RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/14399/the-plot-thickens

EXCERPT:

Was there anyone else on the stage? Not so’s you’d know from the headlines. Biden lost to himself. And considering that the object was to make the debate all about Trump that’s quite an accomplishment.

So what’s going on? Why did whoever’s running the show allow this to happen?

I’ve been of the view, ever since the 2020 primary season, that Biden is the Permanent State’s conscious response to Trump: in 2016, Trump was all candidate and no minders; Biden is all minders and no candidate. In that sense, the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet is the perfect embodiment of American politics. We can do all the cracks about “Obama’s third term” or “the Manchurian candidate”, but the truth is that, in a supposedly self-governing republic of 350 million people, we have absolutely no idea who’s actually running the show – other than the fact that, out of those 350 million, the only one we can definitively rule out of having anything to do with it is the purported head of the executive branch.

You have to figure that that’s greatly to the advantage of the Deep State, and that’s why they’d like to keep it that way. It’s quite something to teach the people the lesson that representative politics is just a meaningless joke, third-rate dinner-theatre in which all the faux-combat is an obvious sham. In the Soviet Union, the point wasn’t to persuade you to believe the lie but to force you to live with the lie. Reducing the two-year US election cycle to the same state inflicts an even more brutal humiliation on the masses.

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.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/29/how-did-the-army-of-debate-fact-checkers-miss-this-biden-whopper/

Not surprisingly, the self-appointed “fact checkers” in the media went to town on Donald Trump’s remarks during Thursday’s debate, picking apart every utterance and rating them false even if they were mostly true. Also not surprising, President Joe Biden got a relative free pass. (Although to be fair to fact-checkers, it was often hard to tell what Biden was trying to say.)

But what’s truly mind-boggling is that they missed the biggest lie Biden told all night. A lie that came out of his mouth as soon as he opened it. A lie that he then used to blame Trump for everything bad that has happened in the past three-and-a-half years.

Let’s roll the tape.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, to his credit, started the debate with a hardball question for Biden.

TAPPER: Let’s begin the debate. And let’s start with the issue that voters consistently say is their top concern, the economy.

President Biden, inflation has slowed, but prices remain high. Since you took office, the price of essentials has increased. For example, a basket of groceries that cost $100, then, now costs more than $120. And typical home prices have jumped more than 30%.

What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?

BIDEN: We’ve got to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me.

We had an economy that was in freefall. The pandemic was so badly handled. Many people were dying. All he said was it’s not that serious, just inject a little bleach in your arm. You’ll be all right.

The economy collapsed. There were no jobs. The unemployment rate rose to 15%. It was terrible.

And so, what we had to do is try to put things back together again.

Later Biden repeated the claim:

There was no inflation when I became president. You know why? The economy was flat on its back. 15% unemployment, he decimated the economy, absolutely decimated the economy. That’s why there was no inflation at the time. There were no jobs.

And then later: “Look what I’ve done. Look how I’ve turned around the horrible situation he left me.”

https://thespectator.com/politics/presidential-debate-see-get-trump-biden/

These weren’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They weren’t Kennedy-Nixon. If those were graded “A,” then this was “C-minus,” at best. The low point was who is the better golfer? I’ll go with Lincoln.

Both candidates filled the air with hyperbole. Trump led the way, as usual, calling everything he did “the best ever,” and everything Biden did “the worst.” He doesn’t favor shades of gray.

Biden responded in kind. He was right to emphasize Trump’s hours of silence during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But he didn’t stop there. He went on to repeat what he surely knows is a lie about Trump’s comments after Charlottesville. And he kept going, trying to link Trump directly neo-Nazis.

It could have been worse. The CNN format was far better than previous debates. Keep it. Ditch the audience and allow only one mic at a time. The moderators’ questions were fair and tackled the big topics, as they should have. The debate would have been more informative if each candidate had time for a second rebuttal. That would have encouraged more debate over several major issues. Perhaps they can make that change next time.

What will stick in voters’ minds?

First, Trump is the same guy they either loved or hated the last time around. He hurt himself with inflated self-praise, bombastic language and turning his criticism of Biden up to eleven each time he spoke. Still, his performance was far better than his first debate in 2020, when he repeatedly interrupted Biden and came off as a bully. He avoided that trap this time, partly because of the format, partly because he didn’t disregard the rules. Trump’s major plus was that he drove home his main points about inflation, immigration, the economy and foreign wars.

For Biden, the message is far darker. Frankly, it must have been painful for many viewers to watch.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-the-president-has-a-cold?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPT

In a last-minute scramble, Biden’s team leaked to friendly media: The President has a cold. The Biden after-party featured an extraordinarily animated Jill Biden saying to her husband: “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question! You knew all the facts. And let me ask the crowd, what did Trump do? He lieeeed!” 

I think the question we all have to ask after tonight is simple: If this is Biden, who’s been running our country? Like, practically, who’s been doing the job job of it? Jill Biden? The White House handyman? The interns? Karl Rove? A random Houthi? I’m not mad, I just want to know. Because the people who have been pushing to keep him in office certainly know he’s this bad, and they must like it that way. Weak and confused, he can be used, kept as a pet moderate. Interns, release the old man, just tell us your demands, and we can figure something out.

→ The cheapfakes are getting really good: Now that the dam has broken on Biden’s age and mental fitness, recall what happened in recent months to those who said out loud what was obvious last night—and has been pretty clear for some time. 

Only a week ago, Biden’s people were slamming “cheapfakes” and selective editing as dangerous weapons of misinformation that might leave the American people with the idea that the president is in anything other than rude health. Okay, well, on last night’s evidence, these cheapfakes are getting really good. 

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that a few Washington insiders who’d been in meetings with the president noticed “signs of slipping.” The story was slammed as “pointed” and “partisan.” And when Special Counsel Robert Hur called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory,” the response from Biden and everyone around him was indignant: “How the hell dare he,” said the president. Good liberal Ezra Klein was yelled at by his cohort for suggesting back in February that Biden should step aside.

Unnamed sources were always praising Biden’s “energy” and “passion.” We’re all just thinking about memory and age in the wrong way, guys. 

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.