"It was only going to help Donald Trump, um, and I think that's how a lot of them rationalized it. Now whether or not history will judge them, you know, as being right for doing that, um, you know, we will see, but this is also part of the reason why the White House was shielding him from as many people as possible including Cabinet secretaries because sometimes, you know, you see him once maybe it's just a bad day you can just say, like, you know, maybe I just had one bad meeting. You're not really sure..."
Said Alex Thompson, co-author of "Original Sin," on "Fox News Sunday" yesterday.
The interviewer, Shannon Bream, quotes from the book (on page 85): "[A longtime Biden aide said] 'He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years — he'd only have to show proof of life every once in a while. His aides could pick up the slack." She asks: "Who would have been running the White House in a second Biden term?"
Thompson responds: "Well, this person went on to say that when you're voting for a President you're voting for the aides, uh, around him. But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides. These are White House aides. These were unelected people. And one of the things that really I think comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which, I think, is what this person is talking about."
It's like fighting fire with fire — fighting the destruction of the democracy with the destruction of democracy. You had to destroy the village to save it. Noted.
Posts
101 comments:
"and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy"
The problem is, when they think "democracy" what they mean is "us in charge". You can tell that because they stopped talking about "our democracy" when the voters turned against them.
These people - these criminals - have shown they need to be kept as far away from the levers of government power as they can be.
Like, um, you know.
I haven’t seen this analogy elsewhere, but we had a King leading America. He wasn’t legitimately elected. He was installed. Then, he becomes senile and his aides cover for him.
How many times has the rest of the world suffered under a King or Queen who wasn’t elected and was corrupt and did stupid things or was senile?
The coverup by the Press was especially egregious. The Cabinet is deeply at fault too.
The idea that Trump was some type of threat to democracy is ridiculous on its face and surely didn’t justify all the law breaking by the Dems.
There needs to be big time accountability. The Dems need to be destroyed. The GOP needs to pick a few targets and go after them hard.
thous dost protest too much, btw Franky Foer proved to be an easy mark, have they mulched that yett
The people running the White House weren’t trying to “save democracy”—they had an unpopular agenda and they needed to foist it. My money is still on Obama having had a third term.
I don't think these aides sincerely believed in anything other than the will to power, they're just peddling whatever rationale now that they think will be accepted on the left. It had to have been intoxicating and almost impossible to resist, the opportunity to exercise unchecked rule with no accountability, to be that man or woman behind the curtain pulling the strings. But what other kind of person would Joe Biden have had him around him anyway?
Where’s the equilibrium in this process? The other side eventually takes power. What happens then?
Or — Suppose a President acted like he was out of it, saw his aides claiming power they weren’t granted by him — does he have them executed for insurrection?
Like you can only increase the intelligence of women by destroying men.
Once you say that Donald Trump is a threat to the nation ("our very Democracy"), you activate snipers. Assassins.
They wanted him dead and they still do. And they'll say or do anything that causes the sickos in their party to try to murder him. The press especially wants Trump murdered. In public. Live. On television. So they can show the snuff film over and over and over again.
It's why CNN and MSNBC only carried a single Trump rally live all throughout his campaign: The Butler Rally. Where he was to be head-shotted into history.
And don't think for a minute that just because they missed that they're done trying to murder Donald Trump. They're not done.
And they're going to succeed in the end.
"and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy"
I'm calling bullish*t. The people who perpetrated this coverup did not believe Trump was a threat to democracy. The only people who actually believe that are the ones who believed Biden was fit to serve, which is to say nobody. They were lying then, and they're lying now. This cannot stand.
"It was only going to help Donald Trump..." so we supported a sock puppet for POTUS, the-most-powerful-man-on-the-planet.
Is that the THIS in "This is what Democracy looks like"?
'Donald Trump is a threat to Demock-crah-seh !'
You always know this is bombast, because when this cry is raised, nothing of substance follows - except creative attempts to block the action, however tortuous.
