Friday, June 14, 2024

This Can No Longer Be Ignored

Up tp now, I've been extremely reluctant to come to any medical-related conclusion about Joe's condition. Yesterday's vignette from Italy above changed my mind -- it shows him wandering away from the group of G7 leaders watching a skydiving demonstration. I've had several relatives who were affected by dementia, and what Joe did there was a little too familiar. According to the Mayo Clinic,

Wandering and becoming lost is common among people with Alzheimer's disease or other disorders causing dementia. This behavior can happen in the early stages of dementia — even if the person has never wandered in the past.

. . . Wandering isn't necessarily harmful if it occurs in a safe and controlled environment.

The G7 meeting is about as safe and controlled an environment as you can find, but what we see in the video clip is Joe apparently becoming distracted from the main event, wandering a few paces away from the group, and then becoming confused. Prime Minister Meloni belatedly recognizes the problem, possibly prompted by President Macron, steps over and seizes him gently by the elbow, and pulls him back. Joe, apparently sensing that something was off but not quite understanding exactly what, compensates by putting on his sunglasses.

Once again, I'm not a medical professional, I haven't examined the president in person, and I'm not qualified to make a medical diagnosis. On the other hand, if you do a search of web sites that give advice on wandering, none of them tells you to get a medical diagnosis -- they seem to assume you recognize the symptoms easily enough, and they just tell you to implement preventive measures, which can certainly include placement in a memory care facility.

Here's a post on X, for what it's worth:

Harry Cole is the Political Editor of the UK Sun, so we may surmise that he does have diplomatic sources with credibilty on the subject. He expanded in an article at the Sun:

"He's losing focus in meetings. Sometimes he's very sharp sometimes, he's very much not. So some worrying developments there.

. . . "Everyone's putting a slight brave face on it this morning. We've got some more for that for the paper tomorrow. But you can see from that footage yourself, can't you?

"This is getting embarrassing now. It makes you really wonder how President Biden is going to be able to run an election campaign in October and November for re election and if that is a man who really thinks he's going to get through the next four years?"

But this is just the fallout from from this week's G7 meeting. Apparently before the G7 episode yesterday went viral, Byron York, a highly conventional sort of guy, wrote in the Washington Examiner,

On Monday evening, the president attended a Juneteenth concert on the White House lawn. It wasn’t a complicated event, as presidential appearances go. All President Joe Biden had to do was walk out of the White House, join the crowd listening to the music, and make some brief remarks.

. . . Everyone was standing and swaying and clapping to singer Kirk Franklin’s performance. Everyone, that is, except Biden. As the scene unfolded around him, the president stood still and absolutely motionless, his hands hanging by his side. His face had a frozen expression, and his eyes seemed fixed, staring straight ahead. This went on for about a minute.

Look at your watch or phone and set it for a minute. It’s a long time. Biden was briefly engaged by Floyd, then resumed staring. Finally, he seemed to come out of it, ending the episode.

A few commentators have compared this to Mitch McConnell's "brain freeze" episodes last summer:

The Republican leader in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, experienced another public health scare on Wednesday when he appeared to freeze for more than 30 seconds while speaking to reporters in his home state, Kentucky.

McConnell, 81, was eventually escorted away by staff, footage from an NBC News affiliate showed.

Asked for his thoughts about running for re-election in 2026, McConnell laughed and said: “Oh, that’s a … ” He then appeared to freeze.

Possibly in response to these episodes, McConnell announced that he would retire as Republican Senate leader this past February, but he would hold onto the job until the November election. He's 82. Although the Trump campaign has posted clips of the G7 video, there's been no official commentary on Joe's episode, Newsweek sent an e-mail to the White House, buit so far, there's been no comment.

I can't imagine that nobody is talking about this, or the Juneteenth freeze, or the generally woozy performance last week in France, behind the scenes. According to the Daily Caller,

Republican Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna claimed Thursday on Fox News that lawmakers are “hearing” that President Joe Biden won’t be his party’s nominee.

. . . [Y]ou know, a lot of people realize that Joe Biden is likely not going to be the nominee,” she continued. “Which is from what we’re hearing on Capitol Hill, [Republican California] Representative [Kevin] Kiley had reported that Kamala Harris [is] actually eyeing a run for California governor because of it.”

