Here’s a thread to discuss tonight’s election results.
As I said earlier, I’m planning to wait quite some time before discussing the results myself. But I thought I’d start a thread for anyone who wants to talk now.
UPDATE:
It’s very late, and which party will be in charge of the House and/or the Senate still isn’t clear except for this: it has been a deeply disappointing and almost frightening night for the right. That’s true even if we manage to hold onto the lead in the House, and even in the very unlikely event we take the Senate.
I plan to post my thoughts tomorrow on what happened and why, but I’ll just summarize here by saying that indeed, a mind is a very very difficult thing to change. In other words, I believe the country is fairly evenly divided and in order for the GOP to dominate an election, a significant number of Democrat voters must change their minds. That’s not happening in sufficient numbers at all, except in a state such as Florida.
It seems that the Democratic half of the country has no trouble whatsoever voting for far leftists and even people who are cognitively challenged (even far leftists who are also cognitively challenged). The only thing that matters to them now is party designation. There is virtually no crossing over, and party is everything and power is everything.
There is much more I could say, but I plan to save it till tomorrow.
You may notice that I’m not making any election predictions. But they’re not hard to find; they’re just about everywhere. Take your pick. I plan to post about the election when results are getting clearer, which probably will be some time tonight.
What I’m doing right now is other things. I’m about to exercise to try to dissipate a bit of my tension. But I thought you might enjoy this interesting distraction:
The borders between France and other European countries are open and, like all the borders of Europe, porous. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants enter Europe illegally each year. Many head for France and stay there. They have been benefiting, since 2000, from financial aid and free medical care to which even poor French citizens do not have access. If they are arrested, like Lola’s murderer, they are ordered to leave the country, but are not placed in a detention center so the order, never enforced, is not an order at all. In 2020, 107,500 orders to leave France were issued; fewer than 7% took place.
Illegal immigrants in France are the perpetrators of nearly half of crimes committed in the country, according to the recently published L’ordre nécessaire (“The Necessary Order”), by Didier Lallement, former chief of the Paris Police. Approximately 48% of all crimes committed in Paris in 2021, he notes, were committed by illegal immigrants. Murders almost as gruesome as Lola’s — most of which are committed by illegal immigrants — are committed nearly every day. No one even mentions them. The victims often have their throats slit. When the mainstream media report on the murders, they do not talk about slit throats. They say the victim was “stabbed in the neck.”
The French now live in a climate of generalized violence.
The author indicates that the presidential candidates who would like to crack down on this don’t seem to get elected:
Polls show that the French population are seeing violence rising sharply: 68% of French people say they feel their lives are increasingly insecure, and 75% say that the record of Macron and the government fighting crime is poor. 70% believe that illegal immigration is a serious problem. Nevertheless, in May 2022, a majority of voters re-elected Macron and rejected candidates who promised to fight crime and illegal immigration.
In an apparent attempt to explain this odd outcome, many commentators say that the French population now expects the downfall of their country.
As I read this, I began to wonder. Are those statistics about half of crime in France true? I was surprised to discover that Macron himself has said it in an interview, although with great reluctance:
Mr. Macron first refused to acknowledge a “substantive link” between the two, or to “generalize.” “On the other hand, looking at (…) crime, for example in Paris, where there’s a high concentration of illegal immigration for geographical and bureaucratic reasons, it’s very evident in the crime figures,” he said, voicing concerns about “nuances” and “having a feeling for the truth” on such a “sensitive subject.”…
To illustrate his claim, Mr. Macron cited a statistic: “If we look at crime in Paris today, we cannot fail to see that at least half of the crime comes from people who are foreigners, either illegal immigrants or waiting for a residence permit. In any case, they’re in a very delicate situation, often coming in through these [illegal immigration] channels.”
That article about the Macron interview goes on to mention the Didier Lallement book, and to discuss slight disparities in the statements between what Lallemont wrote and what Macron said. But the gist of it is that illegal immigrants commit a ton of the crime in France.