Donald Trump needs opposition - every politician needs opposition. His great fortune is having opponents from every angle who are worse than he is.
What's Insty's quote? Oft evil will doth evil mar.
Another four years of open borders, and we might be in the UK's position, where the criminals have the high ground.
Their guilty consciences (the ones who aren't psychopaths) may have made them believe they'd be beheaded and attainted like a failed Tudor minister.
But we’ve known this for years. The Left willfully turned a blind eye to Biden’s incapacity, and further, did everything they could to cover it up, because of TDS. Or maybe it was because they didn’t trust the American electorate to pick a President. Or maybe, read probably, because they knew if Trump was elected their gravy train would end.
I’ll never understand how anyone with a functioning brain and an ounce of integrity could ever vote for a Democrat again.
Trump is a threat to democracy isn’t a policy. It isn’t a good basis for running a presidential campaign as Kamala found out good and hard. And it is not an excuse for covering up the fact that Biden was demented.
"when you're voting for a President you're voting for the aides, uh, around him."
Okay then. Who is responsible for the deaths of these young military members? Please stand up and take responsibility for your arrogance.
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20
Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23
Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin T. Hoover, 31
Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23
Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, 20
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20
Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25
Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20
Navy Hospital Corpsman Maxton W. Soviak, 22
Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan W. Page, 23
Same thing going on across Europe, most recently in Romania, but from Spain to Poland democratic norms have been abandoned and anti war parties have been banned or prevented from forming governments despite winning the right to do so under normal rules. It’s the Rules Based Order!
The Dem party is run like the Mafia in many ways. Omertà is strictly observed.
What has surprised me that NO high level Dem has broken omertà for either money (book of the decade) or patriotism.
From 2015 on, these people claimed Trump was out to destroy democracy. So, the phrase "fighting the destruction of the democracy with the destruction of democracy" makes a good deal of sense in explaining what they did with Biden, which was to stage a true coup, as opposed to the mayhem of a day in the Capitol in 2021. However, what if the idea that Trump was out to destroy democracy was never anything for these people other than a good excuse to do exactly what they did. Then it seems to me the correct way to see this is that those who were okay about destroying democracy to begin with simply pretended it was in response to Trump's supposed threat to democracy. That is, Trump did not make them do it.
So what? Ronald Reagan had Alzheimers and took forever to recover from a bullet wound, Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke and FDR was in a wheelchair. So we need younger leaders? But JFK was a pervert with all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases (probably the gay ones too).
The democrat party and their media lied for 8 years straight. Their “excuse” of Trump being an existential threat is bull****. They call every single one of their political enemies existential threats. Nazis, Hitler, etc.
These people are TRAITORS and I literally hope they are thrown in prison.
“Reclaiming muh Demock-crah-seh!”
Sounds about right… fits right in with these treasonous assclowns.
My question is, what would have happened if the Chinese had shot down a couple of our satellites watching the South China Sea and some one ran into the Oval Office saying “Mr. President, what do we do — are we at war?”
Suppose Dr. Jill, and Donilon, and Klain, and Rice couldn’t agree — who would get to make the call? If things went to shit, who would be accountable?
So if Donald Trump was an existential threat to democracy then stealing the election and putting political prisoners in jail was their civic duty. And they sure as **** did it.
One of your best, Althouse.
"My money is still on Obama having had a third term."
That hardly seems likely. It's real life, not a political thriller. Why would he do that? It doesn't seem like his style. He never seemed power mad. It's more likely that he too was installed by faceless insiders. He has a very pleasant face because he's not driven by these intense and devious desires. I think he's enjoying his life and watching aloofly. He's aloof! Why would he do grim, grueling, behind-the-scenes work?
“I don't think these aides sincerely believed in anything other than the will to power, they're just peddling whatever rationale now that they think will be accepted on the left.”
How intoxicating. To be a low level bureaucrat and by luck, be given the keys to the kingdom.
