Month: February 2024

He is so brain damaged that he still thinks, after all this time, that NATO countries pay some sort of “dues” and if they don’t it means he can refuse to support them. It’s so stupid that it’s hard to even contemplate how dangerous it is to allow this person to be president again.

The only winning move is not to play

Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Joahua, the artificial intelligence defense computer in War Games (1983), almost launches World War III while playing “Global Thermonuclear War” with itself. A young computer enthusiast played by Matthew Broderick thought it was just a cool game he’d found on a military supercomputer he’d hacked. He invites Joshua to play. Joshua was actually in control of missile launch commands.

The presumptive Republican candidate for president in 2024, the imbecile Donald “91 Counts” Trump is no computer, and seems to lack intelligence, artificial or otherwise. But he did have an uncle who taught at MIT, so same difference. Trump last night publicly entertained inviting global thermonuclear war.

In the Broderick role in this year’s War Games reboot, we have the mainstream press. Reporters are busily pecking away at their keyboards trying to coax the American electorate into playing “but her emails” once again … because it was so much fun (and good for clicks and ratings) in 2016. For those with short memories, the press helped Republicans hack the 2016 election by promoting “but her emails.”

In the COVID-19 pandemic response that “but her emails” helped put “I have an uncle who taught at MIT” in charge of, over 1.1 million Americans died. No one died in the Broderick movie.

The New York Times is just one news outlet eagerly stoking this election season’s “but her emails.” Joe Biden is three years older than Trump, have you heard?

Mr. Biden’s voice has grown softer and raspier, his hair thinner and whiter. He is tall and trim but moves more tentatively than he did as a candidate in 2019 and 2020, often holding his upper body stiff, adding to an impression of frailty. And he has had spills in the public eye: falling off a bicycle, tripping over a sandbag.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, does not appear to be suffering the effects of time in such visible ways. Mr. Trump often dyes his hair and appears unnaturally tan. He is heavyset and tall, and he uses his physicality to project strength in front of crowds. When he takes the stage at rallies, he basks in adulation for several minutes, dancing to an opening song, and then holds forth in speeches replete with macho rhetoric and bombast that typically last well over an hour, a display of stamina.

Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin is aghast.

Post by @jenrubin9

View on Threads

Lord love a duck. Joshua at least had the capacity to learn. Not so the press corps.

A demagogue with dictatorial aspirations

Jason Statler (LOLGOP on your favorite social media platform) asks if the press is trying to reelect Trump with “Biden’s too old.” His conclusion, like Joshua’s is not to play:

You don’t have to pretend that the press actually believes that Biden’s age, memory or trustworthiness with classified documents are actual issues — especially compared to Trump, who is basically the same age, whose speech is so littered with lies and errors you can’t even parse which is which, and who stole a trove national secrets, some of which he probably still hasn’t returned. 

You don’t even need to pretend these two men are comparable in any way. Biden is a standard 20th century American public servant imbued with all the imperfections that come with that. Trump is the worst president in American history. A demagogue with dictatorial aspirations. A fraud whose greatest accomplishment in life was avoiding any indictments for his first 76 years.

Politics is moral warfare.

You cannot engage the frames the press traffics in because it knows the best way to reach the maximum audience is to give Republicans what they want and drive liberals to hate reading, hate sharing, and even hate subscribing. Because even by rebutting them, you spread and strengthen them. That’s just how brains work.

Instead, Democrats need to push their own frames. The story here could easily be “Trump loses again, as Biden is cleared.” Democrats could then jump on TV and insist that this is an excellent time for Trump to return any classified documents that he still has at his fraudulent businesses and end this betrayal of America of national security.

These angles are journalistically valid as the story we’re being sold. And they’re far more moral than pandering to narratives Republicans feed, knowing the New York Times and others will play along.

November is still decades away in political years. Every flare up or stumble feels permanent and unfixable. But the truth is the news moves so fast that nothing stays present in the discourse unless there is a concerted effort to keep it there.

Republicans use the press to launder baseless accusations the way Dick Cheney used it to promote invading Iraq.

“We know [Republicans] play pious and law-abiding as their presidents have committed some of the worst crimes in the history of the Republic,” Statler adds. “We know that Republican leadership continually makes America weaker, poorer, and more aligned with the worst authoritarians on earth.”

Where Statler falls short here is that not playing is not enough. The press still wants and needs to be loved to stay afloat financially. It’s not enough to unsubscribe either. Republicans may not be past shaming, but the press is not. Shame away. And shame LOUDLY.

