The New Neo

I saw Peter Ustinov in a YouTube video and I started to wonder about his life

Posted on March 2, 2024 by neoMarch 2, 2024

And so I looked him up.

Want to see something complicated? From Ustinov’s Wiki page:

Peter Alexander Freiherr von Ustinov was born at 45 Belsize Park, London, England. His father, Jona Freiherr von Ustinov, was of Russian, German, Polish, Ethiopian and Jewish descent. Ustinov’s paternal grandfather was Baron Plato von Ustinov, a Russian noble, and his grandmother was Magdalena Hall, of mixed German-Ethiopian-Jewish origin. Ustinov’s great-grandfather Moritz Hall, a Jewish refugee from Kraków and later a Christian convert and colleague of Swiss and German missionaries in Ethiopia, married into a German-Ethiopian family. Ustinov’s paternal great-great-grandparents (through Magdalena’s mother) were the German painter Eduard Zander and the Ethiopian aristocrat Court-Lady Isette-Werq of Gondar.

Ustinov’s mother, Nadezhda Leontievna Benois, known as Nadia, was a painter and ballet designer of French, German, Italian, and Russian descent. Her father, Leon Benois, was an Imperial Russian architect and owner of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Benois Madonna. Leon’s brother Alexandre Benois was a stage designer who worked with Stravinsky and Diaghilev. Their paternal ancestor Jules-César Benois was a chef who had left France for St. Petersburg during the French Revolution and became a chef to Emperor Paul I of Russia.

Ustinov’s father:

Plato Freiherr von Ustinov (born Platon Grigoryevich Ustinov) 1840–1918 was a Russian-born German citizen and the owner of the Hôtel du Parc (Park Hotel) in Jaffa, Ottoman Empire (now Israel).

Ustinov was born in the Russian Empire, younger brother of Mikhail Grigorievich Ustinov (the Russian consul in Hong Kong), son of Grigori Mikhailovich Ustinov (1803–1860) and wife Maria Ivanovna Panshina, paternal nephew of Mikhail Mikhailovich Ustinov (1800–1871; the Russian ambassador in Constantinople), paternal grandson of Mikhail Adrianovich Ustinov (1755–1836), a millionaire merchant from Saratov.

He was a Russian nobleman who held a manor estate in Ustinovka in today’s Balashov Raion. He travelled to the Levant after his doctors recommended its climate to heal his lung disease. On his way there, he met Peter Martin Metzler [de] (1824–1907) and his wife Dorothea, née Bauer (1831–1870), who both worked in Jaffa as Protestant missionaries for the St. Chrischona Pilgrim Mission [de]. The couple earned their livelihood through several enterprises, including a steam mill, a pilgrim hostel, and trading in imported European merchandise. From mid-1861 until early 1862, Ustinov stayed in the Metzlers’ hostel, eventually becoming a financial partner in their enterprises.

There’s a great deal more at the link. But now I’ll go to Ustinov’s mother and add a bit to what we already know:

On 12 January 1889, Ustinov married Magdalena Hall (1868–1945), who had been born in Magdala on 13 April 1868, the day when British forces took the fortress by storm at the Battle of Magdala, liberating her family and others from captivity in Ethiopia. Her family had later moved to Jaffa. Her father was Moritz Hall (1838–1914), a Jew from Kraków and cannon-caster of Negus Tewodros II of Ethiopia, who was converted to Protestantism by missionaries of the St. Chrischona Pilgrim Mission. Her mother was the Ethiopian court-lady Katharina Hall (1850–1932), also known as Welette-Iyesus, who was of mixed Ethiopian-German origin, the daughter of the German painter Eduard Zander (1813–1868) and court-lady Isette-Werq of Gondar, daughter of an Ethiopian general named Meqado (active before the mid-19th century).

There will be a short quiz next period. Not open-book.