Many years ago Ayn Rand was on a discussion panel. The question was: “If you were made ruler for one day, what would you do?”
Ayn Rand’s response: “I’d resign immediately.” How many people have that strength of character.
It's called a coup....
Lucien:
I watched the horrible final Mission Impossible movie yesterday. In it, the President was faced with a difficult decision. So, yes we really dodged a bullet that Biden wasn’t faced with a decision like that. He fucked up enough decisions as it was.
What I am noticing is that the upset is over 'what happened', not 'who did it'. All of this discussion over how wrong it was, how misguided, how tragic, etc etc. I think that means the narrative is being shaped. We'll 'move on' from worrying too much about 'who did it'. What's important, what we can all agree on, is that it 'must never happen again....'. Therefore, 'Donald Trump must immediately....'
What we are seeing is the next war on the present administration, a set of restrictive safeguards 'for the good of Democracy'.
"You are voting for the aides"? What chutzpah. I mean a delusional twit can justify anything. I will admit they had a problem--in Biden's condition it was hard to show the occasional "proof of life". I mean the elevator was there, but it never reached the mental mezzanine.
"you can rationalize anything"
We need to promote an investigation with a focus on identifying the cabal and active participants (some names have already surfaced) in the Biden administration, prosecute and deliver a form of punishment that makes an example of these ferrets.
And the media will stay on its current course and whither away to nothing.
This seems like a good time to bring up the brainwashing book again.
But the interesting ("") thing to me is that no one seems to have been the mastermind of the brainwashing. TDS seems to have arisen more or less everywhere, all at once. I mean, I know the equation R=H where R is any Republican and H is the constant Hitler (or is it the inequality R>H?) has been around for decades. But is it so much worse, so much more actionable, now because Trump is who he is, a lightning rod with no apparent filter, or because people on the political left are actually getting less capable of critical thinking?
Regardless, I think it's probably true that no matter whether those deeply concerned Democrats started out just thinking, "Well, us pulling Biden's strings is a better scenario - for our side, at least - than any situation where Trump is elected" and then "evolved*" through self-brainwashing and the sunk-cost fallacy (as whichever commenter about the book was discussing) into "Trump is an existential threat to our democracy!", or were always making the latter claim disingenuously, they're fully invested in the "existential threat" claim now. There's no backing down.
*The one scenario I reject is that they believed from the start that Trump was an existential threat to democracy. When the media forwarded him (apparently hoping it would be to Clinton's benefit), they thought he was ratings gold and a blowhard, but harmless. Anyone on their side who even considered him as a potential POTUS simply thought such a thing would be embarrassing to the nation, an affront to American dignity, because he'd gold-leaf all the toilets and serve Diet Coke to foreign dignitaries, but not that he would lower the curtain of fascism on the US - and anyway, there was no way he'd get elected, so all that was just an intellectual exercise. They thought he was a punchline - they literally laughed about him. So no, none of them started out believing he was Worse Than Hitler.
Note to Spiros:
Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994, five years after he left office.
Nice use of lefty talking points though.
"these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things.."
like instructing the FBI to assassinate Trump?
like instructing the FBI to wiretap Trump Tower?
like instructing the FBI to stage Jan 6th?
like instructing the FBI to claim the Hunter laptop was Russian?
like miscounting the election ballots?
like releasing a biowarfare agent into the genpop to justify election fraud?
The list goes on and on.
We MUST STOP the people! Democracy depends on it!!
Here is the real root of the problem and the most damning. At the very best, they want their party to win at all costs. But at the very worst - the more unfortunate but more likely scenario: in their arrogance and self-righteousness they deem themselves unerringly capable of deciphering what is the gravest threat to our democracy, and they feel fully warranted to intervene, even if that "threat" is exactly what the people chose.
