Joe biden

Joe Biden is the face of the United States. But Joe Biden no longer looks like Joe Biden. And he no longer sounds like Joe Biden — especially in the long and excruciating silences when he forgets what he’s saying or fumbles for his cue cards. The United States no longer looks like itself either. The sorry theatrical display of Biden’s first press conference is an accurate image of what has happened to American democracy. A carefully limited number of carefully selected journalists asked carefully vetted questions. A carefully chosen president read carefully written answers off his cue cards, and carefully avoided taking any questions from Fox or Newsmax. The White House is no longer the home of democracy. It’s a reality TV series in a care home.

Poor Colin Kahl. The Stanford professor is qualified, experienced, and shares President Biden’s views on defense and foreign policy. Ordinarily, that would be enough to get confirmed to a job like undersecretary of defense for policy. But no more! Three and a half years after #MeToo, the casting couch has migrated from Hollywood to Capitol Hill, thanks to Sen. Tammy Duckworth. On Tuesday, Sen. Duckworth announced that, since President Biden’s political appointees were insufficiently diverse, she would be voting against any Biden nominees with white skin color, starting with Kahl. The only exception, Duckworth said, would be for LGBTQ nominees. Well, Kahl will have a hard time pulling off a racial rebranding this late.

‘Is something neurologically wrong with Donald Trump?’ Yes, was Professor James Hamblin MD’s answer after the headline trumpeted in the Atlantic in January 2018. Yet in the election year that followed it was Biden who was being hidden in the cellar while Donald Trump embarked on an exhausting series of campaign rallies, giving largely unscripted bravura performances to his fanatical followers. Meanwhile on the rare occasion when his handlers let him out, Biden stumbled. On one occasion he forgot which state he was in. Shockingly, America’s Democrat-dominated media stayed silent about Biden’s failing health throughout the presidential campaign.

Thoughtful observers of life often comment on the richness of the English language, its huge polyglot vocabulary, its precision, it sinewy expressiveness. It is doubtless politically incorrect to say so, but English has also shown itself to be a conspicuous ally of political liberty. I have commented on this in the past, noting that 'there seems to be some deep connection between the English language and that most uncommon virtue, common sense'. Speakers of English can be plenty extravagant, it may go without saying, but there is something about English — exactly why, I do not know — that acts to tether thought to the empirical world.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced Tuesday that President Joe Biden will hold his first solo press conference on March 25, over two months after taking office. The administration scheduled the conference after weeks of journalists pointing out that Biden was the first president in 100 years to not hold formal court with the media within his first 33 days on the job. But sadly, unless the White House opens up the press conference to a wider array of journalists, this is just theater. The Biden administration has been responsible for an unprecedented crackdown on media access to the White House, which it has largely blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joe Biden won’t go to the border, but the border is coming to him. The Northern Irish border, that is. On Wednesday, Biden, Kamala Harris (pronouns: she/her) and Nancy Pelosi marked St Patrick’s Day by talking with Irish politicians from both sides of their border. Afterwards, the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, thanked Pelosi for her ‘continued support’ on Brexit. It’s bordering on the ridiculous. Biden’s administration refuses to admit that it has a moral and humanitarian crisis on its southern border, but it makes time to create problems on the border between two close allies, Britain and the Republic of Ireland. The administration insists it isn’t taking sides on Brexit, but the truth is that it already has.

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable. He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

The last thing anyone would accuse Joe Biden of is being overstimulated. But the Senate’s rapid approval of his pandemic aid plan, or American Rescue Plan, as it’s officially called, should be more than enough to put a spring in his step. It’s a victory that may even power the Democrats to victory in the midterms. Captious progressive Democrats will complain that the bill isn’t generous enough. They already are. But House Democrats will dutifully line up next week to pass it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to blow this. After four years of the Trump era, sensible Democrats know that this is their chance to spend big even if it isn’t as bigly as the Squad would prefer.

If the first month of 2021 is anything to go by, the American culture wars show no sign of abating. The country’s institutions withstood the orgy of violent destruction on Capitol Hill, led by a minority of Trump loyalists. What had been a scene of near anarchy on January 6 was just three weeks later the setting for a peaceful, albeit safely cordoned off, transfer of power. Nevertheless, the riots of that day have badly scarred the American body politic, not least by providing the country’s liberal establishment with a convenient pretext for a Big Tech clampdown on conservative opinion.

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

One of my favorite photos of all time comes from a 2012 March Madness basketball game that then-president Barack Obama attended with then-British prime minister David Cameron. The picture captures the two men perfectly. It shows Obama sitting courtside with a hot dog in his hand pointing and lecturing in that quintessential Obama way, while Cameron glowers and appears to contemplate all the places he’d rather be — getting an endoscopy, bombing Libya, anywhere else on the planet, really. The question inherent in that photo isn’t why Obama appeared to be hectoring a European ally: Obama would have hectored the Dalai Lama if given the chance. The question is: what was the most powerful leader on earth doing at a Mississippi Valley State basketball game in the first place?

Whoever Joe Biden picks for attorney general is in a lose-lose situation. Why is that job so hard? At least three reasons stand out:  The ongoing criminal investigations of Joe Biden’s family A boiling cauldron of divisive legal questions facing the new administration, particularly immigration and gun control Pressure to investigate everything the Trump administration ever did All those will land in the attorney general’s lap. The first one, involving the Biden family, is especially vexing.The probe into Biden’s grifting kin will face the AG immediately. The President-elect’s son Hunter and brother James both grew rich by trading on the family name. That, in itself, is not illegal.

William P. Barr is out. Joe Biden is in. And Donald Trump has a few more weeks left to bemoan his fate and lash out at his subordinates now that the Electoral College vote has taken place. Poor Trump! He wanted a no-holds-Barred assault on the election. But Barr, who was supposed to be Trump’s faithful janissary, has proved less than reliable in recent weeks, earning him the ultimate opprobrium of the President today, who declared that at least Robert Mueller, in contrast to Barr, would have set the record straight about Hunter Biden. Yup. Mueller. He would have 'set the record straight’, Trump claimed. So the author of the putative Russia witch-hunt is now being used to highlight the shortcomings of Barr?

Are the chickens coming home for Hunter Biden? It certainly seems so, though experts differ on the critical question of whether they are coming home to roost or roast. Wednesday’s news, splashed via an official communiqué from his father’s transition operation, that Hunter is being investigated by the US Attorney’s Office for possible tax fraud makes me want to bet for ‘roast’ not ‘roost’. Here’s Hunter’s statement from Wednesday, in full: ‘I learned yesterday for the first time that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs.

Does Joe Biden write his own speeches? Surely not. Yet his campaign says Biden was his own speechwriter for the address he made to the nation a week after the election, when he stressed his campaign theme: ‘We must restore the soul of America.’ The Soul of America is the title of a book by the historian Jon Meacham and the New York Times figured out that Meacham had helped with the speech. The campaign’s national press secretary, TJ Ducklo, was forced to concede that, yes, Biden had ‘consulted a number of important, and diverse, voices as part of his writing process, as he often does’.

When Donald Trump took his famous escalator ride, the Republican party was too attached to abstract principles at the expense of the material interests of its own voters. It wasn’t even doing a particularly good job of adhering to its preferred ideological abstractions. Whatever the Democratic party’s ideological failings, its leadership understands the importance of delivering tangible benefits to the electoral coalition that puts them in power (although their newfound suburban voters could be in for a rude awakening if the Democrats ever get too much power). Trump presented an opportunity to change this.