Barack obama

The Big Dog has returned to the campaign trail, and he’s up to his old tricks. No, not those tricks — the one where he offers a running commentary on the choices campaigns are making instead of just stumping for the Democratic candidate. Barack Obama does the same thing, of course, except he’s just perpetually disappointed in all Americans. Bill Clinton’s mistake is being too honest about what he thinks is really going on and warning Democrats why they might lose if they don’t shape up.

On Thursday, while delivering remarks at the eulogy for the late Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Vice President Kamala Harris “accidentally” referred to herself as the president. Kamala was discussing a bill that Lee co-sponsored with Republican senator John Cornyn that eventually became law and made Juneteenth a federal holiday. “As a United States senator, I was proud to co-sponsor it. Then, as president — as vice president — it was my honor, with the president. With the president! It was my honor, along with our president, Joe Biden, to stand beside Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee as our president signed her bill into law.” Whoops.

It’s official. Kamala Harris has received the obligatory support of Beyoncé. The "kampaign" can finally begin in earnest. On Thursday morning, the vice president released her first campaign ad with an assist from the pop giant. Images of diverse Americans fly by as Beyoncé’s “Freedom” plays and Harris promises a utopian future free of poverty and violence. The campaign is undoubtedly hoping the choice ages better than Hillary Clinton’s overuse of “Fight Song.”  “In this election we each face a question. What kind of country do we want to live in? There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos. Of fear. Of hate,” Harris voices over in the ad. “But us. We choose something different. We choose freedom.

The pressure is building for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. Donald Trump leads Biden nationally in seven swing states, according to a recent poll from Emerson College. The New York Times ran a piece yesterday entitled: “Biden called ‘more receptive’ to hearing pleas to step aside.” Several top Democrats privately told Axios that the rising pressure will persuade president Biden to drop out of the race as soon as this weekend. Former president Barack Obama told “allies” that Biden should reconsider the viability of his candidacy, reports the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Biden tested positive for Covid — for the third time. He is currently isolated in his beach house in Delaware, and will not be attending in-person meetings for the next few days.

Pressure is mounting on President Joe Biden to step aside in the 2024 election, as members in Congress voice their doubts about the Democratic Party's chances in November with the eighty-one-year-old at the top of the ticket. Democrat unity began to crumble last week when Lloyd Doggett became the first lawmaker to call on Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 election, launching a growing maelstrom in the House. Then on Wednesday, Vermont’s Peter Welch became the first Democratic senator to join the fray. It’s simple — for the sake of democracy, they argue, Biden must go so an unelected nominee chosen by the DNC can be jammed in his place.

The American media is in a credibility crisis following President Biden’s car-crash debate performance last week. How is it that so many reporters and pundits failed to reveal the depth of the commander-in-chief’s decline? Public trust in the media is in the basement — but it’s been tailing off since 2008, when the legacy media landscape in the United States fundamentally shifted.   Before 2008, the legacy media — while always leaning to the political left — had maintained a patina of objectivity. When Bill Clinton lied to the American people about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, they belatedly pounced. When John Kerry’s campaign began to crater, they reluctantly covered it. They were, to be sure, oriented against Republican candidates and policies.

In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a book about religion called Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion). As a contribution to the understanding of religion, it is, like much of Freud’s work, both banal and outrageous. But it occurs to me that its catchy title as well as its main thesis — religion, Freud wrote, was invented to fulfill “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” — has a certain pertinence to the large-scale entertainment now being offered to the public by Democrats eager to salvage the reputation of President Joe Biden.