Why did the Democrats pick Biden?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not long ago, commenter “baltimoron” wrote:

As much as I disliked Kennedy and Clinton, I could understand why Democrats and a few independent voters were willing to look past their flaws. I didn’t agree with them, mind you, but I understood it. Creepy Joe is different. I genuinely do not understand how the guy got as far as he did. He’s inarticulate, does and says weird things, no one seems to respect him, he has no built in constituency. How did the Democrats pick him?

It might seem that way on the surface. But Biden was a great choice, actually, if their most pressing goal was to stop Trump. After all, Biden had been Obama’s VP, so he had the reflected glory that seems to still shine on Obama with so many people. Secondly, Biden was thought to be a known commodity with a valuable reputation as a moderate. Therefore he could be sold that way to voters in 2020, even though the intent of electing him was not to have a moderate administration at all. Unlike quite a few radical leftists who were running against him in the 2020 primaries, Biden could appeal to the voters more or less in the middle, who hated Trump. And there were plenty of those.

Political operatives in the Democratic Party correctly figured that Biden could be successfully hidden and restricted in movement and appearances because of COVID. Therefore his cognitive and physical deficiencies would be at least somewhat hidden, and the press would cooperate. There was a risk there, to be sure: too many voters might notice anyway. But it was outweighed by the aforementioned pluses of a Biden candidacy, and anyway who would be the alternative if Biden wasn’t the candidate? The was no obvious better choice.

Biden is supposedly “likeable” – and if he isn’t (I never have found him so, even when I was a Democrat), people who are told something like that often enough can sometimes buy it if they want to. In Biden’s case, people wanted to because they were tired of all the contention around Trump. Biden was sold as a return to normalcy, whether the normalcy of the Obama years or the Clinton years, and that was very appealing to people who were weary of what they considered the unpleasant circus swirling around Trump’s every utterance, every tweet, and every move.

Biden himself also had another huge plus for Democrats on the left who were moving the levers behind the scenes – he has no principles and is malleable and was likely to do whatever the left told him.

As I said, there was no viable alternative to Biden, particularly when the choice eventually narrowed down (as it did) to Bernie Sanders vs. Biden. Sanders was too radical and would scare people back into Trump’s waiting arms. Therefore Sanders was simply unacceptable.

Nowadays few people talk about how great Biden is, except in terms of not-Trump and being “normal” . The lack of greatness doesn’t matter to them, because if all Biden did was to replace Trump, that would have been enough for them. The Democrats I’ve talked to about Biden also don’t seem aware of any deficits in him worth mentioning, even now. Whether this is because the MSM has successfully blocked news of those deficits or whether these people simply see only what they wish to see, I really don’t know. But I note the phenomenon.

Lies of the Times

The New Neo Posted on by

This book sounds like it’s worth reading:

“My research churned up not mere errors or inaccuracies but whole-cloth falsehoods,” Rindsberg writes in “The Gray Lady Winked” (Midnight Oil), out now, which examines how the nation’s premier media outlet manipulates what we think is the news.

The “fabrications and distortions” he found in the Times’ coverage of major stories from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to Vietnam and the Iraq War “were never the product of simple error,” Rindsberg contends.

“Rather, they were the byproduct of a particular kind of system, a truth-producing machine” constructed to twist facts into a pattern of the Times’ own choosing, he says.

Rindsberg argues that Times reporters have followed the same playbook since the 1920s.

As expected….

The New Neo Posted on by

…the left pounces on Joe Manchin.

In yesterday’s thread on Manchin, the following point was raised by commenter “Aggie”:

Of course, there’s always Glenn Greenwald’s ‘Rotating Villain’ theory of politics:

“In American Democracy, when the majority party has enough votes to pass populist legislation, party leaders designate a scapegoat who will refuse to vote with the party thereby killing the legislation.

The opposition is otherwise inexplicable and typically comes from someone who is safe of not up for re-election. This allows for maximum diffusion of responsibility.”

Greenwald says:

If Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema weren’t blocking all the lovely and wonderful things the Democratic Party pretends it wants to do, they would just have other Senators doing it instead. Anyone who doesn’t know this understands nothing about how that party functions

Something of the sort occurred to me as a possibility, as well. However, I think Greenwald is incorrect in this instance and also in general. What he’s describing is somewhat how the GOP operates or used to operate. The Democrats, however, have a somewhat different approach. I think the Democrats are extremely serious about passing this legislation (HR1) – every bit as serious as they were about passing Obamacare, for example. However, they know they can’t pass it now without nuking the filibuster and also if a single Democrat member defects (unless, of course, some Republicans come along with the Democrats and vote “yes” on it, which in this case doesn’t seem likely).

