Biden the empath; Biden the mellow
Not.
Details on what he said and did during his Maui appearances can be found here and here.
Biden may be the most tone-deaf politician who ever lived. The left must be desperate to replace him but for a host of reasons hasn’t done it yet, and may not be able to figure out how to do it. Then again, what with anti-Trump lawfare and rigging and MSM propaganda and perhaps even voting fraud, they may think they can win again in 2024. And so which candidate runs becomes almost irrelevant.
And yet, and yet – what an awful guy Biden is. Last night I was asking a friend of mine who’s also a Democrat-to-Republican changer if he can ever remember liking Biden, even back when he was a Democrat. I can’t. He said he couldn’t either.
Then again, we have the seemingly delusional Mona Charen and her ilk. Look, I’m familiar with Republican – or ex-Republican – NeverTrumpers and their often-bizarre reasoning. But Mona Charen’s column on cuddly, mellow Joe Biden reads like parody. Can she really mean this?:
So Biden has some work to do to prove that he’s not senile or decrepit. This has been a favorite GOP talking point since 2020, yet Biden has not been able to debunk it despite owning the bully pulpit, so something has to change there.
What could it be? What on earth could it be that might have to change? Could the problem reside in the fact that Biden is somewhat “senile and decrepit,” and so despite all efforts it’s been hard to disguise that fact and “debunk” (love that word) that “GOP talking point”? In other words, maybe it’s not just a talking point?
More from Charen (and I think this is my favorite part of her piece):
Biden, by contrast [to Trump], does seem to have mellowed with age. I can recall a younger Biden who got himself into multiple embarrassing gaffes because he was prickly, sensitive about his dignity, and quick to anger. The older Biden is more comfortable in his skin.
I can recall a younger Biden who got himself into multiple embarrassing gaffes because he was prickly, sensitive about his dignity, and quick to anger – and that younger Biden was as recent as yesterday and the day before. In fact, Biden has been that way his entire life, and age has done the opposite of mellowing him, although it has made him less energetic.
Charen’s piece is just another reminder of the hollowness of many people who were once considered thoughtful and intelligent observers, worthy of listening to on political matters.
It does make you wonder if Mona Charen actually truly believes what she’s saying. Assuming she actually does, one wonders what kind of extreme cognitive dissonance must being going on in her head to be able to block out all the evidence of mental impairment. There’s the constant gaffes and slurred speech, not to mention the diminished ambulatory capacity (how many times has Biden tripped on the Airforce One stairs?). And of course his angry outbursts at reporters for daring to ask certain questions. To not notice all that stuff while ostensibly being in the political commentary business seems like an astonishing level of willful ignorance to me anyway.
“Charen’s piece is just another reminder of the hollowness of many people who were once considered thoughtful and intelligent observers, worthy of listening to on political matters.”
People like Charen…what happened to them? Were they only playing to the right in order to sell books, get their face on t.v., and make a buck? Did they ever believe what they peddled? Do they believe what they peddle currently?
Is it a simple case of their being hollow or is it more than that? I have family who have shifted to the left and am puzzled as to how that can happen. How can you believe in property rights one minute and the next minute believe it’s perfectly fine for the government to force you to share your hard-earned resources with lazy ne’er-do-wells? How do you stand for blind justice one minute and the next minute decide the Biden syndicate deserves a pass?
Seriously, what happened?
As I keep saying, you have to wonder. They either believe–which is hard to believe–or they’re lying.
Maybe there’s a filter which keeps reality out…?
Lying about facts they assert and about what they believe. But if they don’t believe, why lie?
windbag:
I wish I knew the answer to your question.
The conventional answer about people like Charen – and I think it’s at least partly true – is that they live in an elite-commentator bubble in which people just felt Trump was icky and declasse and a boor and therefore anyone who supported him was likewise. They didn’t want to be considered icky declasse boors themselves, and so they turned against the entire right. I think that’s too simplistic an explanation but I definitely think it’s part of what happened.
People can talk themselves into things if the motivation is strong enough.
As opposed to pundits and supposed political experts, the regular folk who change their minds are probably operating under a host of other motives. I cut them a bit more slack. Perhaps it’s just virtue signaling, perhaps it’s the relentless drumbeat of the anti-right lies of the press, perhaps it’s both.
