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As of time of writing, it’s possible the Hunter Biden plea deal may be falling apart.
Apparently the government isn’t after all quite willing to dismiss any future gun related charges after being pressed by the judge. If this is the case it looks like the media circus about the plea deal being unethical might not even have been necessary? It’s my opinion that the court process usually figures this stuff out on its own, unless anyone thinks media attention somehow influences the in court decisions of any interested parties significantly?
The funny thing about Hunter Biden is the Hunter Biden Brand is very culture warry but Hunter Biden himself is just a fairly stereotypical fucked up elite guy who did a bunch of grifting on his name.
Deep down I don’t even think Joe is culture warry left. He was probably disgusted by a bunch of trannies showing their boobs on the White House. But he grew up a Democrat politician and his chief skill is being that so he says what he needs to say for his coalition. He likes being the front man.
The only reason these people matter is because the left could never agree on a politician that wasn’t just a blank state so they propped him up. And now all there scandals became culture war.
I’ve been saying the whole time: Biden is the kind of president I want. For a sufficiently weak definition of “want,” at least. Boring. I want the President to shut up, sign or veto things, and sort of play mediator. And especially not commit crimes. Maybe this is what it means to be “presidential.”
Even Biden’s attempts at signature legislation feel more like complying with someone else’s push than a personal campaign promise.
I think right-leaning news knows that this plays pretty well with centrists. Hard to offend people by doing nothing exciting. This would be why the “mentally unfit” attack has seen so much airtime.
The problem though is when the handlers pushing the presidential puppet around are way more activist, be that right wing or left wing. I don't find it hard to believe Joe didn't know or care about Sam Brinton, but somebody wanted that particular non-binary personette in that kind of government job as a signal. And that's how you get the trans folx flashing their boobs (or lack of same) on the White House Lawn.
It would be just as bad for a compromise puppet Republican president where the administration behind-the-scenes people were pushing their agenda. A milquetoast president who isn't going to frighten the horses isn't a bad thing and a lot of people would be happy to vote for them, but such a president has to be forceful enough that they aren't just a puppet and The Whatever Agenda is being carried out by others without their knowledge, input, or consent.
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I've been working on a post claiming that Biden and Fetterman are the perfect white male democrat candidates because they are a literal mental blank their handlers can puppet however they want, but your explanation is much better.
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Sometimes a guy like that is fine if everyone agree the country is on the right track. While I think the Bidens themselves aren’t radicals I do think Joe will back what his side tells him to. Perhaps he doesn’t have his own opinions. I guess my point is his driving force is power for himself and some modest grift on the side - though the grifts they do often seems to be people the US shouldn’t be owing favors too. Like if he grifted 50 million from an options trade on inside info I would care less.
At other times a leader like Musks would be fantastic. Even in a society doing well. Someone with vision who can move the country to somewhere better. In some ways our culture wars todays are different visions of maintaining the US decline (absolutely - relatively we’ve probably rarely been more powerful).
For your “mediator” I think the people complaint is because he’s mediate between the HRC branch of corporate types (those who’ve taken the neolib liberal today) and a bunch of people I really don’t like.
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Whose push? If he's just a puppet letting someone else pull the strings, then isn't that person or group effectively the President? How do you have Democracy and accountability if the literal President is just a figurehead representing unknown people in a political party? Does every Democratic Senator vote to decide what Joe Biden's next position should be? Does Nancy Pelosi call all the shots unilaterally and functionally equivalent to being the president herself except she gets none of the blame or credit if things go badly? Is Hillary Clinton the puppetmaster and electing Joe Biden was politically equivalent to electing her? Is the CEO of CNN actually influencing Joe Biden by implicitly threatening to smear him if he doesn't do what they want? We don't know. And next election cycle, if Joe Biden steps down and another puppet steps up you might have the exact same person/people pulling their strings, bypassing term limits, and pretending to be starting fresh with a new reputation, forgetting all the mistakes they made in the past.
