RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/reminder-biden-has-3894-or-99-of-pledged-dnc-delegates/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

With full-blown panic setting in among Democrats following President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the question of an open convention to replace him has been thrown around. But realistically, Biden won’t be replaced unless he can be convinced to withdraw.

The delegate math is this: There are 1,976 delegates required to win the Democratic nomination, and Biden has 3,894. Two other candidates have a combined seven with another 36 uncommitted. In other words, he controls about 99 percent of pledged delegates.

There are an additional 739 superdelegates, but they can only vote in a second ballot and even if every one of them wanted to oust Biden, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference.

Thus, if Biden is determined to keep running, Democrats won’t plausibly be able to replace him.

That is why, as I noted on our liveblog, First Lady Jill Biden is now the most important person in politics. If she can be convinced that her husband needs to step aside, then she is the only person who would be able to persuade him to do so. If she wants him to stay in the fight, Democrats are almost certainly stuck with him.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-biden-debate-debacle/

Democrats cannot say they weren’t warned. Joe Biden’s age has never been a secret. He shows it every time he appears in public. We warned them ourselves. Back in February, we wrote that Biden should have withdrawn from the race last year — and still owed it to the country to do so. That reality ought to be clear even to his admirers after a debate in which his chief opponent was not Donald Trump but his own frailty.

Biden sounded weak, wheezy, decrepit, and overwhelmed. His best moments came when he got indignant, but even then, his mantra of “the idea!” got almost as old as he sounded.

It was an unspinnably bad performance. The people who claim that Biden is consistently sharp and vigorous behind the scenes always strained credulity. They should now be ignored or mocked.

If Biden’s performance had not been so halting and weak, Trump’s own ramblings and flights from reality — on tariffs, on January 6, on deficit spending — might have cost him. But Trump was himself more disciplined than he had been during the 2020 debates, making relatively focused defenses of his record and attacks on Biden’s. He drew blood from Biden on late-term abortion and on Afghanistan.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/showdown/

On Thursday night, June 27, unpopular President Joe Biden faced off for a debate against challenger and former President Donald Trump, whose popularity is surging despite (or in many cases because of) him being labeled a “convicted felon.” The 90-minute showdown took place before heavily biased moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper in the Atlanta studios of CNN, the least trusted name in news.

To keep tight control over the debate process, Team Biden requested there be no live audience – because Trump knows how to work a crowd – and that Trump’s mic be muted when Biden is speaking and vice versa; this, according to the New York Times, is “intended to guard against Mr. Trump’s penchant for interrupting and speaking over debate opponents.”

In other words, Biden’s team and his media collaborators wanted to hamstring Trump’s successful pugilistic style. They couldn’t afford to allow him to fluster his senile opponent with the kind of devastating off-the-cuff remark like the one he used to skewer Hillary Clinton in their 2016 debate. Hillary had said it was a good thing “Trump is not in charge of the law in our country” and he shot back, “Because you would be in jail.” Disappointingly, the debate constraints left no room for that kind of spontaneous kill shot.

Biden’s handlers also refused to allow the aging President to be tested prior to the debate for performance-enhancing drugs, despite widespread speculation that he would need to be “jacked up,” as Trump put it, to maintain mental focus and to prevent Biden from reaching for nonexistent hands to shake or wandering offstage.

As it turned out, if Biden wasn’t on any performance-enhancing drugs for the debate, he should have been, because there was immediate widespread consensus among his fellow Democrat leaders and media supporters that the debate was a colossal failure for the aging President.

The debate kicked off with a question about the economy, a topic that recurred throughout as both candidates blamed each other for soaring inflation, high taxes, and the decimation of the middle class. Biden accused Trump and corporate greed of causing families to struggle with rising prices, and declared that the road to prosperity lies in taxing the rich. Trump blasted Biden for turning us into a third-world country by allowing illegal immigration to cripple the economy.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/28/the-nation-finally-got-to-see-the-real-biden-the-one-the-press-has-been-hiding-all-these-years/

Many if not most Americans tuning into the debate Thursday night were probably shocked at President Joe Biden’s performance.

He was confused and tired. He mumbled and bumbled through his answers. He looked at times despondent. He had trouble keeping focused. His closing statement was perhaps the worst in the history of presidential debates. And this was after spending a week at Camp David resting and preparing.

Anyone who was surprised by his performance should be asking themselves Why? Why didn’t they know how bad a state Biden is in? How did the White House keep this under wraps for so long?