A bit more about Peter Ustinov himself:

He spoke English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian fluently, as well as some Turkish and modern Greek. He was proficient in accents and dialects in all his languages. Ustinov provided his own German and French dubbing for some of his roles

Some rare good news for the J6 defendants

Posted on March 2, 2024 by neoMarch 2, 2024

Here it is:

A federal appeals court on Friday tossed out a portion of a Jan. 6 defendant’s sentence that could affect more than a hundred other cases related to the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

The ruling by a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., looked at a lower court’s “enhanced” sentencing of a defendant over his “substantial interference with the administration of justice” on the day Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. The appeals court ruled that “‘administration of justice’ does not encompass Congress’s role in the electoral certification process.”

The ruling potentially opens the door to the resentencing of Jan. 6 defendants who were hit with similar sentences to that of Larry Brock, who appealed his case to the Washington court. The panel upheld Brock’s overall conviction.

So this particular ruling isn’t about the guilty convictions themselves, it’s about the “enhanced” charges that made some of the sentences so much longer than any actual offenses seemed to call for.

This was a federal court in DC, which makes it somewhat surprising that they didn’t just rubber stamp the enhanced sentence. Perhaps they figured that if they did, it would be overruled by SCOTUS? What’s more, two of the judges involved in the ruling (Pillard and Millett) were appointed by Obama, and the the third was appointed by Bill Clinton.

Israel is not caving on hostage negotiations

Posted on March 2, 2024 by neoMarch 2, 2024

At least, not for now.

There is tremendous motivation for terrorists to take hostages, especially Israeli hostages. Israel has a history of agreeing to extremely lopsided deals with Palestinian authorities in order to get its people back. The most extreme example of which I’m aware is the Shalit deal of 2011:

The Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange … followed a 2011 agreement between Israel and Hamas to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,027 prisoners — almost all Palestinians and Arab-Israelis … Two hundred and eighty of these had been sentenced to life in prison for planning and perpetrating various attacks against Israeli targets.

Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari was quoted in the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat as confirming that the prisoners released under the deal were collectively responsible for the killing of 569 Israelis. The agreement came five years and four months after Palestinian militants captured Shalit in southern Israel along the Gaza Strip border.

Netanyahu was in charge back then, by the way. No wonder the Gazans thought that kidnapping hundreds of Israelis on October 7, 2023, would yield even greater results, if possible – including a ceasefire and more power.

Here’s what Israel is saying now:

Israel will not participate in further talks aimed at achieving a temporary ceasefire and prisoner swap until it receives a list of living hostages still held by Hamas, the Axios news site reported Friday, as Hebrew-language media indicated that the Palestinian terror group had adopted an increasingly intransigent stance in the negotiations.

According to the Axios report, Qatar and Egypt, who mediate between Israel and Hamas, had coaxed Israel to take part in talks over the past week in Doha by guaranteeing that if an Israeli delegation were sent, Egypt and Qatar would secure a list of living hostages, and pressure Hamas to come down from its demands regarding the number of Palestinian prisoners to be released in return for each Israeli hostage.

But after three days of talks in Doha, the Israeli delegation returned home without any answers on either issue. “The mediators promised that Hamas would give numbers and that didn’t happen,” Axios quoted an unnamed Israeli official as saying.

On Thursday, Qatari and Egyptian officials proposed another round of talks in Cairo to take place over the coming week, but Israel refused the offer due to the mediators’ failure to receive from Hamas the promised list of hostages.

“There is no point in starting another round of talks until we receive the lists of which of the hostages are alive and until Hamas gives its answer regarding the ‘ratio’ that defines how many prisoners will be released for each hostage,” the official said.

This is what Netanyahu is saying at present:

In any case, “we won’t capitulate to Hamas’s delusional demands,” Netanyahu said, noting that “if we capitulate, we simply won’t be here.”

But I submit that there’s nothing “delusional” about Hamas’ demands, if you look at the history. Netanyahu of course knows that, but what he means is that things are different now. Hamas has always exhibited Israel-eliminationist rhetoric. Now it has made it clear that it’s not just rhetoric. Not only do Hamas and the other Palestinian jihadis/terrorists have the will to destroy Israel but they are gaining skills and coordination at doing just that.

