Wednesday, March 13, 2024

State Of The Union Fail

Last week I noted that Biden wasn't really addresing the country in his State of the Union address. In fact, he wasn't addressing the free world, he wasn't addressing the American people, he wasn't addressing Congress, he wasn't addressing the justices of the US Supreme Court, although he did offend them gratuitously while insisting women had electrical power. I pointed out that he was actually addressing nervous Democrat donors, who'd sent a back-channel message that they wanted to see "passion and fire out in public as assurances" that Joe was still sharp and able to take on Trump.

The answer from the big guy himself, according to the CNN report I linked, was a cryptic "State of the Union". The implication seems to have been that this is where he'd turn it all around. After a week, it hasn't happened.

In the latest HarrisX/Forbes poll, which was taken three days following last week’s State of the Union address, Joe Biden saw his approval rating drop and former President Donald Trump’s 2024 lead tick up.

The best spin Team Biden can put on this poll is to seek comfort in the margin of error and say the State of the Union address changed nothing. But that wasn’t the goal, nor is it what Biden needed. He needed that speech to be a big win, to change public perception, and launch him into the coming presidential campaign.

In fact, Joe's handlers worked against themselves by sending Joe to an interview Saturday, when he'd have been better off going back to Delaware again. The full Jonathan Capehart MSNBC interview had him "regretting" calling illegals illegals, but the problems went farther than that:

Capehart asked if he would go back to Israel and address the Israeli Knesset. Biden answered, "Yes," then appeared to blank out and gave a long pause.

Capehart tries to help and lead the witness with the subsequent questions.

Biden looks clueless and then says, "I'd rather not discuss it more."

When Capehart asked what that meant, Biden said, "It doesn't mean anything."

. . . he claimed, "America made a mistake" in how it went after bin Laden.

"America made a mistake. We went after bin Laden 'til we got him, but we shouldn't have gone into Ukraine. I mean, excuse me, we shouldn't have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn't necessary. It just caused more problems than it raised...than it cured."

. . . This is a very bad window into the thinking -- what there is of it -- of Joe Biden.

Then on Monday we had the handlers cutting his feed in New Hampshire as he threatened to answer reporters' questions, followed yesterday by former Special Prosecutor Hur's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, which, with the transcripts of his Biden interview released the same day, simply focused more attention on Joe's mental state. Jesse Waters made the point,

Biden’s mental state let him escape justice, which forces the media to argue that Biden’s competent enough to be president, but not competent enough to stand trial.

Just the News noted,

After confirming the date of his son’s death with the lawyers, Biden still appeared to be confused about the timeline of his post-vice presidential private life.

Biden said: “And what's happened in the meantime is that Trump gets elected in November of 2017?"

Two individuals corrected him, saying it was in “2016,” according to the transcript.

“2016. Alright, so – why do I have 2017 here?" Biden asked.

Joe's handlers did their best to give him a script and a schedule that would change the dynamic of the campaign, which, given the results of yesterday's primaries, has effectively begun, with both Trump and Biden having won enough delegates to secure their respective nominations. The challenge for Biden's handlers will be to defeat the growing perception that in private, he's just as vague, shallow, and bumbling as he is in public. The fact that they had clearly hoped to turn this trend around after the State of the Union and haven't is an indication of the problems they face in an extended national election campaign.

Joe can't stop being Joe.

posted by test @ March 13, 2024   0 Comments

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

"Am I Allowed To Take Any Questions? Anybody Here?"

Joe was at a New Hampshire rally yesterday and created a remarkable vignette: at the end of his remarks, he asked, "Am I allowed to take questions? Anybody here, the staff?" By several accounts, his handlers immediately cut the feed, replaced it with a test pattern, visible in the clip above, and chased the reporters from the room.

I briefly wondered if this wasn't as spontaneous as it seemed, and maybe it was some sort of pre-arranged code word from Joe to his handlers that it was time in fact to wrap things up -- that might have been a slightly better take on what happened, but only slightly. I watched it again, and Joe seemed very much at loose ends, the audience giggled nervously before an awkward pause, and then the handlers cut the feed. This wasn't scripted.

As Nick Arama commented on Red State, "The leader of the free world, and he appears to be run by unnamed staffers and people behind the scenes."