“Right, that’s the backup plan. So you are hearing also in D.C. that Joe Biden isn’t going to be the Democrat nominee?” Watters asked.

“Correct,” Luna responded.

. . . Reports have circulated that top Democratic Party officials are allegedly panicking over the chance that Biden may lose the 2024 election to Trump, according to Politico.

This will make the June 27 debate with Trump all the more important. The problem for Joe is that his condition has visibly worsened in recent months, and pumping him up with whatever is going to have fewer and fewer effects. Beyond that, I've simply got to assume there's a lot we aren't being told -- and oddly, there's been little comentary from anyone on the G7 wandering, and so far, there's been no White House response. This in itself prompts me to follow this story closely.

posted by test @ June 14, 2024   0 Comments

Thursday, June 13, 2024

No Delaware Jury Will Convict A Biden

Jonathan Turley's reaction to Hunter's guilty verdict in his regular column raises a delicate question about why Bidenworld's judgment seems so poor:

[T]he defense had to know that they were increasing the chances of prison time by pursuing a nullification defense. The hope was that Wilmington is Bidentown and no local jury would convict the son of the favorite son of Delaware.

It didn’t work out that way. The team seemed to overplay its hand with defenses that were so implausible as to be insulting for the jury. They suggested that Hunter might not have checked the box or signed the form during a brief window where he was not using drugs. The prosecutors demolished those defenses within two days of the trial.

Turley expanded on his written view in this video clip. At 4:00, he says,

There are reports out today that many of the Biden family believe that a Delaware jury would not convict Hunter Biden, the son of the favorite son of Delaware. . . . So I think there were some in the family who were shocked by the quick verdict.

The way he put things in his column referred to just "the defense" or "the team", but in this Fox interview, he narrows the decision down to "the family" who believed no jury in Bidentown would convict Hunter. By "the family", he could have meant only Joe, Dr Jill, and possibly Hunter's wife and adult daughters.

So this raises the implication that if "the family" called the shots for Hunter's defense in the unrealistic belief that no Delaware jury would convict a Biden, where else is "the family" calling the shots? And if "the family" was off in its reading of the trial, can "the family's" judgment be questioned over other decisions? And who, specifically within "the family", are we talking about?

Jonathan Turley himself is carefully circumspect over this question, although I'm sure he knows the answer. Stephen Kruiser, on the other hand, doesn't beat around the bush.

Jill Biden is undoubtedly the iron fist that directs the cabal that runs her husband's head and administration. Woe be unto anyone who attempts to thwart her ambition to enjoy the perks of being first lady until January 2029, even her beloved Joe and his diminishing mental capacity.

I think this has become an entirely credible assessment, and Turley's implication that Dr Jill is the one who drove Hunter's feckless defense strategy is consistent with it. Kruiser's assessment of the predicament is that Dr Jill simply isn't ready to leave the party:

Jill Biden knows where the bodies are buried and who to lean on to get her way. The nervous desire among Democratic operatives to have a complete do-over on this ticket may very well be building to unstoppable force levels. Sooner or later, however, it will hit the immovable object that is DOCTOR Mama Jill Biden.

I know where my money is going in that one.

But this suggests that Hunter's defense strategy isn't the only area where Dr Jill has called the shots. Let's move to the question of Joe's June 27 debate with Trump, the often-expressed view that this is the decision point for whether Joe stays on the ticket, and how Joe prepares for it. Kruiser, of course, takes the view that Joe will ever leave the ticket is a chimera, and he's probably right. But what can we interpret from the plans we see for Biden's debate prep and Dr Jill's influence on those plans? And if her judgment on Hunter's defense strategy was so poor, what does this say about her plans for Joe's debate prep?

Biden is taking the debate seriously, a person with knowledge of the president’s plans told the Associated Press. Biden’s debate prep could last “the better part of a week at Camp David” for just the first debate alone, the person said.

So OK, we can assume the usual rehearsal of talking points and moot court practice with Trump stand-ins. Beyond that, according to NBC,

Inside the campaign, aides believe Biden walks on the stage with the upper hand. Mostly, his mandate will be to let “Trump be Trump,” which they believe will reveal extreme leanings and a less stable Trump than four years ago. Biden is likely to cast Trump as obsessed with revenge and retribution and hark to the political violence in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, a campaign official said.

