RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/22/this-is-the-end-of-the-democratic-party-as-we-knew-it/

The end of Joe Biden’s presidency also signals the demise of the old Democratic Party, with its roots in liberal ideals and advocacy for ‘the common man’. Although Biden, to his own detriment, chose to adopt the progressive views now dominant in the media and political apparat, he remained, at least superficially, a man of the old Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy Democrats.

With the ascension of Kamala Harris, the Democrats have made a full break from their historic roots as the party of workers and have gravitated towards the decidedly post-industrial politics of California-style progressives. Rather than worrying primarily about lifting up living standards, the party’s emphasis will now be on issues like climate change, abortion, reparations and trans advocacy.

Arguably the biggest winner will be identity politics. After all, Harris’s career was made possible by both traditional femininity – most evident in her career-boosting affair with a much older man, former California State Assembly speaker Willie Brown – and her identification with feminist causes. Her mixed-race background has been – forgive the expression – her trump card.

It’s highly unlikely that a politician of such modest gifts would have had such a meteoric career if she had been a man or a plain vanilla woman. Clearly, her elevation to vice-president was entirely based on her identity as the product of West Indian and South Asian parents, as well as her XX chromosomes. If elected, she would be America’s first DEI president.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-art-of-democratic-democracide/

Democrats are destroying democracy by engineering a veritable coup through forcing out Biden from the race—but not from the presidency.

Here are ten of their new rules of American democracy that they have now bequeathed to us.

1) The Democrats have decided that Biden is technically mentally unfit to run as their nominee for president—but fit as fiddle to continue for six months as our president. Thus, the Democratic primary winner turns out today to be the loser. And it is far more important to be mentally fit as a Democrat candidate than as an American president.

2) So, primaries and delegates won by popular vote now mean zilch. They are erasable at the whim of the back-roomers in the darkness. Will Democratic primaries cease to exist? If not, why would anyone take the time to vote in them?

3) Remember the same coup plotters today in 2020 engineered the sudden abdications of all of Biden’s socialist primary rivals to ensure that he would be a suitable veneer for their own extremist agendas. In that now infamous Faustian bargain, Joe and Jill got the ceremonial White House spotlight. In exchange, the team of Barack and Michelle ran things stealthily. So did Joe live by the coup, and then die by the coup?

4) The donors and politico grandees (did anyone vote for these people?) determine who runs and who doesn’t—not the people who vote in the primaries.

5) The convention will be as rigged as was the coup to depose Biden.

6) Barack Obama set a new precedent that the ex-president stays put in Washington, implants his team onto his successor’s administration, and runs the country covertly through a puppet president.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/25/coup-upon-coup-upon-coup/

In March 2020, all the major Democratic primary candidates abruptly, mysteriously, and in near unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden.

Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—and only won his first victory in South Carolina.

Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and others simply evaporated.

The fear of a front-runner Sanders’ socialist victory and nomination—and thus an enviable landslide loss to incumbent Donald Trump in the general election—had prompted the donor class and shadowy political insiders to act.

And they did so by choosing a perceived moderate, old Joe Biden from Scranton. That required the coerced departures of all his far-left rivals, who had hitherto performed much better than Biden in the primaries.

Now front-runner Biden still displayed obvious symptoms of serious cognitive decline that had only seemed to mount through the 2020 campaign. And his dementia continued to accelerate during his first three years as president.

Biden had deceitfully promised to conduct a healing campaign and a unifying presidency. But once in the White House, his extreme agendas proved the most divisive and far-left in nearly a century.

Rumors of that prior March 2020 Faustian bargain emerged. The Bidens got to serve as useful moderate veneers. So, they enjoyed the ceremonial functions of the presidency while outsourcing the real operations to former Obama officials, consultants, and advisors.

Indeed, Obama did not, as most ex-presidents do, exit Washington upon leaving the White House. Instead, he bought a mansion and stayed close by.

https://thespectator.com/politics/joe-biden-delivers-own-eulogy-white-house-address/

Joe Biden delivered a eulogy for his presidency and his political career from the Oval Office Wednesday evening. It was a sad, sluggish ending to a life in politics, decades in the Senate, two terms as vice president, and finally a single term as president.  

