About the press conference last night...
I missed a party last night to watch Biden’s press conference. I initially thought I could make it because the conference was set for 5:30, and I assumed Joe would last 15 minutes. When the starting time moved to 6:30, I still thought I’d be partying. However, because Biden didn’t get to the podium until almost 7:30, I was stuck at home. Still, it was a great night. When Biden gave the world an hour of his standard shtick— endless use of “anyway” when he got lost in his thoughts, appeals to authority, whispers, shouts, antisemitism, and lies, all in response to polite questions from pre-selected journalists on his list—I thought, who needs a party to be happy? Joe didn’t go full demented, so the Dems are stuck with Biden.
By now, you’ve all heard about the gaffes. There was Biden’s introduction of President Putin of Ukraine during earlier NATO proceedings and, even better, Biden proudly boasted about “Vice President Trump”:
Vice President Trump pic.twitter.com/sBQnjFg8tt
— greg (@greg16676935420) July 11, 2024
Regarding Biden’s conduct, if you were willing to put up with Biden before the infamous debate at the end of June, you should still be willing to put up with Biden. He’s not functioning well, but he’s still functioning and can probably adequately mimic a candidate for the next four months. After all, we all confuse names (e.g., Putin v. Zelenskyy, Trump v. Harris, Afghanistan v. Israel). Standing alone that’s not enough to axe a candidate.
What really matters to America’s continued constitutional viability is that many of the Democrat faithful aren’t even bothering to pretend that they are voting for a constitutional president. Instead, they are voting for a Soviet-style commissariat, which sees a figurehead president and a cabal of high-level but mostly faceless bureaucrats presiding over the nation.
In this regard, it’s worth noting that Biden hasn’t met with his cabinet in nine months. It doesn’t matter who heads the ticket if the cabal carries out an increasingly radicalized platform. Provided that Biden doesn’t repeat his babbling, incoherent idiot performance, the base is satisfied.
And Biden’s performance was very adequate. I sensed that they got the medicines’ timing right this time. (And yes, I assume that he’s on tons of medicines. I also believe that the place to look for doctors’ visits isn’t the public White House visitors’ logs but the secret Delaware visitors’ logs from his weekly trips home.) Biden’s team timed his appearance perfectly when it came to maximum pharmaceutical efficacy, something that may explain Biden’s hour-long delay in appearing.
During the Q&A period, Biden blatantly solicited questions only from pre-selected (i.e., friendly) journalists, didn’t have to focus on what Trump was saying, and didn’t worry about a timer clicking away. Because these factors minimized Biden’s stress, his body wasn’t churning out the massive amounts of adrenalin that burned through his medicines more quickly.
Biden’s oft-repeated word “anyway” at the end of a discursive answer is a dementia tell. People who aren’t deep into dementia are very good at hiding it, as everyone knows who’s dealt with a parent with dementia.
Often, you only realize in retrospect that, when Mom abruptly cuts off a narrative to say, “But I don’t want to bore you,” she isn’t worried about boring you but, instead, has permanently lost her train of thought. Aggressive responses to questions are also a way to hide the fact that the person has no way to answer. Biden showed both traits repeatedly.
Biden also lied repeatedly during the press conference. And before someone jumps on me about Trump lying, Trump, the salesman, “puffs,” a legal term for exaggerations that don’t implicate facts. Saying that yours is the best product ever is puffery. Saying that your product will cause users to lose 25 pounds in a week, if that’s not true, is a lie. Trump puffs; Biden lies.
The obvious, big lies were:
- His assertion that Trump would put a 10% tariff on all products coming into America, when Trump only speaks of targeted tariffs against China;
- His lie that Trump called Putin’s invasion “genius” when Trump actually used that word to describe Putin’s rolling Biden in the lead-up to the invasion;
- His ginormous honker of a lie that the border is more secure now than it was when Trump left office;
- His insistence that five presidents have been elected despite poll ratings lower than Biden’s at this time in the campaign;
- His ludicrous claim that Trump, despite four years in office, knew nothing about NATO until a week ago;
- His excuse that his poor debate performance was due to traveling through 15 time zones in the week before the debate when he’d been home for almost 12 days by then;
- His claim that Palestinians are turning against Hamas when the opposite is true;
- His statement that the United Auto Workers just endorsed him, something that happened five months ago and that UAW leadership is now trying to walk back;
- His boast that thousands attend his rallies; and
- His screaming contention that guns are killing more American children than anything else which ignores (a) abortion and (b) the fact that most of the “children” killed with guns are legal adults of 18 or 19.
Showing the media’s disaffection with Biden, CNN, the WaPo, and the New York Times all fact-checked him! (Not very comprehensively, but still...)
Biden also showed his oozing contempt for Israel, blaming it entirely for the fact that there is no peace, which he explained would involve a “two-state solution” that would see Hamas retain control over the region. In other words, this farshtunkener alter noyef blames Israel for refusing a ceasefire that would ensure its annihilation. My theory is that Biden hates Israel as much as he does because every time he meets an Israeli leader (and he boasted last night that he was in the game with Golda Meir), those leaders remind him how fundamentally stupid he is.
As many commenters said, Biden was awful but not so awful that Democrats can justify jettisoning their chosen candidate in the four months before the election. In other words, if one ignores the fact that this human detritus is the official head of America, it was a great night for Republicans.