Nonapod is much nicer than me. My response is: “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HER!!??! HAS SHE LOST HER MIND??!!??”
Biden nodding off to sleep in Hawaii has been circulating in the video clips. There are a few excellent suppositions one could make as to why this happened. The one I like is the idea that Joe’s handlers have reached the limits of his drug routine.
Neo, I think you have put your finger on the explanation of much TDS. Peggy Noonan was a good example. I met Mona Charen on an NRO cruise one time. That was back when NR was still sane or at least their donors had not yet flipped.
There was a strange flip back around 1990 when the rich, especially the tech rich, went all Democrat. I can remember one of the early tech billionaires saying that he supported Democrats because his wife was very concerned about abortion.
A lot of the rich moved left, like the Disney and Walton heirs, as a form of virtue signaling. “I inherited my money but I’m a good person because I support Black Lives Matter.”
They don’t care about economics anymore. Their advisors take care of that. Trump is different because he made the money. His children or, more likely, grandchildren, may be more like those we see.
Lee Also:
My original title for a post on the Charen piece was, “Has Mona Charen gone stark raving mad?”
David Frum is an heir to a centimillionaire. It’s a reasonable wager his balance sheet is flush even if he’s not making a dime from his writing. George Will at his peak had a gross income of $1 million a year from speaking fees, broadcast appearances, and his column. His children are out of school. It’s a reasonable wager he avoids offending various interests who hire his wife’s PR and lobbying firm, but they don’t need the money at this point. Mona Charen is the wife of a partner in a Washington BigLaw firm; if any of her 20-something children are on her books, it’s only due to parental indulgence. All of them are past their peak professionally and only Frum and his wife are shy of retirement age (Will is 82). These people can’t be bought. They’re telling you what they actually think and how they respond to data.
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The younger set have bills to pay. In the case of Megan McArdle and Ross Douthat, the whole situation is rather poignant. As for the rest of them, the only characters worth reading that Richard Lowry ever recruited were contractors who had salaried positions elsewhere. The people who actually worked for him were consistently insipid and still are, no matter who pays the bills.
Art Deco:
The rich almost always want to get richer. Often, much richer.
I don’t think it’s about money, anyway. I think it’s about class, status, groupthink, and snobbery.
A lot of the rich moved left, like the Disney and Walton heirs
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The Disneys aren’t the Fords. They don’t own much of the company. The last of the Dinsey heirs to work for the company died in 2009.
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The vociferous leftoid is Walt Disney’s grandniece, who has never worked for Disney. She’s been the ‘executive producer’ for scads of ‘documentaries’ of the sort which get screened only on college campuses and for which the price of admission is gratis.
Lee Also on August 22, 2023 at 4:07 pm said:
Nonapod is much nicer than me. My response is: “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HER!!??! HAS SHE LOST HER MIND??!!??”
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This is very similar to what Norman Podhoretz said about Bill Kristol, when interviewed at Ricochet, about his (NP’s) continuing support of Trump.
According to NPR and my local Librag, Joe did a terrific job as Empath-in-Chief in Maui, and the AWFL people in my family are quite smug about it! So what’s the problem?!
Ps. The Librag did mention in the very last paragraph that a few local “Republicans” were critical of his visit. Well, being a Republican in Maui means you have to cover a lot of territory!
Neo, the line of thinking that many find Trump icky is accurate I think. I hear many Trump supporters qualify support for him with a disclaimer up front about his character.
I think he’s icky. I wouldn’t trust him to watch over my wallet or my daughter over the weekend. But that’s the touchy feely part. The part that counts is what he did, and when challenged to state his failings as President his enemies either say “Russia, Russia, Russia” or some form of “mean tweets.” Thin gruel for assessing a President.
I expect more from pundits who claim to conservatives.
