"Biden has in many ways remade himself as president. He is no longer the garrulous glad-hander I met when I first covered Congress..."

"... more than four decades ago. He’s still an old-time pol, to be sure, but he is now more focused and strategic; he executes policies systematically, at home and abroad. As Franklin Foer writes in 'The Last Politician'... 'he will be remembered as the old hack who could.'... In a month or so... [i]t will be too late for other Democrats, including Harris, to test themselves in primaries and see whether they have the stuff of presidential leadership. Right now, there’s no clear alternative to Biden — no screamingly obvious replacement waiting in the wings. That might be the decider for Biden, that there’s seemingly nobody else...."

Writes David Ignatius in "President Biden should not run again in 2024" (WaPo).

Ignatius is tripping over himself. The somebody else is screamingly obviously Kamala Harris. If Biden steps aside there will be a grisly interlude in which Harris is destroyed. Who wants to see that? I mean, who wants to see that who doesn't wish the Democrats ill?

ADDED: No sooner did I publish this post than I noticed this Guardian piece by Sidney Blumenthal: "Democrats need to realize that there is no alternative to Biden – and buck up/Spooked by Trump’s shadow, Democrats react with disapproval of Biden, whose numbers are stagnant. They risk creating a self-fulfilling prophesy."

Blumenthal doesn't even mention Harris. He just says there's "no alternative," which is an obtuse way to say Harris is an unworkable alternative. 

"Is your war against President Vladimir Putin — or against Russia itself? Nearly every time, I got the same unyielding answer."

"The enemy is a Russia that must be defeated and transformed. Through Ukrainian eyes, this terrible conflict has become a clash of civilizations. They argue that most Russians support Putin’s brutal war in the way that most Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Unless Russia as a nation abandons the imperial dreams that Putin has evoked, the conflict cannot be resolved through negotiations."

Writes David Ignatius in "How Ukrainians define their enemy: ‘It’s not Putin; it’s Russia’" (WaPo).

“Russia has to go through the same process that Germany did after World War II,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak insisted Saturday in an interview with me and the other members of a group organized by the German Marshall Fund, of which I’m a trustee.

“If Russian society doesn’t understand what they’ve done, the world will be brought into chaos.” He enthusiastically predicts that postwar Russia will dissolve into five or six smaller nations.

This Ukrainian desire for total victory... poses a painful dilemma for the Biden administration. As President Biden made clear in a May 31 essay in the New York Times, the United States seeks “a negotiated end to the conflict” in which Russia withdraws from occupied territory. Biden seeks a Ukrainian victory, but not a total Russian defeat....

Ignatius says the Ukrainians he's spoken to "unanimously rejected" a negotiated settlement. Theirs is a fight to the decisive defeat of Russia. 

"Persuading Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to take the invasion danger seriously wasn’t easy, initially."

"Blinken spoke to him at the COP 21 climate summit in Glasgow in early November and provided a summary of intelligence about Russia’s plans. 'I basically had the task of telling him that we thought it was likely that his country was going to be invaded,' Blinken recalled. Zelensky was skeptical, according to a State Department official.... [I]n December, Blinken and his colleagues began seriously discussing with allies what steps they would take.... As a result, [Blinken] said, “when the aggression actually happened, we were able to move immediately.”... The Biden administration’s organization of this coalition to support Ukraine may look simple in retrospect. But it was a complicated coordination of diplomatic, military and intelligence resources that pulled together dozens of nations at what may prove to be a hinge point in modern history. Putin thought he could roll through Biden and the West to an easy victory in Kyiv. The Russian leader made a catastrophic mistake in overvaluing his own strength and underestimating the resolve of Biden and his team."

Writes David Ignatius, based on "new details" "Blinken and other officials gave me... this week," in "The secret planning that kept the White House a step ahead of Russia" (WaPo).

"President Trump’s senior military and intelligence officials have been warning him strongly against declassifying information about Russia..."