In other words, the strategy will be for Joe to come off as a reasonable centrist, with Trump as a raving nut, which was also the 2020 plan.

Angelo Carusone, president of the left-leaning journalism watchdog group Media Matters for America, said most people get their impressions from snippets of news or shortened videos on social media, which depict Biden as a doddering old man, walking slowly or stumbling over his words.

“I don’t think that he’s going to come off as diminished and meek. My sense is that people will see that comparison and they’ll hear somebody making coherent arguments and Trump saying some really random stuff,” he said.

Frankly, I have a sense of overconfidence, which likely comes from Dr Jill, and which seems to have driven Hunter's failed defense strategy -- there's no Plan B, because Plan A just can't help but work. But the NBC account has a worrisome component:

Biden, now on back-to-back European trips, is to return to the U.S. only to head to Los Angeles for fundraisers. Once Biden is back at the White House, a source with knowledge of his debate prep said, he is expected to have a 10-day window to hunker down and engage in extensive preparatory sessions. They could include more intensive sessions at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.

But Jill has had Joe on a non-stop schedule in the weeks prior to his return to the US -- just since his return from France this past Sunday, where his performance was at best woozy, she had him on display at the early Juneteenth celebration Monday, where he appeared frozen and out of it; he had to deal with Hunter's conviction the same day; on Tuesday he gave a speech in his usual stumbling style and then went to Wilmington, presumably to meet with Hunter.

Then all day Wednesday he's flying to Italy; by early morning today Italy time, he's doing G7 stuff, but that's noon US time, so he's tired and jet lagged. Right now, he isn't doing well:

By Saturday, he's flying not just back to Washington, but to Los Angeles for a Hollywood fundraiser, another full day equivalent in the air back and forth across the US after a flight across the Atlantic. Then he can maybe start to unwind and prep for the debate the following week, Thursday, June 27.

This might be doable for a robust man in early middle age. Trump might even be able to bring something like that off. For someone 81 years old whose overall health is looking more and more shaky, I'm not sure if putting him into a make-or-break debate with maybe a week to rebuild his strength is prudent or realistic.

I've heard rumors that the Royals kept Queen Elizabeth II going with blood transfusions -- maybe King Charles did so well in France for the same reason. But they're just heads of state, they aren't on a presidential schedule. I can visualize Joe hooked up to tubes with fresh blood and other meds being pumped in to jack him into shape, but really, that's something out of a science fiction flick. I don't think you can bring that off in the real world.

It sounds like Dr Jill and her yes-people are assuming that no matter how badly Joe comes off, Trump's mask will fall, he'll magically show he's actually a raving nut, and everyone's gonna change their minds. Justlikethat. And no Delaware jury will convict a Biden.

posted by test @ June 13, 2024   0 Comments

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

The 270-268 Scenario

Most of my posts over the past several days have covered the move in respectable opinion through the five stages of grief to reach depression and finally acceptance that Trump is on track to win the November election. There's an increasing consensus that Biden, even five months out, has run out of time to turn things around, and the only possible remedy is maybe Gretchen Whitmer at the top of the ticket, or something like that, which is pure fantasy.

But now we have two important people, Nate Silver and Sean Trende, suggesting a possible new reason for optimism, which I will call the 270-268 scenario, whereby Joe reverses the Republican strategy, loses the popular vote, but ekes out the thinnest possible Electoral College victory by flipping a few of the so-called "battleground" states at the last minute. Yes, right now at the aggregators, Biden is behind in all of them, but Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are closer. According to Nate Silver,

Take 2020 as a contrast. In that election, Biden held polling leads in the Blue Wall states and in the “Sunbelt Trio” of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. For that matter he was even slightly ahead in polls of Florida and North Carolina. Biden substantially underperformed his polls in the Blue Wall states — as Hillary Clinton had in 2016 — but not by quite enough to lose them. He did lose Florida and North Carolina, of course. However, Biden also had backup options in the form of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where the polling proved to be largely accurate. That was enough to provide him with a relatively robust 306 electoral votes. Biden could have lost any two of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona — and in some permutations, even three of these states — and still come out victorious.

But Silver acknowledges Biden has far fewer states he can potentially flip in 2024:

Very much unlike Clinton in 2016, Biden could withstand quite a bit of polling error and still squeak by [in 2020]. It was unfortunate for him that the tipping-point states were to the right of the country overall — Biden won the popular vote by nearly four-and-a-half points — but at least he had a lot of them to choose from.