President Biden needed to accomplish three things in the speech: 

Explain why he decided to withdraw from the race after months of insisting he would stay in and after receiving 14 million primary votes; 
Convince the country that he is still fit to serve the remaining months of his term; and 
Promote the candidacy of his replacement atop the Democratic ticket, Kamala Harris

He certainly promoted Harris and indirectly attacked Donald Trump, effectively calling him a threat to democracy. But he did nothing to explain why he withdrew from the race and nothing to convince a worried country that he was still fit to serve as president. 

He didn’t even try to explain why he withdrew. He simply quoted John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech that it “was time to pass the torch a new generation.” But quoting JFK doesn’t explain why Joe suddenly reached that epiphany last weekend, rather than a year ago, before he chose to run and cleared the field of other Democratic candidates. What changed? Biden’s speech evaded the question. 

There are lots of plausible answers. It might have been his catastrophic debate performance, which convinced many Americans that he no longer had the cognitive capacity to lead the country. It might have been his dismal poll numbers, the lowest of any president since modern polling began (even before the debate performance). It might have been polling in swing states, which showed he was unlikely to win the electoral votes he needs. It might have been the intense pressure from elected Democrats and unhappy donors, some of it in public, much of it behind closed doors.  

The best reporting says Biden didn’t jump, he was pushed. He was ousted in a back-room coup, led by Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

https://www.libertynation.com/the-canonization-of-joe-biden/

Even before the white puff of smoke could be seen rising above the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, DC, members of the president’s party lined up to laud the man who had suffered their wrath only a day earlier. The Joe-Must-Go campaign finally came to its obvious denouement after a few weeks of pressuring the president to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. Joe Biden didn’t go willingly and didn’t go quickly, but, by God, he went – and that’s all that matters to the Democratic Party.

Without hesitation, Washington, DC’s prominent legacy newspaper and The New York Times invoked the H-word on their front pages. As they see it, Biden’s decision to remove himself from the Democratic ticket was “heroic” – and he may now don the mantle of American Hero. As the Roman triumphus got underway, The Times chose historian Jon Meacham to spread the word of their victorious, conquering hero. And he laid it on thick:

“Mr. Biden has spent a lifetime trying to do right by the nation, and he did so in the most epic of ways when he chose to end his re-election campaign. His decision is one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history, an act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington, who also stepped away from the presidency. To put something ahead of one’s immediate desires — to give rather than to try to take — is perhaps the most challenging thing for any human being to do. And Mr. Biden has done just that.”

One wonders if Meacham will initiate a movement to put Biden’s face on the one-dollar bill. However, he might have to queue up behind columnist David Ignatius, who intoned, “Bravo to Biden for opening the curtain as he closes his own.” Dana Milbank breathed a sigh of relief, saying, “[I feel] heroic more than anything. Biden did what he has always done and put the country first.” Editor and commentator Ruth Marcus chimed in with, “It is hard to age — indeed, hard to accept our own frailties and limitations at any age — and Biden’s story, laced with tragedy throughout his career, ends on a note that is both tragic and, I hope, heroic.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-curious-case-of-the-missing-president?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_

But first, a simple question about the leader of the free world. 

On Monday afternoon, Joe Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, composed a memo designed to reassure the American people. The president, who tested positive for Covid six days ago, has completed his tenth dose of Paxlovid, he wrote, and “his symptoms have almost completely resolved.” O’Connor reiterated that Biden “continues to perform all his presidential duties.”  

After that letter was released, everyone here at The Free Press still had the same question: Where the hell is the president?

If Joe Biden’s decision to step down was extraordinary, so was the manner of his announcement. At this dramatic denouement of his fifty-year career in Washington, he declared the end of his reelection bid by tweeting out a letter. Since then, nothing. Or almost nothing. Late on Monday afternoon, he phoned his former campaign headquarters, now Kamala Harris HQ. “I know yesterday’s news was surprising and hard for you to hear, but it was the right thing to do,” Biden said on the call. 

But we still haven’t seen the president in days. 

Last Wednesday, Biden flew from Las Vegas, where he had been campaigning, to his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware. It was there that he isolated and stewed, alongside only his immediate family and closest advisers, and reportedly came to the decision to step down. According to the White House daily schedule, the president will reemerge this afternoon and return to Washington. 

https://www.steynonline.com/14465/unburdened-by-what-has-been

~Now that Kamala is unburdened by that has-been and before whoever’s holding Joe Biden releases another not-quite-proof-of-life audio recording, let’s go back less than a month to when this started – the June 27th debate and the formerly loyal press corps’ amazing synchronised-shivving routine. As I wrote back then about the sudden outbreak of “third-rate dinner theatre”:

So why weren’t they able, after a week-and-a-half of dosage experimentation, to shoot the stiff enough of the juice to pass him off as being back in his State of the Union top-of-the-game mode?