Well, let's face it, this happens all the time. The New York Post covered an episode in a 2023 book by Franklin Foer when Joe made an off-the-cuff remark that appeared to call for an uprising against Vladimir Putin:

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.“

The statement alarmed Americans and international US allies who worried it would spark retaliation and escalation from Putin — and his full arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Upon leaving the stage, “Biden instantly knew that the White House would have to clarify his mistake,” according to Foer.

No stranger to walking back comments made by the president, Biden’s staff quickly took the initiative to explain away the controversial statement. But they’d done so without consulting the president, which drew the octogenarian’s ire and resentment, according to the book.

. . . Deep down, he “knew that he had erred” by making the comment in the first place, Foer says. But instead of taking responsibility for the flub, he “resented his aides for creating the impression that they had cleaned up his mess.”

“Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler,” Foer writes.

What strikes me about Monday's New Hampshire episode isn't so much that it happened, although it's clearly part of an ongoing problem for Joe as a candidate. The problem is that it took place because the 2024 national campaign has opened in March, instead of after the party conventions in the summer, and this is because the Republicans ended their primary season almost as soon as it started -- just after Super Tuesday, Trump's last Republican challenger dropped out, and Trump began to run against Biden in earnest.

The typical indicators that a Democrat campaign has visibly faltered, like Michael Dukakis's tank ride in September 1988 or John Kerry's windsurfing frolic in September 2004, have taken place during the conventional fall campaigns, and I've noted here that the loyalists who start to post alarms that such campaigns aren't doing well usually begin in the summer and fall. In Biden's case, they've been doing this since last year, and just on Sunday I noted that Denmocrat insiders are demanding "passion and fire out in public" from the big guy.

The problem is that this is March, not September. They seem to have him doing rallies nearly every day, sometimes more than one a day, since the State of the Union, when this sort of thing has never been Joe's strong point -- he does things like dodge his handlers and run off to chat up some pre-teen girl whenever he can manage to do it, and the out-in-public strategy does nothing but create endless opportunities for hair sniffing, MILF groping, gaffes, and malapropisms.

But his handlers can't even keep him to a script. He wanders off the text, inserts new wording, slurs his words, and reverts to vacant pauses -- with month after extra month of an already-begun national campaign. Do Joes' handlers seriously expect to keep up the schedule they seem to be setting for him through November? And this simply leaves aside the accounts of people like Robert Hur of how he acts behind closed doors -- just this morning:

Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

posted by test @ March 12, 2024   0 Comments

Monday, March 11, 2024

Back To Victoria Nuland

I noted in last Wednesday's post that Victoria Nuland's retirement from the State Department must represent some change, but so far not one that's been announced, in US policy over the Ukraine war, since she had been both the chief advocate and often an implementer of US support for a pro-Western alignment there since betore the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which was engineered by the CIA with her collaboration. This story at Zero Hedge, while it contains speculation, offers some possible insight into the potential policy change:

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in a new interview has speculated over the reasons behind Victoria Nuland stepping down from her high-ranking position as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three top official in the State Department.

. . . While there have been rumors that maybe she could be in poor or declining health, McGovern has told Russia's Sputnik that the notoriously hawkish Nuland was a liability at a moment NATO and Russia are inching closer to direct nuclear-armed confrontation.

"My best guess here is that the CIA and the Defense Department and the NSA got this message around saying, 'look, Victoria's got her own agenda here,’" said McGovern.

The former CIA official continued to speculate: "‘The president doesn't really want to strike these ammo depots in Russia or knock down the [Crimean] Bridge. So we got to rein her in, I guess it's time for her to go to early retirement.’"

The piece also notes an alternate theory put forth by Matthew Crosston, a professor of national security at Maryland's Bowie State University, who thinks Nuland had simply come to recognize that Ukraine was losing, and she didn't want to be tied to the failed policy. The piece goes on,

[B]oth McGovern and Crosston would agree that with Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (in this capacity she basically ran all of US foreign policy in Europe), ceasefire talks between Kiev and Moscow remained an extremely distant prospect or even an impossibility.

"One thing is certain: as long as Nuland remained in that chair, there was literally no chance such talk could even be theorized. Now it can," Crosston concluded.

But isn't it curious that Biden in his State of the Union address hinted at no such change? Here's what he said:

. . . Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not asking for American soldiers.