So their calculation is that – for the moment, at least – the filibuster cannot be ended and HR1 cannot pass because the required party unanimity does not exist. Therefore Manchin, of the red state of West Virginia, is allowed to come out publicly against both things. This helps the Democrats in 2022 by robbing the GOP – at least to a certain extent – of the argument that the Democrats have all become radical leftists. This is important to Democrats, because their hope is that this will help them retain the House in the 2022 election and win enough Senate seats in 2022 to be able to pass both things at that point if they so desire.

In other words, they hope not to need Manchin after 2022, and to be in a much stronger position to enact the radical measures they would like to pass.

Manchin isn’t up for re-election until 2024 (at which point he may or may not run again, considering that he will be in his late 70s at the time). And of course, because he’s from a red state, his present opposition to ending the filibuster and to HR1 can only help him win re-election if he does decide to run again.

[NOTE: In addition, as commenter “Art Deco” mentions, HR1 is not “populist” legislation.]

The ACLU has made the name of the organization Orwellian

The New Neo Posted on by

The acronym “ACLU” stands for “American Civil Liberties Union.” Once a proud defender of free speech and other liberties, it stood by the principle of defending the right to speak even for those whose speech is offensive.

But that’s so Twentieth Century. A brand new day his dawned, in which the ACLU is in favor of civil liberties only for those who support the left, making the “civil liberties” in the title something like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and Ministry of Love, the opposite of what it professes to be.

Founded in 1920, almost exactly 100 years ago, the organization’s original credo was (emphasis mine), “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

No more. Here’s law professor Josh Blackman on the changing of the ACLU guard:

…[T]he New York Times published a detailed analysis about the ACLU’s “identity crisis.” The article begins with a vignette about David Goldberger, who argued the famous Skokie Nazi case for the ACLU. In 2017, the ACLU gave him an award. But during the ceremony, he felt a growing unease.

“A law professor argued that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U. and that Black people experienced offensive speech far more viscerally than white allies. In the hallway outside, an A.C.L.U. official argued it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech. Mr. Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged. ‘I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,’ he said in a recent interview. ‘Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.’

No, Mr. Goldberger; these are not liberals. They are leftists, and the difference is that leftists do not care about the First Amendment, any other amendment, or civil liberties, if those things stand in the way of their power. In fact, any liberal who “leaves the First Amendment behind” has also left liberalism behind. And these days the ACLU is staffed nearly entirely by leftists rather than liberals, as the rest of Josh Blackman’s article describes.

Joe Manchin, unlikely hero of the republic?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve never been a Manchin admirer, and I don’t much trust him. But so far he’s been keeping the total power play of leftism at bay.

The left needs him in order to enact their full legislative agenda, and he’s still saying he won’t be a party to it because he plans to vote “no” on HR1 as well as “no” to ending the filibuster:

…[C]ongressional action on federal voting rights legislation must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together to find a pathway forward or we risk further dividing and destroying the republic we swore to protect and defend as elected officials.

Democrats in Congress have proposed a sweeping election reform bill called the For the People Act. This more than 800-page bill has garnered zero Republican support. Why? Are the very Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump because of actions that led to an attack on our democracy unwilling to support actions to strengthen our democracy? Are these same senators, whom many in my party applauded for their courage, now threats to the very democracy we seek to protect?

The truth, I would argue, is that voting and election reform that is done in a partisan manner will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.

With that in mind, some Democrats have again proposed eliminating the Senate filibuster rule in order to pass the For the People Act with only Democratic support. They’ve attempted to demonize the filibuster and conveniently ignore how it has been critical to protecting the rights of Democrats in the past.

Manchin’s fellow Democrats of the leftist variety (which is almost all of them) must really, really hate him. Let’s hope this pledge isn’t just a ploy by Manchin to gain some favors from the Democratic leadership before he caves.

But we can’t afford to rely on the good graces of Joe Manchin. The defeat of HR1 may give the right a little extra time to maneuver, but if the 2022 election doesn’t return Congress to Republican control, and if the Republicans don’t cocnsolidate some of their newfound fighting spirit, it’s just a matter of time before the left manages to get enough people into office to finally change the rules in order to cement their long-term and perhaps even permanent power.

