THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2024
Bret and Gail opine: We were struck by what Gail Collins said midway through this week's Conversation with Bret Stephens.
As their colloquy began, the pair swapped comments regarding the horrors of Hegseth and Gaetz and Gabbard and Bobby. Eventually, Stephens switched gears—and Collins' statement surprised us:
Avengers, Assemble
[...]
Bret: Switching gears, Gail—Joe Biden is kinda slinking out of office. With the election behind us, how would you rate his presidency?
Gail: I’m so torn on that one, Bret. In the future people may well look back on his administration’s achievements—from expanding health care access to the fight against global warming—and give him a high grade.
But at this particular, painful moment, I can’t forgive him for hanging on to his office so long that it became impossible for the Democrats to hold primary elections to find a successor.
How about you?
Collins seems to feel that Biden's refusal to step aside made it impossible for Trump to be defeated. We were surprised by what she said, less so by Stephens' assessment:
Bret (continuing directly): On a ranking of presidents, I’d have to place him alongside Franklin Pierce or John Tyler: inconsequential in a generally bad way.
[...]
Through hubris, Biden destroyed his single greatest accomplishment, which was the defeat of Donald Trump. Through diffidence, he failed to achieve what might have been the most impressive goal of his term, which would have been Russia’s battlefield defeat in Ukraine, thanks to rapid and overwhelming U.S. assistance. Through inattention, he allowed a preventable immigration crisis to unfold, along with a huge spike in inflation that was the predicted result of his reckless overspending. Through imprudence, he permitted the Justice Department to prosecute his predecessor in a way that did more to resurrect Trump’s political fortunes than it did to bury them. Through self-delusion, and the dishonesty or silence of his close confidants, he covered up the extent of his mental decline. Through political malpractice, he anointed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee instead of encouraging a more open process that could have yielded a better candidate.
I bet you think I’m being way too harsh.
Gail: Well, um, yeah.
Bret: But don’t worry. After another four years of Trump, we’ll all look back at Biden as Abraham Lincoln II.
Our summary: Stephens is heavily negative on Biden, thinks Trump is massively worse.
In our view, that list of horribles Stephens presents is food for us Blues to chew on. Almost surely, lurking there are some of the factors which help explain Candidate Trump's 1.6-point win.
Many of us in Blue America seem to have no ability to comprehend this fact. Trump voters are bigots and racists and deliberately dumb. Having offered this sweeping assessment of the Others, we achieve a full stop.
Among us humans, tribal delusion has always worked that way. It's part of the way we humans are built. It can't be anything we might have done.
Eventually, Stephens said this:
Bret (continuing directly): Question is: Will the Democrats have learned the lessons of this election so they can win in ’28?
Gail: Well, if the lesson is to point out when a president’s too old, there’s certainly a whole new opportunity.
Bret: Touché. Although the problem with Trump isn’t senility. It’s … sinisterility.
Gail: We’ll be spending the next couple of years fighting Trump and giving points to the governors and legislators who are doing the best job of pushing back against his worst excesses.
Bret: Paging Ritchie Torres, Seth Moulton, John Fetterman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and any other Democrat capable of understanding why normal, decent people still voted for Trump.
Say what? According to Stephens, some people who are "normal and decent" did in fact vote for Trump! Some normal people had decent reasons which led them to cast that vote.
We voted for Candidate Harris ourselves, but we agree with that assessment. And according to Stephens, there are at least four Democratic office holders who understand this point.
Diogenes is widely said to have looked for one honest man. In our view, we Blues should possibly make a better effort to shine some light on the reasons why some normal, decent people may have decided to vote for Trump.
In our view, the reasons go on and on and on. But so does Blue denial.
Gail praises Biden’s “fight against global warming.” So she says trying to do something worthwhile is an accomplishment, whether or not the President succeeded. I tend to focus a lot more on actual achievements.
