"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. 

"Meanwhile the Washington Post fact checker tweets a fake Fred Trump political ad. We can trust them!"

Says tim in vermont in the comments to "Ironically, the news that 'fake news' is 'killing people’s minds' is fake news."

Here's the shocking-if-true ad:



Here's WaPo's Philip Bump writing in an updated column that is now titled "No, Donald Trump’s father didn’t create racist ads for a mayoral bid":

A pair of ads allegedly created by President Trump’s father, Fred, for a 1970s mayoral bid circulated widely on the Internet this week. They were ads, one titled “Dope Man” and the other “Real New Yorkers,” presenting two depictions of the city during that decade. The first showed a black drug dealer wandering the streets of New York, culminating in a shot of two frightened-looking women with a “Paid for by the Committee to Elect Frederick C. Trump” banner at the bottom of the screen. The second was more optimistic — though the “real New Yorkers” depicted were only white New Yorkers.

If the ads were real, they would certainly be among the more racist ads in American political history, even by the standards of the 1970s. But they weren’t real.... The footage of the black drug dealer, which is available on at least one stock-footage site, is from a short film called “A Day in the Death of Donny B.” from 1969....

The idea that Trump’s father would have created starkly racist ads fits neatly into existing narratives about Trump and his family.

Here's the tweet WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler scrambled to delete:



And here's the Sidney Blumenthal piece that launched the fake news that took in the Fact Checker. It's now cleaned up and ends with the note:

A paragraph referring to Fred Trump’s campaign for mayor of New York, although it accurately reflected Trump’s racial attitudes and his hostility towards Mayor John Lindsay, has been removed because the campaign ads referred to appear to be clever fakes.

There's the old "fake but accurate" bullshit. The evidence is bad, and we tried to palm it off, but trust us, we were still correct about the facts were were trying to prove with fake facts.

"Republican lawmakers sharply questioned Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday..."

"... seeking to build a case that the former secretary of state had been derelict in her duty to secure the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi...."

The hearing was punctuated by a series of increasingly pointed exchanges, especially among Democratic and Republican committee members. At one point, a shouting match erupted between Mr. Gowdy and two Democrats on the committee about the focus on Mrs. Clinton’s email exchanges with Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide to her husband and a personal friend.

But after more than six hours of testimony, exasperated Democrats on the Republican-led panel said they might quit their participation on the committee, declaring it a partisan sham aimed at damaging the leading Democratic presidential candidate.

That makes it sound like Hillary was on the sidelines, which suits her interests.

I sat down to watch when it started. I thought she made a fine opening statement. Though I'm mostly a steely, distanced observer of political theater, it reached me when she said:

I traveled to 112 countries as Secretary of State. Every time I did, I felt great pride and honor representing the country that I love. We need leadership at home to match our leadership abroad. Leadership that puts national security ahead of politics and ideology.

Maybe some actress coached her, but she got just the right emotional pitch on the word "love." I don't know that she's good enough to fake that, but even complete frauds can choke themselves up at the appropriate cornball moment. Still, I thought it was real. Hillary Clinton loves our country. Does she not?

I stuck with it for the first few rounds of questions, enough to make me think she'd make it through the ordeal unscathed, perhaps even with new luster. I had other things to tend to. Who can sit around all day watching television? It's the first part that matters. She was fine. After that, only really striking things are noticed, and apparently all that happened was committee members fighting with each other. Meaningless. Am I being too blithe? Point out what I should care about. And don't say: 4 men died. That was very well covered by Hillary at the beginning of her prepared statement.

Hillary's confidante Sidney Blumenthal called John Boehner "louche, alcoholic, and lazy."

Louche! That really hurts.

Blumenthal went on to compare Boehner unflatteringly with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, saying that while Gingrich was "the natural leader of a 'revolution'", Boehner was "careworn and threadbare, banal and hollow, holding nobody's enduring loyalty."

Hillary's response was just "Thx, as always, for your insights," which is perfectly opaque and boring.

"Louche" is a great word. It means — according to the (unlinkable) OED) — "Oblique, not straightforward. Also, dubious, shifty, disreputable." Sounds like everyone in government, no?

The etymology is: It's French for squinting and comes from the Latin word "lusca," which is the feminine form of the word for one-eyed.

One of the historical examples at the OED comes from George Bernard Shaw, a 1905 letter to Granville Barker: "You could play Snobby. I want a slim, louche, servant-girl-bigamist, half-handsome sort of rascal."

