RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/joe-biden-campaign-strangest-in-history/

Joe Biden may be running for president — and then again, maybe he’s not.

M any argue that 2020 will be the most important election in history, given the wide divergence between the Trump administration’s view and those of Democratic Party’s hard Left, which seems to have captured the Joe Biden candidacy.

Perhaps. But most will at least agree that the 2020 campaign is certainly the strangest, craziest and most absurd in the last 120 years.Joe Biden may at 77 be the oldest major candidate of either major party ever to have run for president. But in this eerie 2020 landscape of pandemic, lockdown, recession, and riot, far stranger than Biden’s frailty is his campaign routine — or lack of same.

Until mid August, Biden more or less stayed ensconced in his basement, campaigning by electronic projection. Not since James Garfield and William McKinley ran their 19th-century presidential campaigns from their front porches has an American presidential candidate simply abdicated from the campaign trail and remained inactive and almost mute.

Biden certainly does not weigh in on many issues. We have no idea whether as president he would join the Jacobin pack to pack the Supreme Court, push to end the Electoral College, enact the full Green New Deal, or seek statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

Does he unequivocally condemn the national rioting and looting? Would he reopen the border, stop deportations of illegal aliens, take down the new wall? Would Biden end fracking as part of his stated vow to phase out fossil fuels, as he has inferred in the past? Is China really a mere rival rather than an enemy? And if so, would he revoke Trump’s China-rollback policy? He has bragged of his role in the Iran Deal — would he bring that back? Biden’s silence only highlights the mystery, and magnifies the importance, of the first Biden–Trump debate — given that millions of voters are curious to meet for the first time the nominee of the Democratic Party and thereby will learn at last why, these past months, he either should have, or should not have, gone into hibernation.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/09/29/tulsi-gabbard-raises-

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has raised an alarm over ballot harvesting and voter fraud, filing a bill to prevent the practice. Gabbard, a former presidential candidate, has shown an extraordinary willingness to buck the propagandistic groupthink in her party, and Democrats have not always appreciated it. Yet she is right to warn about ballot harvesting and voter fraud, and she even noted that the recent Project Veritas sting videos illustrate her point.

“We’re getting closer and closer to Election Day now, and it is critical to remember that the strength of our democracy lies in the integrity of our elections, that every one of us has to have faith that our vote will count,” Gabbard said in a video on Sunday.

“But right now, there are still many states in our country that allow for something called ballot harvesting,” she warned. “This is a system that allows for third parties to collect and deliver ballots for other people, potentially large numbers of people.”

“Unfortunately, ballot harvesting has allowed for fraud and abuse to occur by those who could tamper with or discard ballots to try to sway an election,” the Democratic congresswoman warned.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-weak-leading-the-woke/

Let’s start with an easy one.

How old is Joe Biden?

As this issue goes to press, 77. America’s median age is 38, which means that more than half the country is less than half Biden’s age. If inaugurated on January 20, 2021, exactly two months after he turns 78, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., will be older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan was on his last day as president. Reagan was the oldest president prior to Donald Trump, who is three and a half years younger than Biden and became president almost four years ago. As a result, Trump will reach the age of 78 years and seven months in January 2025, at the conclusion of what would be his second term. Biden will be that old in June 2021.

Last year, when Biden was a candidate for the Democratic nomination, he (or at least his advisors) suggested he would serve only one term if elected. Having become the nominee, he said more recently that he would “absolutely” consider seeking a second term in 2024. If that quest overcomes all obstacles, political and medical, Biden would leave office in January 2029 at 86, an age surpassed by only seven ex-presidents.

To think of Biden’s age another way, he is older than his party’s nominee in each of the seven most recent presidential elections: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. One must go back to 86-year-old Michael Dukakis, who lost the 1988 election to George H.W. Bush, to find a Democratic presidential nominee born before Biden was.

How long has Joe Biden been in government?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/opinion/trump-voters.html

Chris is a registered Democrat in her 50s who lives in Manhattan. She’s well-educated, well-traveled and well-informed. She has voted for candidates of both parties over the years and was enthusiastic for Bernie Sanders in 2016.

She’s asked me not to publish her last name. It would not go down well for her at the store where she works as a manager if her colleagues knew that she plans to vote for Donald Trump.

Chris is also gay. “Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again,” she tells me.

Readers of this newspaper who conjure an image of a Trump voter probably think of people like Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at protesters outside their St. Louis home in late June. But if Trump defies current polling and wins again, it’ll be thanks to a discreet base of support from voters like Chris, who fit into none of the cultural or demographic stereotypes of the Trump base.

It’s worth understanding where she’s coming from.

Start with the economy. “I haven’t seen double digit [gains] in my 401(k) since the internet boom of the late ’90s,” she says. “It went up 19.6 percent” in the year before the pandemic. “Look at the stock market,” she says. (Up about 35 percent from four years ago.) “Look at gas prices.” (About the same as what they were when Trump took office, but well below the $3.31 per gallon at the midpoint of the Obama administration.)