Netanyahu is well aware that the Shalit deal led directly to October 7 in two ways: it gave the Palestinians back terrorists who became the masterminds of October 7 such as Sinwar, and it made the terrorists think that kidnapping a great many more hostages than before would get them what they want in the future.

Roundup

Posted on March 2, 2024 by neoMarch 2, 2024

(1) Deaths from excessive drinking rose during the COVID lockdowns. No surprise there.

(2) Speaking of COVID, the CDC now says the guidelines are the same as with the regular flu.

(3) The current iteration of “bitter clingers” is “white rural rage.” From Matt Taibbi:

Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.

I seem to recall that during the summer of 2020, white rural voters weren’t the ones either committing violence or excusing it.

Open thread 3/2/24

Posted on March 2, 2024 by neoMarch 2, 2024

This is one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen, if it’s not fake. Please tell me it’s fake:

Victim envy

Posted on March 1, 2024 by neoMarch 1, 2024

Jillian Becker writes of a phenomenon she calls Leidensneid. It’s a word she made up, one of those composite German terms that combine two other words, in this case “leiden” (to suffer) and “Neid” (envy).

Leidensneid is a part of virtue signaling and is particularly rampant on the left these days. But it’s been around for much longer than that. Becker, who previously wrote a book about German leftist terrorists of the 1960s, writes that back then:

… [M]ost of the tens of thousands who marched with anti-West banners in West Berlin—or the hundreds of thousands in all the university cities of Western Europe—were not ideologically Marxist, nor wanting victory for the Communists in the Cold War. What those well-off, well-fed, well-educated sons and daughters of the free world wanted was to be seen as voluntary co-sufferers with the wretched of the earth; to qualify by their gestures for membership of an imagined community of underdogs.

These young leftists had already turned somewhat away from the working classes in the 1960s. Even back then, the class struggle of older Marxists was being replaced by anti-colonialism and identity groups:

Not only in West Germany but in all the developed countries, they believed, the working-class had been bought off with material plenty. So revolutionary hope was placed instead in the Third World, in the “victims of imperialism,” particularly the Vietnamese who were being subjected to “American aggression,” the Iranians under the Shah, and the peasants of Latin America.

As the self-styled vanguard of “the revolution,” the student protestors marched for world peace and Western nuclear disarmament—hosts of pacifists, armed with banners on stout staves, bags of paint, custard-pies, cobblestones and petrol-bombs. In their regular clashes with the police, blood was spilt, protestors were arrested, tried, and sometimes sentenced to short terms of imprisonment: which only went to prove, they argued, that the police and the courts were agents of “authoritarianism.” “To provoke the fascist out of the police” was one of the declared purposes of the West German protest movement; and though most of its members had been born after the Second World War, they were, they maintained, still having to combat Nazism. As evidence that the liberal democracy of the Federal Republic was not very different from the Third Reich, they pointed to the many persons in positions of authority who were erstwhile Nazis, and claimed that they, the young protestors of 1968, were “up against the generation of Auschwitz.” In crowded public meetings and in interviews with the press they would often say, “We are the Jews of to-day.”

And yet these German terrorists of the 60s had little use for the Jews either, foreshadowing our present union of left and Jew-hatred:

The notorious terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, when she herself was in custody and giving evidence at the trial of a comrade, declared that the Nazis had been right to kill the German Jews because they were capitalists (“were that which was maintained of them—Money-Jews”). She insisted, however, that she was anti-Nazi and had fellow-feeling for the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. In sum, she considered it wrong to kill Jews genocidally as a “race enemy,” but not wrong to kill millions of them as “class enemies.”

