Monday, July 15, 2024

Links - 15th July 2024 (1 - Joe Biden: Debate Fallout)

Biden backer George Clooney tells president he can't beat Trump - "After supporting him last month at a glitzy fundraiser in Los Angeles, George Clooney has told Joe Biden he needs to drop out of the upcoming U.S. presidential race... “I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” Clooney wrote.  “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”... Biden’s interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos last week only solidified his belief that the president must step aside.  “As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, who we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question,” he wrote... The Ocean’s 11 star has been a vociferous critic of Trump... Clooney’s abandonment of Biden, who has maintained he plans to keep campaigning, follows similar pleas from author Stephen King and filmmaker Rob Reiner... Damon Lindelof, who is best known for co-creating the TV hit Lost, also spoke out against the president in a guest column that appeared in Deadline. “Our president’s debate performance has been characterized in many ways; disappointing, upsetting, terrifying… but for me it was simply game-changing,” he wrote.  In an email obtained by the New York Times, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, a prominent Democratic donor, reportedly wrote that Biden needs to drop out and the Democratic Party needs to find another candidate to take on Trump... The View co-host Sara Haines also begged Biden to walk away. “I think President Biden needs to step down and be replaced,” Haines told her co-hosts."

Thread by @DrewHolden360 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🧵THREAD🧵  Biden’s disastrous debate performance brought to a screeching halt a multi-year campaign from the media to present the president as mentally fit.  Do you really remember how hard the press pushed you not to trust your lyin’ eyes on Biden’s decline?  Start here ⤵️
I suspect most of you remember the allegations from the White House that videos showing Biden behaving erratically were “cheap fakes.”  The media rushed to repeat this claim. Look at the extent @nytimes went to say you didn’t see anything and that Biden was fine. Perhaps the wildest was @washingtonpost, who gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to videos showing Biden displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as fakes, “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype.”  Part of their defense was that Biden “doesn’t dance.”  Really.  Just look at this headline from @AP.  And it only gets worse from there.  Again, your lyin eyes are the problem. Not Biden. Allegedly. @AP took specific issue with one supposed “fake”: a video where Biden freezes and needs to be led off a stage.  The video looks brutal.  But why would you believe what you can see, rather than Biden’s and Jimmy Kimmel’s comms teams? @TheWrap blamed Biden’s stutter.  Really. Line highlighted. @NBCNews lamented how hard all these deceptive “cheap fakes” were for our noble fact checkers. But this headline was everywhere.  An obviously dubious statement from a White House official was repeated as gospel truth.  Here’s @ABC, @NBCNews, @thedailybeast and @CNN. Really. I’m not exaggerating. There are even more at my full write up (link is in bio) but here’s another four boxer courtesy of @washingtonpost, @CBSNews, @Salon and @RollingStone.
But what you may have forgotten are the ways that this was just the latest attempt from the press to hide the fact that the president might lack the mental wherewithal to execute the duties of his office.  Remember the special counsel report on Biden’s documents? Back in February, special counsel Robert Hur determined that Biden lacked the mental fortitude to face a jury without seeming like a feeble, affable old man.  The press were incensed. @nytimes threw up the roadblocks, saying we needed more evidence to make a real diagnosis. @washingtonpost claimed that what had been disclosed about Biden was just like anyone mixing up the names of their children.  Nothing to see here! It was a popular refrain. Here’s @AP doing the same. Just like mixing up your kids’ names!  How silly! Even the leader of the free world does it! @CNN assured us that it was nothing to worry about, Biden was fine, especially at his age.  They quoted a comms professor as their authoritative source. These built off longstanding claims that criticism of Biden’s mental capacity were “ageist.”  Here’s @TIME pushing that claim repeatedly. And some more from @Forbes, @NPR, @TheView and @Will_Bunch.
Perhaps the richest of them all came last year from @nytimes.  Biden was so spry and vigorous that his young staff couldn’t keep up! Everyone was saying so!  It reads like North Korean propaganda.
The debate dashed this narrative that the press had worked so hard to build. Biden has lost even the editorial boards of @nytimes, @BostonGlobe and more. It’s time, the press laments, to move on. And maybe we should’ve seen this coming.  I don’t think it’s a mystery why this topic wasn’t covered well, @CNN. That isn’t to say that some outlets haven’t maintained the fiction.  Biden had a cold at the debate. That was the problem, they claimed. I won’t let @CBSNews, @axios, and @NBCNews forget. Or @AP…whatever this is.
It should go without saying, but the media actively working to hide from the American people that the commander and chief is exhibiting signs of serious cognitive decline is an enormous problem...  And that the press, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say, pushed this fiction to give one side a leg up in the election?  I think the media’s word for that is “election interference” I know it’s hard to believe, but there are many more examples of the media covering for Biden’s mental state than what I could fit in this thread."
Once again, "fact checking" is a way to push the left wing agenda

Eric Weinstein on X - "Can someone walk me through the official narrative of how the impartial press *suddenly* ascertains there is a problem that only seconds earlier they were dismissively defaming people for discussing? I can’t even come up with a story. Any story. At all. Thanks in advance."