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Be a shame if something happened to it

Wicked Witch of the West voice: And your western economy, too!

“The president of a big country stood up, said, ‘Well, sir…” the former president told a MAGAfied crowd in Conway, South Carolina. Here we go. Another bullshit “sir story.”

Washington Post:

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?,’” Trump said during a rally at Coastal Carolina University. “I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

“This is crazy. And 8 years later, Trump shows that he STILL doesn’t understand how NATO works! It’s not a protection racket. They don’t pay us to protect them. Geez,” tweeted former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul.

Foreign policy wonks gasped. Why, at this point, who can say? It’s not as if Trump hasn’t advertised he’s an imbecile for decades.

Naturally, the MAGA crowd cheered.

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Masha Gesson sat through the whole Putin interview. Here are a few of her thoughts. She speaks Russian, of course, so this doesn’t rely on the Kremlin translators as Tucker’s show does: :

What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed by Tucker Carlson

Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin first became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in 2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical trivia about Carlson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A.

Carlson didn’t interrupt or challenge Putin on the many—too many to count—occasions when Putin told falsehoods about the history of Ukraine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the relationship between Russia and nato, probably his conversations with former U.S. leaders, and, perhaps most egregiously of all, the Russian Army’s withdrawal from the suburbs of Kyiv after a month of invasion in 2022. Putin claimed that this was a gesture of good will aimed at achieving a speedy negotiated peace; in fact, it was a military defeat. This would also have been a good moment for Carlson to ask Putin about the well-documented war crimes Russian soldiers allegedly committed during that month of occupation. He passed up this opportunity.

Most important from Putin’s point of view, Carlson seemed to share two of his basic assumptions: that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war with the United States and that any negotiations will take place between the Kremlin and the White House, presumably without involving Kyiv. Carlson even nudged Putin to call President Biden and say “Let’s work this out.” To which Putin responded that the message Russia wishes to convey to the U.S. is “Stop supplying weapons. It will be over within a few weeks.”

What Russian Television Viewers Saw

Putin has reprised his history lecture many times. It seems likely that most Russians who watched the entire interview did so out of professional obligation—their job, as propagandists or political appointees, is to amplify and affirm the leader’s message. Ordinary Russians probably watched only outtakes and commentary. What they saw was that something momentous had happened: one of the most popular journalists in America came to interview Putin and looked like a deer in headlights. Channel One stressed both Carlson’s popularity and Americans’ evident interest in what Putin had to say. Carlson’s promotional video in advance of the interview itself had been watched more than a hundred million times! Russians see Carlson, not unreasonably, as a representative of a future Trump Administration, a preview of the coming America in which the liberals who support Ukraine are finally displaced.

What Tucker Carlson’s Viewers Saw

It’s hard to imagine an American viewer who would make it past the first ten minutes of Putin’s monotonous history lecture. (In the interview, Putin called it one of his “dialogues,” betraying either his ignorance or his idea of what constitutes a dialogue; the Kremlin translated “dialogues” as “my long speeches.”) The translator or translators generally cleaned up Putin’s prose, smoothing out passages that, in Russian, made no sense. For example, responding to Carlson’s question about a possible invasion of Poland, Putin said, in Russian, “Because we don’t have any interests in Poland nor in Lithuania—nowhere. What do we need it for? We just don’t have any interests. Only threats.” The translator rendered it as, “Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest. It’s just threat mongering.”

In another exchange, the translator took liberties to make Carlson appear more dignified. When Carlson asked Putin about his obsession with fighting Nazism eighty years after Hitler’s death, the President said, in Russian, “Your question seems subtle but is very disgusting.” In English, though, Putin appeared to be praising Carlson’s question as “subtle” while Carlson himself, according to the transcript, called the question “quite pesky”—the words were actually spoken by Putin’s translator. However obscure the subject of Putin’s discursive exercise was, the genre probably looked recognizable to Americans. This was a conversation between an older man who has read a history book and fancies himself an expert and his eager nephew, who is trying to feign knowledge in a subject he failed in college. Except one of these guys reaches millions of viewers and the other has nuclear weapons.

Tucker Carlson said after the interview:

“The professional liars in Washington . . . are trying to convince you that this guy is Hitler, that he is trying to take the Sudetenland, or something,” Carlson continued. “Not analogous in any way!”

Gessen writes, “in fact, Putin had clearly, and more explicitly than ever before, channelled Hitler during the interview.”

