July 10, 2024

WE NEED A SERIOUS STUDY OF WHAT CULTURES ARE AND HOW THEY INTERACT AND CHANGE AND… WELL, EVERYTHING:  Culture Clash.

Posted at 3:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

July 9, 2024

KINSLEY GAFFE: ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos Apologizes for Remark on Biden’s White House Chances.

George Stephanopoulos apologized Tuesday evening after being caught on camera quipping to a passerby that he didn’t think President Joe Biden “can serve four more years.:”

The exchange was captured on video by TMZ, and the person lobbing a query about Biden’s fortitude appeared to be working for the outlet. The person approached Stephanopoulos as he was walking, in workout clothes, on the streets of New York City.

“Earlier today I responded to a question from a passerby. I shouldn’t have,” Stephanopoulos said in a statement that was shared previously with both Puck News and TMZ. “George expressed his own point of view and not the position of ABC News,” the Disney news unit said in a separate statement.

The media have moved in such lockstep during the 2008 election cycle to turn a junior senator from Illinois into The One, followed by their unending attacks on Trump, and then until recently, their efforts to prop up John Gill. To see them currently in disarray as Biden, Hunter, Jill, and the many other rival factions in Democratic Party decide the (p)resident’s future is loads of fun to watch. Enjoy it for now, because they will immediately return to uniformly printing The Approved Narrative again once they receive their orders from DNC HQ.

Posted at 10:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PAULA BOLYARD: Democrat NBC Neurologist Lands a Death Blow on Biden Narrative: ‘He Definitely Has It.’

[Dr. Tom Pitts, who works with Parkinson’s patients in a clinical setting in Dayton, Ohio]  conceded, “We’re finding [word] retrieval doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t know what you want to say. What I cannot comment on is his ability to make good decisions. His motor symptoms are degenerating. He has Parkinsosisms. That is a fact. You know, he has the generation of the brain.”

“Show me the MRI,” he challenged Biden’s doctors. “Show me he doesn’t” have Parkinson’s. “You know, put you put your money where your mouth is. He definitely has it.”

He thinks both Biden and Donald Trump should complete the standard four-hour neuropsychological testing—the hallmark test for cognitive performance (as opposed to the shorter Montreal Cognitive Assessment Trump claims to have passed).

“So, for example, they may have you say, like, say as many words you can in a minute that start with ‘F.'” Patients also do block-building, and a trail-drawing test and complete retrieval exercises. “I may, I may say ‘cup’ and have you recall it three minutes later.”

These are done with a professional PhD in neuropsychology,” he said. “It’s a full day. We tell people, ‘Bring a snack.'”

NBC host Lester Holt asked, “You’re a Democrat, you’re a doctor. You sound like you’re frustrated with what the White House is saying.”

“Well, because, you know, I’m an American before everything. And I look at it and say, when I used to see Russia, the Soviet Union, North Korea, when they just make up outrageous things, you know, like when North Korea can’t keep the lights on, and they say, ‘Oh, you know, it was some faulty power thing.’ I kind of hate that kind of stuff.”

Then he landed a death blow on the Democrat Party: “They had four years. My own party had four years to find—you know, this was a wreck in slow motion. And they had four years to find—out of 350 million Americans—one person that could take [Biden’s] place. And here we are, the day before school, trying to do the homework and replace a guy who’s got a neurodegenerative disease.”

At the beginning of the first Obama term in early 2009, the Washington Post through its then sister-publication Newsweek insisted, “We Are All Socialists Now.” Nearing the end of the third Obama term, is it anyone surprised that our socialist Capitol Hill resembles the Soviet Union of the early 1980s?

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOE BIDEN, CHRONIC LIAR, THE CATALOG, PART II: Issues & Insights (I&I) debunks the claims that the Biden presidency has compiled a record of successes. Au Contraire.

Posted at 8:58 pm by Mark Tapscott

DAVID HARSANYI: If You Were Duped On Biden’s Cognitive Decline, You’re Too Dumb To Be A Journalist. And if you knew, you were in on it.

The New York Times has now written two editorials asking Biden to drop out of the race. And if the members of the board had only been reading their own coverage, they might not have known that Biden was struggling. Days before the debate the paper ran a piece titled “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts,” which laid out the case that conservatives had been unfairly attacking the president. An earlier piece, “Release of Hur Report Underlines Perils of the Special Counsel’s Job,” did not investigate Hur’s contention, it merely amplified attacks on him, noting that report was “seized upon by Trump supporters.”

The Times editorial page helpfully ran essays like “I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way,” wherein credulous readers learn that the president’s failure to recall the year his son died is probably not a very big deal. The same thing went on at NBC News, where one story’s subhead helpfully notes: “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”

Are there bigger dupes in this country than media-approved “experts?”

Even now, virtually every discussion on the left regarding the president’s fragile mental acuity revolves around his ability or inability to beat Donald Trump — rather than the dangerous position the administration and a pliant press have put the nation in. One suspects that if Biden withstands the pressure and stays in the race, they’ll all go back to covering for him again.

Because, if there’s anything this incident reaffirms, it’s that far too often the first loyalty of the political media is to the Democratic Party.

No wonder “The Media Want the Flaming Wreckage of the Biden Campaign to Explode — to Cover Their Tracks,” as Jeff Blehar wrote on Sunday:

It’s easy to get lost in bleak humor (or score-settling) and lose sight of the sheer magnitude of what it is we are living through: The president of the United States is an empty shell of himself mentally. His praetorian guard has been keeping his near-complete mental collapse a secret for possibly years now, and the media engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” (Nuzzi’s words, not mine) to conceal it from voters, out of reflexive (in the truest sense of the word) partisan and professional self-interest. Very Smart People tell me that my sense of complete betrayal and abiding disgust is a feeling peculiar only to Republicans and political anoraks — chumps who care too much, in other words. Perhaps so.

But the question Charlie Cooke posed last week should be the same one you hang on to as well: If the media claims it has been lied to about the state of Biden’s health for all these long years, then maybe they should investigate that? How that happened? How much did Kamala Harris — Biden’s almost certain replacement, should he step down — know? When did she know it? A real media would start from the premise that she is just as disqualified by helping to conceal Biden’s collapse as Biden and his people themselves are, and force her to prove otherwise. A real media wouldn’t play a balancing game in its head, saying, “Let’s not push her too hard, we don’t want to help the Other Guy.” This is not a real media, however, so I will invoke Betteridge’s Law by answering the question Charlie merely posed in his headline: Will the media seriously investigate how they were “misled” about Biden’s health? No. That would mean investigating themselves.

And the guild always protects its own. Always.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Are there more solar flares than expected during this solar cycle? “In terms of sunspot numbers, Solar Cycle 25 (our current cycle) has exceeded the sunspot levels of Solar Cycle 24 (which peaked in 2014). With higher sunspot numbers, we’d also expect higher flare counts. This is the case, but the difference is far from what some would have you believe.”

Posted at 8:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

21ST CENTURY “JUSTICE:”

Posted at 7:04 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BUNKERTIME: Biden rebels in Congress see their revolt crumbling. “One House Democrat who was in both meetings said: ‘Most of our caucus is still with him … meaning he’ll stay in. Which sucks for our country.’…Another described the mood as ‘pretty much unanimous’ that Biden has ‘got to step down,’ adding, ‘There were actual tears from people, and not for Biden.’”

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll