"'It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.' We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized."

"Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."

Kamala Harris writes, quoted in "Harris admits Biden 'got tired,' denies 'conspiracy' to hide mental decline/'107 Days' reveals Harris felt unsupported by Biden staff on foreign policy and immigration issues" (Fox News).

How could it be recklessness? Everyone — "we all" — adopted a stock phrase to protect their own political interests and to avoid responsibility for depriving the country of a legitimate primary process and to foist her on us.

I guess it means something that she's calling herself and her confederates reckless. It is bad to be reckless, so she's admitting fault. It's just not believable that the fault was in carelessly disregarding the risks. It was coldly deliberate, and it would have been brilliant, I'm sure they all thought, if it had worked, and she'd won.

You're probably seeing some hot clips from this Hunter Biden interview.

Here's the whole fucking thing:

Go to 2:24:10 for the material about Joe Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. Snippet: "They give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage and he looks like he's a deer in the headlights. And it feeds into every fucking story that anybody wants to tell, and Jake Tapper with literally how many anonymous sources. If  this was a conspiracy, Andrew, you know this, somehow the entirety of a White House in which you're literally living on top of each other has kept their mouth shut about, you know, like what and what's the conspiracy? Yeah. That Joe Biden got old. Yeah, he got old. He got old before our eyes. The people that came out against him were who? Nobody. Except speaker Pelosi. Speaker Pelosi did not give a full-throated endorsement which allowed everybody else to kind of go okay. Except who who came out full-throated? Progressives. AOC, Bernie, the entire  progressive wing."

"Biden drops out!"

That was the news exactly one year ago and the title of my blog post on the occasion.

I said: "My longstanding tag — 'biden drops out' — has come true."

Actually, I believed Biden would resign the presidency within a few weeks of his inauguration in 2021, but I didn't use my "biden drops out" tag for that. I didn't begin that tag until January 30, 2024, when the Washington Post published "Biden faces treacherous political choices in answering deadly attack/Republicans demand that Biden attack Iran. Some warn that risks a wider Middle East conflagration" (WaPo).

I found this line deeply disturbing:

"Former President Joe Biden’s advisers convinced the aging commander in chief to hold an early summer debate with Donald Trump last year by insisting it would allow him to reach the “widest audience possible'..."

"... a leaked memo reveals. The six-page document dated April 15, 2024 — 73 days before the disastrous forum that tanked Biden’s re-election bid — bizarrely capitalizes and bolds any references to the 46th president. 'By holding the first debate in the spring, YOU will be able to reach the widest audience possible, before we are deep in the summer months with the conventions, Olympics, and family vacations taking precedence,” reads the memo.... 'In addition, the earlier YOU are able to debate the better, so that the American people can see YOU standing next to Trump and showing the strength of YOUR leadership, compared to Trump’s weakness and chaos,' it continues...."

I'm reading "Biden advisers pushed early Trump debate to reach ‘widest audience possible,’ leaked memo reveals" (NY Post).

The bold and capitalized YOU and YOUR looks like something from a scammy advertisement aiming to separate weak-minded seniors from their life savings.

I don't for one minute believe the advisers believed the assertions in the memo. I will be presuming that they could see he was going to be incapable of appearing competent and that they needed to push him to release his hold on the nomination, and they only wanted to do that once the primaries were over and it was too late to do anything but advance Kamala Harris. So they conned him into humiliating himself in the debate and giving the media the basis for declaring him unfit — as if they just noticed — and demanding that he withdraw.

The advisers were not mistaken. They knew what they were doing. They were lying. And they were devious. Let me restate that. THEY knew what THEY were doing. THEY were lying. And THEY were devious.

That's my presumption. Prove me wrong.

"This Fourth of July, I am taking a moment to reflect. Things are hard right now. They are probably going to get worse before they get better."

"But I love our country — and when you love something, you fight for it. Together, we will continue to fight for the ideals of our nation."

Tweeted Kamala Harris, quoted in "Critics slam Kamala Harris for gloomy July 4 post — with photo that crops out Biden" (NY Post). That reads as though somebody forced her. Come on, you have to write something for the 4th of July.

Speaking of Biden and The New York Post, there's also "Biden struggles to set up beach chair in Malibu during first Fourth of July weekend since leaving office." Malibu! Whatever happened to Delaware? Oh, I see Malibu is Hunter's home. As for the struggling with the chair, he has Stage 4 cancer, and he is no longer attempting to serve as President. 

Joe Biden speaks to the press — a bit mumblingly — for 3 1/2 minutes.

"You can see that I'm mentally incompetent, I can't walk," he wisecracks. "And I could beat the hell out of both of them," he says — about Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, the co-authors of that book about Biden's decline.

Another addition to the list of quotes of Biden threatening to or bragging about beating somebody up — "If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him," etc.

By the way, I'm seeing reports that Tapper's book — despite the onslaught of publicity — isn't doing very well. I know I won't buy it. I think he shouldn't be rewarded for sitting on the information, apparently in the hope of helping Democrats win the election, and now trying to profit from revealing it. And it's absurd the way he's been going around acting as though he has just learned that journalists ought to do journalism and report events as they happen without toadying to the powerful.

AND: Why does Biden lean into the faces of female reporters? I think it's a grandpa move that has worked to delight little girls. The femaleness of the reporters makes them more like little girls to him than like what they are, adults engaged in professional work. He can't help it, just like he can't help threatening to "beat the hell out of" male antagonists. 

"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. 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. 

"The book has also amplified debate about whether more blame should be placed on Democratic leaders, Mr. Biden’s staff and the press for not revealing more about the former president earlier...."

"Intentionally or not, by being an author of a major book on the subject, Mr. Tapper has allowed himself to become a symbol of the establishment press that conservatives have long accused of hiding the former president’s frailty from the public. [Megyn] Kelly, the former Fox News star, subjected Mr. Tapper to intense grilling on her popular podcast in an interview that went viral online. 'You covered the Biden presidency aggressively throughout the four years, and you didn’t cover mental acuity, hardly at all,' Ms. Kelly said at one point. 'I mean, time and time again when issues came up, you seem to be running cover for the president.' Mr. Tapper denied the charges. 'Conservative media absolutely has every right to say, "We were hip to this, and the legacy media was not,"' he said later in the interview. 'Now, I do not accept that I was part of a cover-up. I do not accept that I was just providing cover for Joe Biden.'"

From "Everyone Now Has an Opinion on Jake Tapper/A book the CNN host co-wrote has received positive reviews and appears to be a sales hit. But it has also generated intense scrutiny of him and his work" (NYT).

So... you weren't "hip to this."

Why not? And why would I read a book written by such an out-of-touch, unobservant, slow learner? Or should I ask why would I read a book written by such a liar?

"Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board. I’ve never seen a situation like this before..."

"... with so few people having so much power. They would make huge economic decisions without calling [Treasury] secretary Yellen."

Said an unnamed member of Biden's Cabinet, quoted in "Meet the Biden 'politburo' accused of running the country in secret/There was the aide who demanded $4 million to advise the re-election campaign. There was the enforcer who 'cast out heretics.' And there was Jill Biden" (London Times).

The Five: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain, Bruce Reed, Anthony Bernal. Plus: Jill Biden, Hunter Biden.

Megyn Kelly corners Jake Tapper, who only apologizes for supposedly not noticing Joe Biden's decline...

... but it looks far more likely that he saw but chose to be part of the coverup:

"Of course, I've said I I look back at my coverage with humility and and uh I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity but I wish I had covered them much more and I wish I mean of course..."

Watch the whole video, please, and see how Jake Tapper treated Lara Trump when she was a guest on his show on October 18, 2020. Kelly shows the video clip in which Lara Trump called attention to Biden's lack of mental acuity — the subject of Tapper's new book — and Tapper accused her of mocking Biden's stutter.

Watch Tapper's face and listen to his voice as he berates her for her lack of empathy. That's very effective on many women. Not on Lara Trump, but on many women, including many viewers of Tapper's show, and I presume he knows it. You can do a lot of subordinating of women by stimulating our fear that we may be regarded as unkind. 

A bubble-wrapped President protected by a chimera in a mirage in an alternate universe.

I'm trying to read "The Tragedy of Joe Biden" by Maureen Dowd:

By the end, when he was bubble-wrapped in 2024, he trusted only his family and his closest aides. And they protected him with a damaging chimera. Sugarcoated interpretations of polls that were not reflected elsewhere. Extreme efforts to redesign the presidency to adapt to his ever more fragile state. Trashing Robert Hur for telling the truth. Refusing to do the cognitive testing that might have established a diagnosis....Tapper and Thompson show how Biden and his inner circle created an alternate universe that they tried to sell to the media and the public — the sort of corrosive mirage of unreality that Trump excels at building....

Trump! How did Trump get into that metaphorical mishmash?

I do like this part, which names names:

It was not just Joe and Jill who wanted to hang on to power, with all the perks and trips and, for Jill, glamorous Vogue covers. It was also their advisers, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini. The “palace guard,” as Chuck Schumer derisively dubbed top Biden advisers, slid from sycophancy to solipsism. The more Biden was out of it, the more his hours and responsibilities were curtailed, the more of a vacuum there was at the top, the more power the advisers had...

They bubble-wrapped the President, put him in a mirage in an alternate universe, and set up a chimera to do whatever it is chimeras do. So they fooled him and they also fooled us, they being Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini... and who else? Where was Maureen Dowd and the rest of the press — among the foolers or the fooled? And she's saying Joe Biden is a tragedy? Too many fools. Too many villains. It's a comedy. 

Instead of "The Tragedy of Biden," write a column titled "The Comedy of Biden." Use Shakespeare as your model of tragedy and comedy and tell me why we, the audience — we the People — experience Trump as Falstaff and — for all his faults — love him.

Randy Barnett is a model of concision.

"We don’t need @jaketapper or anyone else to tell us Biden has been increasingly senile since the 2020 election. We need them to tell us who was actually running the federal government from 2020-2024 and how they did it. You’re not coming clean until you come clean about that."

At X.

Ironically, some of us would have empathized with Biden if we'd been allowed to hear this at the time.

It's the coverup that really hurts.

The scandal is MUCH worse than the Biden WH not releasing the tape. The so-called “independent” Merrick Garland crooked Justice Dept was SUBPOENAED by Congress to release it, he defied that subpoena after jailing Steve Bannon for defying one, then DOJ refused to jail Garland. https://t.co/TLzzdrosZf

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) May 16, 2025

"Plenty of Democrats are annoyed that 'Original Sin' has catapulted the issue of Biden’s enfeeblement back into the news..."

"... threatening to distract voters from Donald Trump’s rococo corruption. I think, though, that Tapper and Thompson have done the party a favor. Some sort of reckoning is due for the disastrous missteps that paved the way for Trump’s return.... Party officials burned a lot of credibility defending Biden’s cognitive fitness. As they seek to earn it back, they should be honest about what they got wrong. Politically, the easiest move for Democrats is to dump all the blame onto Biden, his family and the clique of longtime aides Tapper and Thompson call 'the Politburo': Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed. This group certainly deserves to be excoriated.... But while his closest associates might have hidden the worst of erosion, it was plain enough to anyone willing to see it. Again and again, voters told pollsters that the president was too old to run for re-election. If ordinary people recognized the problem, why couldn’t the insiders?"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden’s Infirmity?" (NYT).

I don't know what "sort of reckoning" you're going to get if you keep saying "too old" when you mean mentally deficient and when you ask why couldn’t the insiders "recognize the problem" when you can't see inside the insiders' head.

I don't think you yourself are recognizing the problem when you say the problem was that he was "too old" and when you portray the insiders as sincerely failing to see what was there. If they saw that he was quite old, they could nevertheless believe that he was an old one with excellent capacities.

But I'd guess that they knew he lacked capacity, and I wonder if the reason they didn't recognize that problem is that Joe Biden has lacked capacity all along — including when he ran in 1988 — and the insiders were always operating through him and didn't particularly need or want him to have what it takes to serve as President.

So if you want a serious reckoning, reckon with that. But you don't, do you? You didn't then, and you don't now. You're just hoping Trump will fail so badly, that the much-abused people will come stumbling back to you in the end because there's nowhere else to go. 

I don't want to read a Clooney-centric account of how the Democrats allowed Joe Biden to win the nomination and then swiped it from him.

The New Yorker has this excerpt from Jake Tapper's new book: "How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump/At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?"

I bailed early, preferring to interact with Grok. My prompts, exactly as I wrote them, presented in order and with zero Grok-written material:

1. Summarize this article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/how-joe-biden-handed-the-presidency-to-donald-trump

2. I skimmed it and it seemed so Clooney-focused it put me off

3. I'd like a critical perspective on the piece that is skeptical of this interest in Clooney. I don't care to read a step by step story of what happened as Biden got excluded from the nomination he won in the primaries. I want much more skepticism about the way the Democratic Party allowed him to win the nomination in the first place and got itself into the seeming (or bullshit) jam it was in last summer

4. Did Democrats engineer a nomination for Harris that she couldn't have won in a fair primary or did Democrats accidentally wait too long to lose hope in Biden and find themselves in the position where they couldn't avoid giving it to Harris? And how did the mainstream media contribute to the problem?

5. Make a clear and concise list of why Tapper's going Clooney-centric exemplifies what's wrong with mainstream media politics and with the Democratic Party

I've spared you any material written by Grok, because I presume you don't want to read what was written without a human mind. But I think what Grok wrote is more useful than what's in The New Yorker.

In case you want to read how the machine reacted to my prompts, here's the link.

"President Trump wrote on social media on Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol..."

"... and a range of other people whom Mr. Trump sees as his political enemies, because they were signed using an autopen device.... But Mr. Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric. Implicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated."

The NYT reports.

The NYT writer — Shawn McCreesh — observes "There is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon, and there is no exception to pardons signed by autopen," but to say that is to look past the question whether there  was a pardon. Even if a pardon can't be undone, how do we know it was ever done? We have a piece of writing, signed by autopen, and maybe it can be shown to have originated within the White House. The power that is in the Constitution is given to "The President," so, interpreting that clause, one might question whether his hand must do the signing... and whether his mind comprehended what he was doing.

But I can't believe courts would entertain challenges like that. It's the ultimate can of worms. Consider the parallel problem in the exercise of power within the judicial branch. We assume that the judicial opinions that emerge from the usual channels are signed/"signed" by the judges whose names appear on them and that the judges minds made the decisions that appear in the words of the text. We may well suspect that law clerks wrote the some of the opinions and even that some of the judges don't understand "their" own opinions. But we accept that they are what they purport to be. Beyond that lies chaos.

ADDED: Here is Trump's post on Truth Social:

"In a political environment like this, you throw at the wall whatever you can."

"This is a political rather than a legal struggle.... It would succeed only in a different environment than we have.... The real question is what political message is being sent."

Said lawprof Laurence Tribe, quoted in "Can He Do That? Here’s What Biden’s Move on the Equal Rights Amendment Means. Presidents have no direct role in approving constitutional amendments. So what could President Biden’s pronouncement recognizing a new one actually do?" (NYT).

From the article: "Proponents of the Equal Rights Amendment have long made it clear that their strategy is primarily a political, not a legal one. Their goal is to dare Republicans to challenge the legitimacy of sex equality, and of moving to nullify something as simple as equal rights for women."

I don't think Biden even purported to "do" anything. He merely stated his legal opinion. Given the well-known deterioration of his mental capacity, who cares what he thinks?

Anyway, as you endeavor to maintain your own mental sharpness, take note of what's happening in the twilight between law and politics.

AND: Tribe's line "you throw at the wall whatever you can" seems to relate to the old expression "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks." How did that get started? Grok tells me about a 1946 cookbook callled "You Can Cook If You Can Read." It says you can test whether spaghetti is done by throwing it against the wall. I don't know if that's the origin of the expression. I always think of Walter Matthau throwing the spaghetti linguini against the wall in "The Odd Couple":

PLUS: I don't know if this is less or more amusing, but a colleague just sent me a link to "The ERA Is Now Law!" by Professor Tribe in — of all places — The Falls Church News-Press. It's also at that new website The Contrarian, with a different title: "The Equal Rights Amendment at Long Last/Thanks to President Biden, the Constitution will finally guarantee equality for all."

My colleague thinks Tribe is contradicting himself: first, Tribe said it was law, and then Tribe said it was politics. My response is that saying it's law is doing politics. You decide: Is it spaghetti, linguini, or garbage?

"Trump is returning as a colossus."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Trump Brings a Chill to Washington" (NYT).

He has brought Washington — Democrats and Republicans — to heel, teamed up with Elon Musk and slapped a gold “Trump” sign on Silicon Valley. The lords of the cloud helped fund the coronation, and they are making a pilgrimage here to bow to their new overlord. (This includes the C.E.O. of TikTok, who is surely hoping that his company’s sponsoring of an inauguration party and his online flattery about Trump’s 60 billion TikTok views will lead the new president to save the social media platform.) But not everyone is looking forward to what’s in store. It will be hard to forget Trump’s day of infamy, Jan. 6, as he gets sworn in at the Capitol, which was smeared with blood and feces by rioters recast by Trump and his acolytes as “hostages,” “patriots,” “tourists” and “grandmothers.”...

As for Biden:  

[H]e will be merely a footnote in the vertiginous saga of how Trump won the White House again.... [T]he chip on Biden’s shoulder devoured his judgment about what was good for him, for his party and for the country. His narcissism trumped his patriotism.... Many noticed that Biden was in a fog, or “dans les vapes,” as an aide to President Emmanuel Macron of France called it....

"Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.’s obituary will be stalked by the counterfactual: What if he hadn’t made the selfish decision to run for reelection?"

"What if he had passed the torch a year or even six months earlier?... The way that events unfolded—his catastrophic debate performance, the stark clarity with which the nation came to understand his geriatric state–-beggars belief. Why didn’t Democrats stage an intervention earlier? Why didn’t his aides stop him from running?"

Writes Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, in "How Biden Destroyed His Legacy/The president’s accomplishments are considerable, but on his signature issue of preserving democracy, he failed spectacularly."

Let me answer those questions (as I'm sure you can answer them): Democrats wanted 4 more years of a mentally deficient presidential figurehead for their power. They just desperately changed their plan when we the people got too good of a sudden, scary glimpse at what they'd been up to.

But Foer says: "A cabal intent on preserving its own power would never have blundered in such tragically self-defeating fashion." And: "Democrats ignored a cascade of warning signs...." Is Foer writing to give them cover?

What do you think? Why didn’t Democrats stage an intervention earlier? 

So, what's your answer?

Cabal

Bumblers

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I keep rereading this sentence: "A cabal intent on preserving its own power would never have blundered in such tragically self-defeating fashion." It gets funnier every time. 

"I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution."

From "Statement from President Joe Biden on the Equal Rights Amendment."

What does that mean? Did he do anything or is he just sharing his thoughts?

From the NYT: "Trump Transition Live Updates: Equal Rights Amendment Has Passed, Biden Says, but He Does Not Force Certification": "President Biden... said he would not press a legal fight by ordering the government to finalize the process by officially publishing it."

The conspicuous doing of nothing.