As for why the French keep voting for people like Macron, I can think of a lot of possibilities, not mutually exclusive. One might be ignorance of the severity of the problem. Another might be that other issues take priority. But what I really think is behind their votes is that the subject is so “sensitive” and “delicate” and they don’t want to be on what is labeled the bigoted and non-compassionate side of it. Macron sounds like the good guy, the nice guy.
There is an old Jewish saying to the effect of “he who is kind to the cruel ends up being cruel to the kind.” It has a harsh ring, doesn’t it? But there’s a reason the saying is famous; it’s because it often seems to turn out to be true.
Speaking of truth, if you look up the Gateway Institute in Wikipedia, you’ll find virtually the entire entry is an attempt to discredit them as lying Islamophobes. Interesting. It makes it so much easier for people to discount what the Gateway Institute says without even reading it and judging for themselves.
Just got back from voting, on a beautiful but seasonably cold day.
When I was a young adult, elections weren’t at all stressful to me. I cared about the outcomes, of course. But it seemed that no matter what, the big picture would go on more or less as before.
Now I get very stressed out and can barely stand to watch the returns. In fact, I don’t always watch them till later in the evening, after quite a bit of time has elapsed. That doesn’t help much either, though; the tension is there no matter what.
And yet, and yet she has a good chance of winning the election. Zeldin also has a decent chance, but it would be an upset because New York is such a deep blue state.
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul claims her GOP challenger Rep. Lee Zeldin is “hyperventilating” over the crime problems in the state.
During a campaign stop Monday at the 72nd Street subway station in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Mrs. Hochul said Mr. Zeldin has been “trying to scare people for fun” over the crime issue.
Bill Clinton was campaigning for Hochul, and this is what he said:
The former president joked that Mr. Zeldin “makes it sound like Kathy Hochul gets up every morning, goes to the nearest subway stop and hands out billy clubs [and] baseball bats.”
Zeldin, who is running on a tough-on-crime platform ridiculing Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s support for cashless bail, said his twin 16-year-old daughters were downstairs in the kitchen doing homework at the time they heard gunfire outside just feet away. The girls locked themselves in an upstairs bathroom and called 911.
Zeldin and his wife were not home and had recently left to attend a Columbus Day parade in the Bronx.
Home surveillance cameras showed three people. One wounded victim was seen lying beneath the porch, while another was seen lying beneath a bush just feet away. The third uninjured person moved around the property freely. The two wounded individuals were Joel Murphy and Elijah Robinson, two 17-year-olds, the New York Post reported.
I am somewhat amazed at the low caliber of so many of the Democrats’ candidates this year. And yet some of these people will almost certainly win. Of course, Biden set the standard for that.
One interesting thing about the recent Israeli election is that the polls were wrong:
Some pre-election polls had Netanyahu’s Likud and its allied parties polling highly enough to secure a bare 61-seat coalition majority — Israel’s Knesset, or national legislature, has 120 seats — but others did not. In the final count, the Likud-centric rightist coalition will attain 64 seats. That may sound like a narrow winning margin, but compared to the previous four indecisive elections going back to 2019, that is a monumental victory, at least comparatively speaking.
…Remarkably, as Likud secured a durable majority and as Religious Zionism cruised to a third-place result, the Israeli Left’s now-decades-long collapse was only further exacerbated. Labor, which dominated the first three decades of Israeli history, will have a minuscule four seats in the next Knesset. Far-left Meretz, moreover, did not even qualify for Knesset representation.
What changed to upset the razor-thin balance of recent elections? The issues this time were the economy, crime, public safety and national security (particularly the threat of Iran). Some of that sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? I also think the election was influenced by the thinness of the legal charges against Netanyahu as revealed in his corruption trial, still ongoing but with a prosecution case that was already much weakened prior to the election. The evidence simply isn’t there.
Elections always make me nervous, and tomorrow is no exception despite the optimistic predictions. I am at least cautiously optimistic, but I feel a lot like William Jacobson in this post:
I won’t believe it until I see it.
It occurs to me that I have a mild form of PTSD from the election of 2020. Maybe a lot of us do. It’s kind of funny (I don’t mean funny ha-ha); Democrats had PTSD from the 2016 election, and in 2020 it was our turn.
