What did he say and what did he mean?

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2024

King Lear on the moors: Can a large modern nation function this way?

Plainly no, it can't. At issue is a pair of questions:

What did President Biden say? Also, what did President Biden mean by whatever it is that he said?

Yesterday evening, Kevin Drum was upset by the flap which resulted from President Biden's most recent disastrous comment. 

He was especially mad at Politico. You can read the Drum post here.

We've long recommended Kevin's work. That doesn't mean that he's always right. Presumably, no one is.

Below, you see Kevin's thumbnail account of this latest disaster. We've long recommended Kevin's work, but we'd have to score this presentation as basically incoherent—as the fruit of partisan rage:

Politico floods the zone over fake “garbage” outrage

[...]

This is all about fake Republican outrage over some remarks by Joe Biden yesterday. Responding to a comic saying that Puerto Rico was a floating island of garbage, he said, "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters."

But wait. What Biden almost certainly said was "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s...demonization of Latinos." See? There's an apostrophe there that was obviously silent when he spoke. Plus he mangled his words in typical Biden fashion and made it hard to parse what he was saying.

This is so plainly a case of fake outrage over a nothingburger that I'm surprised it has any legs at all, let alone massive front-page coverage in Politico. I know, I know: I shouldn't be surprised by anything any more. I just can't help myself. By now we all know the press treats every outrage by conservatives as genuine and every outrage by liberals as calculated for political effect. It's just the way things are.

We agree with some of that. Plainly, there is a lot of "fake Republican outrage" floating around in this latest incident, though we'd attribute that to Republican (and Fox News Channel) leadership, not to Republican voters.

We agree with something else. We agree that President Biden "mangled his words in typical Biden fashion." Also, we agree that this "made it hard to parse what he was saying."

Stating the obvious, the fact that President Biden "mangled his words" helps lay this latest disaster directly at his feet. The fact that this "made it hard to parse what he was saying" is also the obvious doing of President Biden.

This was the latest bungle by President Biden! In this latest incident, blame for this disastrous give-back plainly starts right there.

We disagree with other parts of what Kevin said. Regarding our claim of incoherence, please consider this:

On the one hand, Kevin starts by telling us what President Biden "said."

From there, he moves directly to a statement about what President Biden "almost certainly said."

Stating the obvious, that too doesn't quite parse! Presumably, Kevin means that the second statement is what the president "almost certainly meant."

Sadly, though, there is no obvious way to know what President Biden meant. He might have meant his remark one way, or he might have meant something else.

The way his statement actually sounded was politically poisonous. For that reason, the White House began "cleaning it up"—but there's no way to know with any certainty what he initially meant.

Major players are supposed to avoid such bungles. They're supposed to be able to say what they mean without creating an obvious source of uncertainty.

In fairness, everybody makes mistakes. At this point, President Biden is making mistakes every time he speaks.

It seems to us that Kevin is trafficking here in a form of partisan true belief. In our view, observers like Kevin should simply insist that President Biden stop making public statements until late  in the day next Tuesday.

At any rate, President Biden just keeps doing this. Sadly and destructively, this is King Lear on the moors redux, on a very down-market basis.

One additional point:

We liberals have been creating a fair amount of manufactured outrage ourselves. In the past few weeks, to cite one example, we've created a lot of (real but) manufactured outrage concerning one lone Q-and-A between Candidate Trump and Maria Bartiromo.

The question Trump was asked that day concerned Election Day of this very year, full stop. So did his single answer.

Candidate Trump won't be president on that Election Day. For that fairly obvious reason, he won't be calling out the National Guard and he won't be calling out the military on that particular day.

Having said that, so what? Our tribunes took what he said to Bartiromo and ran, with Jake Tapper leading the way. 

In Blue America, our tribunes do this a fair amount of the time. The mainstream press often plays along with our massaged outrage, as it has generally done in this specific instance.

In this particular instance, large segments of the press have played along with our creative paraphrase of what Candidate Trump was asked and actually said. Simply put, it isn't true that the press always favors GOP outrage while coming down on ours.

Our final point is this: 

Candidate Harris is trying to win. Through his horrible, unbelievable bungling, President Biden keeps screwing things up.

This disaster lands squarely on President Biden and on the people around him. The fake outrage by people like Trump follows along from there.