As my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver observed long ago on The Mark Steyn Show, formulating a useful rule of contemporary politics:

This is happening because they want it to happen.

Just so. Over at Powerline, Steven Hayward wonders:

Was Biden set up? For more than a year, quite a lot of observers have confidently predicted that Biden would not be the nominee, and that the Democratic establishment would swap him out at an opportune moment…

But the scheme needed a catalyst to work. That catalyst was obviously the June 27 debate. It was the earliest presidential debate ever, before either candidate was formally nominated… If that debate hadn’t happened until late September, as is typical, it would have been too late.

True. And throughout that debate every Deputy Assistant Under-Staffer of Media Liaison was texting and/or DM-ing his most biddable press hack:

WHITE HOUSE CONTACT: So how d’you think it’s going?

WORTHLESS HACK: Oh, I think His Majesty’s new suit is pretty sharp…

WHITE HOUSE CONTACT: Really? You didn’t notice that the Emperor has no clothes?

WORTHLESS HACK: Well, yeah, but don’t worry, I’m not going to be saying that…

WHITE HOUSE CONTACT: Actually, we’d like you to…

WORTHLESS HACK: Are you sure? You mean one of those tentative ‘Granted he may have lost a step since he first debated Robert C Byrd on Saturday Night Klanbake in 1943’-type pieces..?

WHITE HOUSE CONTACT: Nah, just go full train-wreck. I can give you Macron and Meloni’s direct lines if you need some deep background…

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/similarities_between_alexander_hamilton_and_jd_vance.html

The childhoods of Alexander Hamilton and JD Vance were quite similar, and the similarities don’t end there. Both had the strong writing skills, energy, industry, and intelligence which led others to take them under their wings and advance their careers. Both had stints in the American military and became proponents of peace through strength, and both became huge proponents of American manufacturing as a key to America’s future prosperity.

Their Childhoods

Both spent their early years in households with mothers who were involved in affairs, even when living with someone else. Hamilton’s mother was even imprisoned by her second husband for adultery. Similarly, Vance’s mother had drug-addiction-related affairs with one man after another.

Both were rescued from their chaotic households when they were in their early teens, and then bloomed in their stable new households. Alexander was rescued (after abandonment by his supposed father James Hamilton, the death of his mother, and suicide by his guardian cousin) by the man who, according to Ron Chernow author of the biography Alexander Hamilton, was likely his real father.

Vance was rescued by his family-centered grandmother whose tough love gave him a sense of determination and responsibility. In his vice-presidential acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on July 18, he told how his tough grandmother had ended one of his friendships:

She once told me, when she found out that I was spending too much time with a local kid who was known for dealing drugs, that if I ever hung out with that kid again, she would run him over with her car and she said, “JD, no one will ever find out about it!”

Literary Skills

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/23/the-big-divide/

Whether the economy is currently bubbling along or facing a slowdown, a slow-motion disaster is about to create a real crisis for the government, our future politics, and the shrinking middle class. Half of households have no retirement savings.

This is just one of many shifts in the economy that reflect the declining fortunes of the middle class. Wages have remained mostly flat for most workers—particularly those without a college degree—since the early 1970s. Recent high rates of inflation further cut into the ability of the self-identified middle class to make ends meet. But the biggest change has been the abolition of employer-provided pensions and their replacement with rickety and self-managed 401k savings plans.

All of this will only get worse over the next few decades. Social Security benefits are currently extremely modest. For those who do not own homes, rising rents will further cut into their ability to maintain a toehold on middle-class existence, assuming they can remain housed at all.

Who Gets to Retire?

It’s easy to think this is extreme, as retirement looks pretty good for most baby boomers. They are the wealthiest generational cohort, often benefiting from pensions, which are supplemented by real estate holdings, 401Ks, and IRAs. This prosperity is distributed unevenly, however.

For every retiree hitting the cruise ship circuit or playing golf, many others have learned too late that they may have to work much longer than they anticipated. The game changed abruptly during their lifetimes, as major companies shed defined benefit plans and replaced them with voluntary retirement accounts managed by workers. As this momentous change took place, the urgency of the moment was not impressed upon workers, and generational optimism blinded many to the difficult road ahead.