don't know what will happen, and we don't know what effect Joe's withdrawal might have if he does, which he might not. But remember, they paid him to write this, however vapid the read. They paid him because they wanted someone to prepare the Real Clear Politics audience for the possibility.

I will say that the buzz over the Foer book confirms another of my inferences about Biden: he resents his handlers. Per this piece at Read State,

[A]fter a now infamous speech in March where Biden said that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” his aides had to once again rush out and “clarify” what he “really meant,” which was pretty much the opposite of what he said. Biden reportedly “fumed” about that and complained he was being treated “like a toddler.” (National Review)

But if we give things a little thought, Biden and his handlers appear to be on the same page about the upcoming "campaign", which I think Lipson understands pretty well: the aim will be to keep Joe out of the public eye entirely and instead rely on state and federal indictments and prosecutions to keep the focus on Trump, as well as on efforts to keep him off the ballot in key states. So far, this isn't working; national polls over the past several days show a Trump-Biden matchup well within the margin of error, while each adverse legal development spikes Trump's fundraising and his supporters' enthusiasm.

On the other hand, it appears that the July 26 court hearing, in which the Delaware judge's reluctance to approve Hunter's plea deal resulted in the prosecution withdrawing it and David Weiss's appointment as special prosecutor, closed off another Biden campaign strategy, which was to get Hunter quietly off the stage as a campaign issue. That Abbe Lowell has been uncharacteristically quiet in recent weeks reinforces the surmise that Biden has had to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new Hunter strategy.

Although the House has been out of session and won't return until September 12, Oversight Committee Chairman Comer is telegraphing further investigative discoveries once the House is back in session:

Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly is teasing the release of a damning tape of President Joe Biden.

"Biden has a big mouth and it got him into a lot of trouble, but he hasn't seen the half of it yet," Kelly said on Tuesday's broadcast of Greg Kelly Reports. "There is an audio tape I am told by people in the know—not necessarily in government, not necessarily out of government, I can't say too much—but there is incontrovertible evidence of Joe Biden's corruption that is about to be made public.

"It's not going to happen tomorrow, it's not going to happen before Labor Day, but it will happen sometime between Labor Day and Halloween," the right-wing host said, adding that he also does not know who will be releasing the tape to the public. Kelly claimed that the White House is aware of the tape's circulation.

I have a feeling Joe is doing all he can simply not to think about any such contingencies, hoping his strategy of prosecuting Trump will carry the day if Joe himelf stays quiet. But the House Republicans are mad. My instinct is that Franklin Foer has been overtaken by events even before his book comes out.

My Views On Joe And The Dunning-Kruger Effect Are Vindicated!

The New York Post has a story about a new book, The Last Politician by Franklin Foer, due out Sept. 5, which is excerpted at The Atlantic behind a paywall. The title of the Atlantic excerpt is "The Final Days", which is clearly meant to echo the title of a 1976 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that covered the end of Nixon's time in the White House. We'll have to see how that goes, but it's intriguing to say the least that the publishers would choose to hitchhike on that story.

Foer's book actually covers the decisionmaking process by which Joe Biden overrode his military and diplomatic advisers and ordered the precipitous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan as of August 30-31, 2021. As deescibed in the Post story,

President Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself” that left his administration unprepared for the devastating chaos of the evacuation of Kabul, according to a forthcoming book.

In “The Last Politician,” due out Sept. 5, and excerpted by The Atlantic Tuesday, magazine staff writer Franklin Foer says the 80-year-old commander-in-chief “exhibited determination, even stubbornness, despite furious criticism from the establishment figures whose approval he usually craved” over his decision to end the US presence in Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, after two decades.

As far as I can tell, neither the book nor the Post's story about it mentions the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. I've been arguing for some time that this is a good explanation for Biden's approach to life, and the depictions in the Post's story illustrate how well the theory fits Joe's behavior:

“One aide recalled that he would say, ‘You foreign policy guys, you think this is all pretty complicated. But it’s just like family dynamics,'” Foer wrote of Biden, adding that in the president’s assessment: “Foreign affairs was sometimes painful, often futile, but really it was emotional intelligence applied to people with names that were difficult to pronounce.”

“Diplomacy, in Biden’s view, was akin to persuading a pain-in-the-ass uncle to stop drinking so much,” Foer added.

Biden’s commitment to his wisdom continued through the hectic evacuation mission, as he reportedly “would pepper [then-Ambassador to Afghanistan John Bass] with ideas for squeezing more evacuees through the gates” of the airport, most of which were all but impossible given the circumstances on the ground.

. . . “Bass would kick around Biden’s proposed solutions with colleagues to determine their plausibility, which was usually low.”

Consider, though, that Biden's attempts to control his own family dynamics had already proved comically futile, as on several occasions immediately prior to his presidential run, he'd had to send members of his former vice presidential secret service detail out to clean up after the escapades of his pain-in-the-ass crackhead son.

In fact, Joe's insistence on the ill-conceived withdrawal probably influenced Putin's decision to invade Ukraine seven months later, calculating that Biden would either be unwilling to offer any resistance, direct or indirect, or too inept to direct any that he might decide to put up. Biden's reported offer to Zelensky of a flight out of Kyiv after the invasion would confirm this attitude, if true, but the full circumstances of what happened are murky.

Nevertheless, according to the Post,

“When it came to foreign policy,” Foer added, “Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself.”

So strong was that faith that Biden, once described by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates as having been “wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades,” viewed experienced diplomats and pundits as “risk adverse, beholden to institutions [and] lazy in their thinking,” according to the book.

The impression I have is that in recent weeks, in his vacations in Delaware and Lake Tahoe, Joe has withdrawn even from his White House circle of advisers and is relying incresingly on Hunter. The difficulty is that Hunter is addicted to cocaine, whose effect is to produce temporary feelings of omnipotence and grandeur, which is just the sort of thing Joe shouldn't be exposed to.

This confirms my view that Joe's shortcomings arise not from a medical condiction but from his character, which is driven by a long-held belief that he's the smartest guy in the room. I don't see a good prognosis here.