I know that their fallback position is that the people are voting based on bad information. So, I'll repeat the analysis: in their arrogance and self-righteousness they deem themselves unerringly capable of deciphering what is "good" and what is "not good" information.
And, at the center of that thought process: what you really see is that in their arrogance and self-righteousness they just think they are better than their fellow citizens, whom they regard as ill informed, duped, and incapable of making a valid choice.
"I'm fully in support of democracy, as long as I and my likeminded superiors can control or overrule the 'Stupid' voters."
And to think those same people who were okay with unknown, unnamed aides running the country, had a problem with Elon Musk suggesting THAT CONGRESS has to clean up waste and fraud in Government (DOGE), crying that they didn't elect him.....
Biden exhibited his disabilities in public long before he ran in 2020, which is why we have a “basement campaign” reference in today’s excerpt. Reagan didn’t have any similar symptoms in office and the disease that eventually killed him was announced two years after he left office, at which point he was not seen in public again. I’m not surprised at dishonest leftists smearing Reagan to absolve Biden but it is thoroughly disgusting and the two situations are not in any way analogous.
From ChatGPT:
Barack Obama’s 2021 interview with The New York Times, where he said:
“I used to say if I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front-man or front-woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and then I could sort of deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that.”
Obama may not have had a “third term”, but given the background of the so-called ruling aides, he likely was advising on certain fronts, like foreign policy or anti-Trump attacks. I am not sure he would be for the open borders, though…. Not clear beyond Mayorkas who would inflict that on us.
Obama knew Biden was not capable of being President. That knowledge alone makes him complicit in the coverup. Shame on him.
Scott Adams sort of buys into your theory. He says that the Democrats really did convince themselves that Trump is Hitler and had to be stopped, even by undemocratic means. I can’t say I agree. I think what’s more relevant is that Trump committed policy heresy by opposing open borders and the money laundering fiasco in Ukraine. Those are the “norms” he broke.
Any chance you can get Susan Rice and Anita Dunn making big decisions, democracy is safe, and all is well. Nothing else pretty much matters so long as the figurehead can strap on a fresh Depends and blink at the cameras.
- Krumhorn
I don't think I've ever seen the word "aloofly."
Jersey’s date sounds more accurate than mine.
The Dem party machine is trying to limit the damage to Biden, his family and a short list of aides, but we all knew what was being done. It was right there in front of us for all to see for more than 4 years. They're throwing those who are no longer useful to the dogs...as one does.
The Obama faction is trying to put it all on the Clintons and "Clintonworld", including installing Kamala as the candidate rather than having some kind of primary process.
I loved Trump’s line that he would have expected that Dr. Jill Biden should have been able to correctly diagnose the problem. That was a sweet burn.
- Krumhorn
Exactly Krumhorn. Obama’s two closest commie advisors just happened to end up on the unelected Steering Committee to Manage Biden. Maybe even Valerie Jarret, the Obama advisor so close to him she lived in the White House with the Obamas.
Trump was perceived as worse because he ALSO dismantled the eGOP cabal. He was ( and is ) threatening trillions in profits by throwing out the eGOP power center. McConnell, Graham,Cornyn and others were JUST as instrumental in letting trumps first term get lambasted as the democrats. In some respects more because I can hear McConnell threatening Trump to let the fake impeachments go forward unless he did their bidding.
Trump and Elon musk have saved western democracy, if they can stay alive to finish it. And if Europe doesn’t just become Muslim.
The Democrat Aides play the rhetorical trick the Left always does. We have to do take this "bad/unethical/unlawful" action because we're "Saving the country/stopping something bad/defending the good".
Its just a lie. They wanted to keep power and so they lied to the American public. This incident should keep the Democrats from ever being in the While House for 20 years. But of course, it wont.
On a lighter note (or is it?): Sometimes there’s elder abuse and sometimes there’s abuse by elders. Cameras caught Macron’s wife slapping him as they deplaned in Hanoi.
