The Yellow Dog Is Down

I had started a post on another topic yesterday. But that was before I watched the debate. People everywhere are responding and commenting, so anything I add here is unnecessary. And yet, because it was historic, unprecedented, and a lot of other adjectives, I want to do a little collection of responses here for the sake of history.

The Setup

My attitude before the debate was that it was likely to be interesting, and maybe I’d tune in. I’ve speculated (I’m not alone in this) that their plan A was to hope he would do well enough. But their more likely plan B was to have this debate early—it comes before either party’s convention and official nomination—so they could finagle some way to replace him on the convention floor (procedures to make that legal TBD).

The question was how Biden would do. We’ve seen him be feeble and deteriorating since his 2020 campaign, and yet the media hides that and says, “nothing to see here.” And his most recent State of the Union wasn’t as disastrous as might have been expected. There’s speculation that he’s drugged to keep him alert and looking somewhat functional for limited periods of time. And this debate was short, with all kinds of limitations to favor Biden. CNN hosted, so we could all predict the questions. Microphones would be cut off except during each candidate’s one-minute answer or response. Biden took over a week away from either campaigning or running the country, secluded at Camp David to prepare. Meanwhile, Trump was out on the campaign trail, during this space of time he’s not tied up in court (and hasn’t been sentenced to jail yet).

They were to have no audience, no notes (they had a pad of paper and a pen for their own use). No campaign people could talk to them during the advertising breaks. No earpieces. Biden did fuss with his ear, making people think he might be adjusting an against-the-rules earpiece so someone could be feeding him the answers. He likely also wears a hearing aid. It seemed to me they could disguise an earpiece to appear to be just a hearing aid, and they could cheat thereby. I can’t prove that, but they haven’t given us reason to trust them.

With all the advantages for Biden, I was concerned that he might not look all that bad. Maybe anti-Biden media scores the footage for only the stumbles, while the other side tries to eliminate those moments from their reporting. So I wasn’t sure we really knew how far gone he was.

But he was bad. Undeniably bad. His dementia was evident. And, even though we’ve seen him like that for years already, people who only watch certain biased news sources were seeing this version of Biden for the first time. And they were shocked.

So the question today (which has been floated around and being denied for a while) is whether/how to replace Biden, and with whom.

How Bad Was It?

I’m on a group chat with some fellow precinct chairs. The reposted tweets and memes started coming well before the debate was over. Many of the memes I’ve used are from that thread. I can’t attribute where I got them all, although many show names of who the original posters were. And some came from Facebook. I don’t mean to take personal credit for any; I’m just not able to trace them all.

Before we get to that fun, I want to state unequivocally that I am against elder abuse. Jill Biden is guilty of this. And whoever else has been propping him up Weekend-at-Bernie’s style. Joe Biden has been an evil person, and evidence from the laptop shows he has been selling out our country (I call it treason) for a long time. He deserves no respect. But the shell of a person they’re using isn’t capable of taking responsibility for his actions. He’s a prop, a puppet—more literally than any I know of in history or literature. It’s shameful to use a human in this way.

That said, there’s a fair amount of glee in response to last night’s debate. It started even before the debate began. I came across this version of Biden Debate Bingo, originating I think from Dan Scavino:

This was worth a chuckle beforehand. But during the debate I realized it was actually worth playing. (There are plenty of other versions of debate Bingo that I came across trying to re-find this one.) Biden came close to checking off the whole card. That first one, about Scranton, PA, was there, even though he left at age 10, nearly seven decades ago, never actually lived in working-class neighborhoods in Pennsylvania, and did his formative years in a wealthy area of Delaware.

Biden's walk onto the stage was a shuffle. His opening speech was a soft and hoarse mumble. Heavy slurring happened. He blamed Trump for all of the ills his administration has created. He needed his wife to escort him down the stairs and off the stage.

There were the lies—so plentiful that the middle free space on the Bingo card makes sense for that. He got fact-checked in real time, with Snopes, which has been notoriously wrong on this, finally admitting that Trump never said “there were good people on both sides” about actual hatemongers, only on both sides of the confederate symbols issue, which those of us who pay attention have known all along—because we listened to Trump’s actual speech at the time instead of the news spin about it.

And then there was Biden’s claim that the Border Patrol endorses him. There came a swift reply: “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.”

The brain freeze that happened not that far in was not something they could cover up by claiming those rascally Republicans created what Karine Jean-Pierre calls a Cheap Fake. The brain freeze moment was a historic turning point for our country. I’ve seen speculation that this is when the drugs they juiced him with kicked in. Or maybe they failed to kick in. Or maybe they wore off. Mr. Reagan (Chris Coles) speculated that he had a cold and it prevented him from getting drugged, because those drugs in addition to cold meds might kill a person in Biden’s condition. Before his response livestream was over, they learned that the media had indeed been informed ahead of time that Biden had a cold. That gives the media a way to excuse his less than stellar performance. Except—it was so bad, and so consistent with how he acts regularly (montages abound), that the media doesn’t seem willing to be other than shocked at his abysmal performance.

That first really big stumble is here. Benny Johnson clips it, and he’s pretty gleeful about it, but it’s a convenient clip. By the way, Biden does correct “trillionaires” to “billionaires” eventually, not shown here. Not that it helps. The math, if correct (dubious), of taxing billionaires in a way that would cause them to put money elsewhere—but if you assume they don’t change their behavior, then he says the additional taxes would be $500 million, which he corrects to $500 billion, over ten years. So $50 billion a year he says would wipe out all “his” deficits (does he mean Trump’s?) and do a bunch of other things. But he’s given more than $50 billion a year to Ukraine regularly now. So that would pretty much wipe out any theoretical new tax revenue. Right? It’s hard to tell what he means through the stumbling.

