The Phony Campaign

2020-05-03 Update

[Amazon Link]
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Welcome to our Sunday featurette! Our Amazon Product du Jour is an actual book. The New York Times described it as "an escapist fantasy that will likely appeal to liberals pining for the previous administration." The author has "Obama playing a cerebral, detached, analytical Holmes to Biden’s bumbling, impulsive Watson." If that sounds good to you, the Kindle version is a mere $2.99.

Joe Biden's woes involving the Tara Reade allegations dinged him at the betting sites this week. And resurrected the hopes of—gulp—Hillary, who the bettors elevated to a healthy 3.5% probability of being Our Next President.

It's enough to make me want to check myself into a nursing home and have people sneeze on me.

Candidate WinProb Change
Since
4/26
Phony
Results
Change
Since
4/26
Donald Trump 48.5% -0.3% 1,290,000 -340,000
Hillary Clinton 3.5% --- 519,000 ---
Joe Biden 42.0% -1.6% 384,000 -36,000

Warning: Google result counts are bogus.

  • If you can bear reading about the Dreaded Hillary Scenario, Douglas MacKinnon of The Hill sketches it out: A Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket to replace Joe Biden? Is it even possible?

    Some Democrats tell me they fear that Biden’s political survival is getting more problematic with each passing day. They cite three main issues. The first is their concern that an allegation of sexual assault leveled against Biden by former staffer Tara Reade won’t go away anytime soon. If anything, it appears to be about to gain a new life.

    Next, they worry that another shoe could drop regarding questions related to Biden’s son Hunter and his business dealings. Lastly, some Democrats are concerned about Biden’s age and possible cognitive issues — a concern that some also have expressed about Trump.

    Mr. MacKinnon details the Biden-replacing mechanisms. and calls the Hill/Barry speculation a "truly out-of-the-box combination".

    I don't want to see what else is in that box. Sounds like the one Pandora opened.


  • But speaking about "cognitive issues", Snopes asks: Did Trump Tweet That Reporters Should Return 'Noble' Prizes? Well, of course he did. Deleted, but preserved:

    This is pig-ignorant in so many ways.

    Although the Pulitzer Prize people really should yank the 1932 foreign reporting prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty of the New York Times. (Here's the Pulizer statement explaining why they decided not to.)


  • Speaking further of cognitive issues, I noticed this bit in the Free Beacon article covering Hillary's endorsement of Biden: Biden Tells Clinton He Wishes She Was Running for Reelection.

    "I wish this were us doing this and my supporting your reelection for president of the United States. You won the majority of the vote," Biden said during a livestream conversation with Clinton, his party's 2016 nominee.

    Takeaway: Joe Biden does not know the difference between "majority" and "plurality". And thinks that matters. Not according to the Constitution, Joe!


  • At National Review, David Harsanyi looks at Joe Biden’s Disgraceful Hypocrisy on Sexual Misconduct. (I think "disgraceful" here means "totally expected and somewhat hilarious".)

    If presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden were forced to live by the standards he wants to set for college students accused of sexual misconduct, he would already have been presumed guilty, have been denied a genuine opportunity to refute the charges leveled against him by Tara Reade, and had his life ruined.

    While Biden has hundreds of pundits and an entire constellation of Democratic Party–affiliated groups defending him, accused 18- and 19-year olds have no such recourse under Biden’s preferred set of guidelines. As conservatives keep hammering the partisan double standards in the media’s coverage of sexual-assault accusations — a wholly legitimate grievance — they should not forget that Biden has long championed stripping the due-process rights of college students accused of sexual misconduct.

    Good point. As I never tire of pointing out, I myself witnessed Wheezy Joe's proud announcement of the Obama Administration's dreadful Title IX "Dear Colleague" due process-trashing regulations for college boys accused of sexual misbehavior.


  • And I pretty much gave up on Andrew Sullivan back when he became obsessed with Sarah Palin's uterus. But nowadays he's unloading on Joe: By Biden’s Own Standards, He Is Guilty.

    Biden is now claiming simply that he never did what Tara Reade said he did. Let’s posit that he didn’t. Too bad. If he were to attempt to defend himself, by his own campus logic, he would be barred any knowledge of what he was precisely accused of, even the identity of his accuser; he would be unable to see the results of any investigation; and his own claims of innocence would be rejected if the woman merely subjectively felt as if she were being abused, regardless of his own intent. Likewise, he could be deemed guilty even if he were completely innocent. As Ezra Klein, a thoroughly mainstream liberal, has explained, the broader fact of sexual abuse on campus required a few broken eggs to make the liberated omelette. In discussing a new “affirmative consent model” in California, Ezra famously wrote:

    Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the law’s success. It’s those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.

    Now apply this standard to Biden. By Biden’s own standards, he’s guilty as charged. Reade claims Biden never got affirmative consent from her, and she feels and believes he assaulted her. He never got affirmative consent for countless handsy moves over the decades that unsettled some of the recipients of such affection. End of story. By Biden’s own logic, it is irrelevant that he didn’t mean to harm or discomfit anyone, that Reade’s story may have changed over time, that she might have mixed motives, that she has a record of erratic behavior, a bizarre love for Vladimir Putin, and a stated preference for Bernie Sanders, who was Biden’s chief rival. It’s irrelevant that she appeared to tweet that she would wait to launch her accusations against Biden until the timing was right. And her cause has been championed by the Bernie brigade. The many red flags and question marks in her case are largely irrelevant under Biden’s own campus standards.

    I can't wait for Joe's "But I am not in college" defense.


  • And Michael P. Ramirez has designed a handy button for the "journalists" covering for Biden:

    [Not Me Too]


Last Modified 2024-02-02 4:53 AM EDT