Biden will address the nation from the Oval Office tonight at 8 PM Eastern Time
I’ll be busy with some family stuff and won’t be watching.
But here’s a thread to discuss the speech.
Will he merely repeat the message that he won’t be a candidate for re-election, and that he backs Kamala? Or might he quit the presidency now? I think the former but not the latter, but nothing would surprise me at this point.
Oh heaven, please let it be a Capt Queeg on the stand moment
I assume that the teleprompter will dwell mostly on how evil, nefarious, wicked and odious is Donald Trump, and the huge threat he and his troglodyte supporters represent to OUR DEMOCRACY(TM).
What else is there to talk about except…no doubt, how marvelous, talented, magnificent and intelligent is his replacement…oh, and how she—following “ably” in his footsteps—is the ONLY candidate who will be able to save the country from certain TRUMPIAN DOOM.
Kevin McCarthy warned Republicans about calling for Biden to ‘step down as president, which would automatically elevate Harris to the top job.’
If, as her campaign is claiming, she’s been closely involved in all the policy meetings and foreign leader meetings since she became VP, then she has known perfectly well since at least the fall of 2021 that Joe was failing, as have Cabinet officers and Democrat congressional leaders. ALL of them lied until the debate made it clear they couldn’t sell the lies any more.
Joe will say whatever the leadership cadre says he should.
Thanks Berry, now I don’t have to watch it, but then I wasn’t anyway. Its not my night to drink the Single Malt
Harris couldn’t commend herself out of a wet paper bag.
We are 2 months down and no hurricanes yet
I am wishing a good 5 minutes on Trump saying there are good Nazis and he just had to run to stop the Fascists from taking over, then Jan 6 happened and it was almost the end of America
Skip, a hurricane went into south Texas and caused some big messes.
She is no leader and making her POTUS removes some of the vote for the first woman glory as well as it’s a woman’s turn bs. Also, it removes her as a tie breaker in the senate and whatever role the Veep has in the certification of the upcoming election.
let 10-12 million into this country, no cuts back a little, hip hip hooray, proportionally thats more than the Syrian invasion, of 2015-2016, so called,
which would have been 2.5 million scaling up
Biden is looking better than I expected, though his pupils are definitely dilated. He speaks OK though on the robotic side.
However, I hate it when I’m reduced to shouting at a screen. So I’ve turned it off and will read the text later.
Huxley: Why bother? I do not subject myself to BS and am surprised you still do.
Cherry or cherish? Mocracy or democracy? The winter of apparel? What difference at this point does it make?
Joe Biden: I’m still on top of this presidency. That’s why I’m appointing Anna Wintour to handle our next winter of apparel.
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Saving democracy. What a joke. So any Democrat party person placed in a position of government power, is saving democracy; including those ardent supporters of communism, because we know how democracy is a bedrock basis for communism.
We’re supposed to buy this nonsense under the unstated presumption that Trump is synonymous with fascist dictatorship.
Huxley: Why bother? I do not subject myself to BS and am surprised you still do.
Cicero:
I find I learn a lot from reality, even if distasteful, rather than assuming things remain the same as my already established opinions.
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The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.
–Bertrand Russell, “The Best Answer to Fanaticism: Liberalism” (1951)
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I still consider myself a Liberal in this sense. Of course, I have my limits.
So to sum it up, Biden is pretty much the best president in history. There is absolutely nothing wrong with him. The people overwhelmingly chose him to be his party’s nominee. But to protect Democracy he’s passing the torch to someone who has never received a single vote in a presidential primary.
Whoever wrote that speech ought to be fired. It didn’t answer any questions about why he’s dropping out and had little in it to inspire even the Democrats. It was full of half-truths and misinformation. Thankfully, it was brief.
So long, Joe. I’m happy to see you go.
From Peter Heck’s post a couple of days ago:
https://notthebee.com/takes/the-real-crisis-we-all-should-be-talking-about
AesopFan
The talking phase ended a few years ago. The oligarchs and the Democrats have been executing plans and trying to pass legislation. What is there to talk about?
In re the suggestions above about how Biden’s speech might refer to Trump:
Matt Taibbi made some interesting observations regarding the way the Democrats and Media are now treating their once-golden-boy president.
https://www.racket.news/p/in-final-kick-in-the-pants-departing
*Somewhat like how a low-grade unelected military officer leaked information about President Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, because he had decided that the elected head of the Executive Branch and Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces was doing something contrary to the foreign policy of the State and Defense Departments, and thus he must be impeached.
I find it incomprehensible that any carbon based life form would be interested in seeing / hearing Joke Bidet’s speech.
What exactly does anyone expect to learn?
HIs “8 pm” speech delivered at 10 after 6, according to his watch. Either way, live at 8 or recorded at 6, way past his bedtime.
J. J. @July 24, 11:27 PM: on Biden’s speech “It was full of half-truths and misinformation.” So a classic example of Joe Biden’s rhetoric! It shows he is just as bright as he ever was!
huxley:
Got news for you. Bertrand Russell’s writing which you referenced is almost 75 years old. He was born in 1872, when Victoria was queen.
I read him way back then, in the 1950s, and was not impressed despite his reputation as a logician, epistemologist and mathematician. He came out against Hitler in 1943!
The world, America included, was a way better place then, in the 1950s.Never mind Stalin and Mao, who killed many, many millions. The US was staunchly anti-communist then, but no longer.
Russell symbolizes the onset of Western decay.It has hit its zenith with Biden and Harris. And the stupid, ignorant American Democratic voter.
“He symbolizes the onset of Western decay.”
Cicero, that’s far too much weight to attribute to such a minor figure, one who arrives so very late on the scene, so surely not an “onset”, I think.
