Tag: Biden

The 2024 Switcheroo

The Summer of 2024 was a political maëlstrom. It included a near-miss assassination attempt and a withdrawal of a sitting president of the United States from his re-election campaign, almost at the last possible moment.

We still do not know much about Trump’s would-be assassin on that roof in Butler, Pennsylvania. Nor does there seem much media interest in that still mysterious criminal episode. But we are learning more about Joe Biden’s stepping down from the campaign, and Kamala Harris’s taking the reins of the Democratic ticket.

Most recently, from a insider-exposé just out by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House (Apri 1, 2025), we learn that Barack Obama, former president and key Democratic Party insider, not only pressured Biden to step down (along with Nancy Pelosi), but he also opposed Kamala Harris’s hasty top-of-the-ticket switcheroo. Strongly. For five days. Then he gave his endorsement.*

It’s widely reported that the Bidens dislike Kamala Harris. It’s also well known that Obama is not exactly Joe Biden’s biggest fan — the Obama/Biden pairing was political, making the match perhaps the most fraught since Kennedy/LBJ.

We learn from co-author Jonathan Allen that Obama refused to endorse Ms. Harris on that infamous first day, after Biden’s endorsement,* and that Obama was pitching for an open convention.

Obama’s political instincts are unmatched within the Democratic Party. That his advice was resisted says a lot about where the party was headed.

And where it’s at now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* If you, like me, are looking for why Biden, so soon after stepping down, publicly endorsed Kamala Harris, the sample on Amazon won’t tell you. But Ms. Harris entreated Biden immediately upon his resignation: “You need to endorse me,” she said, according to co-author Amie Parnes. Pressure was applied.

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Tags Biden, Obama, power, president

Accountability crime and punishment media and media people national politics & policies

Pardon Me

Dr. Fauci, Anthony Fauci, covid, pardons, Biden, justice

Another round of presidential pardons, anyone?

At Medium, former New York Times science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr., urges President Joe Biden to “preemptively pardon Jack Smith, Robert Mueller, Merrick Garland, Brad Raffensberger, Fani Willis, Letitia James, E. Jean Carroll, Judge Juan Merchan and every judge who has ever issued a ruling that made Donald J. Trump unhappy.”

He says that “President Biden should also pardon himself,” along with “the heads of Operation Warp Speed and the chief executives of Pfizer and Moderna,” and “can’t even imagine how many political journalists … also need protecting.”

Is there anyone left?

“While we’re at it,” writes McNeil, “I’d like a pardon too.”

The award-winning journalist had a colorful history at The Times. In 2020, the paper reprimanded him for comments attacking Trump and the head of the Centers for Disease Control over their COVID response, declaring “that his job is to report the facts and not to offer his own opinions.”*

And we can’t forget the primary focus of McNeil’s essay, titled: “Now Biden Should Pardon Tony Fauci.” Declaring “Dr. Fauci has done nothing wrong,” the reporter decries that “a motivated prosecutor can go after you for anything … can break you financially with legal fees just proving your innocence.”

Yes, we know … having watched it unfold against Mr. Trump.

McNeil clearly fears that Trump will become a dictator, throwing out the Constitution and the rule of law. Judging from Trump’s first term, I am not so worried. But does even McNeil really believe these pardons could survive his imagined MAGA maelstrom?

For nearly 40 years, Anthony Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, with primary responsibility for the treatment of contagious illnesses, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. A presidential pardon would be an official admission of his guilt.

In your own vernacular, Mr. Biden: Don’t!

Fauci deserves his day in court. And so do we.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Then, in early 2021, McNeil resigned from the newspaper “under pressure” after complaints surfaced about him using the n‑word on a student trip to Peru, for which he served as a guide.

Note: Back in 2022, Elon Musk did post on X: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

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Tags Anthony Fauci, Biden, covid, Dr. Fauci, justice, pardons

Update

Peculiar Praise

Jessica Tarlov’s encomium for President Joe Biden is curious. “Joe Biden bows out of the 2024 race — we lost a good president and a good man,” ran the whole Fox News headline, but it’s second part, after the dash, that is curious. To the best of our knowledge, Sleepy Joe Biden did not resign the presidency.

Ms. Tarlov has been a contributor to Fox for many years. She is a well-known “liberal Democrat.” The article’s praise for the Biden Administration is clear in the blurb: “American Rescue Plan, infrastructure funding and gun safety are all things Joe Biden can be proud about.” Uh, OK.

“Biden just announced that he won’t be seeking re-election this November. And even though I knew it was coming, it feels profoundly sad to me,” wrote Ms. Tarlov below the headline.

