And I’m not talking about Biden Following up on Tom’s post below …. there’s more: Actually it’s also that he is losing what’s left of his limited faculties and it’s been happening for a long time. The mainstream media never questioned this lunatic’s mental fitness the way they are Biden’s: And then there’s the pathological lying and narcissistic personality disorder. Meanwhile, Biden has successfully brought the nation back from economic catastrophe in record time and better than any of our peer countries, managed to get major bipartisan legislation passed under almost impossible circumstances and reassured allies that we haven’t gone completely batshit insane.
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It’s different for everyone James Fallows has a great newsletter that you should subscribe to if you can. He’s been writing about all this, particularly the political press, for many years and his perspective is extremely valuable. This week he starts off interrogating the idea that age is a static thing for everyone and he quotes some experts on the subject: Last month several doctors and other authors assessed evidence that Biden was on the fortunate side of that divide, a “superager” on the Holmes / Stevens / Carter model. This is even though Biden “reads” as older than his near-contemporary Trump, mainly because of the stiffness of his gait. In this piece at MedPage Today and this in The Hill the authors emphasized differential aging rates and said about Biden: Then he asks a pertinent question. Might age be an advantage? In our youth obsessed culture that’s heresy but he makes a good case: The job of president finally comes down to judgment calls. Emphasize this bill, and not that one.
If you want to go deep on the Hur Report to see just how incredibly disingenuous his novelistic little hit job really is, nobody does it better than Emptywheel. Highly recommend, particularly if you’re interested in Hur’s shoddy legal reasoning. I thought I would share a good thumbnail version from twitter if you don’t have the time or inclination to dig into the details: So I went through and read Hur’s report, and the way the media at large has been presenting things is borderline malpractice. Please take the two minutes it requires to read this tweet because it really does matter. Let me lay it out for you. Hur is alleging there are two counts of Biden willfully retaining classified documents: The Afghanistan docs that were found in his Delaware home and his own personal notebooks. During an interview with a ghostwriter, he made reference to classified documents that were “downstairs” in his rented Virginia home. The supposition is that these are the Afghanistan documents that were later moved to his Delaware home in 2019 and then found by the FBI.
Ron Brownstein has written an in-depth piece for the Atlantic about Trump’s 2nd term immigration agenda. It is terrifying. But Trump and his henchmen are dead serious about carrying it out this time. And the reasoning isn’t just to get rid of immigrants they don’t like. It’s to demonstrate and consolidate power to rule by force in many other ways as well. Don’t think you won’t be affected. Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
Masha Gesson sat through the whole Putin interview. Here are a few of her thoughts. She speaks Russian, of course, so this doesn’t rely on the Kremlin translators as Tucker’s show does: : What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed by Tucker Carlson Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin first became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in 2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical trivia about Carlson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A.
On October 7, 2023, fighters from Hamas invaded Israel and killed around 400 soldiers and around 800 civilians. They raped, injured and kidnapped hundreds of others. By October 13, the Intelligence Ministry of Israel had produced a plan for how to deal with these attacks. Led by the Likud Party member Gila Gamliel, the document … Continue reading The Gamliel Plan
The press did not fail to learn from 2016. It learned what drew eyeballs. Do reporters want to find themselves flung out of windows after January 20, 2025 under a Trump dictatorship? Seems so, the way they rushed to cover the poisoned special counsel report on “painfully slow,” old Joe Biden’s handling of sensitive materials. His exoneration was buried beneath coverage of a gratuitous, MAGA-reinforcing narrative in the report raising Biden’s age as an issue. The path the press chose, The New Republic subhead reads, “suggests we’re stuck in 2016 again.” We know what Trump thinks of the media. We know he admires how Vladimir Putin and other world strong men control theirs. He dreams of ruling with an “iron fist,” like the Chinese president. We know what sort of second term he has in mind. A dictatorship, more or less, with himself unfettered by law to do as he pleases. Including to whom he pleases. So, does the American media have a death wish? Apparently, but reporters will be making the owners money all the way to the sidewalk.
Advice for Biden This piece by Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic makes a good point: [M]istakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career. Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining “why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed.
Yes, we’re talking about Republicans Michael Tomasky’s leadership of the New Republic has been a breath of fresh air. If you haven’t given it a look in years you need to go back to it and check it out. I don’t think it’s ever been this good.And Tomasky himself is writing a lot and it’s all characteristically sharp. Take this insight which I think is right on, made in the wake of the monumentally embarrassing week for congressional Republicans: Republicans today are consumed by this primal need for immediate gratification. They’re the party of the dopamine rush. Go read an article about the brain, and you’ll learn in five minutes that dopamine helps regulate pleasure, and pleasure is great, but too much dopamine leads to delusions, hallucinations, schizophrenia, psychosis. The entire party has a massive and collective mental disorder, a severe chemical imbalance in what remains of its collective brain, which explains why it kneels so slavishly before a psychotic man with the emotional regulation of a 5-year-old.
Let’s just put this week in the past, shall we? Have cocktail and enjoy: Aaaaaah…..