Or maybe an inversion of the truth is what a Big Lie is, as opposed to a regular lie.
Biden and coal plants – who are you going to believe, us now or your lying ears before?
… Biden decided to tell voters that his administration would be shutting down coal plants all across America and transitioning to wind and solar power during an unnecessary trip to California…
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre issued a statement:
“The President’s remarks yesterday have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended; he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense. The President was commenting on a fact of economics and technology: as it has been from its earliest days as an energy superpower, America is once again in the midst of an energy transition. Our goal as a nation is to combat climate change and increase our energy security by producing clean and efficient American energy. Under President Biden, oil and natural gas production has increased, and we are on track to hit the highest production in our country’s history next year. He is determined to make sure that this transition helps all Americans in all parts of the country, with more jobs and better opportunities; it’s a commitment he has advanced since Day One. No one will be left behind.”
Blabity blah blah blah. This is what Biden had said:
So much that Democrats say these days is an inversion of truth. But Democrat voters don’t seem to hear it that way. In fact, when the MSM engaged in a very rare and mild bout of truth-telling about Biden, many Democrats said “How dare they!”. They are accustomed to the MSM being the propaganda arm of the party:
A New York Times piece pointing out President Biden’s gaffes from his Tuesday speech angered liberals on Twitter.
Furious leftists on the platform swarmed the Times senior political reporter Maggie Haberman’s tweet linking to the story, viciously insulting her and the report for making Biden and Democrats look bad…
On Tuesday, the Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker detailed the gaffes from Biden’s speech in a short article titled, “Biden Verbally Fumbles, Twice, During Campaign Trip in Florida.”
In it, he wrote, “President Biden verbally fumbled during a campaign swing in Florida on Tuesday, confusing the American war in Iraq with the Russian war in Ukraine, and then he fumbled again while he tried to correct himself, misstating how his son Beau died in 2015.”
And of course “fumble” is itself a euphemism for what Biden exactly did. Iraq and Ukraine maybe, but the circumstances of the tragic death of his own son? Not a fumble. Not exactly a lie, either; evidence of cognitive decline coupled with Biden’s history of easy mendacity.
Some of the reactions to the Times even mentioning it instead of ignoring it as they usually do:
User “Beth” wrote, “It’s really sad what you think your job is, with your giant f—ing megaphone, during an attempted fascist takeover of our democracy.”
Jamesetta Williams wrote, “Maggie limits the comments when she knows the article she is sharing is problematic. Biden misspoke on Ukraine and quickly corrected himself, that is not news. It’s well documented that Biden believes his son got cancer from burn pits in Iraq, he did not misspeak.”
What Biden actually said about his son was that his son “lost his life in Iraq.”
CNN has also shocked the left by actually fact-checking Biden in a fairly straightforward manner on a number of issues.
Perhaps they’re getting ready to replace Biden. But it does surprise me that they’re doing this truth-telling exercise prior to the midterms. Then again, they’ve either given up on the mid-terms or they know that the fix is in. I don’t know which it is.
When I moved to smaller digs over a decade ago, I stored a couple of boxes of my stuff and some pieces of furniture in my ex-husband’s storage unit.
Actually, at the time he had two storage units, both of them 20′ by 20′ and jammed to the gills with stuff. In other words, he’s a packrat, although a few years ago he managed the Herculean task of reducing the two units to one.
And lest you think it odd that I was storing some things in my ex-husband’s garage-away-from-home, let me add that by the time this happened we were good friends again.
Now my ex is determined to get an even smaller unit, maybe 10 by 15 or even 10 by 10 (goals!), and to get rid of many of the things that are mouldering in the present one, along with random mouse turds and spider detritus (as well as a few living spiders). I volunteered to help him through with stern yet inspirational talk, as well as to remind myself what things I have in there and perhaps get rid of some of them. I know that two of those things are my great-grandparents’ absolutely gorgeous crystal from the late-1800s, and some of my parents’ china too, as well as the aforementioned items of furniture.