Sad on a human level. Joe Biden is a fundamentally good man who did not want this outcome. He believes he can win, even if the data doesn’t say so. And sad on a political level. Biden was an incredible president with a record to be enormously proud of. Whoever is at the top of our ticket will no doubt celebrate his accomplishments – and him! – but there’s a joy to how he talks about what the Biden-Harris administration has gotten done that I’ll really miss.

“I know that I speak for regular Democrats in thanking Joe Biden for an incredible four years and saying that we’re really, really sad. Father Time came for a really good one,” concluded Tarlov.

Chad Pergram, reporting on Fox, claimed that White House insiders had called Biden’s debate performance in late June evidence that his campaign was “unsustainable.” Since that June 27th night, and usually with a pretense of shock at Biden’s decline, major Democratic Party bigwigs, from Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to a huge cadre of billionaire donors, had been calling on him to give up the campaign.

But, oddly, not to resign the presidency. Apparently running the country is no biggie; running a winnable campaign is.

Tags Biden, Fox News, Tarlov

by Paul Jacob video

Watch: La-di-da? No, La-la.

Post author By Redactor
Post date October 3, 2021
No Comments on Watch: La-di-da? No, La-la.

This weekend’s podcast has a video version, like usual. But the visual treatment is … not like usual. Check it out:

The innovations here were not made for reasons of artistic yearning, but out of necessity. That being said, much is said in this outing of This Week in Common Sense, and whether you watch or just listen (on SoundCloud or your favorite pod catcher), we are pretty sure you will get something out of it.

Tags Biden, Chuck Grassley, covid

national politics & policies

Of Bats and Debates

How batty is 2020’s politics?

Adding one absurdity upon another, a minor party candidate got attention this weekend for something even more bizarre than Biden’s bumbling or Trump’s trolling:

She got bit by a bat and is now undergoing painful treatment for rabies.

Her name is Jo Jorgensen, Libertarian Party presidential candidate.

So far, reports on this development have focused on her Twitter account, where jokes abound.

But what dominates her Twitter feed are the usual-for-Libertarians demands that she be included “in the debates.”

What debates?

Is anyone certain that there will be debates at all? Behind in the polls, Donald Trump seems eager to debate, but … Joe Biden?

Well, the Biden camp has agreed to three debates and the candidate says he is “so forward looking [sic] to have an opportunity to sit with the president, or stand with the president, in debates.” But Trump wants more.

And some Democrats want none, for in that same interview (which has gone more viral than rabies), as elsewhere, Biden made so many bizarre gaffes that most folks are beginning to assume that, against the Donald, Biden might wilt worse than a vampire in sunlight.

Biden, who will not even attend his own ostensible nominating convention, remains largely sequestered, under cover of panicky pandemic protocols. Unless the Democrats somehow replace him, the odds of there being debates at all seem low.

And if Trump’s too much for Biden, what is a Libertarian to the two major parties? The Libertarians have been excluded for a reason.* Introduction of substantive, orthogonal-to-the-duopoly ideas into a national debate might show the major parties for what they are: cognitively challenged.

What a year! Bats.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Amusingly, Donald Trump called the exclusion of challenger parties “disgraceful” … back when he was in the Reform Party. I doubt he’d be on board the #LetHerSpeak campaign today — unless he was certain there would be no debates.

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Tags Biden, debates, duopoly, Obama, Trump

ideological culture national politics & policies Popular

They Aren’t Lying Now?

“You lie!”

When U.S. Representative Joe Wilson (R‑SC) shouted this at President Barack Obama during 2009’s State of the Union — scandal!

How dare he?

At issue was whether federal tax dollars would aid illegal immigrants under Obamacare. Democrats denied that any such thing would happen. Indeed, the very idea constituted a calumny, a mere paranoid Tea Party delusion.

This came to a lot of people’s minds after last week’s televised Democratic Party presidential candidates’ debates.

On Thursday, all ten on-stage candidates assented, with hands held proudly high, to giving undocumented aliens free health care. And several from the previous night’s debate are also on record for the same thing, none of them more insistent than Senator Elizabeth Warren, who proclaims that health care is a right.

Democratic opinion leaders now eagerly assert what they took offense at a mere ten years ago.

There are two very basic things we can learn from this.

First, what politicians say about what they want changes over time.

A decade ago, Democrats took offense when called socialist; now they revel in the term. So what are we to make of Democrats’ current s‑word usage? Now they insist they don’t want to nationalize the means of production — but will they tomorrow?

Second, the debate over immigration is not really between restrictionists and open borders supporters. It is between proponents of restricted immigration, on the one hand, and those who demand subsidized immigration, on the other.

A true open borders policy could look very different from what Democrats now push.

Less socialistic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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