The first paragraph of the following passage contains what I consider the most important points in Becker’s essay. I think she is absolutely correct about the European and American left, which since the 60s have been predominantly movements not of the poor and uneducated but of the comfortable and academically inclined, with the motive of showing virtue and absolving their own feelings of guilt [emphasis mine]:

[Meinhof’s] passionate, confused statements made only one thing clear: she and her like-thinkers hoped that by identifying themselves with victims — of the Nazis, of the present social order in the First World, of “colonialism” and “imperialism” in the Third World — they could free themselves from guilt; or, more accurately, protect and preserve themselves from accusation. It was a way of asserting a moral superiority over their own nation and their own class. None of them really wanted to be poor, or oppressed, or hurt, or deprived of liberty, or killed, or compelled to do manual labor. What they wanted, what they envied, was not what victims had to endure, but the supposed esteem in which victims are held, their freedom from culpability, their high moral status. To be a victim—they seemed to believe—was to be innocent. And to be innocent was almost the same as being heroic.

It was not only the young Germans who felt a need to escape from guilt or accusation. Everywhere in Western Europe the rebels of the New Left found cause to be ashamed of their own countries.

Americans also felt a need to evade accusation, and America had its own anti-Vietnam-war anti-America student protest movement, and its own affluent terrorists. The United States was, as much in the eyes of its own protestors as in those of the European New Left, deeply guilty: of the war in Vietnam, of opposition to Communism in general, of ‘dollar imperialism,’ of internal racism, and of Third World deprivation.

In the early 1970s an American student told me that after being enrolled in a Californian university in 1968, she had suddenly left and gone to Calcutta “in order to share the suffering” of the multitudes who had to live on the streets. I asked her how she had thought this would help them. She replied that the whole point was not to help them but to save herself from being “one of the privileged of the earth.” She “stuck it out,” she said, for three weeks, after which the American embassy had arranged for her to fly home.

It is quite obvious that this applies to the current sympathy of Western leftists for Palestinians and Hamas and for other jihadi terrorists as well. As I indicated in my essays about terrorists and romanticism, the intensity of the horror terrorists perpetrate only makes their Western sympathizers regard them as all the more dedicated and long-suffering; why else but from justified rage at oppressors would people labeled as “oppressed” be so cruel? So identifying with the perpetrators who are defined as victims – and who seek to increase the number of their casualties at the hands of their more well-to-do oppressors, the Israelis/Jews, the better to become more numerous victims – seems a good way of shedding one’s own detested privilege.

In other words, the Palestinians envy the Jews the Holocaust and seek to appropriate it and convince the world that the Jews are the real Nazis vis a vis the Palestinians who are today’s Jews. Then the Western leftists buy the Palestinians’ reframing and in turn envy Palestinian victimhood and sympathize with it. It’s victim envy all the way down.

[NOTE: See also this.]

A court is pressuring Catherine Herridge to give up her sources

Posted on March 1, 2024 by neoMarch 1, 2024

The story is here:

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington held veteran investigative Catherine Herridge in contempt and ordered a fine of $800 a day until she reveals her sources for a 2017 story.

Cooper claimed he “recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society.” He also claimed he understands that confidential sources are vital to investigative journalism.

Uh huh.

Cooper’s excuse is that “the court ‘also has its own role to play in upholding the law and safeguarding judicial authority.’”

Cooper wrote in his order: “Herridge and many of her colleagues in the journalism community may disagree with that decision and prefer that a different balance be struck, but she is not permitted to flout a federal court’s order with impunity.”

“Washington” is, of course, Washington DC.

Many more details at the link, as well as here. The case will be appealed.

Does AI dream of electric sheep?

Posted on March 1, 2024 by neoMarch 1, 2024

AI may not dream of electric sheep*, but it certainly has an active imagination. Matt Taibbi found Google’s Gemini to be spinning yarns about him, and even making accusations of anti-Semitism. The more times Taibbi asked Gemini to tell him about controversies concerning Matt Taibbi, the more wild and convoluted its fabrications became.

An excerpt:

… I made the mistake of asking [Google’s Gemini], “What are some controversies involving Matt Taibbi?”

It spat out a list. “Matt Taibbi, a journalist and author known for his investigative reporting and often critical views of power structures, has been involved in several controversies throughout his career,” the bot wrote. Amid accusations of bias and “use of inflammatory language,” this passage woke me up:

“Accuracy and Sourcing: There have been instances where Taibbi’s reporting has been challenged for accuracy or questioned for its source. For example, in 2010, he received criticism for an article suggesting a connection between a conservative donor and a left-wing activist group, which later turned out to be inaccurate.”