Let’s venture, rather perhaps, that Russell, if he’s to symbolize anything at all, stands for his own inherited and haphazard fracture of the one-time unified western philosophical structure, a dissolution which began many centuries prior to the 19th in an earnest if yet hubristic effort to attain to final truth through a pursuit of mathematical objects as ground(s) of being. That project has, yes, ended in an awful failure.
Still, our job is to see the failure itself as such, in all its length, breadth and depth, that we may discover (or rediscover) the alternatives. Anyhow, such is my understanding of the position in which we find ourselves.
Over at Alt house there is an interesting thread on whether the speech was prerecorded as Biden’s watch showed a different time. If true, it would be interesting to know how many “takes” were needed to get what we saw.
@sdferr:Cicero, that’s far too much weight to attribute to such a minor figure, one who arrives so very late on the scene, so surely not an “onset”, I think.
He was a hugely influential mathematician and philosopher who won a Nobel Prize for literature, not a “minor figure” at all. I disagree with a lot of what he said, but he’s not a minor figure.
Context I suppose. He’s a minor figure in the ranks of philosophical staying power, I believe. It’s a “compared to” what, or whom, if you’ll allow. Still though, such is my opinion, an opinion which does not rule anything much.
And more, I’m well aware of your credentialing citations on Russell’s behalf. I’m not in need of them, if that’s your object to inform. I too read Russell seriously many years ago; was even persuaded by him in some ways. But the point, if I may, is not truly about Russell as such, but about the state of philosophical inquiry in our times. Enough from me on that for now. Or worse, too much.
Russell was a fascinating fellow, not only for his mathematical skills, but his political stances were on the extremes, before 1949, he was in the Le May camp he wanted to nuke the Soviet Union, after that period he became an extreme anti American, with his rolling tribunals just another political pilgrim, (ht paul Hollander)
specially on the Vietnam question, had he lived to the present day, well he would have been surprised, but also he would sign all the statements about hamas circulating, around, about ‘genocide’ and such, one notes that einstein was not notably wiser on this or other issues like zionism, as time went on,
as a connoisseur of political thrillers, which seem prescient now, I give you McCarry’s long delayed sequel to Better Angels Shelley’s Heart, the latter is the token of a secret Iluminati type outfit that seems to run things in this narrative,
at the end of the first tale, Mallory, a man so despised by the intelligentsia, that he might as well be Voldemort, had been defeated by electronic voting machines, that had been arranged by the deep state apparat, because the losing candidate, had been challenged by a wave of terror attacks, that had subsided because of controversial tactics, the manque lockhart who might as well be biden, even though he comes from kentucky, is then targeted for impeachment by the progressives, and the tool is not only impeachment but the newly selected Chief Justice, who has machiavellian designs on fundamentally transforming the country, one imagines a William Douglas type, which would have been familiar to Mccarry, in his long experience in DC, except his origin story is more exotic,
The sole portion of Biden’s speech last night that stuck with me today:
What the ever mother loving hell is this shit?
the Harrison Bergeron treatment for the court, so every justice will be as ignorant as soto, or jackson, through ethics codes, forced retirements, ignorant clerks,
Got news for you. Bertrand Russell’s writing which you referenced is almost 75 years old. He was born in 1872, when Victoria was queen.
Cicero:
Got news for you — I can do arithmetic, as well as even fancier math. So I suggest not talking down to me.
Russell’s advice was for the ages, not just for his time, and it is a critical thinking remedy for fanaticism.
The Russell quote is inspiring, but the response would be to look at all the college presidents and administrators fifty years ago and today who held all their beliefs tentatively and provisionally, and as a result were never able to take a stand on anything or take action to protect their beliefs and values from those who acted against them.
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I was moved by Johnson’s withdrawal and Nixon’s resignation all those years ago, but growing up has made me very cynical about politicians and journalists. I missed the speech, but the network coverage afterwards — half campaign ad for Harris, half elegy or eulogy for the noble patriot Biden — was shallow, cheap and unconvincing, at least to me.
There’s been too much lying and too much gaslighting to take the usual chatter about the national drama and trauma, and the fate of the Republic, and the soul of America very seriously. I remember now that a lot of adults (and even more college students) were cynical about Johnson and Nixon. Maybe they were right.
when one takes a deep dive into these matters, one realizes that johnson from the time he was minority leader in the Senate had largely avoided the Indochina tar pit, but largely because he had kennedy’s advisors, he waded in there, of course there were corruption issues with the bobby baker case, that illustrated how he had become wealthy,
with Nixon, the fact he had unmasked their golden boy, Alger Hiss before he could emerge as Secretary of State or higher office, as a Soviet agent was never forgiven, that he fooled Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson et al, to buttress this resentment, they had to create psycho biographies like Fawn Brodie, and a host of other matters, the Hughes loan which staid mostly dormant for 15 years was one of those gotchas, I guess like the payments to daniels, then again they probably didn’t rely on one donor exclusively, then there is the Chennault letter which is a little perplexing about the outrage therein, Madame, was an unpleasant reminder of who the Dems would throw under the bus, as they would sort of due less than a decade later, one might argue if the deal obtained in 72, could have been done, with 25,000 less casualties.
the fall of Saigon might have happened in 71,of course the bulk of his feints to the moderates, like wage and price controls were much more injurious tothe middle class, but the focus on cultural issues, like crime andother values issues, instead of the niche interests of Lindsay enraged them more, so did his plans to consolidate many of the government department (which I think Haldeman really reminded us) so to was a return to a regional powerbloc, hence the reliance on the Shah as local gendarme,
the policies pursued by the current regime, are much like the claptrap that Ramsey Clark considered back at the tail end of the administration, ‘root cause’ foolishness on the Domestic front,