At the DNC: buh-bye, Joe, don’t let the door hit you on the way out
I didn’t watch the DNC last night, but apparently the Democrats gave Biden the honor of addressing the crowd. That was rather magnanimous of them, considering he’s still the president and that he had won the primaries and was their designated nominee for 2024 until just a short while ago.
Someone also scheduled Biden’s speech for 11:30 PM, which seems exquisitely cruel considering that he tends to fade far earlier than that.
I forget what article I read it in, but a pundit on the right described the speech as Joe delivering his own eulogy. He had to pretend that all of this was just fine with him – that it was his own choice, really, to suddenly give up the office he’d pursued for so many decades, finally achieved, and had clung to tenaciously right up to the point when he was forced to let it go.
Here’s a description of the speech:
If the Harris campaign had any hopes that Joe would let them get distance from his record, they were dashed. “When I say we I mean Kamala and me,” he emphasized, reminding voters that there’s no turning the page by voting for Harris.
Biden tried to play the old hits, but they ring hollow now. He talked about Charlottesville and how he claims Trump as president “emboldened” and praised anti-Semites. “Hate has no safe harbor” in America, he says. But we saw how anti-Semites have safe harbors – literal encampments on college campuses, immune from the law – in Joe Biden’s America. Biden even said of the pro-Hamas protestors, “Those protesters out in the street. They’ve got a point.”
It’s sadly appropriate that Biden invoked ye olde Charlottesville hoax at this point, since that’s the way he kicked off his 2020 campaign as well. So the Charlotteville hoax is a bookend to his campaigns. And at the same time that we see Biden’s mendacity about what Trump meant by the phrase, we see his deep hypocrisy when he sympathized with the “point” of the anti-Israel “demonstrators,” which he mischaracterized as wanting the killings of innocents on both sides to end.
And the following just drips with stagy falseness:
Of course, the pretense of one big happy family had to be maintained. Biden denied that he was angry at the Democrats who forced him off the ticket. Nancy Pelosi stood in the front row holding a “We Love Joe” sign, just weeks after wielding the knife. She came to bury Joe, not to praise him.
What a travesty.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have issued their report on Biden’s corruption, which comes a mite too late for anyone to care. Not that more than half the nation would have cared anyway, even if Joe were running again. Andrew C. McCarthy writes:
It is an important summary of the Biden Family Business, as much accountability as the public can expect given the limitations of congressional investigations that are stonewalled by an incumbent administration.
It is, moreover, a useful record of that stonewalling — very much including the corruption of the Justice Department — which connects the current Biden administration with the tireless self-dealing of Biden’s career, culminating in his term as vice president. …
Comer’s committee traces the money trail from Hunter, to Joe’s brother Jim, to Joe Biden himself.
All of this monetization of Joe Biden’s political power should be part of the criminal tax trial Hunter faces in about two weeks.
Why isn’t it? Because the Biden-Harris Justice Department buried it.
Of course they did. Integrity is in short supply these days.
And meanwhile, from a speech by Tim Walz at the DNC delegates’ breakfast yesterday:
We get an opportunity tonight to say a thank you to the best president of my lifetime that I’ve been able to witness, to someone who’s delivered time and time again, someone who made the selfless act of handing that torch to an incredible leader.
You need a strong stomach to listen to that sort of thing, especially while eating.
I have long felt that the ‘Charlottesville Hoax’ was some sort of metaphor. I don’t know how they were able to sell that meme. Well, I do know. The facts were hidden under Monticello.
My younger daughter graduated from UVA with a degree in Sports Medicine. So, my wife and I adopted UVA sports 40 some odd years ago, and we always loved to visit Charlottesville during ensuing decades. Unfortunately, the University and the city embraced the skewed truth and the outright lies. Sadly, like so many institutions, the University went further and rejected its legacy. Now I get a bad taste whenever Charlottesville is mentioned.
so, better than President Obama, the Lightgiver, Eh? What say you, Governor Walz?
My thought here is very old news, but I was still somewhat shocked. I saw a couple minutes of Joe’s DNC “farewell address” about an hour ago, with the sound turned off.