Sean Trende's version is very similar:

[Trump's gains with black and Hispanic voters] provided a boost in important states with large non-white populations, like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.

. . . The gains in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada are consequential. They only get Trump to 268 electoral votes. Assuming the GOP holds a majority of the congressional delegations after the elections (which would ensure Trump wins the presidency in the event of a tie), he needs one more.

. . . One doesn’t have to be gifted with a particularly vigorous imagination to see what could happen here: Trump has substantial improvements among non-white voters, driving gains in some red areas (like Texas) and flipping some important swing states. He also makes gains in some blue states like Virginia, New Mexico, California, and New York, but is unable to flip them because the hole with educated whites is just too deep. Then, in relatively white Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan, very little changes.

The result could easily be Trump winning the popular vote, but Biden eking out a narrow 270-268 Electoral Vote victory (assuming that NE-02 holds for him).

The odd thing is that both Silver and Trende, whose reputations and livelihoods depend on how they interpret the polls, are assuming fairly large-scale polling errors in favor of Trump in this scenario, when the polling errors we've seen over decades have consistently favored Democrats. The 2020 polling was no exception:

Comparing the final election results to the poll numbers for each candidate, Trump’s support was understated by a whopping 3.3 points on average, while Biden’s was overstated by a point — turning what looked like a solid Biden lead into a closer, if still decisive, race.

It seems to me that there's been no change in the actual dynamics of polling: the polls are conducted by polling companies who sell their results to the legacy media. The legacy media buy the results that confirm their bias -- and media bias from time immemorial has been toward Democrats. But Silver and Trende are expecting a different result this year -- they're effectively saying Trump is so far ahead in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia that we can't discount for polling error there.

But in all the other states where Trump has been leading the polls ever since last fall, the numbers are closer, and if we factor in a potential polling error that favors Republicans, maybe Joe can otherwise run the table, lose the popular vote, but squeak by in the smallest possible Electoral College total, in recent times something only Reoublicans have done in 2000 and 2016. This is at best counterintuitive.

Silver in particular sees this strategy as plausible but unrealistic:

It’s imprecise to say the 270-268 map requires Biden to draw to an inside straight — that isn’t the right metaphor, since the polling error between the various states is correlated, not independent like the order of a deck of playing cards. It’s an eminently plausible scenario. But it does require a lot of things to go right. Pinning one’s hopes on this exact scenario feels a little bit like the bargaining stage in the phases of grief over Biden’s continually mediocre poll numbers.

Ah, yes, the stages of grief. That's the point I've been making.

posted by test @ June 12, 2024   0 Comments

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

"If Something Cannot Go On Forever, It Will Stop"

A recent TV show that's exceeded my expectations is the History Channel's How Disney Built America, which focuses on the old-fashioned Disney of Snow White, Davy Crockett, and Disneyland and so far has ignored the trans dudes in fairy godmother outfits selling schlock to little girls in the gift shop. This past Sunday's episode focused on "animatronics", high-tech automatons that move and speak with astonishing realism. The example on the show was the famous Abraham Lincoln figure that was first demonstrated at the 1964 New York World's Fair.

I thought of the moving, speaking Abraham Lincoln when I ran across this story at Red State, which carried the video above as well as several others. All I could think was that what we were actually watching was some beta version of a new Disney animatronic Joe Biden figure, but the bugs hadn't been worked out. For instance, in rhe video below, it looks like they've got the skin, hair, eyes, and costume pretty well down, but they haven't programmed the presidential body movements yet:

I've remarked in the past that if Joe is a puppet, he's defective -- you pull a string thinking it'll move his head, but instead it throws his knee out of joint. But now I think he's more like a Disney high-tech presidential animatron, except that somewhere offstage there's a screen scrolling error messages like "buffer overflow at *(0x12DF)", but nobody's there to see it. The writer at RedState comments,

But it's the eyes that really get me. Somehow, while standing outside, he manages to go the first 34 seconds of that video without blinking. Whatever they have him on is strong stuff.

He's onto something. I'd been thinking all weekend that the D-Day commemoration in France looks like something that would be a strain on anyone at any age, although King Charles, at 75 not that much younger than Joe and recently treated for cancer, seems to have been able to do much better than the president, performing with full dignity and speaking well and clearly. But Joe, not in as good a condition to start with, has unlike the king been forced into a reelection campaign much earlier than other US presidents, and now he's back home and having to work hard at it. And it looks like they've got him on strong stuff.

