RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/05/biden-stephanopolous-abc-interview-condition/

“It was a bad episode,” President Biden told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos Friday of his debate debacle. “No indication of any serious condition.”

Glad to hear it! But what about us?

We — and by “we,” I mean those desperate to avoid the horrors of a second Trump presidency — are in a very serious condition. Biden now trails Donald Trump by six points in both the New York Times/Siena College and Wall Street Journal polls. The latest CBS News/YouGov poll finds that, post-debate, 72 percent of registered voters don’t think Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. That’s up from 65 percent before the debate. Eighty percent of voters in the Wall Street Journal poll believed Biden too old to run. A USA Today poll found that 41 percent of Democrats want Biden replaced as the nominee.

Biden’s prime-time interview with Stephanopoulos will do nothing to reassure people worried about a Biden defeat. Stephanopoulos hectored him with nonstop and repetitive questions about his mental acuity for the full 22-minute session, which undoubtedly made Biden defensive. But the president seemed to be in denial about the magnitude of the problem facing him, unwilling even to acknowledge the obvious truth that he has lost a step over the last 3½ years.

Stephanopoulos pointed out that Biden is behind in the polls.

“I don’t buy that.”

Stephanopoulos, a veteran of the Clinton White House, told Biden he’d never seen a president with a 36 percent approval rating get reelected.

“I don’t believe that’s my approval.”

Is he more frail now?

“No.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-7-2-the-lawfare-campaign-against-donald-trump-takes-three-big-blows

In the 235 or so years since our Republic was founded, until now, no ex-President has ever been prosecuted for allegedly criminal acts committed while in office. This has been a political norm of great consequence. Any such prosecution of an ex-President cannot avoid being inherently problematical, inevitably bringing to a head the conflict between, on the one hand, constraining the President in the exercise of his constitutional duties and, on the other hand, declaring him “above the law.” By far preferable would be for this conflict never to arise, and for the applicable legal rules never to get defined and to remain ambiguous.

So for all those 235 years, our predecessors in the government, whatever their political differences and contentious disputes, have largely refrained from the temptation to use the criminal justice system to bring down political adversaries, and entirely so in the case of ex-Presidents. That political norm came to an abrupt end with the massive “lawfare” campaign initiated during the past two years by Democratic Party prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions against ex-President (and current candidate) Trump.

You might think that people abrogating a political norm like this, so central to the proper functioning of the Republic, would only do so in the face of the most clear-cut circumstances of obvious and significant statutory violations, crying out for criminal redress. But of course that is not the MO of our current garbage political powers-that-be. Instead, we see broadly-worded criminal statutes that would never be so used against anyone else, twisted out of context in the effort to take down a hated political foe. Now, the Supreme Court has been forced to rule on several issues in these cases, and has come out in unsurprising ways.

During the past week, the lawfare campaign against Trump suffered three major blows from Supreme Court decisions. The first of those came in a decision called Fischer v. United States, issued on June 28, and the other two in Trump v. United States, issued yesterday (July 1).

https://unherd.com/2024/07/the-true-president-of-americas-fifth-republic/

The fireworks in America this Fourth of July will be fueled by the country’s imminent election, in which a convicted felon faces off against a doddering old man who is too senile to know that he isn’t really the President. The country’s elite would be glad if this were hyperbole; unfortunately for them, it is not. But Joe Biden’s fitness for office is no longer the big question that the American press is afraid to ask. After three years of near-total silence, they suddenly can’t stop asking it.

There may have indeed been members of America’s political and media elites who were shocked by Biden’s debate performance. Crediting the sincerity of their reactions doesn’t say much for their powers of observation, though. Biden’s shuffling gait, frozen facial expressions, babbling fabulist arabesques and inability to perform simple physical tasks without falling down have all been on public display since the first year of his Presidency — an office he won mostly in absentia while hiding out in the basement of his home in Delaware.

It is certainly possible that the American elite stuck its fingers in its ears and covered its eyes in order to block out Biden’s resemblance to late-period Leonid Brezhnev. Perhaps by repeating the ideas that Biden was not only sharp as a tack but also a geopolitical genius and probably even the greatest American President of any of our lifetimes, they came to believe that some version of these things were true, and had to be true — because everyone said so.

Those who favour psychodynamic in-group explanations can certainly find support in the rapid about-faces staged by America’s leading pundits. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was boasting of the personal time he spent with Biden, who he proclaimed to be “completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail”. After the debate, Krugman called on Biden to step down. Senile dementia is a clever disease. Or maybe Krugman didn’t like the face he saw in the mirror the morning after Biden’s debate performance.

What astounded Krugman and his fellow bold-faced journalist types about Biden’s rotten debate performance wasn’t the obviousness of Biden’s mental decline, but the fear that they were now publicly shown to have been lying. Krugman’s fellow in-house NYT author of Soviet state propaganda, Thomas Friedman, who fancies himself an “old friend” of Biden’s, was writing fibs about Biden as late as last month while boasting of his long off-the-record conversations with the President about the future of the Middle East. It took Friedman less than 24 hours to proclaim that Biden’s debate performance had made him “weep”. Poor man — no doubt it did. David Remnick of The New Yorker, who authored a door-stopper-sized hagiography of Barack Obama during the President’s first year in office, was equally quick to go public with his discovery that Joe Biden was maybe not exactly up to sorting marbles by size or colour, just in time to become a virgin for the next election.

It’s hard to be revealed as a fibber — especially when your job is ostensibly to tell the truth. But the sight of journalistic worthies suddenly grabbing hand towels to cover their proximity to power was not by itself enough to explain the Night of the Journalistic Long Knives.

https://www.thefp.com/p/joe-bidens-alternative-facts

President Joe Biden, in his interview Friday night with ABC News, said many things. The polls had him in a dead heat with Donald Trump. Democratic Party leaders have urged him to stay in the race. America, under his leadership, has “checkmated” China. 

He delivered these assessments with a gravel-voiced clarity missing from his disastrous debate performance on June 27. He was engaged and followed his train of thought to a conclusion. The problem was the substance of his answers were lacking. In fact, many of the things he said strained credulity. 

Call it Biden’s alternative facts. 

Let’s start with the polling. Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up” between him and Donald Trump. It’s possible Biden has indeed spoken to pollsters who tell him the presidential race, after the debate, is 50-50. But the highest quality polls after the debate show Trump in a firm lead. 

The New York Times/Siena College poll, for example, has Biden down six points among likely voters. A Wall Street Journal post-debate poll found 60 percent of likely voters either strongly or somewhat disapprove of Biden’s performance as president. CNN’s latest poll among American adults has Biden at 43 percent versus Trump at 49 percent. 

Former senior adviser to President Barack Obama David Axelrod posted on X a more realistic assessment of Biden’s chances in the race on Friday evening: “The president is rightfully proud of his record. But he is dangerously out-of-touch with the concerns people have about his capacities moving forward and his standing in this race. Four years ago at this time, he was 10 points ahead of Trump. Today, he is six points behind.”