It was the first time I had watched him without sound. Or maybe it was the 11:30PM factor too, or his drug dosage. The silent video was the perfect image of a demented and very angry old man. Really quite repellent.
The silent video was the perfect image of a demented and very angry old man. Really quite repellent.
TommyJay:
To be sure and there is no love lost any which way around. It’s totally bizarre the way the convention began with all this Joy! Joy! Joy!, We Love You Joe!, Put Joe on Mt. Rushmore! stuff.
Meanwhile Joe has been knifed out of his second term (granted, no loss whatsoever), his speech was pushed way past primetime and Joe is being sent on vacation, rather than being the Elder Statesman who magnificently stepped aside for Kamala! and now gets his chance to Bask in the Glow of Grateful Democrats as he so richly deserves.
No, the Obama/Pelosi/Kamala mob are trying to put as much daylight between them and Biden as possible for the remaining campaign.
Democrats are not about the Politics of Love, Joy and Gratitude. If anything, I’m reminded of those alt-history novels where the Axis wins WW II and the syphilitic, demented Adolph Hitler is declining or has died.
All the good, powerful Nazis praise Hitler to the skies while engaged in terrible knife fights to gain power as the Great Psychopath leaves the scene.
I watched until he brought up the Charlottesville hoax and then I turned it off in disgust.
He keeps repeating the Charlottesville slander because it’s popular with his base. His base are the people harvesting and counting ballots….
As for the House Republican report on the Biden family, that’s one thing they’ve been doing, and it’ll get filed in the warehouse alongside the Ark of the Covenant probably. The main thing they’ve been doing is passing spending bills, working hard to get all these appropriations or a continuing resolution in before the debt ceiling “fight” which is coming up.
Of course if they had any real concern about the debt ceiling, the House Republican leadership could have stopped any spending at all simply by not letting spending come up for votes. But that would mean their cronies didn’t get paid.
Instead they prefer to pass the bills with less than what the Dems ask for, the Senate builds it back up, and then they can blame it on the Senate post-reconciliation (reconciliation only needs 51 votes in the Senate, so the Dems can easily lard it up, not that the Senate GOP won’t help). Everybody gets paid with our money.
Not a reason not to vote for Trump. Not saying the GOP is “just as bad” or “just the same” as the Dems. But we need to keep our eyes open to how our political class treats us, and we should probably stop participating in the marginalization of the minority of Republican Congressmen and Senators who are trying to put a stop to it.
Just got an email from our building requesting that we leave by 5:00. Evidently we are to be the focus of a protest this evening. The Israeli consulate office of Chicago is here.
Mike Plaiss:
Best. Keep us updated.
My wife kept the bedroom TV on, as she does a lot, so I saw some of the event. Biden held up well for an hour and looked heavily spaced out. I thought he might have an amphetamine crisis right there and start killing people. He was an angry, shouting old man, like his famous “red drapes” talk, a la Riefenstahl. He kept to the deal and said nothing about his tormentors. It was a clear insult to put him last.
Not clear whether the Democrats truly think the voters are stupid or simply want to create that impression, the better to demoralize the electorate.
Many of their own voters are stupid, of course, and so the Democrats can be forgiven for thinking so, if they do.
Mike+K: Victor Davis Hanson refers to the 2022 “red drapes” speech as Biden’s Phantom of the Opera performance. All it needed were the flickering wall sconces. And the organ. And Kamala in Mary Philbin’s role.
Mike Plaiss: hope you’re already out the door and on the way home.
The way she was shouting at the crowd, one sentence at a time, it sounded like Hillary was doing a William Shatner imitation. Doesn’t she know what those microphone shaped objects on the podium are for?
Red wedding speech i skipped most of it because it was going to be a clip reel
Is hillary an alien is kamala change my mind they have the most peculiar behaviors like they were from remulak
Jefferson is for free speech no naturally he would be persona non grata of course signer and mcauliffe were most responsible
Out the door and on the 5:10 train – our building is also the train station building. It looks like a Die Hard movie right now. 100’s of cops. God bless them.