In particular, as of today, the June 27 debate, which is thought to be the one where if he does poorly, they still have time to replace him, is 16 days away. I had actually thought his handlers, especially Dr Jill, would be doing all they could to get him rested from the D-Day trip and fresh for the debate. Instead, while they must have had him pumped up to get him through the D-Day ceremonies, it looks like they pumped him up some more to get him through that early Juneteenth celebration. Today, he's going to the Washington Hilton to deliver remarks at Everytown’s Gun Sense University, whatever that's about.

But if they have to pump him up for routine events like Juneteenth -- RNC Research comments in the post below, "Biden has absolutely no idea where he is right now" --

when is he not pumped up? You'd think it would be time to get him rested and really start prepping, prepping, prepping for that June 27 debate.

So far, everyone's gaming this out and expecting some miracle of modern medicine to get him suddenly focused and alert as he strides onto the debate stage. I can't rule that out, but other counsels suggest there's only so much they can do, and if he's jacked up now and he's still zoned out, what will they do to get a different result at the debate? Stein's Law: If somthing cannot go on forever, it will stop.

posted by test @ June 11, 2024   0 Comments

Monday, June 10, 2024

More Democrats Reaching Acceptance

Several pieces turned up over the weekend showimg polite opinion moving through the final stages of grief over the potential November outcome. A major theme is that, even with five months still to go until the election, Joe has run out of time to turn things around. At Roll Call:

The Biden 2020 campaign strategy was simple: portray himself as a seasoned centrist who would bring the country together and return the White House to normalcy. After three-and-a-half years governing with liberal policies to appease his base, that direction for Biden is no longer an option. Independents, who won him the election, now overwhelmingly have an unfavorable view of both the job he is doing and him personally. The majority coalition that elected him is gone, as those critical voters no longer view another four years of Biden as a positive.

So another strategy has emerged, almost by default given Biden’s limited options. It is one that seems oddly familiar, as it mirrors Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign strategy.

. . . Clinton’s campaign focused on driving negative stories on Trump’s personal life rather than policy differences, with one goal in mind: to drive up his negatives. They succeeded. Trump ended the campaign with a 60 percent unfavorable.

. . . Trial or no trial, Biden is in trouble. Channeling Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy isn’t going to fix his problem.

The whole point of the trial appears to have been to resuscitate the Stormy Daniels story, which didn't work in 2016, and it flopped again this year. This piece in Politico focuses on the time it will still take to change the public's mind on the economy:

President Joe Biden is running out of the tools — and the time — he needs to turn around Americans’ gloomy view of the U.S. economy.

. . . Inside Biden’s orbit, the fear is that there’s little new the administration can do to change the perceptions of a stubborn electorate that’s living through an upswing — yet simply refusing to believe it.

. . . The Biden campaign perspective is that the issue is not a matter of policies or even messaging, but time. The president will make gains as more Americans tune into the specifics of the presidential race.

. . . But there’s also a recognition that Democrats have tried nearly every tactic available, and whether voters’ outlook improves en masse in time for November is increasingly out of their control.

But the trend of opinion seems to be moving past the question of messaging and toward the sense that the problem is the candidate:

Veteran top Democratic consultant James Carville says he wishes President Biden wasn’t running for re-election and worries that disenchanted young party voters will sit out the November election because of it.

“It isn’t the choice I was crazy about,” admitted Carville, who played a major role in getting former President Clinton first elected in 1992, on 77 WABC radio’s “The Cats Roundtable” on Sunday.

“I thought that President Biden should not run for re-election,” the political guru said. “But he did — it’s him and Trump — and that’s where I am.”

But the big new event is a piece in The Atlantic, Ruth Bader Biden. The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, Democrat megadonor widow of Steve Jobs, and it's reasonable to surmise this is the consensus view of the Democrat megadonor class:

Bad vibes have been the persistent feature of his campaign. No matter the obstacles Trump creates for himself, Biden remains a comprehensively weak incumbent, weighed down by the same liabilities that burdened him from the start, beginning with the largest, and completely unfixable, one: At 81, he is much too old to run for president.