(sarcasm)Wait so you mean to tell me that Joe isn’t fundamentally a good guy? (/sarcasm)
Anyway I think part of it is an excluded middle fallacy. IE they really hated Trump for one reason or another so therefore Biden must be good. As far as I can tell some didn’t like Trump because they’re dyed in the wool lefties. The rich probably don’t like Trump because they figure the trade deals he wants to work out will cost them large sums of money in Asian economies. Of course I should point out my own view of the two. I will always say “Trump is a clown but Biden is just a crook.” (Trump may make a lot of stupid noise but at least he did a good job in his presidency. Biden and buddies are just robbing us blind.)
https://twitter.com/a_newsman/status/1694099443509858644
People who comment on non-commercial political blogs aren’t always the most polished writers but they tend to be serious about their positions. Big columnists tend to be professional writers. Would it be a surprise to learn that some famous conservative columnists are more devoted to perpetuating their writing gigs than to intellectual or ideological consistency?
Human are vulnerable, tribal creatures of flesh, blood and emotions. Reason is pretty far down that list.
Turns out that National Review columnists with solid academic degrees (Charen — BA with Honors @Barnard, JD @ George Washington U) are no exceptions.
I wouldn’t put Sundowner as tone deaf, he has always lived in his world and it’s all about him. And last few years that world is make believe.
It is soothing to ignore the political “influencers”.
Now, I chose the term “influencers” deliberately as the launch point for a rant. The person who invented that description, IMO, should be sentenced to a period in the stocks.
The term has become almost ubiquitous. Which verifies the notion that people who write in the media seldom have an original thought. Recently I have read about tennis influencers, golf influencers, entertainment influencers and, of course, media influencers. There are apparently influencers all around us. To my knowledge, no one has ever defined the parameters that establish one as an influencer
End of that rant.
I agree with Neo. The real divide in this classless society is class. If I were to classify the classes I think I would define two. There is a large, and growing, underclass, which some would call the underbelly; and everyone else. The Underbelly are largely locked in by a variety of factors, with relatively few breaking the barriers. On the other hand it is possible for members of the “everyone else” class to move up or down in status or wealth relatively uninhibited. Of course there are certain people who self identify as “a class above”. Ironically, many in the self identified “class above” often behave with no class.
I note that some now use support for Trump as a dividing line between classes. If that is true, I don’t know where I fit. Back in the primary season of ’15 and ’16, I opposed Trump. During the lead up to the election of 2016, I supported Trump over Hillary. This support continued for his policies, if not always for his personal quirks, through his Presidency. Now, I do not support Trump. However, if he is the GOP nominee, I will support Trump.
This may illustrate that there is a class of people who fall between the “never Trumpers” and the “only Trumpers”. I hope that it is a large group.
Being a professional commentator is a business. It’s a business of telling the Outer Party what the Inner Party thinks they should hear.
I’m not sure why we’d assume that any of those people actually write what they really believe, any more than we should assume that actors really think like the characters they play. Some actors are more believable in some roles than others, and some commentators are more believable with one set of opinions than others, that’s all.
There is no group of decision makers, in the private sector or in government, who are waiting to hear what Mona Charen and her ilk think before they make decisions. It all goes the other way haven’t you noticed: government or business does something, and then the commentariat opines on it for mass consumption. There’s nothing that flows through them to the people who make decisions. The different factions of the establishment have their pet commentators and their pet channels for disseminating their views to the small fraction of the public that follows politics.
Big media has been completely captured by government and marketing. It stands to reason that so have the professional commentators, if they care to continue to have a mass audience and an income.
The ones who probably believe the things they write about are going to be those, like our gracious hostess, who essentially do it as a hobby, or those like Mark Steyn who have given up on the income stream from big media and have to be supported by their readers.
It’s very discouraging to read that the media are covering up Biden’s appalling comments and demeanor in Maui. Neo wrote recently about the demise of shame. Legacy media writers and commentators have no shame.
….”is that they live in an elite-commentator bubble in which people just felt Trump was icky and declasse and a boor and therefore anyone who supported him was likewise.” -Neo
Trump loves the working-class people – the people who built his buildings and golf courses. He’s always rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful, but I think he found them to be less to his liking than blue-collar workers.
Trump also likes to act uber-masculine – many men do, but today it’s unacceptable “toxic masculinity.” It turns educated, sophisticated elites off.
His style of speaking is not in complete sentences. That’s off-putting for many. He doesn’t sound polished and erudite. That’s unacceptable to the Ivy elites.
