Good take, and it makes sense, but I do think you are being overly gracious to Joe Biden.
He’s been a terrible decision maker and an intellectual lightweight his entire career. There were not going to be many good days for Joe Biden regardless of the state of his advancing dementia.
His apparatchiks are terrible at running the country because they seem mostly focused on what are, frankly, bullshit issues like being pro-trans and using the full weight of the federal government to come down on domestic foes of the regime while getting outplayed constantly in the international court of affairs.
Ex: I think they genuinely thought Ukraine was going to beat Russia, and two years later they’re stuck escalating towards WW3 because they’re not bright enough to take the L and work on a peace deal.
I have zero sympathy for Joe Biden. His team, like most Democrats, likely underestimated Trump and overestimated Joe’s ability to create new thoughts or remember the talking points they’d drilled into him. They may have also been expecting help from the moderators like they got in spades in 2020.
Instead, Joe had to stand all on his own, and without security guards and a mob of Democrat journalists and pundits to keep him upright, he looked like the small and feeble man he’s been for decades.
Don't get me wrong-- I don't sympathize with Biden or his staff of toadies and apologists-- much less the regime media protecting him. I am just trying to give others some insight into how they may be thinking and why they made the mistakes they did.
Not just feeble mentally, but also morally. He's an awful human being. Sexual deviant, corrupt influence peddler to our enemies, and a pathological liar...all well documented. A slimeball of the slimiest order.
Best take on this debacle. What do you think happened during the week-long debate prep? Look forward to seeing leaks as the blame game escalates. As it relates to Shultz, how much do you think his age affected his judgment to invest his money and reputation into Theranos?
Re: Debate prep, I'm sure they worked hard, but Biden just isn't up to it. There's only so much you can do
Re: Theranos think Shultz's age had a lot to do with it. I wasn't involved in any of his Theranos dealings, but Shultz was an extraordinarily shrewd man and an excellent judge of character, and it's hard for me to believe he would have been deceived by Elizabeth Holmes when he was in his prime.
My take on this is that the debate prep failed to replicate the competitive combative atmosphere and the resulting stress. Stress, crucially, degrades all coping mechanisms and cognitive mechanisms. They went easy on him in Camp David. Because they're in his bubble, because they intimately know he's fragile even if they won't admit it, and because they didn't want him having a stroke before he even got on the plane. Overall I agree hubris and groupthink is the most plausible explanation for the debacle. The people closest to him are the least culpable. It's the media who were knowingly gaslighting us all.
Good take, likely correct and well reasoned but this goodly author avoided the more difficult question.
Answer this: after years of unanimously covering for Biden when they all knew he was infirm suddenly the entire commentariat immediately and with complete unanimity said - he’s gotta go.
Three years of dissembling, steadfast lying and ruthless attacks on dissent they suddenly reversed course: CNN, MSNBC, NYT, Vanity Fair…..
All of them, in unison, “he’s to old”, it is like they got a memo.
This Biden-apparatchik-group-think-argument is very likely correct but the broader chattering class are in no way monolithic,sorry, no way, which leaves the question: why now and how on earth did it happen all at once, what mysterious force is responsible for such a coordinated response?
I just think DC is going away, the postwar system is ending.
Now it’s very bad not just because it’s gerontocracy, but because there’s no replacements as a governing body or as individual leaders, managerialism being antithetical to both.
You are very kind to Mr. Schults, you are too kind to DC perhaps, you don’t mention they’ve gone way too far and killed too many people and are over their heads.
Mr. Schults was one of the last gentleman of our last actually honest government, Reagan and the rest did not die enriched and surrounded by prosecutors and attorneys. A great legacy of peace and opportunity was bequeathed by Reagan and those who came before him.
Since We’ve had 30 years of wars (I’m a veteran), criminality, looting, lies, incompetence and now spreading chaos. We will have more wars, great wars at home and abroad and will be lucky to escape nuclear war.