Is Israel about to commit suicide?

The New Neo Posted on by

The political stance of a country can change very quickly these days, and elections have consequences. But Israeli elections are especially confusing, and I really don’t have a good idea what’s going on in that country at the moment despite having read quite a bit about it.

It starts with the fact that Israel has a parliamentary system, and Netanyahu failed to get enough votes to form a government. So that gives smaller factions a chance to band together and take power in a coalition, which they seem to be poised to do. However, the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) has yet to vote on it, although that is due to happen on either June 9 or June 14.

Caroline Glick has some very disturbing and pessimistic things to say on the matter:

There is little point at this stage of the game to mention the depths of moral depravity and treachery into which Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked have descended. Now, as the two self-proclaimed “leaders” of the ideological Right defect from the nationalist camp and form a leftist government supported by pro-Hamas Arab parties, the time has come to discuss the strategic and national consequences of their actions.

The place to begin the discussion is by noting that ministers that support the Biden administration’s Middle East policies will hold a majority in the leftist government Bennett and Shaked are now intent on forming.

The Biden administration’s commitment to returning the US to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran leads only in one direction. Biden’s Iran policy guarantees that Iran will achieve its goals of regional hegemony and membership in the nuclear club.

The 2015 deal facilitates Iran’s return to the global market and provides billions of dollars in cash payments to the regime in the form of sanctions relief and reparations. With these funds and lines of credit, the regime in Tehran will deepen its control over Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Iran will expand its war against Saudi Arabia while compelling the Gulf States and Jordan to bend to its will. The Khomeinist regime will then turn its sights on Egypt and work to oust the Sisi government and replace it with the Muslim Brotherhood…

The leftist government that Bennett and Shaked are about to form will not be able to oppose Biden’s policies because most of its cabinet ministers support those policies. And this spells the demise of the Abraham Accords. The rationale for those peace deals is Arab faith in Israel’s willingness to confront Iran even in defiance of the US Once that is gone, the Abraham Accords will be dead in the water.

The leftist government that Bennett and Shaked are now forming will guarantee that the Palestinian Authority will complete its seizure of Area C, endangering Israel’s strategic interests and imperiling its communities in Judea and Samaria. Most of the members of the government object to any steps to secure Israel’s rights and strategic interests in the areas…

And if Hamas – as can be expected – renews its campaign against Israel, the government will not dare to fight back because it will be dependent on the support of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned United Arab List to survive. The UAL will bring down the government if it even thinks about lifting a finger to protect Israel against Hamas.

Beyond the diplomatic and military catastrophe that the leftist government will foment, there’s also the issue of Israeli democracy. A large majority of the ministers in the leftist government now being formed support eternalizing [* see NOTE belo] the legal fraternity’s seizure of power over the Knesset and the government.

There are more dismal predictions where that came from, at the link. According to Glick, there will be a cascade of such events, a result of the fact that Bennett will be forming a coalition with other parties diametrically opposed to what he has professed to stand for.

This is the coalition:

Bennett has signed onto a historic coalition agreement with centrist leader Yair Lapid who brought together a wide swath of political parties as part of a change coalition to oust Netanyahu, including a far left party and even for the first time in Israeli history, an Arab-Israeli party. If Israel’s parliament signs off on the deal in the coming days, Bennett will take the top job for the first two years of a four-year term, followed by Lapid…

Bennett lies to the right even of Netanyahu in several crucial areas. He would carry into office a history of incendiary remarks about Palestinians and a well-documented ambition to annex part of the occupied West Bank.

Few Israelis voted for Bennett’s Yamina party in March elections, picking up just 7 seats compared to Netanyahu’s 30. But Bennett found himself the kingmaker, wooed by both Netanyahu and Lapid who needed his party’s support in order to form a majority.

What could possibly go wrong? That’s the sort of thing I detest about Parliamentary systems.

It sounds to me as though all the groups opposed to Netanyahu – and there are tons of them on both left and right, not all that different from the disparate groups forming the anti-Trump coalition here – got together with the overriding purpose of ousting him from power. That’s their sole unifying characteristic and their sole unifying goal. They will be jockeying for position in the resulting government,if indeed such a government is approved.

More:

That means there’s still time for Netanyahu and his allies to convince members of parliament to defect from the coalition, or somehow tie things up procedurally in parliament. A collapse of the ceasefire with the Hamas-led militants in Gaza or another outside event could also topple the burgeoning new government.

