Joe biden

The question going into Joe Biden’s address to the national from the Oval Office tonight was: will he, having announced that he is dropping out of the race to be president, will he also resign the presidency now? Or would he announce that he was sticking it out till 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2025? Given the perks of the office, and the appetites of Dr. Jill Biden, I thought it likely that he would choose to stick it out. I am often wrong in my political predictions, but about this I was right. In his sad, at times maudlin, painfully mendacious eleven-minute speech, Joe Biden told the American people that he wasn’t going anywhere. Circumstances may intervene to change that. All of us are subject to the sudden intervention of fate.

The events of the last few days have made incontrovertible something that candid observers have known for some time now: that the word “democracy” in the maw of Democrats bears the same relation to really existing democracy that the Russian word “Pravda” bore to really existing truth in the Soviet era. If you look it up, you’ll see that “Pravda” means “truth.” At least, that’s what the dictionary says it means. But anyone on the ground, experiencing the full-court press of Soviet disinformation knew that the newspaper Pravda deployed the word “truth” only to undermine it. It was necessary to pay lip service to the charade.

Tonight on a series of Zoom calls, a majority of DNC delegates endorsed Kamala Harris, helping her secure the required number to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.  The lesson? Destroying democracy is bad, unless it's done over a video call. In which case, it’s totally fine. Earlier, at the now-Harris campaign headquarters in Delaware, Kamala read from a teleprompter before making an awkward phone call to Joe Biden. I was waiting for the part in the movie when the record scratches, the frame freezes and then the narrator Harris says, “Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.”  The fifty-nine-year-old’s haphazard road to the general election is the best scenario she could have hoped for given her shortcomings.

It’s odd how things that have been widely predicted and even widely anticipated can nevertheless occur with an emotional thunderclap. I suppose death would qualify as an example. Joe Biden’s announcement on X earlier today that he would not be seeking reelection certainly does.  The announcement had its curious aspects. For one thing, it came from his personal account, not the account of POTUS. Indeed, for a moment that made me wonder whether it was for real. A glance at the internet assured me that it was. Most of the letter is political thru-text.

It’s been a rough few days over at MSNBC. Since the attempted assassination on Donald Trump over the weekend, the network seems to be the one unable to regain its footing. From J-13 truthers to The Lord of the Rings conspiracies, here’s Cockburn’s rundown of everything that's gone wrong so far. Much like Joe Biden’s weekly routine, MSNBC got off to a shaky start on Monday after it pulled Morning Joe from air following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. Executives were worried Mika Brzezinski planned to pull out her hand-stitched Trump voodoo doll. Whatever the couple had cooked up, Joe Scarborough was not happy that they weren’t able to pull it off.