In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine. And I am determined to keep it that way.

But now assistance for Ukraine is being blocked by those who want us to walk away from our leadership in the world.

What's actually happening is that some Republicans are beginning to ask if the continued commitment to Ukraine is cost-effective, especially if it's draining US supplies of ammunition and there's no exit plan, so out of general dissatisfaction with military policy vis-a-vis border policy, they've stalled Ukraine aid in the House. But indications seem to be that both the State Department and the intelligence establishment -- which is to say the deep state -- is also losing confidence in the Biden-Nuland policy.

Glenn Greenwald summarizes Nuland's career:

At about 5:30:

A consensus emerged among liberals then [2005] that neocons were the single worst faction inAmerican political life, Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz and all these people that brought in Guantanimo and torture and the invasion of Iraq and, you know, the attempt to move that to Iran, and she was not only counseling that, but she was also the UN Ambasdsador to NATO that led the way with Condoleeza Rice under Bush and trying to expand NATO, you know, up to the Russian border to include Ukraine, which was again probably the initial act that led us to where we are in Ukraine, so if I had said, you know, 15 or 10 years ago that Victoria Nuland who again is married into the Kagan family, probably the largest and most important dynastic neocon family in the United States, the brother, the father, her husband -- if you had said, Nikki, Victoria Nuland was this sort of symbol of American evil, every liberal would applaud you, because she was a well-known, recognized neocon. . . now, 15 years later, you won't see a single mainstream Democrat or liberal agreeing with you that Victoria Nuland is that, and that's because, like most neocons, she has aligned herself with the Democratic Party. . .

One question nobody has asked is why, once Nuland was well established in the post-2014 Ukraine political realignment, this was also the Biden father-son team's heyday in collecting payments from Ukraine players there. It's hard not to suspect there was, and continues to be, some level of coordination between Nuland's maneuvering and the Biden family interests, which may explain the current Biden as-long-as-it-takes policy.

But Biden seems actually less and less to be the one in charge, and Ukraine policy seems to be changing on its own without Biden's input.

posted by test @ March 11, 2024   0 Comments

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Who Was Biden's Audience?

As a onetime instructor in rhetoric, I was inevitably brought to look at Joe Biden's State of the Union address from that perspective, in paraticular two of rhetoric's main components:

Audience: The intended readers or listeners of a message.

Purpose: What the writer or speaker wants the message to accomplish, such as influencing an audience’s actions, thoughts or feelings on a subject.

So first, to whom was Joe really speaking? Well, he made some inchoate threats, among others to justices of the US Supreme Court seated right in front of him, but from their facial expressions, it appears they were all offended regardless of their political alignment. He wasn't trying to persuade them of anything. Nor was he trying to persuade the roughly half the country to whom he indirectly referred in his opening passage:

Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.

In other words, Donald Trump and his supporters are Jeff Davis and the KKK. Nobody on that side is going to come over, and that wasn't Joe's intent. So whom was Joe in fact trying to convince, influence, bring over to his side if not his political oppenents? I think the answer is he was speaking to Democrat doubters, or maybe more accurately, that's whom Joe's handler-speechwriters were trying to influence. Joe himself is emperor, this stuff is all beneath him, but his handlers can at least hand him a script that he'll sorta-kinda follow as it suits him.

Via CNN, this was Democrat conventional wisdom leading up to Thursday night:

A handful of Democratic governors made their way through a gaggle of their colleagues last month to tell President Joe Biden directly what they’ve been stressing behind the scenes: He needs to be fighting harder.

The Democrats told Biden that he needed to show more of the fire that was on display in a closed-door meeting with governors when Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte handed him a letter demanding more action on the southern border. Biden flashed a smile, according to two of the governors standing there.

“State of the Union,” Biden said, teasingly.

. . . Two dozen top Democratic officials and operatives who spoke to CNN said they’re tired of reading that the president is cursing about Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, or hearing reports that he told donors that Vladimir Putin is “a crazy SOB” and that MAGA Republicans are worse than segregationists. They want to see that passion and fire out in public as assurances that the president’s behind-the-scenes demeanor doesn’t match the public perception of the 81-year-old commander-in-chief are wearing thin.

