No, forcing Joe out isn’t actually thwarting the will of the Democratic voters …
… although it may appear that way.
After all, it’s not as though Joe was ever the popular choice; he just become the only choice in 2020 because of decisions made by unnamed Democrats on high. The reason was that he was thought to be the most electable of the candidates running.
And until he was forced to drop out now, he was pretty much the only choice in 2024 as well, for the same reason and because he clearly wanted to run and was difficult to push out. RFK and the relatively unknown and unheralded Dean Phillips weren’t really contenders for the Democrats’ nomination.
I know plenty of people who voted for Biden in 2020 and it was always a vote against Trump rather than a vote for Biden, and the same was true in the 2024 primaries. There was no enthusiasm whatsoever for the man, but lots of enthusiasm for the anti-Trump candidate.
Plus, by the time Biden dropped out, the majority of Democrat voters wanted him to do so. Therefore the primaries were mostly irrelevant in the emotional (not the legal) sense. Trouble is, Kamala isn’t exactly Ms. Popularity either. When Biden picked her as his VP, he was upfront about the fact that it was for her gender and race; she’d done very poorly in the primaries.
If Kamala Harris survives the Democrats’ convention as the nominee – which is not a foregone conclusion – the vast vast majority of Democrat voters will vote for her with no hesitation whatsoever. She will be the new anti-Trump candidate and that will be enough. On the other hand, if she’s replaced, the same will be true of whomever becomes the eventual nominee. I still tend to think it will be Kamala, for practical reasons: money and demographics. But behind the scenes there’s a lot of fighting going on.
Kimberly Cheatle testifies – and Congress shows bipartisan rancor
[NOTE: “Crooks and Cheatle” – doesn’t it sound like a law firm in a Dickens novel?]
The Secret Service lapses were so egregious, and Cheatle’s answers so awful, that both sides are getting into the act of criticizing her pretty harshly. I think that Republican rage is real; not so sure about the Democrats, though.
And don’t forget that just three months ago some Democrats proposed a bill to strip Trump of Secret Service protection as a convicted felon. I think the Trump campaign should point this out over and over. The bill was never voted on because Republicans control the House:
House Democrats have introduced a bill that would strip Secret Service protection from convicted felons sentenced to prison, a move directly targeting former President Trump who is currently on criminal trial in New York City for alleged hush money payments made during the 2016 election campaign and faces several other cases which could land him behind bars.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the former chair of the now disbanded Jan. 6 congressional committee, introduced legislation that would automatically nix Secret Service protection for those who have been convicted of a federal or state felony that carries a minimum one-year prison term.
The proposed bill is provocatively called the “Denying Infinite Security and Government Resources Allocated toward Convicted and Extremely Dishonorable (DISGRACED) Former Protectees Act.
It wasn’t just Thompson supporting this bill; nine other Democrats in the House were part of the effort.
Cheatle is in the hot seat and acquitting herself very poorly. You can read details here, here, and here. In addition, Raskin and Comer (that’s bipartisan again) will be sending a letter demanding that Cheatle resign.
Is Cheatle a knave or a fool? I’d say “both.” And yet she’s been the head of the Secret Service for nearly two years.
Where’s Joe?
I read today that, in the midst of all the brouhaha, Netanyahu left for Washington DC. I immediately wondered whether he’d really be meeting with Biden or someone else – say, Kamala? Who is the acting president right now? Why is Kamala making public statements from the White House?
For that matter, we know that there has been a person – or more likely persons – at least partially directing and dictating to Biden for a long time. Will they now dictate to Kamala?
And of course there’s also the very valid question as to whether Biden should continue to be allowed to be president, and whether the 25th Amendment should be formally invoked.
Which leads us to the demands for “proof of life” regarding Biden – meaning, was he really the person who made the decision to drop out of the 2024 race? He’s been awfully silent and invisible. I happen to think that, although he succumbed to major pressure, he probably did make the decision – for the simple reason that his family hasn’t objected to the reports.
Open thread 7/22/24
Biden drops out
And a huge sigh of relief is heard from Democrats, while a groan is heard from Republicans.
See this.
The race changes again.
The pressure on Joe must have been phenomenal. Or the promised payoff great. Or both.
He’s not resigning from the presidency, although of course to be consistent he should. He doesn’t mention illness, though; just says his dropping out is for the good of the country.
Oh, and he’s endorsed Kamala. So she’s the one. The Democrats realized it would be too costly and difficult to replace her, and it’s not as though anyone else would necessarily do better. Plus, now she gets to pick a VP.
Update on Gerard’s book
I’m getting very very close.
The books have been printed, and if I do say so myself I think they look very good. Now all I have to do is fine-tune the website so that the mechanisms for ordering and paying for the books work. That will take a while for various reasons, including figuring out some of the details of packaging and mailing and how much postage will cost.
Here’s a photo of the paperback; it looks better in real life. Ignore the background:
It has forty-six essays, each with at least one photo. Gerard really liked the visuals, so I thought I’d preserve that aesthetic in the book.
Secret Service screw-ups
The revelations continue as we learn more and more about the obvious failures of the Secret Service last Saturday. It is incompetence of such a depth and breadth that one can’t help but think that, at the very least, some of those doing the planning and preparation didn’t deeply care if Trump lived or died.