As I say, you are too kind, the rest of us don’t have the luxury.
Also Biden has always been a narsasist who over estimates his ability. Look at every speech he gives and he believes he is giving a historic speech when in reality he is making a fool of himself in a day to day moment of a politician.
It’s funny I can agree with every word of this while also believing that there were Washington insiders who knew exactly what was going on with Joe. The people you describe, loyal as they may be, don’t have much choice in the matter. But neither do those in a position to pull Joe’s strings. Once they decided to prop up this walking cadaver as the leader of the free world, they put themselves in this exact situation. Let’s be real. Joe was always a pass through for whatever the poobahs thought the country should swallow. From financial arrangements to drugs and crime, Joe has always had his finger in the wind and come down on the side of powerful interests, not ordinary citizens. IMO Joe is there right now because he’s an order taker, not an order maker, and so are his staffers. That’s the problem. Not that Joe is a doddering old fool, but that the curtain has been pulled back on the presidency itself. The decision to run Joe in the first place led inevitably to this moment. It reveals the extent to which the current arrangements are threatened by anyone not absolutely controlled. See also: the attempts to take out Trump. Biden himself is really a sideshow at this point.
Yes, I actually thoroughly agree with this take as well.
"the curtain has been pulled back on the presidency itself."-- Yes, that's why they are terrified.
And yet they had to run Biden in 2020 because otherwise they would have very likely been stuck with Sanders, who was completely unacceptable to the Dem establishment.
They've been digging their graves in slow motion ever since.
I had given “it’s a possibility” to the idea that the debate was the vehicle for the Democrats to move Biden out of the race. This is the best rebuttal to that idea I’ve read and also accords with how I know humans often behave.
I agree with your take Jeremy. The apparatchiks are vested in continuing Biden’s leadership for their own benefit which is sadly divorced from the benefit of the greater American people in an increasingly fast-moving and risky world. The debate was painful to watch and atrocious for the Democratic Party which also stretches from Executive and Legislative branches. A debacle for US Global leadership and for democracy … which appears to be lying down in an enveloping darkness of leadership.
This post conflates aging with dementia. Many people live to an extended age and remain sharp as a tack, without displaying any of the “good days and bad days” phenomena described here. Certainly even young people have good and bad days, but only dementia patients display the utter blankness in the face as did our nominal president. There were absolutely no signs of cognizance in those eyes, and the mouth agape was not something a man who has spent much of a life engaged in public speaking would maintain during a very visible, nationally televised, and consequential debate.
I used to work for a catering firm that would do dinners at his house at Stanford in the late 1980s. Always a gentleman and always sincerely thanked the staff along with his wife. A great man.
Your experience with Sec. Schultz is honorable and fascinating, but perhaps not as applicable to Biden as a decent person like yourself might assume. Assuredly there
Were Biden staff/fans/colleagues/confidants who convinced themselves that Biden could pull it off, but there was enough skullduggery prior to the debate
Suggesting that one aspect of the Dems proposal for an early debate was that
It would provide enough time to change horses if it went poorly. It wasn’t a setup, necessarily, in that the intent wasn’t to prove Biden wasn’t up to the task (though I’m
quite certain that was on the minds of some senior Dems who were clear-eyed about the situation and knew what lay ahead). Any dispassionate assessment of Biden’s decline knew this day was coming since the days he spent barnstorming the nation from his basement in the last election. Why do you think they amended the convention rules two years ago to provide a remedy in the event the nominee becomes incapacitated? Now, in the wake of the inevitable collapse, all the Dem politicos claiming shock are simply lying. How else can they cover for putting the nation in this situation? They can’t.
Only the most cynical and manipulative kind of person could have created the situation we now find ourselves. Unfortunately, the Dems have a strong record of just this kind of chicanery when it comes to anything done for political advantage. It has never been on fuller display than what we have witnessed since 2016. Every branch of government has been corrupted by Democrats to “get” Trump. In this case, your reliance on human decency, while honorable, is misplaced. Today’s Democratic Party doesn’t deserve the slightest benefit of the doubt. They are above nothing.