ADDED: For fun, I wanted to add a picture of Hillary squinting. I ran across a bit of Think Progress nonsense from 2008: "Drudge Posts A Picture of Hillary Clinton With Squinted Eyes, Says She’s ‘Feeling Japanese.'" ("Drudge seems to have deliberately chosen a picture of Hillary that hints at Asian stereotypes — slanted eyes, arched eyebrows, and prominent teeth — to pair with the caption that she’s 'feeling Japanese.'")



Oh, that's not Japanese, it's just louche. Here's a better louche Hillary picture...



... with louche Bill as a bonus.

"Is Obama taking Hillary out?"

Monica Crowley's conspiracy theory is seeming more and more plausible, no?

[Hillary] tried to get her dirty tricks consigliere, Sidney Blumenthal, a top position in the State Department, which Mr. Obama pointedly denied. So she hired him anyway through the Clinton Foundation. Through Mr. Blumenthal, she was fed all kinds of intelligence on global hotpots such as Libya, much of it inaccurate, as she circumvented traditional government communication chains via her private email server. 

She didn't trust Obama, the theory goes, and Obama didn't trust her.

In a recently disclosed email, Mrs. Clinton complained that she heard “on the radio” that there was a “Cabinet meeting” that morning and wondered if she could attend. The secretary of state — fourth in line to the presidency — was frozen out, so she set up her own fiefdom.

Obama wants someone he can trust in charge of preserving his legacy, and that would be Joe Biden, Crowley says.

So here’s the likely plan: Mr. Biden will announce that he is running for president (the reported dying wish of his late son, Beau). After a respectable amount of time, Mr. Obama will announce that while he admires all of the Democratic candidates, Mr. Biden has earned his particular loyalty. Following his presidential endorsement, Mr. Obama will then support Mr. Biden with the full weight of the White House, including the sophisticated technical infrastructure his campaigns used to win in 2008 and 2012. For years, Mrs. Clinton has begged Mr. Obama to turn it over to her, and he refused. He’s been saving it for someone else. Mr. Obama will also use his considerable influence with black and Latino voters to support Mr. Biden, which may be enough to help him significantly....

Crowley connects her theory to the recent, weird New York Times story that "two inspectors general from [Obama's] administration recommended that the Justice Department open a 'criminal' inquiry into [Hillary's] handling of classified material." There's reason to think that the leak came from "Mr. Obama’s own consigliere, Valerie Jarrett."

The Times walked back some of the details, but the damage was done. If Mr. Obama did not want a DOJ criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton to go forward, he would not have let it go this far. He wants the investigation, wants her nailed, wants her out. And he’s doing it, slowly, steadily.

So says Monica Crowley, who should not be confused with that other Crowley, Candy Crowley, the woman who threw the last election (according to another conspiracy theory).

"Seven years after the feminists tried to bring down a Supreme Court nominee for sexual harassment — but really for his conservative stances — they went into contortions to defend Clinton. "

A sentence that deserves to be extracted from yesterday's Maureen Dowd column, which is titled and begins as if it's all about Rand Paul's comments connecting Bill's misdeeds to Hillary's presidential candidacy.

The title is "The Gospel According to Paul," which I didn't like because: 1. It appropriates religion for no reason, 2. I didn't immediately get which Paul it referred to (and avoided the column for a day because I had no interest in reading about Paul Krugman), 3. There was nothing gospel-like about the things Rand Paul had said, and 4. The column is really ultimately not about what Rand Paul thinks, because Dowd takes her own position about the relevancy of what Bill did to the decision whether to elect Hillary Clinton President.

Dowd's column ends:

It is not so simple to cast Hillary as a victim; she was also part of the damage-control team to vouch for her husband and undermine his mistress. White House aides and other Democrats spread the word that Monica was a troubled young woman with stalker tendencies. Sidney Blumenthal, a senior White House adviser, later testified that Hillary told him that “she was distressed that the president was being attacked, in her view, for political motives, for his ministry of a troubled person.”

Monica had to be sacrificed for the greater good of the Clintons and feminist ambitions. Hillary was furious at Bill — stories were leaked that he was sleeping on the couch — but she also had to protect her political investment. If he collapsed, she was done. And she was going up — to the Senate and eventually the Oval Office.

(Boldface added.)

ADDED: Meade, who's helping me proofread by reading this post aloud, pauses at the word "mistress" (which I've highlighted to help you find). He says: "That's old fashioned." And I think: And inaccurate! I ask, as is my wont, for permission to quote him, and he says yes and "Do I have your permission to do anything I want to you?" And now, I have to say: "Do I have permission to quote your 'Do I have your permission to do anything I want to you?'" And he says: "I don't think that would be understood very well, but yeah." And I'll just let you imagine what he said or I'll never be able to end this paragraph.