We all dodged a bullet that day – not just Trump:
Here’s a list of nine failures that led to the failed attempt. I’m especially interested in number seven, and in learning the protocol for taking out a shooter before a shot is fired. I’m assuming there is such a protocol, but I don’t know. From now on, there had better be, and it can’t amount to letting the would-be assassin get shots off before he is killed.
Another fact that came out yesterday is that, although (as number nine points out) security at the rally last week did not include any drones, the shooter had surveyed the venue by drone earlier that day:
Shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks programmed the drone to fly over the Butler Farm Showgrounds before his assassination attempt on the former president, 78, law enforcement officials briefed on the incident said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Investigators also believe he flew the remotely piloted aircraft around the campaign rally site more than once as he mapped out the course of the attack, further adding to the Secret Service’s stunning failure to protect Trump. …
A drone was later found in Crooks’ car after he was shot dead when he opened fire on Trump. …
He had reportedly staked the farm out days before Trump arrived and is believed to have also used a bike to explore the vast grounds of the Butler County Farm Show.
How do they know about the bike? Is there surveillance video that they’re only now viewing?
“Free Palestine from German guilt”
It was decades ago that I first noticed complaints coming from some of the German youths who’d been taught about what Germany did in the WWII Holocaust. They were fed up with hearing about it. “What’s it got to do with us?” they asked. They weren’t responsible for what their parents – and/or their grandparents and now even sometimes great-grandparents – did back then.
Maybe young people today feel that way about history in general.
Years ago I also started to see the complaints pile up in blog comments and MSM article comments, and not just from Germans. Why don’t the Jews stop whining already? We’re sick and tired of it. Sometimes it crossed the line into Holocaust denial. Sometimes the commenter said he or she wanted more Jews to be killed, they were such a blight on humanity.
The internet was very good at spreading this stuff around. I noticed very early in my internet career that searches for anything connected with Israel or Jews would turn up reams and reams of the most vicious anti-Semitic material, and that a person would have to wade through it to get to anything worthwhile. After a few years of that, the search engines managed to tweak the algorithms so that somehow the worst of it was filtered out. But Jew-hating is – among other things – catching.
So last December this phrase caught my eye in an article I read [emphasis mine]:
“Free Palestine from German guilt.” That’s the message on several posters for the pro-Palestinian protests that have been organized since October in cities such as Berlin. These messages are seen in places where there have been demonstrations: in other places, rallies have been banned out of concern that there would be calls in favor of Hamas. The police closely monitored the authorized protests and have gone so far as to remove posters — and arrest those carrying them — with the “quite neutral” slogan of “From the river to the sea, equality for all,” recalls Christa Waegemann, Middle East Regional Director of the NGO Media in Cooperation and Transition.
There is nothing neutral about that “river to the sea” slogan, of course. It’s a call for the obliteration of Israel, and the addition of the word “equality” doesn’t change that. But it’s the “free Palestine from German guilt” slogan that’s of special interest to me, expressing as it does German weariness with bearing the burden of its historical guilt and a desire to free itself by supporting Palestine and accusing Israel of genocidal crimes.
Does much of the rest of Europe have the same desire to cast off its own guilt? After all, in many countries there was quite a bit of cooperation with the Holocaust. What better way to unburden oneself of that history than to decide that Jews are evil, almost as bad as the Nazis themselves were? What a relief that must be.
I believe that the US’s different history is one of the main reasons that Jew-hatred has lagged behind in this country – the US doesn’t share that sense of Holocaust guilt. But as I said, anti-Semitism is catching, and in the US it has also been imported through large numbers of students and especially professors from Arab countries teaching our university students, as well as financial support from countries like Qatar.
Open thread 7/20/24
Friday roundup
(1) An appeals court is blocking Biden’s student loan program – for now.
(2) In no surprise at all, the World Court declares Israel’s “occupation” illegal:
In a conclusive and unambiguous decision, the International Court of Justice declared in a non-binding ruling Friday that Israel’s 56-year long rule in “the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967” is “illegal,” and that it is obligated to bring its presence in that territory to an end “as rapidly as possible.”
“Non-binding” but excellent for anti-Israel propaganda.
(3) The polls are good for Trump, for what it’s worth.
(4) There’s increased evidence that Trump’s would-be assassin Crooks was an equal-opportunity killer and that Trump was a target of convenience. Crooks wasn’t averse to tracking Biden – and perhaps trying to kill him? Who knows – and we may never know – but my leading theory has been almost from the start that Crooks was mostly in the mold of the Las Vegas mass murderer and of Oswald: someone who felt superior and yet obscure, and wanted to make his mark as a master killer.
(5) Here’s Caroline Glick on Israeli and US parallels. She’s spoken and written of this before. But this is a more recent look in light of the Trump assassination attempt:
Trump’s convention speech
I watched most of it last night, despite the fact that I generally hate speeches. I figured this one would be of special interest.
And it was, especially Trump’s description of his own thought process and experience the day he got shot. He did a good job of being both dramatic and reflective as well as believable. His tone was contemplative, and his tribute to the dead and wounded moving.
The rest of the speech bored me, as most political speeches do. That’s just the way it is for me. It was really long, too; about an hour and a half. But I guess it did the job.
I don’t think most people who hate Trump are going to change their minds. Although there are some who might like this kinder, gentler Trump and will now switch, I think their numbers are low.
Then again, there’s this sort of thing:
ZUCKERBERG: “Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life.”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 19, 2024