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So I wanted to revisit a comment I made two years ago. Does anyone actually believe Biden is the president?
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.
The New York Post has also gotten involved.
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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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.
It depends, if he was cognizant enough to make decisions in those 6 hours then yes largely the day to day decisions were being made by the President. With age related cognitive decline and/or dementia, the decline is very rarely (in my experience working in adult social care) linear. Some people become unable to make certain decisions and not others, some are entirely lucid for large predictable periods of time (time of day related usually).
Biden is very stubborn and I am told that he was the one who was pushing for the death penalty commutations hard and had to be dissuaded from commuting them all as staffers felt the most publicity negative few should be excluded. Also there was apparently a lot of opposition to him wanting to pardon Hunter, so clearly he has some level of awareness and enough energy to still be pushing his own agenda at times. But that can't tell us how many things this applies to and indeed increased stubbornness could be a symptom of decline, becoming stuck in positions other people might reason their way out of.
Without a proper assessment on how much of what we see is cognitive vs physical/speech decline it is pretty difficult to know what level of input he is having. I knew geriatrics who struggled to speak coherently but were able to write and type and express their thoughts perfectly well. I also knew some who could speak about say trains or mathematics perfectly coherently but were entirely disconnected from the reality of what year it was, who was who and what was going on. For all except the worst cases you would generally need to spend some reasonable length of time, across different days and times in a back and forth conversation to really be able to diagnose a specific level of decline.
So, I would say the evidence suggests that Biden is for at least some periods of the day the President in more than just name. In reference to the criminal enterprise, I would suggest again that the article itself suggests that many people were kept in the dark by the inner circle and would have had meetings in that 6 hour window. I saw Biden speak for about 30 minutes not long prior to the debate and he seemed a little frail but with it. It is quite possible that limited exposure would mean you wouldn't see much more than that, especially with anyone allied being pre-disposed to rationalize away anything they did see, and to believe any excuses they were given.
Personally I think his inner circle (and himself potentially depending on his awareness) were in fact likely misleading the majority of the Democratic party as well. Because as soon as that fell apart, the internal pressure had him standing down as nominee pretty quickly. Some of that is political expediency of course, but I can't imagine there weren't some people who had they known would have realized the performance wasn't going to be able to kept up long enough, even if not for moral reasons but for pragmatic ones.
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Yes. Mainly because that is too broad of a brush, and captures many, many people who weren't complicit in this. I think it's fair to say that the current administration staff are guilty of willfully defrauding the American people; whether that makes them criminals or not I'm not sure. But if you call the entire Democratic Party a criminal enterprise that implicates every politician, every staffer, at every level across the entire country. That is too far.
I would say no, but other folks might think that the only thing standing in the way is whether or not a fraudulent business document can be surfaced in the State of New York that is at all related to the scheme.
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Surely that's not a crime. Terrible behavior, but not illegal.
I don't think the distinction matters all that much as far as I'm concerned. Way too many people conflate legality and morality. If anything, it being technically legal means they won't be punished via official routes and it's more important to impose social sanctions against them as a substitute. If a man murders my entire family, I'm making damn sure he gets arrested and convicted. If I discover that there's some obscure loophole in the law that made his behavior technically legal, but for all practical purposes he still deliberately murdered them as opposed to it being an accident, then I'm getting my gun.
So if the Democrat Party administration willfully defrauded the American people AND it's legal so they won't get in trouble for it via official routes, then I'm going to make sure they are penalized via whatever unofficial methods I have at my disposal: in this case never voting for them and using this to denounce them and convince other people not to vote for them.
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Well, that's why I said I'm not sure. I just don't know enough about the law to say whether that constitutes a crime. But I certainly agree it is terrible behavior.
Not a crime I would think. Just standard lying in politics.
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Archive link, no paywall.
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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I am fairly confident they don't believe they are doing this, and they effectively believe that the interests of party and country are one and the same. It is not ridiculous to believe that a figurehead Biden presidency run behind-the-scenes by his handlers is better than a Trump presidency with a competent executive. After all, I'm not sure I wouldn't feel similarly about the reverse situation.
Believing that the interests of the party and the country are the same is a textbook case of putting party above country since you could use that logic to justify anything and to monopolize power. Of course the interests of the country and the interests of a party to capture power are not the same because they can't be the same.
Rule by handlers kind of goes against the pretense of American democracy and like the abuse of January 6th through hiding evidence, milking it, and fbi informants who have played a role in the event, there is no reason to buy that Democrats, meaning the party who have demonstrated consistently a pretty malicious nature in the way they engage politics, are motivated by higher ideals. Whatever the party claims to believe, their weaponization of department of justice shows plenty. As well as a lot of other incidents and how it reacted to them.
At the end of the day you can become Stalin and claim to be fighting to save the people and always motivated by higher principles.
It is actually fairly common for political parties to put party above country. And also even for a significant % of their voters. Admittedly in some cases the issue rises to a case of the worst nation destroying treason and in other cases it is of milder form such as corruption. I don't think lying about Biden's dementia is the worst the Democrats have done and the Republicans have also done worse. Their open border policy alone under Biden was a much more severe crime and the context becomes worse when we consider Biden's quotes and the general Democrat behavior on the issue. I would say deliberately trying to replace your own people and opening the floodgates, and refusing to protect one's borders is a much more significant crime.
