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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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So, by now everyone has heard about Biden's lackluster performance in the debate.

I don't want to talk about Biden. I want to talk about the fact that everybody has heard about it. There has been very little effort to suppress it.

If CNN, the NYT, and Time Magazine, and the rest had all held ranks and denied everything, this would probably have blown over. Most people didn't even watch the debate. Those who did could be persuaded to remember it differently. The general public isn't reacting to the debate, they're reacting to the reaction to the debate. Let's face it, this isn't the first time Biden has had a senior moment in public. This was unusually public and unusually difficult to edit around, but it's just a difference in scope, not a difference in kind. The media could easily have put the spotlight on Trump's deranged rambling about abortion clinics murdering babies, or that time he said that under his Presidency America had all the H2O.

Instead, CNN started openly freaking out the moment the debate was over. Prominent Democrats were apparently sending frantic texts to prominent journalists even before it ended. The NYT is openly speculating about replacing Biden. Time Magazine's new cover shows Biden wandering off the page with the caption: 'panic'. They didn't have to do this.

What I find interesting about this isn't the fact that Biden made his biggest gaffe yet. What I find interesting is that everyone broke ranks at once.

That's not necessarily surprising. Nobody wants to be the last person trying to hold the line after everyone else has run away. Still, it was so fast it almost looked coordinated. Were prominent figures prepared for something like this to happen? Were certain powerful individuals thinking to themselves, 'If Biden really acts his age during the debate, we might get the chance to replace him'? Could this perhaps have been the reason that this debate was scheduled unusually early - scheduled, in fact, before the convention where Biden is expected to be formally nominated by the party? Perhaps to give them a reason to nominate someone else?

Even if it wasn't, I think it's obvious that a lot of people have been thinking about this for a long time. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have all suddenly found themselves on the same page.

This is the first general candidate debate I can ever remember that occured prior to the conventions. This was planned to rally support for removing Biden from the ticket to the rank and file.

I guess he could run as an independent? By my understanding, Biden isn't entitled to the Democratic nomination, so if the party wants him gone, he's gone.

I mean why would Biden agree to debate early if a foreseeable consequence was that he would be couped.

In order to give any bad impressions extra time to wear off.

Biden is an extremely arrogant, compulsive liar. He probably does genuinely think that he is saving democracy, that he is the only person who can beat Trump, that he has some unique geopolitical insight, etc.

Here's a clip from 1988 where Biden is basically just making shit up about his academic credentials and achievements on the fly, as a way to make some guy at a campaign stop look stupid: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D1j0FS0Z6ho

Here's a list of a bunch of things he plagarized, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/trump-campaign-press-release-copy-that-joe-bidens-long-record-plagiarism

There's also the recent amtrack lie.

He's a narcissist. He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, thinks he's playing some complex manipulation game, and just makes random shit up all the time. Funnily enough, this is exactly what his compatriots accuse Trump of.

During the 2020 primary season, I was still clinging to my last shreds of belief in the Democratic Party’s ability to steady the ship of state and eject Trump in favor of a staid, professional, competent, technocratic Leader™️. (I was, until her candidacy was unceremoniously double-tapped in the back of the head by shadowy DNC insiders, genuinely feeling the Klomentum.)

So, when Joe Biden was installed as the nominee, I started pointing out to all my liberal friends just how much Biden resembled Trump in several quite unflattering ways. I showed that clip, among others, to people who for some reason had either failed to notice Biden’s tenuous (at times verging on hostile) relationship with the truth, or else misidentified it as the sort of jocular and harmless embellishment you’d expect from Grandpa telling you the fish he reeled in that one time was the size of a Ford Pinto.

No, I said, Joe Biden’s lies are just as often of the maliciously and vindictively self-aggrandizing and ass-covering variety. His ego is, if anything, even more fragile than Trump’s; blame it if you want on his struggles with a stutter growing up, or his insecurity about being a fairly working-class guy forced to deal with effete moneyed DC snobs for fifty years, but the man clearly has a massive chip on his shoulder about his perceived limited intelligence and Springer-esque family scandals, and he’s willing to say anything, no matter how outlandish, to try and pump up his own self-image. Add to that the obvious corruption and influence-peddling his immediate family members are involved in, likely with his direct and explicit involvement, and you’re talking about someone every bit as vulgar and un-Presidential as Trump, albeit with more finely-honed optical instincts and a wider network of enablers/brand managers. He’s Irish Catholic Trump, except rather than slapping his name on chintzy hotels, Biden has just been a stooge for Delaware-based credit card companies for his whole career, with a moonlighting side gig as the central hub of a family grift.

Klobuchar? She would have been awesome. What an alt-reality.

Can you tell me why you think she would've been awesome? This is a genuine question. I definitely preemptively disagree with you, but I'm not going to argue and your posts of the past make me think you're intelligent.

So, again, genuinely want to know.

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If he was incompetent, controlled, deceived, or otherwise making a bad decision.

I agree that there's no good reason, but this theory already requires that he's past his prime.