Joe Biden and the Common Knowledge Game - "Common Knowledge is what everyone knows that everyone knows.  Common knowledge is why coronations and executions are held in public – not so a crowd can see the new king or the hanged man, but so a crowd can see a crowd seeing the new king or the hanged man. Common knowledge is why sitcoms have laugh tracks, why American Idol has a live studio audience, and why professional sports teams pipe in crowd noise. Common knowledge is why the Egyptian government fell in 2011 after a televised protest in Tahrir Square, why the Romanian government fell in 1989 after a televised protest in Palace Square, and why the Chinese government will arrest you today if you distribute pictures of a 35-year-old protest in Tiananmen Square. Common knowledge is why inflation has been non-transitory and persistent, why the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was a fiasco, and why the US response to Covid was so heavy-handed and ineffective. Common knowledge is also why the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign has collapsed... Pretty much everyone in Hollywood knew that Harvey Weinstein was a rapist and a really bad guy, including his wife and his business partners and all the actors who wanted a role in one of his movies. It was widespread private knowledge, verging on public knowledge. I mean, if you’re making jokes about it on 30 Rock, it’s out there.  But it didn’t matter that everyone in Hollywood knew that Harvey Weinstein was a rapist. No one’s behavior changed. No one shunned the guy. No actor turned down a role. No politician turned down a donation. His wife didn’t leave him, and his business partners just upped the D&O insurance and paid out settlements. They all knew, and I’m sure they cared a little and shook their heads in a tsk-tsk sort of way, but they didn’t care enough to change their transactional relationships with Harvey Weinstein. Because that’s the thing about private information, no matter how widespread. Even if everyone in the world believes a certain piece of private information, no one will alter their behavior. Behavior changes ONLY when we believe that everyone else believes the information. THAT’S what changes behavior. Just like with the Emperor’s New Clothes... In the absence of common knowledge, staying quiet — whether you’re an abettor or a victim — is the rational thing to do. In fact, this is what Weinstein and his abettors count on, that their threats and shaming and bribes will set up a Hobson’s Choice for victims. Sure you can go public, but no one will believe you and then we will ruin you. So yeah, go ahead. It’s your choice. Of course no one goes public, because a Hobson’s Choice is not a real choice. Only a victim with Missionary power (and that’s a really rare thing) has the option to not just go public with the story — because simply going public is not enough to change behavior — but to create common knowledge with the story by going SO public and SO loud.   Joe Biden was his own Missionary. Joe Biden was his own little girl who yells out SO loudly that the Emperor has no clothes.  Honestly, I think Biden is the only person with enough juice to pull it off. Maybe Obama. No one else could have been the Missionary here...   You cannot ‘restore confidence’ by reading a speech off a freakin’ teleprompter! There is no ‘confidence’ to be restored!  Everything Joe Biden does for the rest of his life will be seen through the lens of last Thursday night...   And not only will every future public action be put under a microscope, with the entire world waiting for the accident to happen, but all of Biden’s past public actions will be put under renewed scrutiny. You think Attorney General Merrick Garland hasn’t compared the audio recording of Biden’s deposition with special prosecutor Robert Hur to the written transcript? You think there might be some … ummmm … discrepancies between the audio recording and the transcript? You think Garland is feeling all warm and fuzzy right now about his very public vouching for Biden’s mental acuity? LOL. Biden’s cabinet officers are now in exactly the same spot as Harvey Weinstein’s business partners. Of course they knew. But now they know that everyone knows, and that puts their careers in danger. They can’t be seen as the courtiers insisting that the Emperor is wearing a fine suit of clothes now that we all know that we all know he’s naked, but they also can’t be seen publicly sticking a knife into Biden’s back. So what do they do? They bail. They distance themselves. They start waffling. They are ‘busy with crucial departmental business’ when the campaign asks for a photo shoot in the Rose Garden. They say nice things about Biden to his face, and in private they start talking on background to disavow him... Obama saying it was a ‘bad night’ is a classic limited hangout, where you confess truthfully to a small thing to stop the questioning on a big thing. Obama can’t be seen as the guy with the knife, but he can absolutely give his boys Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes the green light to, if not stab away, then at least to distance themselves, their social media and their fundraising from the Biden campaign.  No Democrat who sees a future for themselves in politics is going to commit wholeheartedly to the Biden/Harris campaign now... It’s the entirely rational way to play the game.  All that remains is the cope... I knew Heather Cox Richardson when we were in grad school at Harvard. To see her descend to this level of party apparatchik cope at this point in our lives … ugh. Jeff Sonnenfeld is a professor and dean at the Yale Business School. He also runs an ‘executive leadership’ company that’s affiliated with Yale, sort of a WEF wannabe thing. Barf. But if you think the cope and the recriminations are bad now, just wait until after the election. Man, it’s going to be QAnon-level stuff flowing from the true-believers."