I don't believe the Left "convinced themselves Trump was Hitler". That assumes they're stupid - they're not. And they tried under Biden to pass "electoral reform" , imported millions of illegals, gave them SS numbers so they could vote, and had the FBI/DHS agents go after Rightwingers. That wasn't to stop Trump/Hitler. That was make sure they stayed in power forever.
You'll notice the Left NEVER attributes good faith to the Right. Its the exact opposite.
"aloofly" sounds like the name of an app that helps you keep your list of those you snub and ignore organized, allows you to track your snubs, incidents of avoidance, insults, etc. It will also encourage you and help you improve your performance as an asshole.
As every GOP congressperson or talking head had to answer the incessant question, “Did Trump lose the 2020 election?”, every Dem congressperson or talking head should be asked, “When did you know that Biden was too cognitively impaired to be the US President?”. Given most of the country knew…their answers should interesting.
Scott Adams sort of buys into your theory. He says that the Democrats really did convince themselves that Trump is Hitler and had to be stopped
The problem is that they are indiscriminate with their slurs. Remember BusHitler? Adolph Romney? The leftie choir sings one note, and it’s always the wrong one.
- Krumhorn
Lucien said...
"My question is, what would have happened if the Chinese had shot down a couple of our satellites watching the South China Sea and some one ran into the Oval Office saying “Mr. President, what do we do — are we at war?”
Suppose Dr. Jill, and Donilon, and Klain, and Rice couldn’t agree — who would get to make the call? If things went to shit, who would be accountable?"
It happened. The Chinese floated a spy balloon across our country and Biden did.......................nothing.
The aides they've named were not in a position to dictate to the rest of the Party who would be the nominee, not when it was only Joe running in the primary, not when Kamala was appointed in a group phone call.
The fact that we all do not really know who was running the nation during Biden's first term - - (while they let in 11-21 million illegals - for their corrupt agenda...)
is NOT WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE.
Well said Quayle @9:00AM!
Dude1394 @ 9:18
Once you understand that Washington DC runs on graft it's easy to see why Trump is considered a threat. He threatens the graft thet DC runs on.
he'd only have to show proof of life every once in a while. His aides could pick up the slack.
Isn't that confession to a coup? Who cares if they genuinely believed Trump was an existential threat? Who do they think they are that their opinion matters any more than any other voter's?
There needs to be mass arrests of prominent Democrats. There won't be, but there needs to be.
"when you're voting for a President you're voting for the aides, uh, around him"
And when one of those aides cashes in outside the government, who picks that person's replacement.
@ Quale re: 9:00 AM
Exactly. And there's a name for it. It's called Progressivism.
Quayle @ 9:00-- Yes Indeed!
For those who believe they are on the "right side" of History, all it takes is a bit of Critical Legal theory to deconstruct all law (including constitutional law and interpretation) into a power struggle. The Democrat Party is made up of insider types who know the whole "Democracy is on the ballot" as a cynical ploy, and the large number of banal go-along-to-get-along types who take it seriously. For too long, the Republican Party was run by people who could be manipulated by appeals to Law and Democracy as if these had any objective meaning to the Democrats. President Trump has forced us all to see what is really going on, at great risk to himself and his fortune. You'd have to go back to the Founding Fathers to see similar courage in the cause of the Republic.
Dangerfield: Once when I was a kid I was kidnapped. The kidnapper sent my father one of my fingers. My father said he needed more proof.
That book is more grift for bad apples in the media.
Democrat hive-mind loyalist tribalists look at you like you've lost your mind if you point out a single failure by any democrat. Seriously - democratic faithful see nothing wrong with their party. EVER.
The minions worship, obey and adore everything about their Democrat party elites, with dedicated blind faith.
an aside: The democrats in Colorado have destroyed our once lovely airport. (and our once lovely state) They have ushered in high crime... love embrace illegals and use the NGO's like candy money. Our roads are a mess. The CO dems are obsessed with gender confusion in young children. and making life miserable for parents.