He’s not afraid to fight for what he believes is right. But he often picks fights unnecessarily and punches down. Many see that as bullying, but Trump sees it as meeting all challenges, no matter who or what. He’s an unapologetic fighter, and many elites see that as scary and unacceptable behavior.
Hillary said it best. The Beltway Elite see him and his supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”
IMO, if you want to see the difference between the deplorables and the “nice people,” observe the difference between the fans at an NFL game and the fans at an MLS soccer match. Observe the difference in the way they watch, cheer, and dress – night and day. My guess is that most soccer fans are the sort of people who hate Trump, and the football fans are mostly his base.
Personality matters to many voters more than policy, or so it seems.
All that said, I will vote for whoever wins the GOP nomination.
I would much prefer to think that Charen doesn’t believe a word of what she wrote. The idea that a reasonably intelligent person who actually pays attention to what Joe Biden does and says could believe what Charen wrote is just too sad.
“Last night I was asking a friend of mine who’s also a Democrat-to-Republican changer if he can ever remember liking Biden, even back when he was a Democrat. I can’t. He said he couldn’t either.”
I never did either. He always came off as disingenuous and self serving, even for a politician.
As to Charen, much like David Brooks, she has her niche now: being the acceptable ‘conservative’ voice to bash Trump, hus supporters and pretty much all Republicans outside the Beltway, for a liberal audience
Charen, reminds me of the lady who suggested liberal women should all “service” Bill Clinton because he protected the sacrament of the left, abortion.
Like huxley noted above…it’s a tribal thing. Biden (INO because we know it really wasn’t him) kept the other tribal chief (POTUS Trump) from holding office again. That’s enough to begin the hagiographic writing.
Biden never registered with me as anything more than a mediocrity, a wannabe Prez candidate.
It was in the 2012 campaign, when I listened to the Biden-Ryan Veep debate, that I realized Biden was a deeply mean-spirited politician hiding behind a fake grandfatherly geniality.
Oldflyer:
I am in the same class as you, whatever that class is.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-hearing-president-trump-in-person-and-not-hating-it/
Naomi has some answers to the question above.
Biden has a work-around, a crutch, a gimmick. Joe tells people about his own tragedies and sufferings, in the hope that they’ll think he understands and cares, and maybe they’ll feel a little sorry for him. That’s the way that he creates the impression that he’s empathetic.
There are two problems with this. First, Joe uses it with people who have experienced real tragedies. It may work with people who are having a not great time in life, but it doesn’t really work with people who have to cope with great sufferings. The second problem is that using the gimmick becomes automatic. Joe doesn’t have to think about it. Showing “empathy” replaces actually feeling empathy. That’s not an unusual fate among those who are always trying to sell something, especially when that something is themselves.
I would have thought that staffers would approach Joe and tell him to stop. Maybe they have, but there are problems there. Joe is an ornery cuss and is likely to yell at staffers for trying to cramp his style. Biden’s advisors could script his appearances, but in Maui now, that would seem cold and too distant, so they let Joe improvise and speak “from the heart,” and he launches into his all too familiar routines.
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For all the talk about Trumpism being a cult, it’s often missed that NeverTrumpism is a cult — and a career. These are people who socialize with each other and reinforce each other’s committment to the cult.
When journos become pawns for a favorite politician, they treat the politician as though he or she is their own pawn. Joe is a Barbie or G.I. Joe that they can dress up in costumes and pose in all kinds of in all kinds of attractive or heroic scenes. Having that freedom to make of Joe whatever they want him to be compensates for losing the freedom and ability to look at him clearly and report on his defects.
Abraxas:
Not that I’m into defending Joe Biden, whose “empathy” is formulaic and insincere – but he has actually experienced some very very real tragedies. When he was 30 and newly elected to the Senate, his wife and youngest child died in an auto accident, and the two remaining children (Hunter and Beau) were seriously injured. Then, much later, Beau died of cancer at the age of 46. That’s a tremendous amount of tragedy. But Biden also makes things like a little kitchen fire into a seeming tragedy.