But if Bennett and Lapid’s coalition can hold firm, they would bring weeks (or years) of political maneuvering to a close — and pull off a once improbable deal that would elevate Bennett to Israel’s highest office.

I don’t think I’m the only one who hasn’t a clue what’s going to happen.

[*NOTE: I had never heard the word “eternalizing” before, and at first I though it as a typo for “externalizing.” But that didn’t fit, and I realized that what Glick meant was “making eternal, making forever, making permanent.” Not a bad word, actually, to describe what the left wants to do when it gets into power.]

Signs of hope for the right among Hispanic voters in Texas

The New Neo Posted on by

Because Democrats think primarily in terms of identity politics, they often assume that certain ethnic groups belong to them and vote monolithically. Black people have been voting overwhelmingly Democrat for many decades, and although Hispanic voters aren’t quite as one-party in their voting habits, they have been strongly Democratic, too.

But one interesting thing about the election of 2020 is that in several heavily Hispanic border towns, Trump did better than expected. And that Republican-leaning effect appears to be holding up:

Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor since 1997.

Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor of a major Texas city.

Voters also elected Republican Jim Ross as mayor of Arlington, a suburb of 400,000 people that borders Fort Worth and is only 39 percent Anglo…

But it was the victory of Javier Villalobos [to Veronica Vega Whitacre] in the overwhelmingly Democratic Rio Grande Valley bordering Mexico that shook political observers…

Whitacre’s loss was only the latest sign for Democrats that the Rio Grande Valley is slipping away from them. Biden won the region by 15 points last November, a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016. At the same time, Congressman Vicente Gonzalez won reelection by only 51 percent to 48 percent over Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez in a district Democrats always carry.

“Democrats have a big problem in Texas,” Rio Grande Valley congressman Filemon Vela told the Texas Tribune in January, shortly after he became vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “For the first time in generations, or maybe ever, we lost . . . South Texas counties with significant Hispanic populations,” he said. “And we are going to have to . . . wrap our arms around exactly why that happened. It may be a difficult issue to reconcile.”

Now, exactly why might it have happened, and why would it be “difficult to reconcile”? Maybe because voters in Texas, Hispanic or otherwise, are increasingly realizing the obviously destructive nature of the Democratic Party these days, and all the rhetoric in the world is not quite covering that up the way it used to?

I certainly hope this trend continues, and not just in Texas.

More:

Three major Democratic interest groups have just released a study that the New York Times summarized as follows: “The party is at risk of losing ground with Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters unless it does a better job presenting an economic agenda and countering Republican efforts to spread misinformation and tie all Democratic candidates to the far left.” The report claims that “the opposition latched on to G.O.P. talking points, suggesting our candidates would ‘burn down your house and take away the police.’”

But the report also admits that criticism of the Left’s stance on crime worked.

Can’t imagine where voters might get the idea that such “misinformation” is the truth.

Open thread 6/7/21

The New Neo Posted on by

In concert, Steve Goodman used to borrow a cowboy hat from someone in the audience and then wear it when he sang his comic song “You Never Even Call Me By My Name” (which had been a hit for David Allan Coe in 1975). But one night no one had a cowboy hat, although someone offered Goodman a motorcycle helmet. So Steve came up with this set to go with that headgear:

Thrills and chills: the Bee Gees’ medleys

The New Neo Posted on by

At their concerts, the Bee Gees usually – maybe even always – performed at least one medley. They had so many hit songs that singing a shorter version of a lot of them in succession was one way to please the crowd.

Medleys also took them back to their roots as a vocal group, which was to sing surpassingly beautiful harmonies in their natural voices while standing together at one mic. They often said that using one mic was the way they preferred to sing and to record, because it gave them more unity. Barry Gibb, now the sole survivor of the three brothers who made up the Bee Gees for nearly five decades, has said in later interviews that when he performs solo (which he’s only done after the others died) he can still feel their presences and even their breaths.

Here’s a medley they performed as part of a 1989 concert in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve noticed that they always seem to be in particularly good spirits in Australia, the place where they did much of their growing up.

All three are around forty years old here. It’s about twenty years after their first success as a baroque pop group, and ten years after their disco years abruptly ended. In the early 80s they didn’t tour, having experienced a backlash (primarily in the US) towards their extraordinarily popular disco music, and instead they wrote smash hits for other singers and produced many of the records on which those hits appeared. The late 80s marked their return to live performances, and I think that’s another reason they seem so happy and relaxed here among their Australian friends and admirers.

