The Frankish Reich

A couple flubs of the minor sort. A bit mumbly. Boring. Generally perfectly o.k. in a "meets [pre-debate] expectations" way. If he'd done this 2 weeks ago we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Trumpies: Biden's mind is shot! He has no business being President for four more months, much less four more years. [a year passes] Dems: o.k., o.k., we give up. You're right. We're replacing Biden! Trumpies: how dare you nominate a competent candidate! So unfair! Our entire campaign is based on Biden being a brain dead!! https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/republicans-no-fair-nominating-somebody-else.html

Which is why I'm praying that he screws up.

He just introduced Zelensky as "Putin." So we're off to a good start. Hey, they're both short!

I had him as an 80-something man who in a country that is not so sclerotic that it can't amend its constitution would be forbidden from running again. I had him as an 80-something man who would get confused ordering at Chipotle but who has a good grasp on his beliefs.

Please cite me the part of the constitution that prohibits Obama advising the President, or even formally being made part of the President's administration.

Why not? Why wouldn't he be? If Biden were to make him his Chief of Staff what in the constitution prohibits that? You know there was a time when Presidents gladly took the counsel of their predecessors, particularly those of the same party.

Yes, call it the "Deep State" if you want. I call it "the professionals in government who know what they're doing." See my old topic "Two Cheers for the Deep State." See also Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk. Continuity in government is important. Dare I say it is a conservative value. Threatening to break things without a plan on how to put them back together is a deeply radical agenda. Yeah, you guys are the very definition of stable geniuses. (I don't even know what DMIC is supposed to mean, but I sense that maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with The Jews and George Soros)

So no problem! Reelect Obama under the name of Biden. You guys have talked yourselves into knots.

Aha! So Obama IS running things. And the problem with that is ... what? He's way younger, smarter, better looking than Trump.

Of course he could just fire all his Cabinet members and have occasional meetings with the Acting Something Something and the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director just like his predecessor did.

Can he make Obama VP? Nothing says he can't run for that! Then he drops dead and we have Obama III. I like it.

Astoundingly hard for you to understand, but I'll try again. 1. Not o.k. that a senile octogenarian is president. 2. More not o.k. that a power-mad septuagenarian who tried and almost succeeded in thwarting the will of the people is made president again.

Was 2nd term Reagan an effective president? I think so. And yet there's this: https://www.history.com/news/reagan-health-25th-amendment The president was acting strangely. In the wake of a scandal about his illegal dealings with foreign powers, White House aides felt he was so “inattentive and inept” that a memo sent to the chief of staff raised the prospect of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. The president was Ronald Reagan, who was dealing with fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal. His chief of staff ultimately dismissed the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove him, but the incident is one of the few cases in American history in which White House staff seriously suggested it as an option for removing a president from office, based on his ability to perform the job.

So he's running as a figurehead for the fourth Obama Term? Sign me up!

I agree = the famous belong in the Hall of Fame. When I was a kid I obsessed about these things. Why was the aging Brooks Robinson starting the All Star Game at 3B for the AL? He's hitting under .200! But then you realize that the stars are the ones who changed the game, or our perception of it. A Hall of Fame without Joe Namath (even those his career stats don't support it) would be just plain weird. So is a Hall of Fame with a generally fine but inconsequential player like Harold Baines in it a weird thing.

They were all fired up about Trump. Just like Ol' Tarheel still is.

the Clinton/Republican Congress put the country on the right trajectory. It was up to Bush 43 to undo all of that. Tax cut, Iraq War, goodbye balanced budget.

Because he thought it was loaded with blanks. Because it was expressly someone else's job to ensure that it was loaded with blanks before she handed it to him. We overuse that joke "You had one job ... ." But here she literally had one job. She failed. Ridiculously, preposterously, in an absolutely unprecedented way. She should be doing a lot more than 18 months or whatever. She quite clearly "killed" the cinematographer. You don't like these analogies, but here's another one: The scene calls for an actor to set fire to a house after soaking it with gasoline. I've seen this scene in way too many films. The director failed to take a propane tank out of the vicinity of the fire. It explodes and kills someone. Actor's fault? No.

I get that. Here's a tepid defense of continued Bidenism: It is kind of a Comparative Government 101 core understanding that the U.S. is a little unusual in having the Head of State and Head of Government both held by the same person, the President. There's no King to go to the funeral of the President of Kazakhstan. Big elections in the last few weeks in France and the UK changed the heads of government, but not the heads of state. Macron and King Charles both get to continue to go to state dinners. So Biden's government is kind of moving along fine. I know people disagree with his policies, but I see no indication that his policies - what he believes (or at least believed in 2020, when he was elected) aren't being enacted. In fact, the point that they are being enacted (for example, on immigration) is what pisses off his opponents. On foreign policy we've seen NATO strengthened, Israel defended (perhaps too much), but I don't see any wild deviations from what we would have expected from, say, a formal third Obama Term. He may struggle with those state dinners and funerals. So send Kamala. As an old Senator once said, the Vice President's office ain't worth a warm bucket of spit. So make her the substitute Head of State. The Republic will continue to stand. I hope he withdraws. He was always an old compromise candidate. Nobody was fired up about Biden. There's better Dems out there. We personalize the presidency too much in this country. To me the main danger is one man/woman trying to assume too much control, particularly (Trump) when he thinks he knows more than he actually knows. He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool; shun him.

Exactly. Bill Clinton - with a Republican Congress - was the last administration to balance a budget. And it will probably be the last balanced budget in history.

Look at the history ... debt tends to grow fastest when one party controls Congress + the White House.

Gary Cohn, Trump's former chief economic advisor, on CNBC now. "The chief risk is slowing down (inflation) too fast now."

Use some reason. Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Come on.

Do actors take a weapon safety course? Is there evidence of that? Let's say it's some ultra-realistic movie about a junkie. It requires an actor to actually use a needle to inject what is ostensibly saline solution into the vein of another actor. It turns out the needle has fentanyl instead of saline. Actor's fault?