I certainly don't think the Democrats are "above" anything. My argument in this piece is just that having Biden debate was not part of a conspiracy to get rid of him.
The Democrats have made a huge mistake. Now they are panicking. They will certainly lash out in ever-more-dangerous and desperate ways as a result of that panic. No tactic will be too low for them.
Good analysis. I can understand how the degree to which Biden failed in the debate was unanticipated by Democrats. They also likely expected the debate moderators to be hostile to Trump. They weren’t. However, the post-debate media reaction seemed suspiciously coordinated.
This is 100% convincing. Of course, conspiracies exist, but they’re rare, because they are hard to pull off. That a group of people would fall into group, think and fail to understand how the rest of the world would see something that they are too close to to accurately assess, that is the kind of thing that could happen to anybody.
I’m of the school that says the Bidenistas never thought DJT would agree to a debate under their rules and they could then accuse him of “ducking “ a debate because he was “afraid “ to lose to Joe.
George Shultz was a sharp intellect. Biden is mediocre at best. Shultz accomplished a lot in various sectors in life. He was very successful in the private sector, academia, and government. Biden is a blowhard corporate shill who got picked to balance Obama’s exoticism and then because they had nobody else in 2020 but Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s millionaire Socialist sports car enthusiast. None of that is relevant to the topic at hand, but Shultz was a high quality human being. Biden, not so much.
Good take, and it makes sense, but I do think you are being overly gracious to Joe Biden.
He’s been a terrible decision maker and an intellectual lightweight his entire career. There were not going to be many good days for Joe Biden regardless of the state of his advancing dementia.
His apparatchiks are terrible at running the country because they seem mostly focused on what are, frankly, bullshit issues like being pro-trans and using the full weight of the federal government to come down on domestic foes of the regime while getting outplayed constantly in the international court of affairs.
Ex: I think they genuinely thought Ukraine was going to beat Russia, and two years later they’re stuck escalating towards WW3 because they’re not bright enough to take the L and work on a peace deal.
I have zero sympathy for Joe Biden. His team, like most Democrats, likely underestimated Trump and overestimated Joe’s ability to create new thoughts or remember the talking points they’d drilled into him. They may have also been expecting help from the moderators like they got in spades in 2020.
Instead, Joe had to stand all on his own, and without security guards and a mob of Democrat journalists and pundits to keep him upright, he looked like the small and feeble man he’s been for decades.
Don't get me wrong-- I don't sympathize with Biden or his staff of toadies and apologists-- much less the regime media protecting him. I am just trying to give others some insight into how they may be thinking and why they made the mistakes they did.
I appreciate your balanced take
Not just feeble mentally, but also morally. He's an awful human being. Sexual deviant, corrupt influence peddler to our enemies, and a pathological liar...all well documented. A slimeball of the slimiest order.
Best take on this debacle. What do you think happened during the week-long debate prep? Look forward to seeing leaks as the blame game escalates. As it relates to Shultz, how much do you think his age affected his judgment to invest his money and reputation into Theranos?
Re: Debate prep, I'm sure they worked hard, but Biden just isn't up to it. There's only so much you can do
Re: Theranos think Shultz's age had a lot to do with it. I wasn't involved in any of his Theranos dealings, but Shultz was an extraordinarily shrewd man and an excellent judge of character, and it's hard for me to believe he would have been deceived by Elizabeth Holmes when he was in his prime.
My guess is a trusted colleague brought him in.
Also never underestimate the power an attractive young woman has over men.
Or the power of getting in on the ground floor of a sure thing that happens to have an attractive woman at the helm!
