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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28587 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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So I wanted to revisit a comment I made two years ago. Does anyone actually believe Biden is the president?

I don't mean in an election integrity sense. I mean, does anyone actually believe he is the one steering the federal government or making decisions? I could whole heartedly believe Obama was the Commander in Chief. I had zero doubt George W Bush was in command of the highest Executive Office. Sure, Trump seemed to be at war with his own staff half the time, but he ostensibly tried to exercise the power of his office.

Biden seems like he just gets wheeled out to mumble some words of a teleprompter about once a month. He gets 8/10 of them correct, adlibs something he shouldn't have, and then his handlers come out the next day and "correct" his statements. It just strains my imagination to think he is in charge of crafting policy or executive decisions at all.

Well, with two years of hindsight, and with the kayfabe largely being over, we are finally getting the reporting we should have gotten all along. Via the Wallstreet Journal, How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge . Unfortunately it's paywalled, so you'll have to excuse me if I refer to secondary reporting.

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

The New York Post has also gotten involved.

Presidential staff formed a tight shell around Biden, 82, right after he took office amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with staff immediately limiting his in-person interactions in January 2021.

By spring 2021, meetings were being rescheduled to accommodate for his “good days and bad days.”

Meetings were often scheduled for later in the day — a fact first disclosed after Biden’s debate flop against President-elect Donald Trump, when staff admitted the then-Democratic nominee had difficulty functioning outside a six-hour window that closed around 4 p.m. daily.

One cabinet official eventually stopped reaching out to schedule talks with the commander in chief after having been repeatedly rebuffed, an ex-aide revealed.

The White House also hired a voice coach, Hollywood mogul and campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, to try to improve his faint, raspy tone.

So, looking back to my original comments circa two years ago, one criticism is that these claims were "too good to check". But now with the benefit of hindsight, it's not that they were too good to check. It's that nobody with any ability to do so was motivated to check. It turns out the 25th amendment is broken. Seems when you staff your cabinet with lazy incompetents, they actually enjoy having no boss while the world burns. It's a good gig if you can get, taking 6 months off as Secretary of Transportation while inflation is eating people alive and the supply chain is utterly fucked. Or utterly vanishing off the face of the earth to secretly get treated for Prostate Cancer while World War III is kicking off in the Middle East. Or just meekly apologizing for creating $15 Trillion in debt as a former Fed chair and current Treasury Secretary.

Is it too much to say the Democratic Party is a criminal enterprise at this point? That they executed one of the worst frauds against the American people in the history of nearly any nation? The more evidence that comes in, the more it seems undeniable that the last four years were a complete fraud. We didn't have a president, the country was utterly rudderless, we don't know who's need making decisions, and everyone lied about everything for as long as they could get away with it. In a sane country people would be executed for this treason.

This should also cause those who still think the Republicans were lucky in 2020 to call out Biden’s mental issues to rethink their priors.

I literally saw people argue in 2024 that since Republicans in 2020 didn't have "convincing evidence" of Biden's senility, the current revelations is just a blind luck and not because of Republicans possessing any kind of insight. Of course, by "convincing evidence" they mean the evidence that would convince them, which was impossible. These people are not going to admit they were wrong (or lying).

Very few people will, or ever do. Especially in punditry.

There was a comment a while back about intelligence, which argued that, despite smart people's inclination to probilistic thinking and acknowledging uncertainty, this comes off as ignorance and weakness to most people. While it's probably a sign of high intelligence to be able to critique any measure and admit gaps in knowledge, what most people are looking for in intelligence is being able to meet expectations quickly. People think you're smart if you ace a test, not if you deconstruct the test's concepts (and even if you're right).

I think that's what's going on with punditry -- pundits optimize for looking smart, not being smart. It's also why scientists often come off as aloof nerds: they refuse to speak in certainties, and hedge everything. And that reflects their command of the knowledge base -- they know the known unknowns and account for the unknown unknowns -- but comes off to many as sneaky, shifty, unreliable.

I have no doubt the average scientist is smarter than the average pundit or journalist. But the latter two have made a living off of persuading the masses, and to do that you can't ever admit fault or leave open a gap. Truth may not require conflict theory, but politics does. And the politicos are just doing what they must to ace the test.

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