Godspeed, Mike.
You would think so as secretary of state and presidential candidate
What a pathetic creature Biden has become. His face is that of someone who has sold his soul and has nothing left. His party stabs him in the back and humiliates him and he has to give a speech in the middle of the night that nobody listens to.
It’s amazing how absolutely irrelevant Biden has become in just a few weeks. A short time ago his speech would have been eagerly analyzed. Would we see the angry State of the Union Biden or the sleepy, confused debate Biden? Now nobody cares. It’s easy to forget that Biden is still alive, never mind that he is still technically the leader of the most powerful country on the planet.
I would love to hear Jill Biden’s uncensored version of how all this went down. She must be a lot of fun to be around these days.
I dont think he ever had a soul well at least since 1973 yes hes a bitter shell of himself
Were stuck in this heisenberg paradox is he president or not does it really matter
Who runs the show who tells him what to say what to do
If you want some enjoyment out of this Democrat mess, go to this link and listen to them trying to sing the national anthem.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/08/20/dnc-day-2-dems-butcher-the-national-anthem-and-protesters-make-it-inside-the-convention-n2178325
Kate:
I watched the anthem video. It pretty much sums up the Democrat party and sadly a large part of the country these days. It’s funny, sad and ultimately tragic. I often wonder why the Democrats try to muster even the pretense of patriotism. I wish they would just go ahead and take the mask off completely and openly advocate for a complete overhaul of the Constitution and every principle on which this country was founded. Maybe if Kamala wins that’s what we’ll see.
The problem, one of the problems, one of the many problems, which the Dem leadership faces with the Kamala! ticket is that while she may not be senile, she is a deeply linked to the Biden administration.
Kamala! can’t be the new BIPOC Sheriff riding into town, á la Obama, to straighten out the corruption and set us on a higher moral path.
She was a Biden deputy, although god knows what she did in that capacity. An ultimate insider.
Her handlers will try, but they can’t erase her links to Biden or the impression that she is Biden 2: Younger, Darker, Female.
You’re gonna love her!
}}} Biden even said of the pro-Hamas protestors, “Those protesters out in the street. They’ve got a point.”
Translation:
“Those anti-Semites out there are very fine people.”
Unlike Trump, he ACTUALLY said it. :-/
This treatment of the DNC anthem travesty is amusing.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1825975090737295754
I can’t say it’s disappointing because nobody expects much from Biden anymore. I expect he’ll remain in office until he can deliver a “farewell address,” but that won’t be anything to write home about. Biden doesn’t have it in him to give a good speech, and the “Soul of America” stuff Meacham writes for him has gotten stale, if it wasn’t stale to begin with.
Well, Barack O. is on now. He’s done his best to ruin the country.
But he is a pro.
Peter Heck nails it.
https://notthebee.com/takes/lets-be-serious-there-is-no-conservative-case-to-be-made-for-harris
Prior to 2015, you were aware of the phenomenon of the soi-disant conservative magazine writers whose only audience was liberal magazine editors and produced articles of the genre Robert Stacy McCain identified as “The Conservative Case for [insert pet liberal cause]”. Conor Friedersdorf was, ca. 2008, the exemplar of the type. What we learned after 2015 was that about half the Republican commentariat were poseurs. You look at David French in particular – his education, his legal career, &c and you wonder if he was a plant all along.
Those protesters out in the street. They’ve got a point.
Dershowitz:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/biden-sees-a-very-fine-point-on-both-sides-dnc-antisemites-protest-israel-59630d75?st=er67ltckhnsaguo&reflink=article_copyURL_share
I dialogued with master conor f when he was at culture 11 wow what a shallow canoe of course he went off to the daily basilisk and ultimately the atlantic
Mike Plaiss, I saw video of the protests outside your building downtown last night. It was probably a good thing they told you to leave early.
It was surreal. I rarely watch the news, but did last night. Fox News. The officers with the yellow vests were local police. I recognized several. They’ve been hanging around inside our building this week.