I scratched my head, not remembering this. “When was Matt Taibbi accused of inaccuracy in 2010?” I asked. Gemini’s answer:

“In June 2010, Matt Taibbi faced criticism for an article he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine titled ‘The Great California Water Heist.’ The article alleged a connection between conservative donor Charles Koch and a left-wing activist group called the ‘Compton Pledge.’

“However, investigations by other journalists and fact-checkers later revealed that this connection was inaccurate…Following the controversy, Taibbi acknowledged the error and issued a correction on his personal website.”

None of this happened! Though it sounds vaguely like a headline for an article I might have written, there was never a Rolling Stone piece called “The Great California Water Heist,” and I’d never heard of the “Compton Pledge.”

More questions produced more fake tales of error-ridden articles. One entry claimed I got in trouble for a piece called “Glenn Beck’s War on Comedy,” after suggesting “a connection between a conservative donor, Foster Friess, and a left-wing activist group, the Ruckus Society.”

With each successive answer, Gemini didn’t “learn,” but instead began mixing up the fictional factoids from previous results and upping the ante, adding accusations of racism or bigotry. “The Great California Water Heist” turned into “The Great California Water Purge: How Nestle Bottled Its Way to a Billion-Dollar Empire—and Lied About It.”

The anti-Semitism accusation came when Gemini fabricated the following supposed Matt Taibbi quote that never existed:

Look, if Nestle wants to avoid future public-relations problems, it should probably start by hiring executives whose noses aren’t shaped like giant penises.

I have to say: WTF?

Gemini even had some words to add about the supposed reaction to Taibbi’s supposed “nose penis” statement:

An amazing follow-up passage explained that “some raised concerns that the comment could be interpreted as antisemitic, as negative stereotypes about Jewish people have historically included references to large noses.”

I stared at the image, amazed. Google’s AI created both scandal and outraged reaction, a fully faked news cycle …

Much more at the link.

Between this and AI porn, I can’t say I’m feeling hopeful about the influence of AI on the human race. But I have a lot of company in that.

[*NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on the title of the Philip Dick novel – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – on which the movie Blade Runner was based.]

Open thread 3/1/24

Posted on March 1, 2024 by neoMarch 1, 2024

An update can be found here.

California and the Jew-haters

Posted on February 29, 2024 by neoFebruary 29, 2024

Yesterday I wrote about a blood libel that appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles is southern California, although the paper has a broader reach than that. Today we have northern California: Berkeley, to be exact. First, grade schools and high schools [emphasis mine]:

Enduring “Kill the Jews” statements from peers. Being asked what their number is, “referring to numbers tattooed on Jews during the Holocaust.” Teacher-prompted walk-outs in support of Hamas terrorists. A teacher directing second-graders to write, “Stop bombing babies” on sticky notes displayed around the school.

These are some of the allegations against the Berkeley Unified School District in a Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Anti-Defamation League complaint filed on Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

The complaint further alleges that “peer-on-peer antisemitic bullying has escalated, as students are emboldened to emulate their teachers and perpetuate the hostility against their Jewish classmates.” The situation “is so bad that Jewish and Israeli students are often afraid to go to school,” the complaint adds.

“The eruption of antisemitism in Berkeley’s elementary and high schools is like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” said Kenneth L. Marcus, chairman of the Brandeis Center.

This is taught in the schools and the teachers are the instruments who spread the hatred.

Next, the University of California at Berkeley:

Some 200 people protested violently outside an event with a former Israel Defense Forces soldier at the University of California, Berkeley on Monday night, forcing Jewish students at the event to evacuate.

Anti-Israel students banged on doors and windows—breaking a glass door—and chanted “intifada, intifada” and accused the speaker Ran Bar-Yoshafat of committing genocide, The Daily Wire reported.

Bar-Yoshafat, who fought in Gaza with a special forces unit, told the publication that he was guilty until proven innocent to the protesters. “I don’t think this about the IDF, Jews or even Israel,” he said. “This is them lacking Western values like freedom of speech.”