There was a point where he got stuck, backed up, and repeated words, the way you do when you have a memorized statement that you can’t quite remember, so you have to start at an earlier point to get the flow going again. In other words, he wasn’t thinking of answers; he was just trying to regurgitate talking points, and even that is what he was failing at.

There was a question on abortion. Biden thinks killing babies up to and beyond birth is a winning issue. And here’s how he “articulated” that:

Trump passed along this Babylon Bee meme, which is very nearly not satire:

Almost immediately afterward, to talk of replacing Biden began. CNN’s John King was one.

Houston radio guy Michael Berry passed along a tweet from NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wishing for Biden to step aside. Kristof is assuming, of course, that Biden is capable of reflecting on his debate performance, which I wouldn’t guarantee.

Charlie Kirk points out a Politico announcement that “Biden is toast.”

And a couple more:

During Robert Gouveia’s response video on Friday, he mentions a New York Times tweet, reported on by Cassandra McDonald with Tim Pool’s team, asking: “I would like to know why Nick Kristoff and the New York Times had this article calling for Biden to drop out due to his debate performance. Why was that already preloaded on their back end on June 25^th, two days before the debate.”

It may be like that old photo showing a headline that “Dewey Defeats Truman” back in1948; they have two versions, and they may print a limited number of both, and then when the news is certain they go ahead with the one that happened.

mistaken news headline, Truman won in 1948
image found here

But the New York Times seems to be pushing this message now. Today, Fox News reported this: “New York Times editorial board calls for Biden to drop out: His candidacy is a ‘reckless gamble’” (by Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News, June 28, 2024). It’s getting weird when news outlets report as news the news and opinions of other news outlets. But I digress.

By the end of Friday I was hearing speculation about invoking the 25th Amendment. The downside of that is Kamala Harris, who is both sides' worst nightmare.

Today a Business Insider headline showed up in my news feed, with some fill-in-the-blank possibilities to replace Biden. I think seven is a stretch; they do not have a deep bench. Or any bench:

Among the nightmare scenarios, the most likely may be Gavin Newsome, who has ruined the formerly beautiful state of California beyond recognition and would like to do similar service to the entire US. And there’s Hillary still waiting around. (This is a meme, not real, I shouldn’t have to say, but…”

 

Was It Planned?

Was this all a setup? Was it planned as a way to take Biden out? It’s possible. Carol Swain is a careful thinker, but she’s looking at what we’re all seeing. And others agree:

It’s Not about Trump

Trump had some good moments in the debate. He was quick and capable, and answered what he wanted, regardless of the questions that were meant to set him up. One of the better moments was, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.” Biden had said something about the border being better now than under Trump, but even with the transcript it wasn’t intelligible, or truthful.

Trump was very understated. Almost never has there been a debate or major even like this when the talk wasn’t about Trump. He knows how to make talk happen. But this time—I believe intentionally—he was steady, less bombastic, clear, and clearly capable. He got out of the way and let Biden be the story, because it was not going to be anything but a bad story.

Polling show Trump shooting up about 15 percentage points and Biden dropping by about that many. Such a fall, for such good reason, is not recoverable. It’s probably well beyond the cheating margin.

Robert Gouveia shows a polling result immediately after
the debate, during his livestream and response

Serious Talk

There’s some satisfaction in seeing what we all knew finally being acknowledged by all but the “yellow dog Democrats” [i.e., those who would vote for any Democrat on the ticket, even if it’s a yellow dog], and even some yellow dog voters are bailing.

But the serious situation is, our country is being led by an incompetent man. Dr. Hur had said he wasn’t capable of standing trial because he’s an old man with memory problem. Maybe one ought to extrapolate from that that such a person doesn’t belong in the Oval Office, ostensibly running the free world.

And since we know he’s not capable of running the free world, we are being “ruled” by someone we did not vote for. (Not that We the People ever truly voted Biden in.) We don’t know who that is.

Glenn Beck pointed out the serious danger we’re in with a dementia patient who has access to the nuclear codes. He walked through the seven minutes it would take for a missile from, say, North Korea, to reach us, in which the president must make the decision to use such a weapon in response—before we even know whether what is launched at us is nuclear or not. If we respond a nuclear weapon, we would wipe out several hundred thousand people. And fallout would affect possibly hundreds of thousands of Chinese as well, which would be taken as an act of aggression, of course. And fallout could affect Russia as well, with them taking it as an act of aggression against them. Can this demented old man make such a decision? Clearly he cannot. And our enemies around the globe know this. They have known for a while—hence wars in Ukraine and Israel. But it still wasn’t spoken of openly. Now our weakness is exposed.

We ought to make note of who has tried to foist this incapacitated puppet leader upon us. His wife is one. His close staff and cabinet. His VP. His spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, and her staff. Many upper leaders—possibly of both parties, although you can mainly blame the Democrats for this travesty. Media people. All of these people knew he was incapacitated, and yet they pretended he was fully capable—not just of a campaign but an additional four-year term. They hid him and covered up, and blatantly lied. They put our nation at risk to perpetrate this deceit on us. Their betrayal is not a small thing.

We can hope to get to the election and to the transfer of power. If we can get that far, before our enemies take advantage, then there is some chance for recovery. And then we need accountability—a better word than retribution, and more accurate. We absolutely need the swamp cleaned out.

We need to return strictly to our Constitution.