But who wants crystal and china these days? I don’t think my son does, and I don’t think my nieces and nephews do either. I’ll get rid of the few items of really cheap second-hand furniture I bought when my husband and I separated and I started living on my own, and keep some of the older stuff.
But then I spied the Smith Corona electric typewriter. I had forgotten about that. It looks a great deal like this one, and if memory serves me, it worked until I retired it when I got a word processor in the 80s. But oh, the memories I have of that typewriter! It took me to the end of high school and right through college. The moment I saw it forlornly standing there in that storage unit, I pictured it on the small desk in my dorm room freshman year of college – and me sitting in a wooden chair, chain smoking and typing away through the wee hours of the morning, having postponed my work till the last minute. Where was my roommate? Maybe she was asleep in the other bed, or maybe she was awake and studying, too, since it was probably near finals time.
When I was pressed for time I didn’t write drafts; I simply typed the thing out on that typewriter until I reached the required number of pages. Somehow the product I churned out usually seemed coherent enough. It was risky business, though, because – for those of you who might be young enough to have never typed on an actual typewriter yourselves – there was no good way of correcting errors. We did have erasable typing paper, but it was somewhat flawed and you had to catch any major errors pretty quickly or the formatting was wrong. Same with white-out.
I still remember my wonder and excitement the first time I used a word processor – when I made a correction the rest of the text magically rearranged itself.
And as I stood in the storage unit staring at the Smith Corona in its heavy case, my memory went back even further to its predecessor – my mother’s old mechanical typewriter. She had been a secretary for a while and was a master typist, and could also take shorthand. What skills! Her fingers flew over that keyboard, which was even more impressive because the machine didn’t respond to a soft touch and made a satisfying sound as each key struck the paper. She could use carbons. She could do just about anything on that thing, although the keys sometimes stuck and had to be pried down again and even sometimes untangled from each other.
I learned to type in junior high because it was required. We learned on IBM electrics with the keys covered so that we couldn’t see the alphabet. Our teacher was a pretty itty bitty woman with a stick she beat on the floor at times, and a will of iron. Terrifying to defy her. We had timed drills in which five words per minute were deducted from our scores for every mistake we made. But I learned to type, although never as well as my mother did.
My mother’s old typewriter looked very much like this one. But you won’t find it in my ex’s storage unit. My mother must have given it away long ago. She didn’t keep a lot of things. But she did save an enormous number of photos and letters, some of them going back to the 1850s. A couple of months ago I bought a bunch of plastic storage cases to use when I sort them out. Soon; soon.
[NOTE: Two days ago I wrote a post on the over-the-top fearmongering of Michael Beschloss, who has written a number of books on presidential history and who is often described as a “presidential historian.” That reminded me that shortly after Biden’s Philadelphia speech with the blood-red background, I had started a draft about the influence of Jon Meacham on Joe Biden, but had never finished and published it. So here it is; consider it a companion piece to the other post. Like Beschloss, Meacham is another presidential biographer. What is it with these presidential biographers? They seem to also want to become part of history themselves – at least Meacham does, as you will see.]
Aides said that Biden had been planning to give a version of Thursday night’s address [the one in Philadelphia with the red background] since this past June, relaying he wanted to speak on what he saw as increasingly grave threats to the nation’s democracy. But events continued to get in the way of its delivery. Pressure built over the past few weeks, they said, amid a number of developments…
The actual writing of the speech started about three weeks ago, with Jon Meacham, the historian who has had a hand in a number of Biden’s most sweeping speeches, helping the framing.
I hadn’t paid any attention to Jon Meacham before, but that certainly made me curious.
Curious that with all his writing background (although I’ve never read any book he’s written, so despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for a biography of Andrew Jackson, I can’t attest to his skill or lack thereof) the speech, just in terms of memorable phrases and literary value, was a zero.