. . . It is too late for Democrats to do anything about their predicament now, barring some 11th-hour event that triggers an extremely unlikely swap-out of nominees at the Democratic National Convention. Trump and his party keep pushing further beyond the bounds of what would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

. . . Like many people, I’ve made the unwelcome comparison between Biden and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal icon whose legacy was stained by her unwillingness to retire while Barack Obama was still president. Ginsburg’s death, at 87, occurred in the final months of the Trump administration, which allowed him to appoint her successor (Amy Coney Barrett). The Real Time host Bill Maher dubbed the octogenarian president “Ruth Bader Biden” on his HBO program last September. Biden, Maher said, was “the person who doesn’t know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country.”

Biden’s conduct is far worse than Ginsburg’s, in fact, given the awesome power of the presidency and the havoc Trump could unleash with it this time.

I simply can't imagine that Ms Powell Jobs would allow this to run in The Atlantic without her knowledge and approval -- it's saying flat out that as of this June, a remarkably early point to be making such an assessment, the Biden campaign is out of time to turn things around, and it's Biden's fault. And this feeling is echoing, as we see at the other links here. And the overall listlessness of the consensus is striking.

Look at James Carville's view of the Democrat alternatives in the next-to-last link above:

Carville argued that the Democrats have a deep bench of younger elected officials who would be a better fit for the times than the 81-year-old Biden, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn.

I've noted that David Axelrod calls the idea that Joe would withdraw in favor of a candidate like one of these, possibly chosen at the Chicago convention, a "fantasy", not least because the far left Democrat faction will never support a white candidate, much less a Jewish one like Shapiro, but Hakeem Jeffries is a non-starter to anyone else. The only serious replacement for Biden if he withdraws is Kamala Harris, but this, the single non-fantasy alternative, is the one nobody mentions. Nobody. Ever.

Meanwhile, with a growing and unprecedented consensus even among knowedgeable Democrats so early in the cycle that Biden is going to lose the election, Joe himself looks incresingly frail and unwell. The photo at the top of this post was taken at a French cemetery on the last day of his trip to the D-Day commemoration. His gait is clearly stiff, he's relying on Dr Jill to keep him steady, and somehow his suit doesn't quite fit. Again, I think he's losing weight. Worst of all, he's wobbling through a graveyard.

We're looking at what's turning into an eight-month interregnum, an unprecedented situation. I'm starting to question how he can make it to the June 27 debate.

posted by test @ June 10, 2024   0 Comments

Sunday, June 9, 2024

"If You Have To Explain He Isn't Pooping His Pants, You're Losing"

Let me say that I do accept, at least for now, Snopes's fact-check of Joe's awkward pose at the D-Day commemoration. But it's worth pointing out that this is at least the third allegation, no matter how far-fetched, that Joe has done this, from an episode at the Vatican on June 21, 2021, to this one last month on the White House driveway: Someone posted this post's title on Twitter, but it raises a bigger question. Whether Joe has been pooping his pants at all, these episodes all catch Joe in awkward moments that suggest he is simply not a well man.

And this leads to Jim Geraghty's point that I linked in yesterday's post, that at some point in the future "we will ‘learn’ something like, ‘the president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties.’” My own reading of Dr Steven Lomazow's research on Franklin Roosevelt's actual health condition in the years before his death makes me suspicious that there may well be more behind those and other of Joe's awkward moments than just pooping his pants.

Two US presidents have died during or soon after strenuous trips, Warren Harding in 1923 and Franklikn Roosevelt in 1945. Harding was reported to have died "suddenly" on August 2, but he had cut short a tour of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest due to abdominal pain and other symptoms and had been attempting to recover in a San Francisco hotel since July 29. As with Roosevelt, the widowed First Lady forbade an autopsy, and the exact cause of Harding's death has never been satisfactorily established, but this link says, "Today, most historians accept that Harding, 57, died from a heart attack brought on by ample evidence of cardiac problems."

Roosevelt was clearly very sick during his trip to Yalta in February 1945, and Dr Lomazow in FDR's Deadly Secret, published years before Biden's presidency, makes a great deal of Roosevelt's faltering performance speaking before Congress on his return on March 1, losing his place, rambling, repeating himself, and garbling his words much like Joe does now. This was such a stark departure from Roosevelt's former brilliant and assured oratorical style that observers at the time viewed it with deep concern. He died on April 12, six weeks later, and as with Harding, his death was reported as "sudden", when insiders, especially his White House and personal physicians, were fully aware of his real condition.