Neo…not to belabour the point too much…but with Biden, even his real tragedies become the stuff of lies (truck driver “drank his lunch” etc…) and they’re retold not as gut-wrenching fellow sufferer tales, but as “hero-in-his-own-fairytale” sagas.
And that bloody “lightning strike coulda killed us all!” nonsense…His empathy simply doesn’t go past his own skin. It’s all for show…and he’s never been good at it & now he’s abysmal.
And he lost his hair, too. The real tragedy is that no one believes him. Poor Brandon.
And that’s it in a nutshell. To sum it up in a sentence “Biden lies when the truth would serve him better.” If he just told us about losing is wife in a tragic car accident or his son to a random brain tumor we’d feel sorry for him and maybe relate. But he can’t just say that, he makes up the story about losing his wife to crime or his son to military service. All it makes me wonder is if he’s willing to lie significantly about something as serious as what should be some of the most tragic events of his life, probably for extra pathos, what isn’t he willing to lie about? Actually it makes me wonder did he lie about it because he thought he was immune to criticism because his family member did die and it would get him extra sympathy? At this point I honestly believe he’s so cynical because he literally thought this way and doesn’t understand why people have such a problem with it. (To quote Joe, “I mean come on man.”)
J. J. — your description of Trump really resonates with me.
He actually likes blue collar workers. He’s rubbed shoulders with them & shares mutual respect.
He is not an eloquent speaker, not an off-putting “elitist” so-called “thinker” like Obama. Thank God.
But yeah, he acts on emotion too much, & has shot his own foot.
I will still vote Trump if he ends up winning the primary. Sigh …
“Personality matters to many voters more than policy, or so it seems.”
This amazes me. Makes me want to scream in their faces.
Seems that many “independents” may fall into that category. I think it points to either a) an arrogance — “My intuition” or “My judge of character” decides my vote & I’m proud of that! —
Or b) a shallow thinker who likes attention & being sought by politicians.
Or perhaps … It’s laziness. They figure when it comes time to vote, they’ll just listen to some favorite “influencer” — Eeeeekkk!! LoL.
Neo’s Salon has had a long-running discussion on whether or not the Republicans should fight back against the Democrats by employing the Left’s favored tool: lawfare.
Here is an example of how to do it, without inventing crimes that have no precedents or basis in the statutes, or lying about the accused’s actions or intentions.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2023/08/22/biden-back-to-lake-tahoe-to-continue-vacation-n2162900
I suspect Steyer charged Biden a nominal, low, rate only because of all the flack the Democrats have been giving Justice Thomas because of his vacations as a guest at a friend’s home.
Years after Clinton had left the White House Dan Rather said he really considered Bill to be honest. We see this type thinking in politics, but also lots of other spheres of life.
For Rather, Democrats are the good people. Clinton is a Democrat. Therefore, he is a good person. Good people are honest. They don’t lie. Thus, Bill Clinton must have been an honest person who didn’t lie.
People who are morally self-aware don’t think like this. Sadly, I’ve never met a Democrat with moral self-awareness. And very few Republicans.
Followed the Mona Charon link!
She says that the other guy, a mango-hued counterexample, has failed to become less angry with age. I wonder if she would be as sanguine after receiving four politically driven indictments and over one hundred charges in the middle of a presidential campaign.
She also does the straw man thing by claiming the concern is that Biden won’t live long enough to complete his second term. She even quotes actuarial data that says he should statistically live for three more years after that term. Two words: bell curve. Two more words: preexisting condition. And in reality the real concern is that he is so mentally and physically declined as to be incapable of performing the job already, and that he might actually live to his actuarial 89.1.
Finally she claims that at 66 she has cast aside her own anger, while in the same article displaying her severe TDS. It’s unthinkable that the mango-hued person might win. Why, the fate of the republic rests on Trump losing!
Amazing.
True, Biden has seen real tragedies, but in the same way that Joe’s continually going through his “empathy” routine has deadened his capacity for empathetically relating to others, his running through the litany of his tragedies, the little ones along with the big ones, deadens our capacity — or at least my capacity — for sympathizing with or pitying the man.