Meacham appears to be another Bush-type Republican who went fully over into the NeverTrump camp. With Meacham, the form that took was to cast his lot firmly with Biden, as part of the writing of Joe’s 2020 nomination acceptance speech. What motivates a person like Meacham? Is it partly his background as a genteel Newsweek writer back in the days when there was still a moderate wing of the Democratic Party, and the “reaching across the aisle” concept still seemed somewhat viable? Does he remember Joe Biden that way, back in the 90s (I think Biden was always an opportunistic fraud who was motivated entirely by personal ambition, but I doubt Meacham shared that opinion)? He’s written biographies of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson and Jon Lewis as well as Bush the Elder, in addition to one about the friendship between FDR and Churchill, and spoke at Bush’s funeral as well as his wife Barbara’s.
And yet to me, anyway, his writing for Biden is quite a stretch, tantamount to Liz Cheney’s journey (and motivated perhaps by the same anti-Trump pro-Bush animus):
Meacham was asked to speak at the 2020 Democratic National Convention on the Soul of America. He endorsed Joe Biden, saying, “history, which will surely be our judge, can also be our guide. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, we’re at our best when we build bridges, not walls”.
Notice that the title of the 2020 Democratic convention speech used a phrase that was echoed in Biden’s Philadelphia speech: the soul of America. Biden wouldn’t really seem to be the best person to be cast in the role of soul-restorer, but he and the Democrats seem to have decided to call him that, and people like Meacham have puzzlingly agreed. It seems to me that one look at and one listen to Joe Biden would be enough to disabuse a person of that notion, but wishful thinking can be very powerful, and I think that someone like Meacham has created a fantasy Joe Biden in his mind who is the Joe Biden he wants him to be, as well as a fantasy cartoon-evil Trump for Biden to combat (the fantasy Trump probably came first). Who knew someone with Meacham’s credentials thought in such terms? That’s another thing that Trump’s presidency has revealed.
I had forgotten – or perhaps I hadn’t previously realized – that this “soul of America” theme was set early in Biden’s presidency. In fact, it was also the theme of his victory speech – perhaps written by Meacham as well? In addition, it’s the title of a book that was released right at the time of Biden’s inauguration: Restoring the Soul of America: The Election of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. The book is by Rick Daniels, and that Amazon page starts with a quote from Biden’s: “I ran for this office to restore the soul of America.” The book doesn’t seem to have made much of a splash.
However, Meacham has also written a book that has gotten a lot of readers and a lot of reviews, and it’s called The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels It was an Oprah pick, and I suppose that brought it a lot of attention, and it seems to focus on American history. The book was published prior to Biden’s candidacy, in May of 2018, and so this “soul of America” theme is his. Here’s a description of the book at Amazon:
Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear—a struggle that continues even now.
And here you can see the kindly professorial Meacham himself talking about it:
One more thing – Meacham seems to be religious, and has written a book about Jesus. He talks about that here:
Why do I even care about Jon Meacham? One reason is that NeverTrumpers fascinate me, and although you might not share that interest, I am intensely curious about what makes them tick. It’s not just their dislike of Trump – that’s the easier part to understand, and I think it’s based on a kneejerk patrician revulsion and a focus on certain things he’s said that really are somewhat offensive and/or which have been twisted into something they were not (the Charlottesville hoax, for example). But how can they switch to the current Democrats and the corruption, mendacity, and leftism of Joe Biden and those he has appointed, as well as his incredibly destructive policies? And how in particular can someone like Meacham see Biden as a soul-saver, and provide the words for him to assert that idea while simultaneously trashing half of America? How can Meacham justify this to himself? Because it’s pretty clear to me at this point that this “saving the soul of America” theme is Meacham’s, written by Meacham for Biden to mouth right from the start of his presidency and even during his candidacy.
And although you may disagree, I think Meacham is sincere. I think that as a writer he has held to an idea of forces of light and darkness in American history, and Trump is the darkness (a la Ku Klux Klan and Father Coughlin and McCarthy, from that Amazon description) and Biden is the light. That this is now in the realm of fantasy is not apparent to Meacham, because it is so compelling and he so wishes it to be that way. A vision of the anointed, indeed. This is my strong impression on learning about Meacham’s history and his role in Biden’s campaign.
Go back to Biden’s inaugural speech and see some excerpts (probably written by Meacham). In the following excerpts, the italics are mine:
This is America’s day.
This is democracy’s day.