I very much want a President who has policies and agendas, declares what they are openly, honestly, and publicly, and then sticks to them as much as reasonably possible. Because then we the people can decide which collections of policies and agendas we actually agree with and vote for whichever President has the best. Because we the people are supposed to be in charge, not shady politicians making secret deals behind the scenes and avoiding responsibility.
I don't think so, while I do think the Clintons retain some influence within the party. But I'd love to know what particular bunch are the puppetmasters, because I do think things like Brinton and the White House Lawn trans people are happening deliberately, while Biden kiboshed the student loan forgiveness that he was elected on. Is it Kamala? I find that hard to believe, but is there some Obama-era rump set of officials who were firmly Hopey Changey who are using Biden as a way to push forward their slice of progressive activism?
I don't think there's any particular bunch of puppetmasters per se, but a variety of competing powerblocs whose levels of influence waxes and wanes through time. That's the most plausible explanation I can find for the sheer incoherency of US foreign policy over the last two decades.
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When did Biden kibosh the student loan idea? The SCOTUS kiboshed it correctly imo
And notably, Biden almost immediately came up with another idea to try to forgive student loans.
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That, yes, but I was going off all the online moaning about how Biden had stabbed everyone in the back and not done the debt quashing. I suppose I shouldn't get my news from lefty complaining!
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And Biden immediately started working around it, including reneging on the debt-ceiling deal to extend an effective payment pause.
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This is way too binary for no reason. Biden isn't either powerless President Dopey-Grandpa or dictatorial President God-Emperor-of-Mankind, he's somewhere in the middle like every other president. He can do some things, more things with the cooperation of the rest of the state apparatus than he can without it, and he can't do others. He is uniquely limited by Barack Obama's continued existence and popularity, and probably to a lesser extent by the Clintons', in the sense that if he went too far from Barack's wishes on virtually any policy I don't think Biden's policy would survive a Barack Obama speech/MSNBC interview/NYT Op-Ed coming out against Biden's policy.
Biden is not the most popular active member of his own party, that makes him weak and limited. I don't think we have a recent parallel, maybe since Taft? HW was a direct successor to Reagan so it doesn't feel the same (and Reagan was pretty much gone mentally by the end of his term), Clinton was vastly more popular than Carter while in office, by the time Dubya was in office HW and Reagan were firmly in dotage, Obama was more popular than Bill, Trump didn't have much to fear from Dubya and in fact directly defeated his forces in the primary. Back further than that you're getting into Reagan-Nixon, Carter-LBJ type pairings where the predecessor clearly left office a failure.
For example, if Biden wanted to send US Air Force trainers to Lviv, and Barack Obama immediately published an NYT article opposing doing so, I doubt they would be sent, by one means or another the policy would fall apart before arrival. Or if Biden was close to signing a major treaty or passing a legislative compromise, and Obama came out against it. As a result, Biden has to compromise with multiple power bases, both inside and outside the government, to keep his priorities moving forward.
Priorities being a key word. CW doesn't strike me as Biden's number one issue set, and politics always means sacrificing a lower priority issue for you that is a higher priority issue for someone else so that your counterparty will support your priority issue. The CW stuff strikes me as largely the same Third Way slop from the Blair/Clinton years: give the Left enough wedge issue wins that they'll refuse to vote for the other guy, to keep them in line for corporatism.
But on the flip side, Barack and Bill and Hillary and Kamala could all try to force Biden into signing a particular treaty with Russia ending the Ukrainian war, if Biden didn't want to he couldn't be forced to do so. Essentially we're getting a system with multiple vetoes, which creates inaction and favors the status quo and inertial movement.
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I think most Dems aren't personally enamored with Joe Biden the man, and more than a little embarrassed by him. Attempts to cast him as 'just a boring understated centrist' who doesn't really offend anybody is a kind of cope, and a facade of false humility that permits them to say 'Boy, how unhinged right-wing anger is! He's not even really progressive and you're still foaming at the guy! Partisan politics much?" while progressivism turbo-charges under his watch.