Putin has reproduced Hitler’s rhetoric before. Ten years ago, announcing the annexation of Crimea, he seemed to borrow from Hitler’s speech on the annexation of Sudetenland. At the time, I assumed that the language had come from a speechwriter who knew what they were doing while Putin may not have. But the way Putin described the beginning of the Second World War in his interview with Carlson suggests that, although he keeps accusing Ukraine of fostering Nazism, in his mind he might see himself as Hitler, but perhaps a wilier one, one who can make inroads into the United States and create an alliance with its presumed future President.

It’s telling, too, that Putin took the time to accuse Poland of both allying with Nazi Germany and inciting Hitler’s aggression. As he has done with Ukraine in the past, he is positioning Poland as an heir to Nazism. He mentioned Poland more than thirty times in his conversation with Tucker. If I were Poland, I’d be scared. 

I’m scared. Tucker Carlson is a traitor to decent people everywhere. And he’s brainwashing a whole bunch of people in America. Like this POS:

And people are worried about Biden…

Ron Brownstein has written an in-depth piece for the Atlantic about Trump’s 2nd term immigration agenda. It is terrifying. But Trump and his henchmen are dead serious about carrying it out this time. And the reasoning isn’t just to get rid of immigrants they don’t like. It’s to demonstrate and consolidate power to rule by force in many other ways as well. Don’t think you won’t be affected.

Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.

“What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they are themselves undocumented,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. “What he’s describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigration.”

How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

[…]

Miller outlined the Trump team’s plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden.

To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, he said, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.

In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to “building the Panama Canal.” He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to “deputize” local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.

Miller offered two scenarios for enlisting National Guard troops in removing migrants. One would be in states where Republican governors want to cooperate. “You go to the red-state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard,’” he said. “We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.”

The second scenario, Miller said, would involve sending National Guard forces from nearby Republican-controlled states into what he called an “unfriendly state” whose governor would not willingly join the deportation program.

The article goes into great detail about how they hope to accomplish this and what the consequences might be. Most people he interviewed seem to think that they can theoretically do it but the result will be civic unrest unlike anything we’ve seen since the civil war.

In fact, as I’ve written, a mass-deportation program staffed partially with red-state National Guard forces is only one of several ideas that Trump has embraced for introducing federal forces into blue jurisdictions over the objections of their local leaders. He’s also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.

These plans could produce scenes in American communities unmatched in our history. Leopold, to take one scenario raised by Miller in his interview, asks what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trump’s request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, it’s easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?

For all the tumult that the many disputes over immigration are now generating, these possibilities could prove far more disruptive, incendiary, and even violent.

“What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”

First they came for the migrants …

If you want to go deep on the Hur Report to see just how incredibly disingenuous his novelistic little hit job really is, nobody does it better than Emptywheel. Highly recommend, particularly if you’re interested in Hur’s shoddy legal reasoning.

I thought I would share a good thumbnail version from twitter if you don’t have the time or inclination to dig into the details:

So I went through and read Hur’s report, and the way the media at large has been presenting things is borderline malpractice.

Please take the two minutes it requires to read this tweet because it really does matter.

Let me lay it out for you. Hur is alleging there are two counts of Biden willfully retaining classified documents: The Afghanistan docs that were found in his Delaware home and his own personal notebooks.

During an interview with a ghostwriter, he made reference to classified documents that were “downstairs” in his rented Virginia home.

The supposition is that these are the Afghanistan documents that were later moved to his Delaware home in 2019 and then found by the FBI.

Hur indicates that in order to convict Biden of willfully retaining classified documents, the prosecution would have to prove that 1. These are the same documents and 2. That Biden remembers that single sentence from 2017.

It’s against this backdrop Hur says:

When Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter about finding ”all the classified stuff downstairs,” his tone was matter-of-fact. For a person who had viewed classified documents nearly every day for eight years as vice president, including regularly in his home, finding classified documents at home less than a month after leaving office could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event.

Notably, the classified Afghanistan documents did not come up again in Mr. Biden’s dozens of hours of recorded conversations with the ghostwriter, or in his book. And the place where the Afghanistan documents were eventually found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware garage-in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus-suggests the documents might have been forgotten.

In addition. Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully-that is, with intent to break the law-as the statute requires.

Another viable defense is that Mr. Biden might not have retained the classified Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home at all. They could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation. This would rebut charges that he willfully retained the documents in Virginia.