Jess Griswold(D) CO's Sec of State, left passwords wide open in the voting system - and never had to pay a price. She lives on MSNBC. She wants to be our attorney general.
Who was running the country has been downgraded to who was running the White House. I guess there is a lack of examples of running the country. Running the White House might seem to be an easy lift, but the Chief of Staff always runs the While House. Impossible to prove or disprove, but perfect for a fake scandal.
Admittedly, proving the scandal would be a heavy lift, essentially proving a double negative. What did the President not know and when did he not know it? Sorry, that’s the standard. Until you have that, you have nothing.
What they say defending democracy what they really mean is defending their taste of the skim. With apologies to Tony Soprano.
Annoying that Thompson gets brownie points for supposedly leading the case re Dementia JB. James Rosen, respectfully questioning JB directly in January 2022, was first but faced eight months of press-corps banishment. No one followed up until the 2024 election cycle. The book credits Rosen, but the media’s 2.5-year delay reveals their priorities.
"My money is still on Obama having had a third term."
My theory is that the same people who were really calling the shots while Obama was the front man were calling the shots with Biden as the front man.
Liars rarely come clean even when you catch them lying on video. Jake from Fakefarm and his ghostwriters will never admit they were lying for five years.
The real question is “who convinced them that Trump was a threat to democracy”?
To be fair, they did always say “our democracy,” so if you think of it more like la cosa nostra, it would not be a lie.
Howard beat me to it again.
yes Obama's nominees were largely recycled by this camarilla, the 'shovel ready' jobs, were even less visible in the mountain of droppings Malley Blinken Sullivan, were all retreads,
"when you're voting for a President you're voting for the aides, uh, around him."
Said the aides around him.
Seems treasonous to me.
the largest collection were those tributes to Xi, meaning the solar mandate,
"when you're voting for a President you're voting for the aides, uh, around him."
true but a real dodge. When you vote for the President you vote for the guy selecting aides that will implement his agenda. you are not voting for aides that will implement their own agenda. That is a weasel-like equivocation.
Oh, so Trump does what his aides tell him, huh?
What bullshit.
You had to destroy the village to save it. Noted.
Very nicely skewered, Althouse. Well done! But will anyone who is not a Boomer get the reference?
"I don't believe the Left "convinced themselves Trump was Hitler". That assumes they're stupid - they're not. "
Those pulling the strings may not have believed it, but their foot soldiers, aka democrat voters, do. And yeah, they are stupid.
that of course was an apocryphal quote like reality based community, that lefties use in their semiotic pens,
"The real question is “who convinced them that Trump was a threat to democracy”?
They didn't need to be convinced. They wanted to believe that Trump was a threat. And then they accepted it.
@Althouse: I think [Obama is] enjoying his life and watching aloofly. He's aloof! Why would he do grim, grueling, behind-the-scenes work?
Why, then, did he buy that large house in the Kalorama district of D.C., where a stream of bigfoot Democrat moneybags and fixers constantly come and go. Why didn't he quietly go back to Chicago or Hawaii and remain aloof from Washington?
BIG ZER0 has conflated aloof with a resounding EFF OFF from most of the country.
The Dems were exploiting “this thing of theirs”, apparently for a helluva long time.
If Biden had died on January 20th 2021 and they hid his body for 4 years- what would have been different?
When did the Democrats devolve to a level at which one man could become an excuse for every errant, immoral act committed by the Party, their leaders, the leftmediaswine and their other depraved consorts? It began with BDS (Bush derangement syndrome), came of age with Obama’s and Hillary’s blessing, bloomed fully with Trump.
“ I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things”
This has been The Left’s go-to rationalization for every crime and treason they’ve committed over the last decade — Trump made us do it. But truth be told they’d have done all the same things if the GOP had nominated DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, or Abraham freakin’ Lincoln. It has never been about Trump and it’s never been about Democracy, and anybody who thinks otherwise is being deliberately obtuse. The Left is all about acquiring and keeping raw political power. It is their North Star and raison d'être and always will be.
