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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   38783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I have never seen any evidence that Harris has the intelligence or insight required to lead a nation.

Does Trump?

Likely no--though he does possess a certain raw cunning, which served him reasonably well in his first term. I think his handling of COVID was pretty bad, but prior to that I had no serious complaints. Whether he actually has the insight or intelligence required to lead a nation, he has actually done so, which seems to qualify as at least some kind of evidence. Harris, by comparison, appears to have had basically every political position handed to her. Whitmer, at least, has some executive bona fides.

I don't think this switch will be good for the Dems (Biden staying would also not have been good for them, it's a no-win situation), but at least they can now make the instant switcheroo to "It's Trump who is old and demented, HE should drop out now".

Agreed--and really, I'd love it if Trump did drop out, too, though I have to wonder whether today's announcement was timed to make that maximally difficult for the Republicans to manage. I also wonder how thinking Democrats feel about having this happen now, after the opportunity to hold open primaries has passed. There's no way Kamala would have been the pick. It looks very much like the party is prepping a Clintonesque coronation, again--and there's nothing about Joe Biden's health today that wasn't known six months ago--or even four years ago. The tacit (and heavily papered-over) admission that Biden will not be fit to serve as President in January is also, I think, effectively an admission that he should probably have been removed from office for disability months, if not years, ago.

and there's nothing about Joe Biden's health today that wasn't known six months ago--or even four years ago.

Au contraire; there were all sorts of things that weren't publicly known. Four years ago Biden was obviously on the downslope, but still capable of speaking in public for more than 15 minutes without garbling half his words or having his vocal timbre described as a "whisper." Just pull up the footage yourself: even at his bumbling worst 2020 Joe is worlds above 2024 Joe. Even six months ago he was still doing ok. Something really changed in the last 6-12 months; his "wandering" moments got a lot more frequent, and his speaking just dove off a cliff.

It's also quite likely that Republicans were implicitly or explicitly saying that Joe is demented long before he was actually exhibiting signs of it, which must have created a bit of a boy-cries-wolf effect for many Dems.

I think a legitimate argument is stress over Hunter pushed him over the edge - there's interesting stuff that specific family stress can make otherwise fairly normal older people decline much quicker.

Trump got the 2 big things right on Covid. Project Warpspeed. And the initial shutdown with a quick stimulus package.

The bad things on Covid were not fixable. Not being an island nation we were never going to Covid 0. And the other big issue is the media. The very worst lockdown actions came because the media scared the shit out of people for politics. I am not sure how Trump could have solved this issue. If the msm worked with Trump on covid policy then we would have had a better covid response. Things like keeping more of society open and running policy to protect grandma.

The tacit (and heavily papered-over) admission that Biden will not be fit to serve as President in January is also, I think, effectively an admission that he should probably have been removed from office for disability months, if not years, ago.

They could go with "Biden still has enough juice to serve until 2025, but does not have enough juice that it would have last until 2029." Dunno how true it is, but they COULD go with that, and probably will.

Do they have to go there at all? The line is just that it's best if Biden doesn't stand again because it looks like he was going to lose, no reason to concede anything about his fitness to serve.

I think the issue there is doing it after the primaries.

"The candidate people voted for wasn't going to win, so we picked a different one for them" is kind of an awkward line to have to focus on.

I think it would be better if they had an open convention partly for this reason.

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