Eventually, the event “Israel at War: Combat the Lies” had to be canceled.

Not just freedom of speech: truth is another casualty. And what is this “had to be canceled” business? It was a choice to cancel it, a choice the demonstrators counted on the administration making. One of the main reasons for such demonstrations is to make it extremely expensive to have such speakers, because security has to be stepped up. Of course, the administration could decide to do that in advance, if having such speakers was something they wanted. Also, ex post facto, they could decide to identify the students and make them suffer some sort of consequences. I very much doubt they will, and the demonstrators know it.

The provost wrote a meaningless statement of sympathy to the Jewish students. But the university should have anticipated the problem and prepared for it and prevented or controlled it. Or, if they failed to do that, they should have responded to it by calling the university police or the Berkeley police. Of course they didn’t. The school is a big part of the problem. Perhaps – as in England – the police there are, as well.

Today’s Jew-haters are feeling very strong and very immune, and they are deeply ensconced in the schools of California, although the problem is hardly limited to that state.

SCOTUS agrees to hear the Trump presidential immunity case

Posted on February 29, 2024 by neoFebruary 29, 2024

This means there will be a delay in the Jack Smith trial:

… [T]he case was moving towards a March 4 trial when Trump appealed denial of his defense that the conduct alleged was covered by presidential immunity. Special Counsel Jack Smith sought to go directly to the Supreme Court, to try to keep the trial on track, but was rejected in favor of allowing the Court of Appeals first to consider the issue. To no one’s surprise, the Court of Appeals rejected the immunity defense, and Trump sought a stay from the Supreme Court preventing the Appeals Court issuing a “mandate” for the case to proceed to trial pending the Court taking the case on the merits.

Today SCOTUS granted the stay and treated it as a grant of certiorari to hear the case on the merits. …

With an April 22 argument, even a quick decision would mean, assuming Trump loses on the defense, that a trial in DC prior to the election is doubtful, as there is a lot of work to be done before trial, and the March 4 trial date was unikely even without the appeals. Of course, if Trump wins in the Supreme Court, the case likely is over.

I know nothing about the speed of such things, so I defer to Professor Jacobson’s judgment on the issue. I do think, however, that the situation is so complex and volatile that anything is possible.

More on the oft-discussed topic of Biden’s cognitive health and what the Democrats might do about it, as well as what the MSM says about it

Posted on February 29, 2024 by neoFebruary 29, 2024

[Hat tip: Scott Johnson at Powerline.]

From Danielle Pletka:

The question of Joe Biden’s age, recently vaulted onto front pages by the devastating Hur report on the President’s retention of classified material, has become a political football. Montages of Biden’s senior moments, his trips on the stairs, his new sturdy sneakers, his bizarre whispering, his frequent confusion etc etc etc have become staples in opposition news dumps.

But that’s been highlighted on the right for his entire presidency and even during his 2020 candidacy. It was just that the MSM protected him.

To a certain extent, the MSM still does. But now the MSM reporters go back and forth between denial that anything is wrong other than a few “gaffes” – which is their old line – and admitting that he’s not quite as sharp as he used to be.

Biden is clearly in some sort of decline, but he never was mentally sharp and he always lied or made egregious errors that the MSM would have called him out on had he not been useful to the Democrats. In fact, back in the 1980s, when Biden was not senile and was just one of a large group of presidential candidates, the MSM did call him out on his plagiarism.

This Time article is from 2019; the topic is his campaign for the 1988 nomination for president [emphasis added]:

“Then, as now in fact, Biden is not as fast on his feet as a successful candidate usually is,” argues Laurence I. Barrett, a former TIME national political correspondent who profiled Biden during his three-month-long presidential bid in the run-up to the 1988 election. …

Not that the candidate was without his drawbacks: “Biden’s mouth is both his greatest asset and his greatest liability,” Barrett wrote [in 1987] shortly after Biden announced his candidacy. That analysis would prove enduringly prescient.