Well, be careful what you wish for. His handlers told him the lizard people want passion and fire. At some level, Joe may have abosrbed this, especially in the context of a potential move to dump him from the ticket, but he likely understands this probably won't happen under any circumstance. Nevertheless, his handlers gave him a script and a schedule, the big speech Thursday, a Pennsylvania rally on Friday, an interview with Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC and something called a national organizing call on Saturday. His response to any perceived urgency was at best passive-aggressive.

On Friday,

Joe Biden’s handlers decided to send him out on the road for a rally on Friday following his disastrous State of the Union Address Thursday night.

. . . The speech obviously took its toll. On Friday night Joe Biden traveled to Pennsylvania for a small rally of supporters. Joe was shot.

. . . Joe Biden: “Pennsylvania, I have a message for you: Send me to Congress.”

. . . Biden then told the crowd that our freedoms came under attack on July the 6th? Huh?

. . . And Joe Biden admitted that almost every world leader has grabbed his arm, pulled him aside, and said, “You can’t win again.”

In the Capehart interview:

He apologized for calling Laken Riley's accused killer "illegal," saying he should not have done that and that illegal aliens "built the country."

. . . On top of that, he was all over the place on Israel, saying he didn't have a "red line" but then saying that Israel can't go too far. He was delusional about how much the left hates him on Israel. He claimed it wasn't a "widely shared sentiment" that he was assisting in genocide by helping the Jewish state.

At the virtual rally the same day:

He was doing a virtual campaign event on Saturday, but even with his handler wife by his side, he was clearly struggling not only to read the teleprompter but to have any kind of coherence and to understand what he was trying to say.

. . . He not only seemed unable to read the words, but then once that threw him, he had a problem with tenses, saying, "We have to start off by vaccinating America," when he should have said past tense. It was clear that he was talking about the past, but he still got the tenses messed up.

He doesn't want to do this, he's humoring his handlers, and his heart isn't in it. On top of the first two events on Saturday, he had a rally in Atlanta last night. I don't see how he can maintain this kind of schedule, but the people behind it are his handlers, who want to keep their jobs, and Dr Jill, who also wants to keep the First Lady gig. The purpose, the second part of rhetoric that I listed above, is for Dr Jill and his handlers at leaat to keep their jobs past the convention and wait for some miracle to pull things out after that. They mean to do this by convincing the lizard people they're at least going through the motions.

The problem is that the more you get Joe out in front of the public, the more you just get Joe, and Joe doesn't have the stamina to keep this up. But the lizard people don't really have any options. The question is how long until Joe balks and goes back to the beach.

posted by test @ March 10, 2024   0 Comments

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Good Sense On Space Aliens

Via ABC News:

A new Pentagon study that examined reported sightings of UFOs over nearly the last century has found no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence, a conclusion consistent with past U.S. government efforts to assess the accuracy of claims that have captivated public attention for decades.

. . . The issue received fresh attention last summer when a retired Air Force intelligence officer testified to Congress that the U.S. was concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects. The Pentagon has denied his claims, and said in late 2022 that a new Pentagon office set up to track reports of unidentified flying objects — the same one that released Friday's report — had received “several hundreds” of new reports but had found no evidence so far of alien life.

The authors of Friday's report said the purpose was to apply a rigorous scientific analysis to a subject that has long captured the American public's imagination.

Over the past ten years or so, I've begun to think we can approach this question from the rear. Let's say that in fact, whether they've visited us or not, there are creatures out there with advanced technology that can circumvent the laws of physics with warp drives and such and zip from galaxy to galaxy in hours or days. The inevitable conclusion must be that they're not just technologically advanced, but that they got there via skills that must closely resemble what we would call the scientific method involving math, physics, and reason.

But here we run up against contemporary neo-Aristotelian or neo-Thomist arguments for the existence of God from figures like the philosopher Edward Feser and Bp Robert Barron. Bp Barron asks, for instance, why nature can be interrogated using math, and why it can give us consistent answers. And if we can study nature using reason as a tool, why is there reason? Where does it come from? Neither reason nor math is part of the physical world, they can't have "evolved" as part of a physical process of natural selection.

(I was thrown out of an economist's blog comment section when, after an abstruse mathematical discussion, I asked how all that could have evolved from pond scum. I still say there's no good answer to that question.)