End Wokeness on X - "NEW: Parkinson's expert Dr. Tom Pitts tells NBC that Biden clearly has it. No debate. He compares the coverup to the Soviets. This is coming from a lifelong Democrat."

Collin Rugg on X - "JUST IN: Crowd starts cracking up after Ben Shapiro breaks Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell's brain after he asked a question about Project 2025.
Swalwell: "How much do you support Project 2025?"
Shapiro: "Like President Trump, I haven't looked all that deeply at Project 2025, but it seems that Democrats on this committee are sort of like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. If they say Project 2025, enough, their presidential candidate becomes alive again."
Brutal."

Biden Can’t Spin His Way Out of This - WSJ - "To me it feels like August 1974. The president’s position isn’t going to get better, it is going to get worse. The longer he waits to step aside the crueler his departure will be. The post-debate polls show he is losing support both overall and in the battlegrounds. A cratering like that doesn’t happen because you had a bad night, or a cold, or were tired. It happens when an event starkly and unavoidably shows people what they already suspected. It happens when the event gives them proof. Before the debate a majority of those polled said they no longer thought he had it in him physically or mentally to do the job of president anymore. After the debate that number reached 72%. You can’t un-ring that bell... I don’t agree with the narrative that what was revealed in the debate was a sudden and dramatic decline. What he has been showing, for at least two years, is a steady and unstopping decline. In January 2022 we worried here about the president’s propensity for “unfinished sentences, non sequiturs; sometimes his thoughts seem like bumper cars crashing and forcing each other off course.” In April 2022 we wrote of a poll in New Hampshire that asked if Joe Biden was physically and mentally up to the job if there is a crisis. Fifty-four percent said, “not very/not at all.” In June 2022 we said there’s a broad sense it’s not going to get better: “He has poor judgment and he’s about to hit 80 and it’s not going to change.” Voters feel “unease.” In December 2022: Mr. Biden doesn’t think he’s “slipping with age,” but he’s wrong. “He’s showing age and it will only get worse, and he will become more ridiculous, when he’s deeper into his 80s.” Trusted Biden intimates must tell him to get out of the race. “You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net. . . . You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role. And now you should go out an inspiration.” In September 2023 Mr. Biden had been busted in the press for telling tall tales that didn’t check out. We noted that while repeated lying is “a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.” “The age problem will only get worse.” “In insisting on running he is making a historical mistake. . . . He isn’t up to it.” What we saw in the debate isn’t new. That’s why voters won’t accept the idea that it was just a bad night. They think it’s been a bad and worsening two years... Can America afford for another four years to have an obviously neurologically impaired president? No, it isn’t safe. It is on some level provocative. Weakness provokes. The president’s rationalizers point out that he’s fine from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I am sure presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia will only decide to take back Taiwan or move on Poland at lunch time EST, to keep things fair. Why wouldn’t they schedule their aggressions around the president’s needs? The elected officeholders of the Democratic Party should take responsibility and press the president to leave. You can’t scream, “Democracy is on the line,” and put up a neurologically compromised candidate to fight for it. They haven’t moved for two reasons. One has to do with their own prospects: You don’t want to be the one who kills the king, you want to be the one who warmly mourns the king and takes his mantle after someone else kills him. The other is fear of who would replace him on the ticket, and how exactly that would happen. These are understandable fears. But the answer isn’t to hide in a dumb fatalism, a listless acceptance of fate. It makes no sense to say, “Joe Biden is likely going to lose so we should do nothing because doing something is unpredictable.” Unpredictable is better than doomed. This is a party afraid of itself, literally afraid of its own groups and component parts. They are afraid of their own delegates. Party professionals think letting the convention decide would reveal how fatally shattered and divided the party is—how wild it is. But that’s how the party looks now, with its leaders in Washington frozen and incapable and no one in charge. What a tragedy this is. A president cratering his historical reputation, his wife and family ruining any affection history would have had for them when Donald Trump wins. They have no idea how they’re going to look."