A few days before [the Bork hearings] began, video surfaced that spliced together footage of U.K. Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock giving a speech and Biden clearly quoting Kinnock at the Iowa State Fair without attribution. More examples of misattribution came to light, and the plagiarism scandal became more memorable than [Biden’s] leadership during the Bork confirmation hearing. His mouth — or rather, what he failed to say — got him in trouble again.

Here’s how TIME described [the article is from 1987] why the fallout was so intense:

[T]he Biden brouhaha illustrates the six deadly requirements for a crippling political scandal.

1) A Pre-Existing Subtext. “The basic rap against Biden,” explains Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, “is that he’s a candidate of style, not substance.”

2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.

3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because “he didn’t know what he was saying. He was on autopilot.”

4) The Press Piles On. Once textual fidelity became an issue, reporters found earlier cases in which Biden had failed to give proper citation to Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. By themselves these transgressions would not have been worth noting.

5) The Discovery of Youthful Folly. During his first months at Syracuse University Law School, in 1965, Biden failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote. Since Biden was allowed to make up the course, the revelation was front-page news only because it kept the copycat contretemps alive.

6) An Overwrought Press Conference. With a rambling and disjointed opening statement, Biden failed to reap the benefits of public confession, even though he called himself “stupid” and his actions “a mistake.” Part of the problem is that he contradicted himself by also insisting that it was “ludicrous” to attribute every political idea.

The “final blow” for the campaign came when Newsweek unearthed C-SPAN footage of Biden rattling off his academic accomplishments, including saying that he graduated in the top half of his law school, when in fact, he ranked 76th out of 85.

Note the following: he’s not a candidate of substance, he’s “a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas,” “he didn’t know what he was saying,” he gave “a rambling and disjointed opening statement,” and he lied about his accomplishments and was a serial plagiarizer. All known and acknowledged in 1987, when the MSM could afford to notice because there were plenty of other candidates. If Biden had revealed himself to be one of the weaker candidates instead of one of the stronger ones, then he was dispensible and the MSM would help get rid of him by highlighting these flaws.

In 2008, Obama picked him, partly for this very reason: that he is “a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.” That’s exactly what Obama needed. Biden also had the undeserved reputation – which the MSM would support because of its need to have Obama win – of being a mature and seasoned expert on government and especially foreign policy. And so, although Biden was neither of these things, the press was all too happy to ignore that fact, especially when it was revealed during Biden’s debate against the supposedly ignorant Sarah Palin.

If you’ve forgotten what Biden said in that debate, here’s something to refresh your memory. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few examples, especially a relevant one on foreign policy:

“Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the Executive Branch,” Sen. Biden said, dismissing Sarah Palin’s expressed intention to play a role in legislative affairs.

Article I of the Constitution defines the role of Congress, the legislative branch, and declares that “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” That is the only responsibility of the vice president delineated anywhere in the Constitution. …

“When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” Sen. Biden said.

“Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life,” said Michael Totten, who reported from there during the so-called Cedar Revolution. “Nobody has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody. Joe Biden has literally no idea what he is talking about.”

Despite that, the MSM coverage focused on Palin and her supposed errors, and often took this form. An excerpt:

Biden offered a fluent, self-assured performance of the sort that cannot be especially hard for him after two presidential campaigns, 35 years in the Senate and countless appearances on Sunday morning programs. People impressed by references to legislation, or citations of his record in world hot spots from Bosnia to Darfur, got these in spades.

Hezbollah – what’s that?

We all saw years later in 2020 how the MSM covered for Biden, when his decline – from the supposed high-water mark of 2008 – was obvious. The current back-and-forth on the issue of his cognitive function reflects, I believe, a behind-the-scenes uncertainty and dissension on what to do about it. There is probably a wing that thinks keeping him is okay – perhaps the “rigging” and the “fortifying” or the anti-Trump lawfare, or some combination of all of them, will pull Joe across the finish line. Another wing almost certainly thinks he needs to go, and if they can figure out the best way to do that and the best person to replace him, they will.

And the MSM will do their bidding.