As with Harding's widow, Eleanor Roosevelt forbade an autopsy, and details of Roosevelt's actual health condition have been closely guarded secrets ever since. Dr Lomazow, as a trustee of the FDR library, has had unique access to what records exist, and he has found evidence of congestive heart failure, inoperable prostate cancer, and melanoma that had matastasized into his brain and digestive tract.

So here we have another president, Joe Biden, whose public appearance can only be described as frail -- and the way his suits hang loose and the collars stand out from his neck suggests he's losing weight -- on a strenuous trip to France, while he's also apparently consumed with Hunter's legal problems:

Over the past few weeks, President Joe Biden has grown consumed by worries over the trial of Hunter Biden. He’s called family members more regularly to check on his son’s mood. The topic of the criminal case dominated the family gatherings in Delaware over the weekend.

Dr Jill's travel schedule indicates the real level of concern in the Biden family over Hunter's predicament:

[W]hen Joe flew to France to start his trip, landing on Wednesday morning. Jill wasn't with him. She went to Hunter's trial. Then, acccording to CNN, she took a separate "red-eye flight" to France later on Wednesday to be there in Normandy for the D-Day ceremonies on Thursday. She boarded a military aircraft at Paris-Orly to go back home to Wilmington after the Thursday ceremonies, so she could be there at the trial for Hunter on Friday, while Joe was in Pointe du Hoc making his remarks. After that, she got on another flight back to France, so she wouldn't miss being honored during the festivities of the state dinner on Saturday.

Fox picked up how she was flying back to Wilmington for the trial on Friday, but they weren't getting a lot of answers from the White House.

The writer asks what this cost the taxpayer, but he misses the other question of what this says about how much strain Hunter's trial must be putting on Joe, whose schedule at this point must be extraordinarily tiring for someone in his condition in any case.

Yet nobody seems remotely to be thinking about the parallels with Harding and Roosevelt, especially given the entirely reasonable suspicion that, as the White House has ever done with presidents' health reports, a great deal about Joe is not being revealed. The obtuseness at legacy sites like RealClearPolitics is clear when it carries betting averages for the Democrat nomination (Biden 79.6, Newsom 6.0, Michelle Obama 5.8 when Michelle took herself out of the running months ago) but doesn't list Kamala Harris at all. Oddschecker.com does, however, carry odds for Kamala for both the nomination and the presidency, though they aren't high.

The fact is that looking at Joe's condition and performance, factoring in other issues like his preoccupation with Hunter's mutiple trials, the strain of a lengthy foreign trip, and the historical parallels of Harding and FDR, I would say that the likelihood of Kamala Harris succeeding to the presidency before November is at least non-trivial. This could happen if Joe resigns or if he's clearly incapacitated, or if he passes away. Even if he chooses to complete his term but withdraws as a candidate, Kamala is the only realistic choice for the nomination, since the far left faction of Democrats will never get behind a potential white replacement when she's available.

Nobody is gaming this out -- except, you know what? I'll bet Trump and his advisers have thought this through. I'll bet the new Trump megadonors, many of them very smart people, have been thinking about it as well.

posted by test @ June 09, 2024   0 Comments

Saturday, June 8, 2024

The Stages Of Grief

Over the past week, I think there's been a major shift in polite opinion, prompted in part -- but not completely -- by the Wall Street Journal piece that simply gave everyone permission to admit what people had been seeing for months, if not indeed years. The other factor is that Trump's conviction in the New York "hush money" trial gave him, if anything, a slight boost in the polls, but it also fed $400 million in donations in the week following the verdict.

This brings to mind the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think we can say that polite opinion in the wake of these developments has moved entirely past denial. A week ago, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict and beginning to recognize that calling Trump a "convicted felon" wasn't going to change a thing, Harold Myerson got mad in The American Prospect, calling Trump The Martyr of Mar-a-Lago:

The political consequences of yesterday’s verdict won’t be clear until after November’s election, if then. While Trump’s bluster, belligerence, and bullshit may have failed him in court, they have also created his political base, made him MAGA’s man, and recentered the Republicans around a new constituency: millions of young men lashing out in all directions against, as Tom Edsall described it in his Wednesday New York Times column, their “precarious manhood.” . . . To the remade Republican Party, the party of precarious manhood, he is the victim of the same outsider-controlled system that victimized their young men; he is the martyr of Mar-a-Lago.