A day of history and hope.
Of renewal and resolve.
Through a crucible for the ages America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge.
Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy.
The “democracy, democracy, democracy” theme was already in place.
And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.
To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words.
It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy:
Unity.
To restore the soul.
In another January in Washington, on New Year’s Day 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
When he put pen to paper, the President said, “If my name ever goes down into history it will be for this act and my whole soul is in it.”
My whole soul is in it.
Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this:
Bringing America together.
Biden’s whole soul. Wishful thinking on the part of Meacham, reading a teleprompter on the part of Biden.
Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.
The battle is perennial.
Victory is never assured.
Through the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice, and setbacks, our “better angels” have always prevailed.
Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln – a Republican, by the way. And note once again the title of Meacham’s Oprah-favored book: The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.
And go back even further to Biden’s nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in August of 2020. Apparently this was Meacham as well, and it uses the Charlottesville hoax as the supposed inspiration for Biden’s presidential run (Biden, a man who’s been running for president nearly as long as he’s been alive):
Just a week ago yesterday was the third anniversary of the events in Charlottesville.
Remember seeing those neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists coming out of the fields with lighted torches? Veins bulging? Spewing the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s?
Remember the violent clash that ensued between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it?
Remember what the president said?
There were quote, “very fine people on both sides.”
It was a wake-up call for us as a country.
And for me, a call to action. At that moment, I knew I’d have to run. My father taught us that silence was complicity. And I could not remain silent or complicit.
At the time, I said we were in a battle for the soul of this nation.
And we are.
Joe’s a politician and demagogue, but Meacham’s a writer on historical matters. Does he not care what Trump actually said, in context? Or does he take Newsweek’s word for it? Perhaps it didn’t even occur to him to check what Trump really said, because the reports from the left of what he said fit so perfectly into Meacham’s already-existing template of good and evil, and he’s written so much about the older civil rights movement. Charlottesville and its visuals upset him – “seeing those neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists coming out of the fields with lighted torches? Veins bulging? Spewing the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s.” Meacham has his morality play, and in that play these people are killer Nazis that Trump defended, although he did not. And Biden is the person fighting them – instead of a mendacious, corrupt, ambitious and long-term racist (and if we must talk about the Klan, Biden eulogized former Klan member Robert Byrd, although by then Byrd was long out of the Klan).
You can say Meacham’s a dreamer, but he’s not the only one. He created the Trump he needs and the Biden he needs to be a hero in the battle for what the religious Meacham sees as America’s soul.
Here’s the closing part of Biden’s nomination acceptance speech:
This is our moment.
This is our mission.
May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light joined in the battle for the soul of the nation.
And this is a battle that we, together, will win.
Go back even further to Biden’s April 2019 announcement that he was running for president in 2020, “Biden Launches 2020 Campaign As Rescue Mission For America’s ‘Soul'”:
Biden’s announcement focuses on a “battle for the soul of this nation,” with a dramatic video centered around the 2017 white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Va., and President Trump’s response that there were “very fine people on both sides” after a counterprotester was killed.
“In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime,” Biden says in the video.
I guess Meacham was on board early on.
I doubt that Meacham had much if anything to do with the lighting and setting of Biden’s awful Phildelphia speech. If he had, as a history writer he might have recognized that it was likely to conjure up, not a uniting lightbringer, but those forces of darkness that so repelled Meacham “with lighted torches…Veins bulging…spewing…bile.” But to him and to Biden’s aides, that thought probably wouldn’t occur, because they apparently are so focused on their own message and think Biden is a believable messenger to deliver it (or perhaps the only one available right now), and that the evil of the other side is so apparent. They don’t see that speech as a declaration of war on kulaks or on Jew-equivalents, and that the imagery reinforced that perception.
I am struck, also, by the Biblical nature of the phrase Meacham used in Biden’s inaugural speech: “to restore the soul and to secure the future of America.” “Restore the soul” – what does it conjure up for you? For me, it’s the 23rd Psalm, King James edition. How ludicrous to apply that to Joe Biden. And yet there it is, courtesy of Jon Meacham.
