Saturday Miscellany

First, say it ain’t so, Joe.

The decline and fall of Joe Biden is consuming the media. As of this moment, we do not know whether or not Biden will remain in the race or whether we will be offered cackling Kamala as a replacement.

How did it happen so quickly? Peggy Noonan offers an explanation in the Wall Street Journal:

The post-debate polls show he [Biden] is losing support both overall and in the battlegrounds. A cratering like that doesn’t happen because you had a bad night, or a cold, or were tired. It happens when an event starkly and unavoidably shows people what they already suspected. It happens when the event gives them proof.

In fairness, everyone suspected as much. And yet, with the connivance of the media and of Democratic politicians, a great gaslighting was imposed on the American people.

Now, Biden’s remaining supporters want to see more of him, want to see him do town hall meetings and live interviews.

And yet, Noonan points out, if Biden could do so he would have done so already:

Those who support the president offer suggestions on conference calls. “Just get him out there—long, live interviews, lots of news conferences, a big rally in the round with Q&A from the voters.”

They don’t know what they’re talking about. He can’t do what they want him to do. He can’t execute it. He tried to do it last week—the debate was, in effect, a live, high-stakes interview. He won’t be able to do it next week or next month either. Old age involves plateaus and plummets. It gets worse, not better.

The elected officeholders of the Democratic Party should take responsibility and press the president to leave. You can’t scream, “Democracy is on the line,” and put up a neurologically compromised candidate to fight for it. They haven’t moved for two reasons. One has to do with their own prospects: You don’t want to be the one who kills the king, you want to be the one who warmly mourns the king and takes his mantle after someone else kills him. The other is fear of who would replace him on the ticket, and how exactly that would happen.

Second, one Tyler Austin Harper offers this explanation for the shock that is befalling younger Americans.

Maybe the Biden situation is only possible in a society with heavy generational siloing, where people don’t interact with other age cohorts except at Thanksgiving. Nobody who interacts with 80 year olds regularly could honestly think an 81 year old man should run the country.

Dare I say, for those of us who are on the elderly side, this is not good news.

Third, and then there was Biden doing a radio interview on Thursday. Therein he said this:

By the way, I'm proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman... to serve with a black president. Proud to be involved of the first black woman on the Supreme Court. There's so much that we can do because, look... we're the United States of America.' 

Does Biden think it will help his cause when he claims to be a black woman?

Fourth, there is Olivia Nuzzi’s report about Biden in New York Magazine. If she had not held the story back, we would have been talking about her and not Annie Linskey-- whose Wall Street Journal expose of the Biden mental state we have covered in these pages.

One is amused by Nuzzi’s contention that a conspiracy of silence surrounded the truth about Joe Biden. She was a card-carrying member of that conspiracy. Duh.

Nuzzi explains that those who surround Biden have produced a conspiracy designed to keep the truth from the world.

She takes no prisoners:

The worry is not that Biden will say something overly candid, or say something he didn’t mean to say, but that he will communicate through his appearance that he is not really there.

Joe Biden’s mind is deteriorating, at a fairly rapid clip. One recalls that Michael Burry, of Big Short fame, made the same argument several years ago, and that he is a physician.

Nuzzi writes:

Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names. For many inclined to support the president, this was good enough. They did not need to monitor the president’s public appearances, because under his leadership the country had returned to the kind of normal state in which members of a First World democratic society had the privilege to forget about the president for hours or days or even weeks at a time.

The sad part of this article is the fan girl aspect. Nuzzi thinks that under Biden everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. She ignores the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East-- or else she considers them to be normal. And she ignores the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and the open borders policy. 

Fifth, speaking of failure, the British conservative party, led by the hyperwealthy Rishi Sunak, was destroyed in Thursday’s parliamentary elections.

Conservatives had been in charge for more than a decade. Apparently, they did not do a very good job.

Since the media world has been lit up with claims that the Labour victory was a victory for the British left, it is worth adding a remark made by David Goldman on Twitter:

The UK election was a shift to the right, not the left: Nigel Farage's Reform's 13% knee-capped the Tories and allowed Labour a record number of seats by plurality with just 33.8% of the vote (compared to 40% in the 2017 election which it lost). The UK thus is in line with Germany and France.

Sixth, the second round of French parliamentary elections will take place this weekend. As I dutifully noted in these pages, the parties of the left have tried to consolidate their power, the better to ensure that the right wing party of Marine Le Pen does not prevail.

As you know, the French do not have Donald Trump to kick around, and to accuse of being Hitler. So, they take the next best thing, the Le Pen party, whose past was contaminated with Nazi sympathies, and become completely hysterical about the return of Hitler.

As it happens, the party of Marine Le Pen has not only worked to rid itself of the radical right, but it has staunchly supported Israel.

The anti-Le Pen group contains the socialist leader, Jean Luc Melanchon, who supports Hamas and the Palestinian cause.

Seventh, a recent article by Tara Isabella Burton allows me to get back in touch with my inner pedant. Burton offered some reflections on literary pilgrimages for The Hedgehog Review. As you know, the most famous work of pilgrimage literature was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the fourteenth century.

As it happens, Burton makes two significant omissions. First, and most obviously, she does not make note of the ultimate in fourteenth century pilgrimage smut, the Decameron of Boccaccio. It does not contain a surfeit of pieties, but it is certainly fun to read.

And then there is the thirteenth century book by one Bonaventure, called, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum-- which means, The Soul’s Journey unto God.

The Bonaventure guidebook launched a series of books about spiritual journeys-- not quite the same as a pilgrimage, but close enough. Dare we suggest that this book was one of the first books of psychotherapy.

Finally, I signal that I have some free consultation hours for my life coaching practice. Those who would like to know more about life coaching are directed to examine my case fictions, published here on the last three Fridays. If you are interested, email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

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