My take on this is that the debate prep failed to replicate the competitive combative atmosphere and the resulting stress. Stress, crucially, degrades all coping mechanisms and cognitive mechanisms. They went easy on him in Camp David. Because they're in his bubble, because they intimately know he's fragile even if they won't admit it, and because they didn't want him having a stroke before he even got on the plane. Overall I agree hubris and groupthink is the most plausible explanation for the debacle. The people closest to him are the least culpable. It's the media who were knowingly gaslighting us all.
Good take, likely correct and well reasoned but this goodly author avoided the more difficult question.
Answer this: after years of unanimously covering for Biden when they all knew he was infirm suddenly the entire commentariat immediately and with complete unanimity said - he’s gotta go.
Three years of dissembling, steadfast lying and ruthless attacks on dissent they suddenly reversed course: CNN, MSNBC, NYT, Vanity Fair…..
All of them, in unison, “he’s to old”, it is like they got a memo.
This Biden-apparatchik-group-think-argument is very likely correct but the broader chattering class are in no way monolithic,sorry, no way, which leaves the question: why now and how on earth did it happen all at once, what mysterious force is responsible for such a coordinated response?
Is Curtis Yarvin’s Cathedral a real thing?
I just think DC is going away, the postwar system is ending.
Now it’s very bad not just because it’s gerontocracy, but because there’s no replacements as a governing body or as individual leaders, managerialism being antithetical to both.
You are very kind to Mr. Schults, you are too kind to DC perhaps, you don’t mention they’ve gone way too far and killed too many people and are over their heads.
Mr. Schults was one of the last gentleman of our last actually honest government, Reagan and the rest did not die enriched and surrounded by prosecutors and attorneys. A great legacy of peace and opportunity was bequeathed by Reagan and those who came before him.
Since We’ve had 30 years of wars (I’m a veteran), criminality, looting, lies, incompetence and now spreading chaos. We will have more wars, great wars at home and abroad and will be lucky to escape nuclear war.
As I say, you are too kind, the rest of us don’t have the luxury.
Also Biden has always been a narsasist who over estimates his ability. Look at every speech he gives and he believes he is giving a historic speech when in reality he is making a fool of himself in a day to day moment of a politician.
Ps: You should go on Scott Greers podcast.
It’s funny I can agree with every word of this while also believing that there were Washington insiders who knew exactly what was going on with Joe. The people you describe, loyal as they may be, don’t have much choice in the matter. But neither do those in a position to pull Joe’s strings. Once they decided to prop up this walking cadaver as the leader of the free world, they put themselves in this exact situation. Let’s be real. Joe was always a pass through for whatever the poobahs thought the country should swallow. From financial arrangements to drugs and crime, Joe has always had his finger in the wind and come down on the side of powerful interests, not ordinary citizens. IMO Joe is there right now because he’s an order taker, not an order maker, and so are his staffers. That’s the problem. Not that Joe is a doddering old fool, but that the curtain has been pulled back on the presidency itself. The decision to run Joe in the first place led inevitably to this moment. It reveals the extent to which the current arrangements are threatened by anyone not absolutely controlled. See also: the attempts to take out Trump. Biden himself is really a sideshow at this point.
Yes, I actually thoroughly agree with this take as well.
"the curtain has been pulled back on the presidency itself."-- Yes, that's why they are terrified.
And yet they had to run Biden in 2020 because otherwise they would have very likely been stuck with Sanders, who was completely unacceptable to the Dem establishment.
They've been digging their graves in slow motion ever since.
Denial is like jumping off a 100 story building and believing that you are flying. It works great for the first 90 floors or so.
Be optimistic. 98 at least.
For the truly committed denialists.
I had given “it’s a possibility” to the idea that the debate was the vehicle for the Democrats to move Biden out of the race. This is the best rebuttal to that idea I’ve read and also accords with how I know humans often behave.
I agree with your take Jeremy. The apparatchiks are vested in continuing Biden’s leadership for their own benefit which is sadly divorced from the benefit of the greater American people in an increasingly fast-moving and risky world. The debate was painful to watch and atrocious for the Democratic Party which also stretches from Executive and Legislative branches. A debacle for US Global leadership and for democracy … which appears to be lying down in an enveloping darkness of leadership.
