Media: It's Time For Joe To Go

Friday, US President Joe Biden appeared on ABC in the first half-hour of prime time with George Stephanopoulos.  

 

 

It was a week and one day after Joe had matched wits with Convicted Felon Donald Trump on a debate stage.  Aided by a bored and lazy media, in the 24 hours after the debate ended, concerns over Joe's ability to handle a second term soared.  Efforts on his part to reassure voters the day after the debate with speeches -- including one at Stonewall -- failed to stop the media-created tsunami.

 

As the days piled on, so did the garbage.  Norman Solomon -- who used the public airwaves in 2008 to advocate for Barack Obama while pretending he was objective and that he wasn't, in fact, a pledged delegate for Barack -- showed up this go round pretending like he was sincerely concerned.  He wasn't.  He'd led an earlier effort to prevent Joe from running for a second term.  He's as a big a liar as Roseanne Barr -- a Trump supporter who Tweeted the night of the debate that she felt sorry for Joe, genuinely sorry, honest, no fingers-crossed, for reals.

People like that, more than actual Democrats, created a drip-drip that wouldn't cease and kept the topic the focus of the media -- a media that failed repeatedly to hold Donald Trump accountable for his non-stop lying in the debates or for The 2025 Project.  

It shouldn't take Taraji P. Henson, at last week's BET Awards, talking on stage about The 2025 Project for the media to finally pay attention to it. 

But that's what's happened.  And even so, Donald's gotten a two week pass where serious issues of substance were only fleeting media conversations.  The drip-drip was very good for Donald and very bad for Democrats.  

 

"For Joe Biden!" hiss the non-Democrats posing as Democrats to influence the conversation.

 

No, for the Democratic Party.

 

This has been very bad for the Democratic Party.  And Socialists and Marxists and Democratic Socialists and Greens and whatevers on YOUTUBE who've declared their support for presumed Green Party nominee Jill Stein and pretended like they hadn't -- all sorts of people pretending when they really don't give two s**ts about the party. 

Which is why it didn't matter to them if they damaged Joe's reputation and he stayed on  the ticket.  They were and are willing to bloody him to the point that he loses the 2024 election.   or that their efforts to damage Joe's reputation and standing would improve Donald's chances at re-election as they kept the focus on Joe.

We're voting for the Democratic Party's nominee whomever it is (while playing it isn't I-Love-Israel-and-have-divided-loyalties-and-I-have-a-toxic-work-enviroment Josh Shapiro) and were fine with this being decided without us.

Then came Friday.  

And we honestly now believe that Joe needs to step aside.

We talk a lot in these media pieces about how people paint themselves into a corner and destroy their reputations.  They take a position and it turns out they're wrong but their pride keeps them from admitting it so they end up Glenn Greenwalds with no ethics at all.

But there's another way you can paint yourself into a corner: By letting others set the tone.

The morning before the debate, one of us wrote in the "Iraq snapshot:"

 

I don't know Jamaal Bowman.  I'm sure he's a wonderful person.  But watching the attempts to save his seat in Congress?  Bewilderment.

Who was this sitting member of Congress and why should I care?

Tomorrow night US President Joe Biden is scheduled to debate Convicted Felon and well known liar Donald Trump.  I hope we don't see the behavior on that stage from Joe, hope this is some new Democratic Party fad passed off as 'framing' or whatever.

Jamal is probably a nice person.

But watching the nonsense that I watched -- as a nonvoter (I don't live in his state, let alone district) -- I kept waiting for a coherent story as to why he mattered and I never got that.

Beggars can't be choosers, agreed.  And in a fight like this -- a Democratic Party primary -- he needed and probably took any support he could get.  

That's fine for the voting booth, that's not good for get out the vote.

So the first mistake his campaign made was in the selection of some of the mouth boxes they threw in front of the cameras.

Here's tip one:  Voters don't usually go for painted up whores.  If you're a member of Congress trying to support another member of Congress, minimize the make up.  That's especially true if you're wearing false eye lashes and even more so if those lashes are opening and closing repeatedly every time you speak.  Do you think anyone's listening to you when you can't stop batting your eyes with those two to three inch eye lashes on?  They're not.  They're laughing at you at worst.  The kinder ones are just distracted and maybe wondering if thick false eye lashes make it harder for you keep your eyes open.

Here's tip two (and see Marica's "The bald idiot needs to let someone else speak publicly"), you are trying to get them on the side of the person you're supporting.  Stop yelling at them.  It's one thing to be enraged about possible policy ramifications if the candidate you're supporting doesn't win.  But you push people away when you're just yelling or hectoring.  Nobody wants a big mouth trying to tell them what to do.

In fact, we could go on and on but we have a lot to cover so let's just sum the tips above and about 15 more I had as: Watch what Ayanna Pressley did and don't do that.  Any member of The Squad could have done a better job than Pressley did.

Ilhan Omar, for example, invites you into a conversation when she's advocating for someone or some issue.  Pressley, from the opening, leaves you off put.

Again, I don't know Jamaal.  More importantly, after weeks of his defenders taking to the media and YOUTUBE (I'm not referring to podcasters offering analysis, I'm referring to guests on those shows who were supposedly advocating on his behalf), I still don't know him.

AIPAC is awful and shouldn't be allowed to be involved in US races.  No foreign money should be allowed period.  And that's something people could have supported.  Israel sticking its nose in a US district election?  No one wants that anymore than they want France or China or even the UK flooding our 'home' elections.  