ReplyDelete
DeleteSo DavidinCal your answer to get Actual Achievements™ fixing Global Warming is to completely unravel environmental regulations, increase USA carbon production to even higher levels than the record output during Biden, bad mouth all green energy based on the usual RW lies (except with Elon - E cars are now tolerable), and undue the billions in the works and scheduled for the future to build-out green energy, minimize carbon emissions. You are rooting not only to have no achievements,but to exacerbate the problem. And I assume you know this is a generational problem that will take decades to have small impacts, and your grandkids are likely going to have a time of it. Kinda hard to figure how you deal with all your conflicting thoughts in your head.
Arty - Trump and Biden did almost the same thing about global warming — Nothing vs Almost Nothing.
DeleteWell President's Manchin and Sinema lessoned Biden program impact, but still a very good start. (Try researching at Wiki.) Again, explain how vowing to go backwards vs. forwards will get to your desired Actual Achievements™? Nothing but blather from you.
DeleteIt isn't true that Biden did nothing about global warming. It is true that Trump will now reverse the things he has done.
DeleteArty - you are right. Trump’s approach will not solve global warming. Now can you .explain how Biden’s approach WILL solve global warming.
Delete@6:36 How much cooler will our planet be in year 2100 because of Biden’s actions? That’s the measure of his achievement. I would guess the answer is less than 1/100 of a degree.
What is wrong with cleaner skies, less asthma, less cancer? I remember in early 2000's Lieberman and McCain had a Senate presentation on exactly this topic. They said even if their proposals don't impact climate change much, we can celebrate making pollution better. Then Rush Limbaugh and Fox attacked them and they said never mind. And your hero Raygun taking the solar panels off the White House. A FU to controlling climate change when it might have had a chance to have a significant impact by starting work 40 years back, not three years back. (The population has nearly doubled from 4.4B in 1980 to 8.2B today.) And again, why are you supporting your Felon going backwards as a means to get to Actual Achievements™? Wouldn't it be better to have the Felon usher in substantial improvements in climate change policies, rather than telling oil execs if you give me a $1 Billion I will remove all environmental regulations.
DeleteSo Dickhead, Biden's gobal warming policies weren't successful because they didn't solve global warming by themselves?
DeleteSounds like your usual cogent analysis.
Jimmy Carter, the most scientifically educated president in modern times, put solar panels on the White House roof. Imagine where the world would now be if the US had then taken the initiative to be the world leader in combating global warming. Luddites like DIC will be long gone from this planet when history is written that will not look favorably on the ignorance of him and his ilk and how they did nothing except offer up stupid platitudes like the one above.
Delete"I tend to focus a lot more on actual achievements."
DeleteSounds a lot like "I like people who weren't captured."
I keep asking David to tell us where that giant faucet is in California that Trump is going to open up and end California's water shortage. Please David, tell us.
DeleteDavid in Cal,
DeleteBased on past actions by Trump when he was President, there will be no closed borders this time, either.
Biden isn’t “slinking out of office”, he’s wandering off, per usual. He hasn’t been in charge since he was inaugurated.
ReplyDeleteIf that were true, we should be thanking whoever did such an excellent job for us.
DeleteI heard on the radio today that mortgage rates are increasing due to uncertainty about how Trump's economic measures will play out. That is the opposite of what he promised voters. They decreased under Biden and his assistants.
Trump is busily appointing unqualified people to various positions. Is that going to accomplish better results than Biden and whoever has been guiding him lately? Not judging by Biden's accomplishments.
https://bsky.app/profile/tesler.bsky.social/post/3lbfcrm5rzc24
Delete"The share of Republicans who say that they’re worse off financially than they were a year ago is already down 15-points since the election."
Republicans can only squeak by in national elections when their electorate has their heads entirely up in their Wurlitzer information bubble ass...
Also, Fox is suddenly uninterested in talking about inflation.