I don't really think you can make this stick. Voters know the kind of advisors that every candidate will select -- in many cases they are out in the media stumping for the guy anyway. And it's been a longstanding tradition that Presidents impact policy mostly by the selection of their lieutenants (and, when they are in conflict, by resolving disagreements between them) than by putting a hand directly on the tiller. Most people are voting for a package of ideas, not for the personal touch of a single dude.
If anything, this has been a thing that's commonly a left-wing attack against conservative Presidents that they felt were insufficiently part of the intellectual/bureaucratic class. The line was used just as unconvincingly against Reagan ("empty actor") or Ike ("spends more time golfing") even though both put their own indelible mark on US history (for better or worse).
I'm not suggesting that a diminished President is a good thing -- a real crisis could brew at any moment -- but it's bad for reasons largely independent of the line you're trying to draw here.
No, it is actually a bad thing for handlers and bureaucrats to be doing as they please and shows that there is a lack of electoral accountability because then the handlers can bypass the president. The president is the guy who is elected to actually decide, not merely to delegate, to direct his advisors, listen to them and reject their views when he disagrees with them which actually always happens on various issues. To actually also change the team if they show themselves incompetent.
If not the president who is actually deciding this? Does one handler dominate the rest? Blackmail? Who exactly runs things? A clique of advisors? These are genuinely problems and you ought not to so easily disregard them.
Of course when it comes to people running departments this includes people who have never been elected like the permanent neocons. The Nuland's and those that replace them. These unelected Bureaucrats then can more easilly bypass the control of the public which ideally happens by electing someone.
Just by the act of electing a politician, doesn't mean a political party has carte blanche to do as it pleases.
Since the presidents are pressured to select people by powerful organized interests to get elected, and there are organizations with agendas that can and will go against common good and voter's preference, there is in fact room for disagreement as we saw aplenty with the Trump administration. But even among President's not pressured in this manner they can select advisors with conflicting outlooks or who they disagree with in part, but think might have some things of value to say.
If you are fine with the president being a decorative item, and handlers being in charge then indeed you have changed the system to a much democratic one, and much less transparent and accountable one. One where the permanent deep state becomes more powerful. Or maybe revealed something about what was already happening.
Just downplaying the whole thing as democracy working as it ought to, is excusing something that is a genuine problem. And in fact the lack of accountability and transparency of the rulers is a slippery slope to worse unaccountable tyranny and corruption and bad decision making.
If some of the decisions taken by the late Biden administration on Ukraine and elsewhere end up catastrophic, who is going to take accountability for them? Who exactly among the people in American goverment by their position close in power have been made the people in charge?
It is the job of the president to steer things in line with the common good of the people and get the bureaucrats in line. This applies for any administration because of the issues I elaborated above of disagreements, need of leadership, the fact that who knows who dominates in such cases, electoral accountability which also includes people who take bad decisions losing their job, and of course the permanent swamp of certain kind of groups with common agenda marching on institutions whose agenda can be unpopular among the public, such as the neocons. Weak and diminished presidents can lead to some factions who find it more difficult to get elected but are influential (including with said presidents) to act more brazenly, arrogantly and push for more. While a president who lets say is 60% a neocon, might be willing to disregard them and care maybe a little about the public's disagreements with said agenda. Just one example but there was in fact some conflict of this nature during the Trump administration and even to an extend with the Obama administration.
There is in fact a difference between having some vacations, and being there when needed and mentally acute, and being mentally diminished from your role. But certainly it is quite possible that right wing politicians were too asleep at the wheel and they failed to impose on themselves.
Still, it is actually a genuine weakness of especially right wing governments that they a) went too much along with the same agendas promoted by the left and failed to do differently, especially on issues that don't have to do with big donor approved economic differences. b) We have Nixon's leaked tapes that shows a discontinuity between his personal views and the more left wing way he governed. In addition to their failure to govern in a way that sufficiently was different, they failed to restrain sufficiently the kind of people who marched on institutions and to change the leanings of the people running institutions. So there is an even greater need there for the presidents to be involved since there is in fact a difference between the deep state and what kind of policies are prioritized and what the public and even more so the base who votes for a president wants.
I don't think there's ever been a President intelligent enough to actually do this across the span of domains. It's always been a job of delegating.
Who exactly run things in any major power structure? Never a single person. Your complaint is so breathtakingly naive. Visit any Fortune 100 boardroom and see how they do it. If anything, the President gets a leg up on most of them since he gets to select his entire set of advisors fresh. Of course those people wield influence over the Prez and over each other: they are positively selected for that!
Of course there are genuine problems, but those are problems inherent to the leadership of any large institution.
Indeed. And they can't actually do that without delegating a broad swath of authority to their cabinet and advisors because there is simply too much, even for a non-diminished President, to possibly try to steer.
There is no democratic accountability in the US political system between elections! None. Never has been! This was a specific intentional choice of the Founders as compared with the contemporaneous systems in Europe in which elections could be called at any time.
The only democratic recourse we have is every 2 years to vote new people into government and the back pressure this causes on officials that don't want to tank their chances.
At best, what I take from this is that Presidents should make a habit of pre-announcing their high level appointments before the election so that voters can better assess the entire package of leadership they are voting for, rather than after.
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