Others have moved into depression and acceptance. For instnace, Bill Maher:

Bill Maher predicted an Election Day defeat for President Biden, despite reiterating his support for the president, telling tech journalist Kara Swisher that former President Trump is likely to rally enough support for a second term.

“I would vote for [Biden’s] head in a jar of blue liquid over Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean that I’m — first of all, I think it’s a moot point at this point. He’s going to f‑‑‑ing lose,” Maher told Swisher on an episode of his podcast.

Ed Kilgore in The Intelligencer writes Trump Conviction Shows There’s No 2024 Game Changer Coming:

Anyone holding their breath to see if a guilty verdict in the Trump hush-money trial would impact the election can now exhale. While it’s possible to look at the data and see a glass that is half-empty or half-full, the overall indication is that Trump’s conviction has not changed the race. And on balance, that’s good for the 45th president.

. . . [F]acts aside, Trump’s conviction and his overall status as a man perpetually on the wrong side of the law are being perceived through partisan lenses, which in turn will tend to encourage unaffiliated voters to discount them. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but it’s reality.

. . . [W]e’re in a presidential contest that appears to be all but impervious to the kinds of things that used to be called “game changers.” It’s time to accept at least as a rebuttable presumption that the game isn’t changing. And that has implications for future events like the presidential debates, the two major-party conventions, and the cut-and-thrust of the campaign competition as the November election grows nigh.

So polite opinion for now is moving from anger toward depression and acceptance that, first, Biden's condition has become an obvious problem, and second, that he's likely to lose in November. But Jim Geraghty at the NeverTrump National Review is making the next necessary point:

Way back in June 2022, I wrote, “I think the single most predictable ‘bombshell’ of the coming years is that sometime in 2025, someone like Bob Woodward or Robert Costa will publish a book with a title like Perpetual Crisis: Inside the Biden White House, and we will ‘learn’ something like, ‘the president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties.’” This morning, the Wall Street Journal takes us another half-step toward that minimally shocking revelation, interviewing more than 45 sources and offering a grim portrait of President Biden behind the scenes: forgetful, mumbling, increasingly reliant on notes to remember basic facts, and seemingly oblivious to his own administration’s policies and decisions.

But Geraghty wonders what this really implies:

I’m not that worried when Biden says, in his Time magazine interview, that Vladimir Putin “wasn’t just going into Moscow” when he meant “wasn’t just going into Ukraine.” We all flub our words here and there, and in that example, Biden quickly corrected himself.

I’m much more worried about when Biden insists that he wasn’t told something and military leaders or members of his cabinet maintain, under oath, that he was. Biden had insisted during his infamously short-tempered interview with George Stephanopoulos that no one had recommended keeping a small group of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to keep order at the airport or anywhere else, specifically stating, “No one said that to me that I can recall.” A few months later, under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Central Command general Frank McKenzie and Joint Chiefs chairman general Mark Milley both said they had recommended President Biden maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.

. . . Biden’s long record of shameless BS makes it tough to tell when he’s misremembering or simply lying. When the president keeps insisting that inflation was 9 percent when he took office, is that just spin trying to get voters to blame Trump for inflation? Or does Biden really not remember that inflation didn’t start increasing until he had been in office a few months and signed some massive spending bills? Does Biden not remember assuring Americans, in July 2021, that “there’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way”?

I can understand why Biden would want to forget certain inconvenient facts and regrettable guarantees. But it matters a lot if the guy making decisions as commander in chief and head of the executive branch actually can’t remember what he was told from day to day.

Whatr he's edging toward is the real question: it's not whether Biden will lose in November -- smart people have laid $400 million on that outcome in the past week alone. The question is whether Biden is fit to serve now, or indeed if he's been fit to serve for some months or years already. And if something needs to be done, the next problem is that his constitutional successor, the vice pressident, is probably less fit to serve than he is. We're facing not just a transition period between November and next January, we're facing a de facto interregnum now with no clear solution.

I call this a constitutional crisis. We haven't reached the stage where polite opinion can handle it.

posted by test @ June 08, 2024   0 Comments