DeleteWe're too broke to have a big-government border program. I heard it on Fox.
DeleteYou two are so silly. And uninformed.
ReplyDeleteWe normies hate to break it to you but we are horrified by fads like mutilating children's genitals. Talk about "conversion therapy." Democrats think these bizarre developments represent "progress."
ReplyDeleteThere are numerous other examples of why normal people reject Democrats.
Whatever you guys are, you are definitely not "normies."
DeleteWhere were you when teen guys were putting studs in their penises? You confuse freedom to make decisions about one's body (or for parents and doctors to do so) with advocacy of certain procedures, which is not being done by anyone on the left.
I think tattoos are mutilation, but I am not going to attack those who do it because of my personal revulsion at the practice. Look at what Pete Hegseth has put on his body! Is that progress?
They're incels. TDH is their honeypot.
DeleteGo ahead and start a movement entitled "Republicans against circumcision".
DeleteDemocrats do not describe gender altering surgery as "progress". And WTF is it your business that there is a miniscule segment of our population that undergoes such surgery? March in lockstep with all the other right wing assholes who are triggered by these people. I stay in my lane and will ignore our differences as long as one isn't taking a sports trophy from my kid, an extremely rare event that of course makes headline news in rags and media outlets owned by the Murdochs. Leave well enough alone those people who aren't bothering you, especially since your side seems quite content to vote in pedophiles, pedophile enablers, and sex traffickers. Why don't you get your party's own shit together for once? It's disgusting.
DeleteThis is a hoot. AOC is condemning Republicans for endangering trans women (and girls, she says) by making them use the restroom of their bio sex.
DeleteWhy? Because those icky biological men tend to act like icky biological men…
https://x.com/timrunshismouth/status/1859832847676342625?s=42&t=oYvKLjVc8YzJIvwKoQTYBQ
I always feel sad when one of the trans women at my work uses the male restroom- if I happen to be in there. Because I think of them as a female. But they may make the women feel uncomfortable if they were to use that restroom. They still have a penis. Maybe that should be the criteria. If they have the penis removed in surgery, then they can use the women's restroom. But all that being said, we are just taking a leak at work. As awkward as it is for about a minute, it's not the biggest deal in the world. It's just taking a piss. Even though it sucks, after a minute, you're back at work and it's forgotten.
DeleteThat's all this issue is. A really small subset of women who need pull their penis out and pee for a minute.
DeleteIt's completely normal for Republicans to rape children. Anyone who says it isn't, is a liar.
Delete4:51 If you can’t make a connection between the fads of sterilizing and mutilating children and your own children, you’ll never get it.
DeleteAnd we shouldn’t only be concerned for our own. The “miniscule” victims deserve to be protected from this barbarism even if their own parents refuse to protect them.
Anonymouse 7:57pm, there are bigger deals in the world. . One of them being why in the heck would we allow a trans woman boxer to knock the hell out of a bio female boxer? And this in a sport that had not been open to women until the 1990s.
DeleteYes, I agree.
DeleteStephens ignores that Biden went through a primary process and won his primaries. If there were serious opposition to his running for a second term, an opposing candidate could have come forward then, a process that was only months prior to the beginning of the general election.
ReplyDeleteIt was obviously the campaign to malign Biden and portray him as doddering (via fake videos and with the help of the NY Times) that caused alarm about his second term. It shows the power of propaganda, not Biden's flaws for not stepping aside. Biden has been doing a good job as president during the time when Harris campaigned, and he continues to do so on his diplomatic travel over the past several weeks. This idea that Biden did something horribly wrong, after winning all of his primaries and earning the nomination, is a right wing invention.
The Democrats behaved badly by pushing him aside (when he out-polled Harris against Trump). Some number of Democrats may have stayed home or showed less enthusiasm for Harris due to this Democratic power play engineered against the party's nominee. Or Harris was not the better candidate after all, given that some number of Democrats wouldn't come out for her.