Given Mr. Biden’s limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified 5 documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence. We searched for such additional evidence and found it wanting. In particular, no witness, photo, email, text message, or any other evidence conclusively places the Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017.

In other words, the totality of the case on the Afghanistan documents would come down to whether he remembered a single un-noteworthy sentence he spoke seven years ago that may or may not have referred to the Afghanistan documents.

The Hur says:

We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.

That’s the entire context. Do you remember every sentence you spoke in 2017? I sure as hell don’t. 

Oh, and regarding the notebooks. There is no controversy over whether Biden knew he had those. He had handwritten notes with classified information on them.

However, Biden claims that they are personal and points to Reagan (who did the same thing) as a historic precedent.

Note it was Biden who made this argument, not his lawyers. (In fact, he made this argument to his lawyers.) Hur declined to prosecute this on the grounds that Biden is probably right.

Not bad for a dude with dementia. 

Also, one other thing you won’t see on Fox is that Hur goes through an entire section explaining why Trump’s case is prosecutable but Biden’s isn’t. 

Here’s what he said about that:

…Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts.

Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation. 

The link to the report. justice.gov/storage/report…

For more reading, I refer you to @emptywheel who did a much more thorough job than I.

Robert Hur’s Box-Checking – emptywheelBefore Robert Hur confessed that jurors who “are unwilling to read too much into Mr. Biden’s brief aside” that Hur quoted out of context would never vote to convict Joe BIden, Hur went to ridiculous l…https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/02/09/robert-hurs-box-checking/

All the media cared about was Hur’s character assassination because they are lazy, delayed adolescents when it comes to this stuff and they easily succumb to a “Lord of the Flies” mentality, which the right understands very well and knows exactly how to tickle their lizrd brains.

It’s different for everyone

James Fallows has a great newsletter that you should subscribe to if you can. He’s been writing about all this, particularly the political press, for many years and his perspective is extremely valuable.

This week he starts off interrogating the idea that age is a static thing for everyone and he quotes some experts on the subject:

Last month several doctors and other authors assessed evidence that Biden was on the fortunate side of that divide, a “superager” on the Holmes / Stevens / Carter model. This is even though Biden “reads” as older than his near-contemporary Trump, mainly because of the stiffness of his gait. In this piece at MedPage Today and this in The Hill the authors emphasized differential aging rates and said about Biden:

The geriatricians evaluating Biden’s medical history in 2020 found evidence to suggest he could be a “superager” — a subgroup of people aged 80 years and older that operate physically and cognitively at a level that is common among those much younger.1

There is no clinical evidence for cognitive decline in President Biden — despite armchair gerontologists declaring otherwise.

Then he asks a pertinent question. Might age be an advantage? In our youth obsessed culture that’s heresy but he makes a good case:

The job of president finally comes down to judgment calls. Emphasize this bill, and not that one. (For Obama: the health-care act, versus a big environmental act.) Compromise here, but draw the line there. (For Biden, the tradeoffs necessary to get the big economic bills through.) Fight for this appointment, but give up on that one. (For Biden, going with some GOP choices for judges.) Trust this person, not that. Decide where to fight (Ukraine), where to fall back (Afghanistan).

The presidents we respect, looking back, mainly distinguished themselves with these big calls. By my lights, Biden has made these calls correctly at an unusually high rate. There are some missed opportunities he will look back on, but fewer than most of his predecessors. Even if you disagree with his calls, I think you’d have to observe that they were made in a sane and orderly way, through advisors who have shown far less back-biting and squabbling than in previous administrations, and with practically no scandals.

The same Hill piece says on this point, with emphasis in original:

Verbal memory, inductive reasoning and vocabulary increase with age — cognitive skills particularly important for decision-making.

It’s true that “fluid intelligence” (the capacity to learn new ways of solving problems and performing activities quickly and abstractly) does indeed decline with age. But “crystallized intelligence” (accumulated knowledge that allows for intelligent decision-making) and “tacit knowledge” (practical or pragmatic knowledge learned through experience) increase with age. 

In practical terms, someone President Biden’s age might take a longer time to learn how to fly a plane, but he would be less likely to crash it relative to a younger person.

(Or a stupid, sociopath but that’s another story.)