Yes, Liga. Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of "Late Stage Roman Empire" in our governance now.
This post conflates aging with dementia. Many people live to an extended age and remain sharp as a tack, without displaying any of the “good days and bad days” phenomena described here. Certainly even young people have good and bad days, but only dementia patients display the utter blankness in the face as did our nominal president. There were absolutely no signs of cognizance in those eyes, and the mouth agape was not something a man who has spent much of a life engaged in public speaking would maintain during a very visible, nationally televised, and consequential debate.
💯
I used to work for a catering firm that would do dinners at his house at Stanford in the late 1980s. Always a gentleman and always sincerely thanked the staff along with his wife. A great man.
Secretary Shultz was every inch a gentleman and always extraordinarily thoughtful about little things and about people who worked for him.
This persisted throughout his life and was something that I tried to learn from him.
Your experience with Sec. Schultz is honorable and fascinating, but perhaps not as applicable to Biden as a decent person like yourself might assume. Assuredly there
Were Biden staff/fans/colleagues/confidants who convinced themselves that Biden could pull it off, but there was enough skullduggery prior to the debate
Suggesting that one aspect of the Dems proposal for an early debate was that
It would provide enough time to change horses if it went poorly. It wasn’t a setup, necessarily, in that the intent wasn’t to prove Biden wasn’t up to the task (though I’m
quite certain that was on the minds of some senior Dems who were clear-eyed about the situation and knew what lay ahead). Any dispassionate assessment of Biden’s decline knew this day was coming since the days he spent barnstorming the nation from his basement in the last election. Why do you think they amended the convention rules two years ago to provide a remedy in the event the nominee becomes incapacitated? Now, in the wake of the inevitable collapse, all the Dem politicos claiming shock are simply lying. How else can they cover for putting the nation in this situation? They can’t.
Only the most cynical and manipulative kind of person could have created the situation we now find ourselves. Unfortunately, the Dems have a strong record of just this kind of chicanery when it comes to anything done for political advantage. It has never been on fuller display than what we have witnessed since 2016. Every branch of government has been corrupted by Democrats to “get” Trump. In this case, your reliance on human decency, while honorable, is misplaced. Today’s Democratic Party doesn’t deserve the slightest benefit of the doubt. They are above nothing.
I certainly don't think the Democrats are "above" anything. My argument in this piece is just that having Biden debate was not part of a conspiracy to get rid of him.
The Democrats have made a huge mistake. Now they are panicking. They will certainly lash out in ever-more-dangerous and desperate ways as a result of that panic. No tactic will be too low for them.
Yes, yes, yes and finally,
YES! Thank you.
Good analysis. I can understand how the degree to which Biden failed in the debate was unanticipated by Democrats. They also likely expected the debate moderators to be hostile to Trump. They weren’t. However, the post-debate media reaction seemed suspiciously coordinated.
Yes. It seemed to be almost prerecorded.
This is 100% convincing. Of course, conspiracies exist, but they’re rare, because they are hard to pull off. That a group of people would fall into group, think and fail to understand how the rest of the world would see something that they are too close to to accurately assess, that is the kind of thing that could happen to anybody.
I’m of the school that says the Bidenistas never thought DJT would agree to a debate under their rules and they could then accuse him of “ducking “ a debate because he was “afraid “ to lose to Joe.
George Shultz was a sharp intellect. Biden is mediocre at best. Shultz accomplished a lot in various sectors in life. He was very successful in the private sector, academia, and government. Biden is a blowhard corporate shill who got picked to balance Obama’s exoticism and then because they had nobody else in 2020 but Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s millionaire Socialist sports car enthusiast. None of that is relevant to the topic at hand, but Shultz was a high quality human being. Biden, not so much.
Violently agree with your analysis of conspiracy theories.
The only way to break from ignorance is a hard hit of reality