"... that his advisers say would compromise sensitive collection methods and anger key allies.... Trump and his allies want the information public because they believe it would rebut claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin supported Trump in 2016. That may sound like ancient history, but for Trump it remains ground zero — the moment when his political problems began.... CIA Director Gina Haspel last month argued strongly at a White House meeting against disclosing the information.... Haspel also met personally with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Tuesday.... Haspel’s most unlikely defender has been Attorney General William P. Barr, who opposed a pre-election push to declassify the sensitive material, according to three current and former officials. At a showdown meeting at the White House, Barr pushed back against revealing the secret information.... The issue may have played a role in Trump’s surprise decision on Monday to fire Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper...."

Writes David Ignatius (in The Washington Post).

Would Jeb Bush — as he has pledged — support Donald Trump as the nominee?

He was asked that question by John Dickerson on "Face the Nation" yesterday:

BUSH: Look, I have said -- I -- because anybody is better than Hillary Clinton. Let me just be clear about that. But I have great doubts about Donald Trump's ability to be commander in chief. I really do. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt to see how the campaign unfolded. But if you listen to him talk, it's kind of scary, to be honest with you, because he's not a serious candidate. He doesn't talk about the issues at hand that are of national security importance for our country. To keep us safe is the first priority of the president. And he's all over the map, misinformed at best, and preying on people's fear at worst.

Dickerson asked the apt question: "How would any of that specifically be better than Hillary Clinton?" What was Jeb supposed to say?

BUSH: Well, I will let voters decide about Donald Trump. I'm pretty confident that, the more they hear of him, the less likely it is he's going to get the Republican nomination.

Later, on the pundit panel, WaPo's David Ignatius effused:

IGNATIUS: I thought [Jeb] was powerful in taking out, calling out Donald Trump. I thought that this was moment in which he went to the heart of the matter, that Trump is playing on people's fears. This is -- it's getting toward Bush's last chance.

AND: Ignatius also summed up the whole show like this (addressing the host, John Dickerson):

You know, John, I heard one thing today on your show that really surprised me. I heard from John McCain talk about candidates bloviating in this race. I heard from Ben Carson talk about hateful rhetoric that was hurting the country. And I heard from Jeb Bush how Donald Trump was preying on people's fears. It's the first time I can remember hearing on one show three candidates speak out against the tone in the Republican race.

There's a real effort, in the elite mainstream media, to portray the GOP as ugly and aggressive and fear-mongering. And this is morphing into a focus on Trump: He, specifically, contains what normally is seen as permeating the GOP. The elite media are cheering on the GOP characters who are trying to take out Trump by adopting this rhetoric, but if Trump is taken out, it won't be long before mild-mannered Jeb and gentle Ben are accused of ugly aggressiveness and fear-mongering.

What if ISIS hit us here in the homeland: What would all the presidential candidates be saying we should do?

From yesterday's "Face the Nation" transcript. Peggy Noonan threw something forth as an idea — or as the transcript has it "fourthism (ph) idea":

[S]uppose ISIS hit the United States, as everybody fears. What would we all be thinking the next day was absolutely the right, urgent, strong thing to do?... What would that look like to us? And what would be the proper response at this point?

WaPo's David Ignatius gave this answer:

I -- certainly if we're hit directly, the public will support and even demand retaliation. I think there -- there are two roots [SHOULD READ: routes] that -- that we would follow in that case and should think about following now. One is to augment the direct action strikes that our special forces are already making every day inside Syria and Iraq. We are killing dozens of people who get back in touch with would-be attackers in the United States, who come in on -- on social media. And if you call -- if you get a call back, if you're one of those people who's trying to direct an operation, we'll try to kill you. And so -- you know, that's already going on. It should -- it should be augmented. The second, harder question is, whether to add ground troops. I mean from all the talk from McCain and Graham [who were on the show earlier], there is not an Arab ground force that can clear Raqqa or any of these places reliably. Are we going to provide that? Will we do that with NATO, with the -- with air -- a coalition of Arabs? Those are the kinds of questions that we would ask the next day and we should ask now.

In short, what we'd do then is what we should do now.