Joe Biden vows to 'beat Trump in 2020' and says he's proud to be a black woman in latest gaffes - "Maura Healey, the governor of Massachusetts, became the most high-profile sitting Democrat to publicly call for Mr Biden to consider his position... Mr Biden may not even be wholly in charge of which policies the White House puts through, a source from “inside the building” told Semafor news website yesterday.   The source said much appeared to be handled by his close team including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The White House denied the claim... when asked why voting mattered, Mr Biden delivered an apparently unrelated answer that referred to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to grant Trump considerable immunity to prosecution... he fluffed his lines when speaking to military families on the White House South Lawn. During a four-minute address he said he was “not going anywhere” but he seemed to stumble when he referred to Mr Trump as “one of our colleagues”. While defenders of Mr Biden say he has long mixed up words, during his 90-minute debate last week he frequently appeared lost.  Further damaging revelations about his mental capacity have since emerged in the US media, including the suggestion that he is not cogent after 4pm each day, and that he sometimes forgets the names of close friends.   A guest at a party attended by Mr Biden told New York Magazine they were shocked to find he could not make it through an evening reception because it was too late."

Meme - Ben Dreyfuss @bendreyfuss: "Biden must only step aside if the coalition of pundits calling on him to do so includes a black, a Hispanic, an Asian, a SE Asian, a Native American, 3 gays and lesbians (each), a trans person, a cripple, a drug addict, a homeless person, & a few people with self-diagnosed autism"
Tristan Snell @TristanSnell: "These are the folks calling for Biden to quit.  Gosh, if there was only something they all had in common..."
Lex Jurgen on X - "White men attacking other white men over DEI credentials is the WNBA of political activism."
Slate56 on X - "Yes! They're all progressives like you for one. You loved each and every one of them until they voiced an opinion you don't like, but supported every opinion of them when agreed with their opinons."
Noam Blum on X - "This would make your opinions just as invalid as theirs. You’re a more generic white guy than the default character in a video game."
MuhSocioFactors on X - "Cool it with the anti-semitism."
Future Moldovan Citizen on X - "I don’t get it. You think these guys want Kamala Harris to become president because they are racist?"

Dr. Eli David on X - "Biden is the same age as Mick Jagger 🧐 *Video of vigorous and energetic Jagger*"

White House Claims Biden Has Had A Cold For The Past 4 Years | Babylon Bee - ""He's just had a bad four years," Jean-Pierre said. "And he's been perpetually jet-lagged since the '70s — a rare but serious condition."... Peter Doocy of Fox News asked, "Do you mean to tell me that he's had a cold all these years but still goes out in public to shake hands with world leaders? Isn't that irresponsible? Is he trying to get people killed, Karine?"  Jean-Pierre shut him down immediately. "Look, I'm not going to discuss the president's public interactions with world leaders because those are private, okay? That would be wholly inappropriate."  "How is a public interaction private?" Doocy asked in a follow-up.  "I already told you that's inappropriate," the press secretary answered. "I will now only take questions from NPR.""

Meme - NH State Rep. Wendy E. N... @WendyENThomas: "First, I unequivocally support Biden for President. 100%. What everyone is calling dementia *could* be long covid. When I had long covid, I had difficulty with reading, word retrieval, and short term memory."

Black Insurrectionist--I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS on X - "I just hung up with my friend who works in D.C. The guy who has nailed everything and given me inside scoops for months that have led to viral tweets, correct predictions and he has not been wrong yet. Not sure if I should post this, but:
Jill Biden is running the country right now.
Joe Biden is sleeping up to 16 hrs. per day.
The Biden and Obama family rift has now blown fully open and any aides loyal to Obama are going to get canned.
Obama is going to try and force Joe out. Obama is meeting privately with power players to get them to withdraw funding.
Hollywood will begin to turn on Biden via Obama is telling them.  Democrats are making decertification plans in case of a Trump win. Deals are being attempted with some republicans right now to turn on Trump.   A full-blown civil war in the DNC and an attempt to make sure Trump does not get elected at any cost is now happening. Many in D.C. are already saying that the Biden family has completely obliterated the constitution with how they are running the country.   Obama has the CIA and NSA in his corner. Bad news for Biden. The Biden family has cut Joe Biden off to anyone other than a few close people.
The Hur tapes are completely different than the transcription. The desperation to keep them is because apparently Joe Biden had full blown Dementia during most of that interview and some are saying the transcripts are in fact, doctored. I was even warned that I probably should not post this, but the hell with it, I hate the DNC, I hate democrats. The quicker we get rid of the democratic party the better off we all will be. But that includes getting rid of the GOP. Both parties suck.   Anyway, last night press conference did nothing, there is a full court press to get rid of Joe Biden and it is intensifying, watch for leaks to the press about Joe Biden and things that are happening behind the scenes. If the Hur tapes come out, it will be the end of Biden for sure and will lead to prosecutions because of the doctoring of the transcriptions. Internal polling has been disastrous. Many saying Biden has no path to win and if he were to win, the country would go up in flames. Crazy times we live in."