But if the putative space aliens can study and manipulate nature well enough to master warp drives, they must have reason, however advanced, except that reason itself isn't susceptible to physical processes like natural selection. It had to have come from somewhere else. The religious answer is that creatures capable of reason are made in God's image, and reason is something that comes from God. Materialists might answer that this path of inquiry is irrelevant, but it has to acknowledge that reason exists, and it has to acknowledge that it must have a cause.

Thus it's hard to avoid thinking putative space aliens, who must be capable of reason, are creatures made in God's image. A materialist might answer that postulating God as the cause is irrelevant, but he must still acknowledge there must be a cause, which we would have to label something like C, and the reason exercised by space aliens comes from C, whatever it is -- but it's definitely non-material and non-contingent.

But this brings me to the problem one of our archdiocese's vocation directors posed several years ago -- he said that, in a classs discussion with seminarians, he posed the question whether, if a contingent of space aliens were to arrive, we should offer them baptism. My original answer would have been "yes, because they're made in the image of God," but I've thought more on this, and my answer would now be more like, "Well, Satan's Fall was an event that took place before Adam": the serpent and the theological apple were there before Eden.

Satan’s fall from heaven is symbolically described in Isaiah 14:12–14 and Ezekiel 28:12–18. While these two passages are referring specifically to the kings of Babylon and Tyre, we believe they also reference the spiritual power behind those kings, namely, Satan. These passages describe why Satan fell, but they do not say when the fall occurred. Jesus, the eternal Son of God, witnessed Satan’s fall, and He mentions it in Luke 10:18: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” We know that the angels were created before the earth (Job 38:4–7). Satan fell before he tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3:1–14). Satan’s fall, therefore, must have occurred somewhere after the time the angels were created and before he tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Otherwordly creatures made in the image of God must have had a salvation history equivalent to humans on this planet, so it's hard to say, but the Fall that led to the state of nature we have precedes creation of either people or space aliens.

But if we're bringing up salvation history in that context, reason suggests we might cancel out the zeroes; if there was a single Fall before Adam, there must basically be a single salvation history, and to postulate a first mxtymmni on the planet grrfygrt who ate a vbrt5sw, we're multiplying entities without necessity. Were there two Kpstrycxs who were sacrificed on a cross? We're veering into absurdity.

This strongly suggests to me that there was just one salvation history of one set of creatures in God's image. No duplcates are out there.

But that's just me. On the other hand, the laws of physics are just one part of natural law. Natural law -- partly expressed in the laws of physics, which can be interrogated via reason, the scientific method, and mathematics, has a cause. When we start to reason from the cause, it's hard to avoid the rest.

posted by test @ March 09, 2024   0 Comments

Friday, March 8, 2024

About As Expected

One big thing I noticed from still photos of last night's speech was the continuing problem of his eyes: he's frequently squinting through a slit-eyed but otherwise expressionless mask, or, if his eyes are open, his pupils are unusually dilated. It's not a good look. The clenched fist in the lower photo is plainly rehearsed, but the pouty mouth contradicts it. Give 'em hell, Harry! He basiclly can't put together a public persona, much less a likeable one.

The big episode that stood out, apparently for most commentators, was the exchange with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

He then went off script and veered into incoherence:

“Laken [Lincoln] Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. That’s right,” Biden said. “But how many thousands of people being killed by illegals? To her parents I say, my heart goes out to you having lost children myself.”

“But look, if we change the dynamic at the border, people pay these smugglers,” he added.

Nobody can really figure out what he meant by " how many thousands of people being killed by illegals?" or how, "if we change the dynamic at the border, people pay these smugglers." The takeaway is that he can never be allowed to leave the teleprompter, but he routinely does. This is just the latest example.

And the corollary is that he can't debate. His surprise performance in the 2020 debates with Trump took place four years ago. Then, he was focused enough to recite a canned reply about Hunter's laptop: "These 51 former intelligence officers declared that it was disinformation and phony." I very much doubt he could do that now, much less even get the number right or pronounce "disinformation and phony" without slurring. This will go as it goes, but even his boosters acknowledge that any public appearance carries the risk of gaffes.

The final point for me was his remarks on Ukraine:

If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not.

But Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not asking for American soldiers.