I think that’s key. I have often tried to imagine how Biden would have handled COVID differently that Trump and I think it’s obvious that he wouldn’t have been telling people to use snake oil or lying about the threat in order help his reelection campaign. But even more importantly, he would have known how to deploy the federal government in the early days to get the medical supplies to places like NY City where people were dying by the thousands and move the congress much faster to deal with the economic fallout. He would have ensured that the people who were charged with the details were experienced hands who knew what they were doing. Trump did none of that because he’s a narcissistic imbecile and he empowered people like his arrogant, inexperienced son-in-law to handle the emergency.

Fallows on the mix-up of Egyptian president Al-Sisi in his press conference:

-First, everyone does this. A weary Barack Obama once said that had been to “all 57 states” of the country. I once introduced a panelist at a conference with her middle rather than her last name. As a pilot I’ve screwed up read-backs of frequencies and routings to air traffic control. On the same show last night in which he talked about Biden’s “Mexico” gaffe, Jesse Watters, of Fox, started an interview with Kristi Noem by introducing her as “Governor of South Carolina,” rather than South Dakota, where she actually serves.

All of this is the spoken version of “auto-correct” on a computer, which often fills in things in ways we don’t intend. And it’s very highly correlated with fatigue.

-Second, Biden’s illustrations are neither repeated (like Donald Trump’s Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley when he meant Nancy Pelosi), nor grossly fictitious. (As when Trump said in New Hampshire that he had carried the state in general elections, which he had not.) It’s like the difference in how the two men handled classified information they had taken home, according to the new special counsel report. Biden erred largely by inadvertence, and corrected the problem when it was found. Trump stonewalled.

Was “Sisi of Mexico” a gaffe for Joe Biden? Yes. But one worth keeping in perspective, unless there is evidence that Biden has confused the underlying realities, not just the names,

He did not confuse the underlying realities as he amply demonstrated in the entirely cogent comment within which that slip occurred. Ask yourself if Trump could have ever said something like this:

Q    A question on Israel, sir.  Can you provide an update on the hostage negotiations?  The hostage negotiations — can you provide an update of the hostage negotiations in Israel?

THE PRESIDENT:  The hostage negotiation, look — 

I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza — in the Gaza Strip has been over the top.  I think that — as you know, initially, the President of Mexico [Egypt], El-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in.  I talked to him.  I convinced him to open the gate.

I talked to Bibi to open the gate on the Israeli side.  I’ve been pushing really hard — really hard to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza.  There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop, number one.

Number two, I was also in the position that I’m the guy that made the case that we have to do much more to increase the amount of material going in, including fuel, including other items.  I’ve been on the phone with the Qataris, I’ve been on the phone with the Egyptians, I’ve been on the phone with the Saudis to get as much aid as we possibly can into Gaza.

There are innocent people — innocent women and children — who are also in bad — badly in need of help.  And so, that’s what we’re pushing right now. 

And I’m pushing very hard now to deal with this hostage ceasefire.  Because, as I — you know, I’ve been working tirelessly in this deal — how can I say this without revealing? — to lead to a sustained pause in the fighting in — the actions taking place in — in the Gaza Strip. 

And — because I think if we can get the delay for that — the initial delay, I think that we would be able to extend that so that we can increase the prospect that this fighting in Gaza changes. 

There’s also negotiations — you may recall, in the very beginning, right after — right before Hamas attacked, I was in contact with the Saudis and others to work out a deal where they would recognize Israel’s right to exist, let them — make them part of the Middle East, recognize them fully, in return for certain things that the United States would commit to do. 

And the commitment to — that we were proposing to do related to two — to two items.  I’m not going to go in detail.  But one of them was to deal with the protection against their arch enemy to the northwest — northeast, I should say.  The second one, by providing ammunition and materiel for them to defend themselves.

Coincidentally, that’s the timeframe when this broke out.  I have no proof for what I’m about to say, but it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the — Hamas understood what was about to take place and wanted to break it up before it happened.

Here’s how Trump answers when asked about Gaza:

In an interview with Univision he said this:

“So you have a war that’s going on, and you’re probably going to have to let this play out. You’re probably going to have to let it play out because a lot of people are dying.

“It should have never started. There was no way it would have started again. Iran didn’t have the money because Iran is leading this. And only fools would say that’s not true. They’re leading this. They’re very tricky, very smart, very cunning. They’re leading it, and it’s got to end.”

“There is no hatred like the Palestinian hatred of Israel and Jewish people. And probably the other way around also; I don’t know. You know, it’s not as obvious, but probably that’s it too. So sometimes you have to let things play out and you have to see where it ends.”