Charles Gasparino on X - "BREAKING: An alternative view from a CEO who knows @JoeBiden  well and says "NO FUCKING WAY he's dropping out." Here's his take: "Joe Biden couldnt care less what the elite in his party thinks, what the elite fundraisers think or anyone else. He really hates them; he'll take their money but he knows they look down on him as some rube. Plus he thinks he earned the presidency after trying so many times and there's no way he's giving it up to go down in history as a loser who dropped out because he isnt tough enough. He only cares about his wife and family and he will tell everyone else to fuck off.""

White House screened Cabinet officials' questions for Biden during rare meetings with prez: report - "President Biden’s Cabinet members have been emphatic that the commander-in-chief is sharp and probative behind closed doors.  However, the 81-year-old chief executive’s interactions with key members of his administration are actually pre-scripted and carefully choreographed — with aides going over questions and discussion points with Cabinet secretaries ahead of time.  Biden has not convened a meeting of his full Cabinet since Oct. 2, 2023, nine months ago. “The entire display is kind of an act,” one source told CNN of the closed-door get-togethers. “They would come and say, ‘Hey, the president is going to call on you about 25 minutes in and ask this question. What are the bullet points you’ll respond with?’” One unidentified Cabinet secretary told the outlet that they were unclear on the status of Biden’s health or cognitive performance because they met with the president so infrequently. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is not a Cabinet member but is nominated by the president, told House lawmakers Wednesday he had not met or spoken with Biden since May 2022... multiple sources claimed to CNN that such carefully choreographed exchanges between the president and top officials were not the norm in the Obama administration... Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, 77, confirmed Tuesday to a congressional panel that the Cabinet had not mulled the use of the 25th Amendment power to remove Biden from office and defended his astuteness.  “The president is extremely effective in the meetings that I’ve been in with him,” she said, declining to specify when the last time the two met... Biden’s allies managed to muddle through controversy over the president’s age back in February, despite him making a major gaffe at a subsequent presser, intended to allay concerns over his age, in which he referred to the Egyptian leader as the president of Mexico.  Mishaps and verbal flubs have dogged Biden’s White House tenure — even during carefully orchestrated events."

Radio host resigns after Biden campaign fed her interview questions - "A Philadelphia radio host has parted ways with her station after interviewing President Biden with questions provided by his campaign, a move prohibited by many newsrooms including her own.  Andrea Lawful-Sanders is one of two journalists — both hosts of Black radio shows in critical swing states — who acknowledged over the weekend that the Biden camp had fed them questions for interviews earlier in the week.  Their admissions come at a time when the president is already facing heightened scrutiny...   NPR has confirmed that the Biden campaign — as opposed to the White House — engaged with the hosts ahead of their interviews.  Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt defended the move in a statement, saying it’s “not at all an uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer” and that the questions asked of Biden were “relevant to the news of the day.”... Biden has engaged in fewer press conferences and media interviews than any of the last seven presidents at this point in their terms, according to an analysis shared with NPR by presidential scholar Martha Joynt Kumar... The practice of accepting interview questions from subjects is widely frowned upon in most newsrooms."

At Biden’s high-stakes press conference, the trouble began when the teleprompter stopped - "The trouble began as soon as the teleprompter was turned off. Just two weeks after a disastrous debate plunged his campaign into crisis, and with heavy hitters in his own party refusing to publicly support him, Joe Biden’s performance needed to be flawless. But in his first answer, to the first question, at his first open press conference in eight months, he confused his running-mate, Kamala Harris, with his mortal enemy, Donald Trump... That might not have drawn so much attention if he hadn’t confused president Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with his mortal enemy, Russian president Vladimir Putin, just hours earlier... This was billed by the White House as a “big boy” press conference — a demonstration of the president’s mental strength after so many doubts. That such a description could be given to a routine part of a president’s job is a sign of how low the bar has been set for Biden following that catastrophic 90 minutes on stage with Trump in Atlanta."

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