If Biden talked about his losses less often, we might remember them and admire his stoicism, or at least the media would keep reminding us of what he has gone through. It was like that 40 years ago. The public didn’t hear much from Joe at all, but when his name came up people remembered what happened to his wife and daughter. Now that he’s been bringing up his tragedies so often, they have less of an impact. Joe is the boy who cried wolf too many times.
Finally she claims that at 66 she has cast aside her own anger, while in the same article displaying her severe TDS
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Charen seems to have the interpersonal skills to keep her household from falling apart, but I doubt she’s a capably introspective person. And her problem is not that she’s angry. It’s that she lies to herself quite readily. The question is why.
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Her skill set for 30-odd years was that she was articulate. She could turn in copy on time and think on her feet well enough to converse on television (though it’s possible that discussion programs like Capital Gang are much more scripted than they appear). She was trained in law, but never practiced and has never written about it either. She has published books about international relations, social policy, and men-and-women. Only the last subject is in her wheelhouse. (One thing that bothers me about outfits like Regnery and the Ethics and Public Policy Center is that they invest resources in people that they shouldn’t). She’s a professional Republican and has been for 40 years. That’s interesting inasmuch as people with Charen’s social background seldom vote Republican under any circumstances.
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I think the interventions of people on these boards and at Althouse suggest that it is atypical for even committed and opinionated Republican voters to get emotionally invested in particular politicians, pro or con. Defenses of George W. Bush were largely reactive (and have dissipated in the last 15 years). There’s a reactive quality in much of the discussion in defense of Trump; it wouldn’t be happening if the Democratic Party in all its manifestations hadn’t been so unreasonable. Trump can fill an arena, but if the J6 defendants are any guide, its largely with the sort of people Mona Charen has never had much personal contact.
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Some of us can recall how a certain constituency reacted to George Bush the Elder. The New Republic ran quite a clutch of short commentaries expressing contempt for the man and once solicited and published contributions from readers as to why Ellen Goodman’s crack about him (“reminds every woman of her first husband”) was ‘so funny’. (No, they didn’t publish any replies from people who said it actually wasn’t funny, nor any literal-minded replies which pointed out that very few woman had discarded husbands who were combat veterans, or who had sailed through Yale, or who had built a business from the ground up, or who had sired six children, or who had gotten elected to Congress, much less all ad seriatim). I’m remembering a conversation like this between two people (born in 1930 and 1931) along these lines deriding Bush; he reminded them of people they knew and didn’t like. Now, you’d think two people pushing 60 could assess someone’s good points and bad points, but it was beyond them.
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Which brings us to Charen. I doubt she’s deranged in any way. I think the personal has always been the political for her, and that her entire history of political advocacy up to 2015 was ultimately derived from an affective attachment to Ronald Reagan. Now its derived from an affective repulsion from Donald Trump. She isn’t a serious person and she never was.
True, Biden has seen real tragedies,
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Then used them as fodder for stump speech hooey, which included repeatedly slandering the driver of the truck which hit his wife’s car.
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The Bushes lost a child to leukemia in 1953. Mrs. Bush offered some reminiscences when asked, but it wasn’t a subject they alluded to frequently.
“J. J. — your description of Trump really resonates with me.
He actually likes blue collar workers. He’s rubbed shoulders with them & shares mutual respect.”
We are living at the Trump hotel in Las Vegas (primarily now run by son Eric). The staff, Black, Hispanic, or White, absolutely love the family. They can do no wrong. They are, almost to a person, solidly working class. But it is also a family, that we have, to a lesser extent, been privileged to join.
“The local government in Douglas County, Nev., requires vacation homes to be permitted, and multiple residents of the heavily Republican county filed complaints.”
I can attest to that. My 5 years in that county were the only time I ever participated in Republican politics (though thinking about doing it where we live in MT). County seat is Mindon, down in the valley below Tahoe, and 20 minutes south of somewhat leftist Carson City (since it is the state capital). Compared to Tahoe, the winters are relatively mild (similar to Denver/Boulder), but you can see the edge of Heavenly Valley ski area from town, and I could ski an hour and a half there, running laps, then be at my desk in Minden by 10:30-11:00. Often walked to work, when I didn’t bike or skate. Idyllic for me. Wanted to move back. But my wife can’t handle the (mild to me) winters there, and we already had the place in MT for the warmer half of the year.