He then wanders into NATO, which is off the subject -- Ukraine isn't in NATO and under current conditions, it's unlikely ever to join, since there would need to be a settlement of the current conflict that would require Russian agreement, when Russia has consistently opposed Ukraine joining NATO. But Biden concludes,

I say this to Congress: we must stand up to Putin. Send me the Bipartisan National Security Bill.

History is watching.

If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk.

Biden's own record has been delaying decisions over weapons like F16s and Abrams tanks beyond the point where they could have been effective, but as the story has developed, it appears that a big proportion of US aid has been lost through Ukrainian corruption. Reports I've cited here suggest that Secretary Blinken and the CIA have lost confidence in Ukraine's ability to achieve Zelensky's objectives, which continue to be driving Russia back to pre-2014 borders.

In that context, Victoria Nuland, the architect of current Ukraine policy, announced her retirement earlier this week, suggesting the need for serious re-evaluation -- but Biden seems oblivious. As Tucker Carlson commented,

This is crazy talk. There's no explanation of what the goal is here. There's lie after lie. Ukraine can stop Russia. No it can't. This has gone on for over two years.

Even when I supported Ukraine's fight based on optimistic projections from the retired general talking heads, I was always uncomfortable that there was no plan for an end state, just an assertion that we'd support Ukraine for "as long as it takes" to do whatever it was. This has turned out not to be viable, but even if Secretary Blinken and the CIA have lost confidence, so far, there's no attempt to recalibrate.

Apparently Biden's handlers still hope Murphy's Law doesn't apply.

posted by test @ March 08, 2024   0 Comments

Thursday, March 7, 2024

How Will The Big Guy Do Tonight?

This piece notes,

The speech’s March 7 delivery date is the latest one for a State of the Union address in history, Fox News noted.

This is only the second occasion in history that the president has chosen not to speak in person to a joint session of Congress in January or February. On March 1, 2022, Biden made his first speech to Congress.

This must certaintly reflect discomfort among Joe's handlers over his ability to stand up and read coherently from a teleprompter for an hour or more. Whatever ails him -- and I'm still hesitant about any answer that requires a medical diagnosis -- there's a general consensus that it's gotten worse.

Former aides who worked directly with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama administration have called current fears over his age “a very real issue” — with some alarmed at how he has become more “frail” and “mumbly.”

“If you watch Joe Biden speak, oftentimes he sounds frail and he sounds more frail than he used to, even in 2019 and 2020,” Jon Favreau, the chief speechwriter for Obama when Biden was vice president, said in a recent episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast.

“The voice sounds frail, and he shuffles more because of the arthritis in his back,” Favreau said, adding that the oldest-ever president also appears “mumbly.”

. . . Podcast co-host Jon Lovett, another ex-Obama speechwriter, agreed and argued that the Biden campaign should get the president out in public to demonstrate his mental and physical abilities — even if they are concerned that he will make more gaffes.

“I’m sure that going out there means more missteps … more gaffes that start circulating, but if you don’t view Biden being out there as a net positive, then the argument he shouldn’t be running is right.”

The problem is that he was out in public earlier this week, and there were gaffes. About ten seconds into the video, he leans over and breathes right in the reporter's face, "I'm winning [huuuuh] Five [huuuuh] Five in a row!" Frankly, if I'd been there, I would have averted my face to avoid the hot, heavy reek of alcohol on his breath, but that's just me. Another reaction to another episode on Tuesday: This post affirms the view I've had ever since the 2020 debates: They either have to change up his meds or keep him off the sauce for a day or more before a major event, and those chances seem to be less and less frequent. But he was out and about as recently as Tuesday and not looking good. On one hand, Trump has repeatedly said he doesn't think Biden can make it through to the election, although now he's challenging Joe to debates. So far, this isn't a subject the White House likes:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre sparred with a reporter on Wednesday over questions about whether President Joe Biden will debate GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump ahead of November’s election.

“Is President Biden going to commit to a debate with President Donald Trump?” Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked.

Jean Pierre responded, “That’s something for the campaign to speak to.”

“Well, we know when the debates are going to be. We know where they are going to be. Is he going to go?” Doocy pressed again.

“You should speak to the campaign,” she said.

But leaving debates aside, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of confidence in Joe's ability to stand up and read coherently for an hour on national TV. Yes, he's done it before, and yes, he's exceeded expectations, but I'm just not sure how much of that he still has in him.

posted by test @ March 07, 2024   0 Comments