The only people I have ever heard describe him in such a fashion are... Democrats. Many of them who are rather politically milquetoast and blasé now (a sharp change from their demeanor under the last presidency), and it frankly feels like deflection. The random assortment of people I've talked to where he comes up as a topic - the closest I can get to a 'man on the street' whose political affiliations I'm unfamiliar with - typically have a very different take on the guy.
Which isn't to say they're right wing or would vote for Trump.
What do they tend to say? I’m surrounded by well-off Texan defense engineers, which form quite a bubble. They unironically tend to assert that various economic or cultural failings are Biden’s personal fault. Well, or Hillary’s!
I think mild embarrassment is okay. Not admirable, but not a barrier to cheering for your team. I wasn’t politically aware at the time, but I kind of assume this is how people felt about W prior to 9/11.
This is not comprehensive, but my sample can be boiled doen to some types: random barber in my area (southern but with ample blue ambition for decades in no small part due to transplants, myself included), Latino working class man and his wife looking to escape LA who I met at a wedding, tattooed nerd-chic good-looking friend of friend in AI tech, immigrant Uber driver shooting the shit, cosmopolitan (and attractive) Peruvian office co-worker with a pronounced accent and stereotypical latin flair, and a few others I'm probably forgetting. On a very shallow reading based on appearances and speech patterns, it wouldn't be out of the question to assume many of these people would lean Blue to some degree or another, which often left me a bit surprised when an unprompted 'state of the country' or 'Biden is making a mess' comment would leave their mouths. None of them struck me as obsessive partisans in the same way I often wonder I am.
If I could synergize and condense their words into something, it is: Being a gaping hole through which progressive ideology spills through you does not make one a centrist or a moderate. A number of these folks did the usual "I couldn't stand Trump" disclaimer, but now find themselves livid over things like student debt cancelation, soft-on-crime policies in their local area, and (but of course) the normalization and pushing of transgenderism on children. I wondered if these people are outliers, but they would match up broadly with polling that indicates the growing unpopularity of these movements and attendant policies. These are people who truly expected the promised "return to normal", and now feel cheated. For Biden to qualify as centrist or moderate in their eyes would require him pushing back on the excesses among his ranks, and instead they see a doddering figure who probably doesn't even understand half of what's being shoveled through him. Like, do you think Biden has even a semi-coherent understanding of transgenderism, or does he get by just aping the rhetoric of yesteryear's gay rights battles? They wanted Bill Clinton, and instead they got a puppet that can barely conceal its strings. Biden is most likely 'moderate' as a mere man, but as a President he is anything but, and acting like the former means anything or is consequential in any way feels like gaslighting.
Now, it's not like I had extended conversations with many of these people. I'm at risk of filling in some gaps with my own concerns and putting words into their mouths. But, I have only ever heard "He's just old and boring" said by people who are hard-coded Democrats and who could never even entertain the idea of voting for a non-Trump Republican, no matter how moderate or 'presidential' they would be by comparison. Like a good friend of mine who may say "Y'know, it seems like conservatives are making a bigger deal out of the pronouns issue than liberals", and I have to irritatedly remind him that cons aren't the ones who kicked up this 'pronoun issue'; that to whatever extent they are mad about it, it's in reaction to progressives pushing and enshrining it out of seemingly nowhere. Or the kind of person who dismisses seething over the Pride flag with "Jeez, I can't believe you're that burnt up over a little ol' piece of fabric!" but then goes to DEFCON-4 with media and institutional support if anybody were to sully or remove one. The kind of person who says they don't care for Biden at all and only considered him the least worst option, but conspicuously never has any specific criticisms of him and his performance (except old/boring) and is very eager to change the topic to some Republican malfeasance instead of giving a straight Yes/No answer if puberty blockers for toddlers is a good idea.