Here he is on the stump promising to deport anyone who protested against the Israeli actions in Gaza:

Fallows on the press:

After Biden finished his remarks last night, White House reporters bayed and yelled at him, more aggressively than I can ever recall. They exceeded the baseline I wrote about nearly 30 years ago in the book Breaking the News, about the macho-style code of the press room that equated being ill-mannered with being intellectually tough:

Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public’s representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public’s views much less than they reflect the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.

After this yelling session, most of the leading press ran stories like this one in the NYT, saying that the one word—Mexico—had:

placed Mr. Biden’s advanced age, the singularly uncomfortable subject looming over his re-election bid, back at the center of America’s political conversation.

Note the agent-free verb “placed.” It’s actually the journalists who are placing it there—as they placed Hillary Clinton’s emails eight years ago, and as they have not placed Donald Trump’s Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley.3 Putting your own spin and frame on events is fine. That’s what I’m doing here. But when you’re going to do it, it’s better just to say so.

Personally, I think he’s being too nice here. The media was utterly disgraceful in that press conference. They were screaming and screeching like jackals. Note this rude exchange:

Q    Mr. President, for months when you were asked about your age, you would respond with the words “Watch me.”

THE PRESIDENT:  Watch me.

Q    Many American people have been watching, and they have expressed concerns about your age.  They —

THE PRESIDENT:  That is your judgement.

Q    They —

THE PRESIDENT:  That is your judgement.

Q    This is according to public polling.

THE PRESIDENT:  That is not the judgement —

Q    They express concerns —

THE PRESIDENT:  — of the press.

Q    They express concerns about your mental acuity.  They say that you are too old. 

Mr. President, in December, you told me that you believe there are many other Democrats who could defeat Donald Trump.  So, why does it have to be you now?  Why — what is your answer to that question?

What is a person supposed to say to something like that? Is it designed to elicit some information or is it just a nasty question designed to elicit an emotional reaction? It’s a nasty way of asking, “have you any plans to drop out of the race?” which is also inappropriate because it’s clear he does not. It’s just designed to embarrass him to his face in front of the whole country. It’s not journalism.

His answer to this question, by the way, was spot on:

Because I’m the most qualified person in this country to be President of the United States and finish the job I started.

So STFU.

Another ridiculous person asked this one:

Q    Mr. President, why are you confusing the names of world leaders?

As Fallows says, everyone does that including half the Fox New hosts, just this week. I do it all the time.

Who the hell do these people think they are? Ah, I know the answer. They are like piranhas in a feeding frenzy when these kinds of scandals hit and I hate to say but it there are way too many liberals and progressives who get all febrile and excited when there’s blood in the water and forget themselves as well. The media kewl kidz have been doing this for many years now and I guess there’s no end to it.

These are the results:

They haven’t learned a thing.

I agree wholeheartedly with Fallows on this point:

The best test of whether people “can” do a job is how they have actually done it. I would argue that Biden, the oldest president ever, has been one of the best at doing the job in decades. Choosing and managing a staff. Guiding through his legislation. Containing frictions within his own party. Taking advantage of chaos and schisms on the other side. Meanwhile presiding over the most broadly-based economic growth most Americans have ever experienced.

Maybe if the press could find the time between their gleeful enjoyment of ageist snark about Biden and shrugging over the fact that his opponent is a fascist imbecile they could squeeze in a few of those facts as well.

And I’m not talking about Biden

Following up on Tom’s post below …. there’s more:

Actually it’s also that he is losing what’s left of his limited faculties and it’s been happening for a long time. The mainstream media never questioned this lunatic’s mental fitness the way they are Biden’s:

And then there’s the pathological lying and narcissistic personality disorder.

Meanwhile, Biden has successfully brought the nation back from economic catastrophe in record time and better than any of our peer countries, managed to get major bipartisan legislation passed under almost impossible circumstances and reassured allies that we haven’t gone completely batshit insane. For that he’s getting the Clinton emails treatment from Republican functionaries foolishly empowered by the Democratic Party and the godforsaken press, the members of which will be the first ones rounded up for the camps once they deport every brown-skinned immigrant in the country, (And that’s if the entire business of mainstream journalism hasn’t completely collapsed before then.)

It’s hard to belive that we’d have to go through this again but here we are.

Morning Joe montage and more

Republicans living in glass houses, etc. God bless the United Shhates.

The clip montage below was from FIVE YEARS AGO, people.

As for Joe Biden, well, he doesn’t brag about “acing” a test for dementia.

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