The medley begins with a few of their 60s hits, songs that I loved at the time they came out but had no idea the Bee Gees had written and performed. Then they sing one song from the disco years that is not a disco song, “Too Much Heaven.” After that, they sing several of the hits they wrote in the early 80s for other people, and then back to songs from the late 60s and early 70s.

During the 60s song “Holiday,” which features only Robin and Barry, Maurice takes the opportunity to fool around a bit, as he sometimes did. It’s one of those brother things; he’s trying to crack Robin and Barry up, and although they smile, their consummate professionalism means that their voices aren’t affected at all. As children, they learned to sing through anything, even the bar fights that sometimes went on in the audience during their gigs as boys in Australia.

The entire medley is done in their regular chest and head voices, not a falsetto to be heard (although Barry sings a single line in a sort of breathy high head voice). On “Too Much Heaven,” for example, a song originally recorded in the studio with all three in falsetto, in this medley they are singing in normal voices instead. But the song remains one of their loveliest.

I have no idea how the Bee Gees achieve their soothing yet soaring quality, but they make it look and sound effortless. This medley gives the listener an opportunity to hear both Barry and Robin in solo or together, Barry and Maurice together in one song, and of course at times the threesome. Many of the songs cleverly build that way to a feeling of completeness: first one, then two, then all three of the brothers.

As one YouTube commenter says: “nobody sings better, nobody blends better, nobody wears jeans better.” That latter Bee Gees attribute might not matter to you – the audio is definitely the thing – but the visuals are very pleasant icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.

Another commenter adds:

I saw an interview today where Maurice was asked if they also got chills from their harmonies. He said they did and always had. This was especially true during the acoustic medleys. That made me happy to know they also feel it.

I had seen that interview a while ago, too, but I haven’t been able to find it again since. I recall that in it Maurice describes the very first time the brothers tried singing harmony, when the twins were about five years old and Barry eight. They could do it naturally, right from the start. He said that the first time they heard the sound they were able to make all together, they got chills. Right then and there I think they became hooked on singing together. Even as young children they decided that’s what they wanted to do with their lives and that’s what they were going to do with their lives, an endeavor they pursued with extreme energy and dedication.

And with a great deal of joy, as I think you can see here:

The language of the left

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Griffin.”]

Andrew Sullivan is one of those writers of whom you can say that when he’s good, he’s very very good, and when he’s bad he’s horrid. In this essay he’s good:

And that is the only recourse an average citizen has when buried by this avalanche of abstraction: ask the language-launderers what they are really talking about. When some doofus apologizes for the “terrible pain” they have caused to the whatever community, ask them to give a specific example of that “pain.” When someone says “structural racism,” ask: what actual “structures” are you referring to? How do they actually work? Give concrete examples.

When someone calls American society “white supremacy”, ask them how you could show that America is not a form of “white supremacy”. When someone uses the word “Latinx”, ask them which country does that refer to. When someone says something is “problematic”, ask them to whom? When you’re told you’re meeting with members of the BIPOC or AANHPI communities, ask them first to translate and then why this is in any way relevant, and why every single member of those communities are expected to have the same opinion. And when you’re told that today is IDAHOBIT Day, ask them if you can speak to Frodo.

…[W]e do not have to speak this debased and decadent language. It is designed to overwhelm and confuse and smother and subdue. And the more it is used by elites, the more normal Americans, still living in the real world, feel utterly alienated by their masters, and the deeper our divide goes. Reclaiming our discourse from these ideological contraptions will make our writing better. It will help us think more clearly. And it could help re-start a genuinely national conversation. In everyday English, the language of democracy.

You often hear or read the sort of language Sullivan is describing, coming from the left. Such language is indeed designed to “to overwhelm and confuse and smother and subdue.” But even more than that, it’s designed to indoctrinate and to make a certain sort of attitude automatic. The confusion it induces makes it difficult to even think clearly about what’s being said, and therefore tends to block an effective public response or even a private one.

If an offense is not even properly described, it becomes formless and pervasive. How can something that amorphous and slippery be fought against? It becomes a Gordian knot that cannot be untied but can only be cut.

The sort of language Sullivan describes dominates academia and school administration. It is becoming more common in corporations that issue diversity and other social policy pronouncements. You can also read it in the many apologies that have been issued by those attacked on social media for thoughtcrime. It has become a form of quasi-religious dogma, to be repeated and repeated and taken on faith.