Somerby has ever expressed any enthusiasm for Harris, but he also attacked Biden based on his age, joining the right wing campaign against Biden, who was doing fine as president.
Notice how Cecelia has never admitted that those videos of Biden were edited and fake, and how she continues to refer to him as "wandering off" when he never did that at all. Somerby should be discussing why and how it was possible for the right wing to engage in a successful campaign like this (based on ageism), but instead he joined in the attack on Biden. That should be all the explanation we need about why the Dems lost this election. Even supposed Democrats like Somerby were taken in by watching Fox 24/7 and followed the wrong path to undermine Harris and put Trump into office.
We now know that at least some of those fake videos were created by Russia-funded firms. Is it OK that such foreign powers have been meddling in our election process? Why doesn't Somerby speak out about that? We obviously need more effective propaganda activities on the left, but Somerby has ignored that need too.
Meanwhile, how did Trump win? He cheated, with the help of clueless Dem leadership like Nancy Pelosi and stooges like George Clooney. And now we are stuck with a different doddering old fool and his henchmen, who are worse than anything Biden might have done had we all let him do his job without interference.
Thank you, Hiroo Onoda.
DeleteRight, none of this matters.
DeleteWhat matters is the epidemic of post-birth abortions.
DeleteBiden wasn't winning the election any more than he won the debate. Look, after 9/11, starting the Iraq war and escalating our involvement in Afghanistan, George W. Bush was re-elected, so this is not the first time that Republicans won the day voting inexplicably for a moron. And what happened his second term? The worst recession since the great depression. If Trump's vision of tariffs and tax cuts for the wealthy become reality, there is absolutely no avoiding worsening inflation and a sharp increase in the national debt. When 23 Nobel Laureates in economics cosigned a document warning against Trump's economic agenda they could easily be ignored by Republicans and the undereducated as eggheads from elite universities that are the enemy. Culture wars won the day, as sexually aberrant citizens needed to be first and foremost the objects of condemnation that Republicans could rally against. History repeats itself. Look forward to an especially dismal economy in the next four years.
DeleteAnonymouse 6:28pm, those videos showing Biden’s cognitive impairment weren’t faked. He’s cognitively impaired, has been increasing impaired his whole term, and it became impossible for him to continue.
DeleteNo political party forces their presidential candidate to step down from a re-election campaign a few months before the election without it being catastrophically necessary.
This got Trump re-elected, just as Somerby feared since before Biden was even nominated. Anonymices absolutely owe him an apology for all the things you called him.
Just because you and your paid zealots shop your shite around here 24/7, doesn’t mean that everyone else is buying.
Cecelia calls anyone who doesn't rape children "doddering".
DeleteThe thing that calls itself Cecelia may have missed the multiple rally events in which Trump’s meandering bullshit monologues devolved into unintelligible gibberish. It is now 6 years and counting since he was carted off to Walter Reed on a Saturday for an unscheduled visit and a dementia test. Do you know the result of that and his more recent one? If you believe Trump’s word on it, he’s got a few championship golf trophies to sell you. He prides himself on “passing” a “hard” test of his mental capacity that involved identifying cartoons of zoo animals. And you gullibly believe him, sucker. Leader of the free world.
DeleteAnonymouse 8:52am, no, I call old men impaired when they’re obviously impaired. I agreed with YOUR leaders.
DeleteLet's start a movement: Hulk Hogan for press secretary
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ReplyDelete"Why did some "normal" people vote for Trump?"
What do you mean "some"? And what do you mean "normal"?
All normal people voted for Trump; all of them.
Because normal people want to make America great again. All of them.
And, of course, all normal people want liberal perverts and liberal idiots (but I repeat myself) out of the government.
Trump will leave the borders wide open, like he did the last time he was President.
DeleteAnd if history repeats itself, kill hundreds of thousands of citizens, more likely to be his gullible followers.
ReplyDelete