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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27113 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.

Via the Wallstreet Journal, How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge. Unfortunately it's paywalled

Archive link, no paywall.

Seems when you staff your cabinet with lazy incompetents, they actually enjoy having no boss while the world burns.

If one puts party over country, one isn't inclined to declare a member of the same party, particularly one as visible as the POTUS, to be incompetent. If Biden's allies were to plead the 25th, it would validate the long time republican talking point that Biden is merely a puppet. Only when the strings frayed so obviously during the debate, that the "Biden is all there" thesis was no longer defended.

If the WSJ article is accurate, then Biden was President, but doing the job badly. The key point is that there is no suggestion that someone else was leading the administration the way Edith Wilson led the administration after Woodrow Wilson's stroke, or that people joked about Hilary running the Clinton administration or Dick Cheney running the GW Bush administration. The ultimate way a disagreement between Biden administration players was resolved was still "put it in front of the President during his six good hours".

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