Original Mike (11:59) of Democrat voters: “… And yeah, they are stupid.“ For the most part they are also immoral.
They are all scum who should never be close to any responsibility, authority, or power again. They have demonstrated themselve unfit to do anything other than benefit themselves. To hell with them.
I remember after the 2000 Presidential election, how the Democrats tried to delegitimize George Bush by saying that he was "selected, not elected." (Ironically, it turned out that even if the Supreme Court had sided with Gore, he still would have lost the election.)
"I think there was a feeling — like, a lot of members of the Democratic Party that were seeing this or saw moments um of him seeming out of it — um that going public was not going to change [Biden's] mind."
"It was only going to help Donald Trump, um, and I think that's how a lot of them rationalized it.
There's this group of people known as "voters". If the Democrats gave a shit about them, they would have had a primary in 2023 - 2024, and then it wouldn't have mattered what Biden wanted.
But the entire Democrat Party conspired to make sure there was no primary.
So no, this doesn't get them off the hook
"if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things" As if we needed confirmation that Dems will do anything for the party and its lust for power, voters and truth and country be damned.
But will Althouse and the Althouses of America remember the destructive rationalization next time? Or will they rationalize the former rationalizations away?
One mystery about how the Democratic coalition handled (or didn't) the cognitive decline of Biden is in not wrapping their heads around the reality that the relevant verb form wasn't "declined". It was "declining". When you are on that slide, it keeps going and it usually accelerates. However bad he was in February 2024, he would have been worse in April and June and August and so on. It wasn't so much that he botched the June debate, as that fair-minded people looking at him and the observed rate of decline would have thought, "What will he be like in October? Or next January, if he gets re-elected? Clearly, much worse than even this." Because they were paying attention not just to his problems during the June debate but were extrapolating out the trend line. Not clear to me why the Democratic leadership couldn't do this.
Trump’s inner circle is charging $5 million for a private dinner with the president. But at least they aren’t hiding his cognitive decline from the press the way that Biden’s inner circle did.
Left Bank of the Charles said...
Who was running the country has been downgraded to who was running the White House. I guess there is a lack of examples of running the country. Running the White House might seem to be an easy lift, but the Chief of Staff always runs the While House. Impossible to prove or disprove, but perfect for a fake scandal.
Admittedly, proving the scandal would be a heavy lift, essentially proving a double negative. What did the President not know and when did he not know it? Sorry, that’s the standard. Until you have that, you have nothing.
Nothing needs to be proven. Everyone involved has already admitted that Joe Biden was not the person wielding Presidential powers.
You are just a completely dishonest person and you are proud of this for some reason.
People like this are why actual democracy is so rare in the world.
With Trump’s second term, we can see the importance of energy in the Executive. No question who is calling the shots.
“Admittedly, proving the scandal would be a heavy lift, essentially proving a double negative. What did the President not know and when did he not know it? Sorry, that’s the standard. Until you have that, you have nothing.”
“Nothing needs to be proven. Everyone involved has already admitted that Joe Biden was not the person wielding Presidential powers.“
It’s back to the Autopen. Evidence that most of the pardons, along with a bunch of other stuff, was signed by a specific Autopen. Also, evidence that Biden wasn’t there at the time. With Pardons, the burden is on the person asserting the pardon to prove it. And they won’t be able to overcome the contrary evidence. After that, they can go up the chain, proving forgery. If Biden didn’t sign the documents (the Autopen did), then who authorized the signature? Can they prove that there was direct contact with Biden? Was he in Delaware? Already in bed? Look into enough of these, and a pattern emerges. RICO?
The Bondi DOJ is apparently looking into the Autopen scandal. We shall see. A lots at stake here, including all those pardons, but also the EOs.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.