The president is, after all, the most public of public figures. His every move is scrutinized. It is true that the White House minimized Biden’s public appearances, and kept them short and carefully scripted.

But the media are always around him taking notes. Reporters are in constant contact with the people who work for the president. They’re always talking to others in the president’s party.

And for three and half years, the press has been telling the public that Biden is doing fine. That all the talk of his age and infirmity was misinformation. Just last week, the media tried to convince voters that Biden’s incredibly odd behavior at recent events was all “cheap fakes” by Republicans.

They said Donald Trump made verbal mistakes and was old, too.

But the contrast between the two men last night could not have been more striking. Was Trump’s performance great? No. But it was standard Trump. His closing statement was a huge missed opportunity to paint a bright picture of America’s future. Instead, he rambled about his record. But next to Biden, he looked like he was a young man at the top of his game.

https://nypost.com/2024/06/25/us-news/george-latimer-ousts-squad-rep-jamaal-bowman-in-16th-district-primary/

Head for the (fire) exit, Jamaal!

Westchester County Executive George Latimer sent Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) packing from Congress Tuesday night, defeating the far-left “Squad” member in the 16th District’s Democratic primary.

Latimer, 70, will be heavily favored to defeat Republican Madeline Brame in the Nov. 5 general election to represent the deep-blue Bronx and Westchester constituency.

“Tonight, we turn the page and we say that we believe in the inclusion of everybody,” Latimer told cheering supporters in White Plains.

“It doesn’t matter your age, religion, sexual identity, whether you’re a right-hander or left-hander, whether you’re a Met fan or a Yankee fan — our inclusiveness in Westchester County is how we govern the people,” he added. “You can’t destroy this country with your rhetoric and your arguments. We have to have unity.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/will_voters_turn_the_world_upside_down.html

So the Great Awakening continues apace.  All over the West, men and women who simply want to be left alone are concluding that their governments will not let them live in peace.  Woe to any Establishment hobgoblins who believe they can sabotage their home nations without paying a price.

After having failed to implement Brexit or curtail mass illegal immigration during their last decade and a half in power, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives appear destined for extinction-level losses in the U.K.’s July 4 general election.  This regrettably means that Labor’s champagne socialists will seize Parliament’s suicidal reins and drive that once great nation deeper into the ground.  But in the background of Great Britain’s self-immolation is the resurgence of Brexit champion Nigel Farage, who enjoys unprecedented support for his Reform Party.  Because the U.K.’s Deep State has refused to honor the terms of Brexit, the British people are ready to overturn the whole system.  July 4 — what a lovely day for a revolution!

Emmanuel Macron, the Rothschild banker and diminutive king who married his grandmotherly schoolteacher, will likely suffer electoral humiliation of his own in France’s legislative elections over the next two weeks.  The Napoleon wannabe — who speaks snobbishly of European empire and prefers to be photographed while kitted out in the latest boxing fashion — called for snap elections in a stompy-foot hissy fit after the French people handed him heavy losses in the European Parliament vote earlier this month.  Just as Le Petit Fromage seems to believe that he can convey strength by staring menacingly at stationary punching bags, Macron thinks his political hubris can transform almost certain defeat into chance victory.  The French people, on the other hand, are fed up with mass illegal immigration, rising crime, and deteriorating standards of living (common complaints throughout the West) and are not particularly enthused about the growing prospect of a hot war with Russia.  It is difficult to persuade French citizens that they should rally around their tricolor flag and defend Ukraine’s borders when French aristocrats continue to lecture the peasants that national borders are so passé (another common complaint throughout the West).

Of course, the granddaddy of imminent political earthquakes is the (cross your fingers, throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder, turn around three times, and whisper, “MAGA-MAGA-MAGA”) likely return of President Trump to the White House.  Oh, I know the Democrat Deep State will continue to do everything it can to rig the election in November (even if it has to throw the MAGA Man in prison and wake up half the dead people in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Phoenix to “vote”), but political polling in the United States continues to show Iron Trump with substantial leads over Horse-Glue Biden.  If the United States didn’t have a third-world election system devoid of voter identification and rife with mail-in-ballot fraud, the propaganda press would already be grudgingly admitting that Biden’s re-election hopes are as dead as a doornail.  Since Dementia Joe is the president for dead voters, though, and because he managed to “win” fifteen million more votes than the progressive demigod Barack Obama did during his re-election campaign, the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation and the Department of (in)Justice are still telling everyone, “Don’t worry.  We’ve got this.”  As Hans Gruber would say, “You ask for a miracle?  I give you the FBI.”