It's the same ploy behind his or his handlers' "Do I look like a radical socialist?" statement during his 2020 run. Because we all 'know' that geriatric white politicians who say "folks" are just an aged, bland flavor of vanilla, and how could anybody be incensed by it unless they're nuts. It's the same machinery behind "I can't believe the Right is going after Big Bird!" when Sesame Street is pushing vaccines, "I can't believe shooting Nazis is now controversial!" when a game company is intimating similarities with MAGA supporters, or "It's just a comedy show!" when some dumb shit falls out of John Oliver's mouth.
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All this is just the trappings of centrism, and it only works because of media compliance. Imagine some normal Republican acting boring, but doing the reverse of all the Biden things: Siccing the FBI on teachers unions and Planned Parenthood. Multiple investigations into Democrats for things every politician knows they all do. Passing massive budget cuts to 3 letter agencies, welfare, and medicaid. Securing the southern border and expediting deportations.
Could President Mike Lee do all that quietly and be the "kind of president you want?" Of course not, he'd be constantly attacked as a theocratic fascist, and people who want "normalcy" will have it insisted to them that only Democrats can ever be normal. "But Trump" has never been correct. Always remember Rubio was actually worse was a take from one of the smartest and least crazy Democrats.
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/20/11067932/rubio-worse-than-trump
I would significantly prefer that president to Trump, yeah. Less likely to damage normal government functionality, whether intentionally or by incompetent/nepotistic staffing.
I mean, I’d prefer the executive be trimmed back in general, moving most of those actions under the control of Congress. But I don’t hold out much hope for that!
I think you think that. And you might actually think that after seeing such an administration in action. But the typical person will not, and especially the median Democrat. Look how they were just able to manufacture a special counsel out of literally nothing (Russia) and an impeachment over a completely legitimate inquiry into Biden family corruption in Ukraine. And all this for a guy who didn't actually do anything to negatively affect their interests.
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To add to this, Obama didn’t campaign for gay marriage. Now you have Biden actively promoting gender transition and calling attempts to stop it in minors as “close to sinful.” This is by far the most leftist administration in American history yet we are being told it is centrist? I hate the gaslighting.
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Yeah if you exclude all of the things Biden has done then he is centrist.
Instead Biden has:
Tried to unilaterally cancel about 500b of student debt that everyone (including Pelosi) thought required congressional approval since you know generally congress has to approve buildings.
Required effectively all working adults to take a vaccine they didn’t want to try to stop the spread of a virus when they knew the vaccine couldn’t do that once again without congressional approval.
Sic the FBI on parents calling them domestic terrorists for..being involved with school board meetings in a way that went against his beloved teachers union.
Engage in significant censorship and tried to create a disinformation board.
Used the bully pulpit to support gender affirming care calling laws to stop it “close to sinful” or used that bully pulpit to claim benign voter lawyers as “Jim Eagle.”
It really is tiring hearing supporters of Biden continue to claim “he is centrist” when he has been anything but and the only reason he didn’t have more progressive policies passed was because Manchin.
Also of course there appears to be the vast amount of bribes he took so that you know undermines the whole “don’t do illegal acts” thing.
You missed the various rule making and policy changes affecting firearms as well. See VanDerStok v Garland very similar to the student debt case where through administrative rule-making they attempted to redefine statutory language well beyond the plain meaning. There is also the "zero tolerance" policy for FFLs treating form 4473 errors made by applicants not the FFLs and that were approved by NICS (FBI+ATF) yet still incorrect (putting country in the county field of question 10 as an exmaple) as "willful violations" leading to license revocations that can only be challenged in a hearing presided over by an ATF employee who is the boss of the same ATF employees who made the determination to revoke the license in the first place.
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Jim Eagle? Why the code word? You can just say Crow.
He famously claimed Georgia now was basically Jim Crow but worse — he then called it Jim Eagle.
Oh I missed that. Lol.
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Presumably @zeke5123 was referencing this Biden quote.
Yep thanks!
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