So you could have made that a strategy.  When AIPAC was raised, I understood what they were getting at but don't think most listening would.  They needed to make that a strong point and they needed to make it an easy to understand point.

But they failed at that.  

Just like they failed to tell us his record and failed to let us know his plans for the future.

AIPAC defined him as unworthy and all his supporters that spoke to the media did was say, "Oh, but he's a good guy."

That's not how you fight.

We say Joe won the debate -- in part due to Donald's lies.  And it goes to the media and the male dominance of the media -- especially our so-called 'independent' media on YOUTUBE -- that something as ridiculous as Donald Trump claiming women were aborting babies right after they gave birth to them  was not the biggest moment of the debate and a non-stop ridicule in the media as just how stupid Donald is.

But what women grasp, apparently men don't -- neither do male-identifying women who'll do anything to get by in the male-dominated media. 

But while we felt Joe won the debate, we didn't think he did what he needed to.

And as we talked to various Democratic Party operatives -- many of whom were weighing in during media appearances -- we said that what Joe didn't do in the debate and what he needed to immediately do now was pivot to his plan for the next four years.  

He really didn't do that in his day-after speeches.  He came closest in his Stonewall speech but he blew that almost immediately with his nonsense regarding trans youth (trans youth decisions are parental decisions -- end of story, it was sad to watch Joe cave on that and trans rights out of desperation).  

It didn't happen the day after.  So we took our complaints higher and higher.  At one point, a White House insider told us that we didn't get it, he was shut out and couldn't do anything regarding Joe.  That's because the wagons were circled.  And as a bunker mentality set in, Joe's chances vanished.

In last Friday's ABC interview, George had things he wanted to do and questions he wanted to ask.  We're not faulting him for that.  We're acknowledging what his job was.

Joe had a job as well.  

And Joe failed at it.

His job wasn't too spar with George or to bicker over this or that.  His job wasn't to refer to the debate and his health constantly.

His job was to put that behind him but he instead dwelled on it.

He made it the interview.  The November election is months away.  He has wanted people to give him a chance and people have.  We have.  We were staying out of calling for him to step down until Friday.

What changed?

Some have drawn attention to this exchange:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

 

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about. Look, George. Think of it this way. You've heard me say this before. I think the United States and the world is at an inflection point when the things that happen in the next several years are gonna determine what the next six, seven decades are gonna be like.

And who's gonna be able to hold NATO together like me? Who's gonna be able to be in a position where I'm able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where we're-- we're at least checkmating China now? Who's gonna-- who's gonna do that? Who has that reach? Who has-- who knows all these pe…? We're gonna have, I guess a good way to judge me, is you're gonna have now the NATO conference here in the United States next week. Come listen. See what they say.

 

 

That's troubling.  Norman Solomon (with Jeff Cohen) skipped over it in his 'informed' 'analysis.'

But it's the most troubling.

Because we only have one real shot to defeat Donald?

There is that.  But it's more than that.  It's Joe's response there and throughout.

George is doing his job -- asking hard questions.  Joe had a job in that interview as well and that was to make the case for himself.

NATO isn't making the case for Joe but it was better than nothing.

Know what else wasn't making the case for Joe?  All those excuses he gave.

Over and over, the debate was the them tooth that just fell out of his mouth and whose empty space Joe's tongue kept going back to.

That wasn't how you reassure.  Joe's painted himself into a corner and is unable to get out.

What he needed to do was pivot on every question.  

 

Example: 

George: Americans are worried that you're not going to win the election.

 

Joe: We're all worried about a lot of things.  But we're going to roll up our sleeves and address them.  We're going to get ROE codified, we're going . . .

 

What Americans needed to hear was what the next four years under a Biden presidency would be and how it would impact their lives.

Joe carping about the debate, whining about the debate, accepting George's terms about the debate did not help him nor did it help America.

Joe of olden days was a confused mess more often than not.  That's why we weren't that concerned about his slow start at the debate.  Barack Obama, for example, tasked him with selling the unsellable to Iraqi leaders in 2010.  That fall, he had to go to the winners of the 2010 elections (Iraqiya) and tell them that the US wasn't supporting them, that thug Nouri al-Maliki (who had come in second in the election) was getting a second term and that a contract (The Erbil Agreement) was going to do this and that all the Iraqi leaders -- including Iraqiya's Ayad Allawi -- were going to sign off on it.  Encountering resistance, Joe pivoted to a tale of North Ireland that had nothing to do with the topic at hand and left the Iraqis confused bu achieved the goal of getting them to sign on. See Emma Sky's THE UNRAVELING: HIGH HOPES AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES IN IRAQ if this is new to you.

Or think about how Joe wanted to split Iraq up into three regions.  And how Joe would then spin it to insist (as late as early 2008, right before he dropped out of the Democratic Party's presidential primary) a federation was what he was advocating for and that wasn't splitting up anything and then he'd bore you with examples to the point that you just didn't care.

He can't pivot now.

Is it age related?  It might be.  But we think the debate was a horror for him and that the media coverage that followed was an even bigger horror.  He's turned it into a chip on his shoulder and instead of saying, "George, I've answer the question about that night and I've answered it repeatedly so let's talk now about what the next four years are going to be about?"

Joe is a politician.  It's all he's ever been.  He entered the US Senate in 1972.  He left in January 2009 only because he moved on to Vice President.  He held that post until January 2017.  This was followed by two years where he was not in office and not on the campaign trail.  Those were the first two years since 1972 where Joe wasn't a politician. In 2019, he'd begin campaigning again.

He's always known how to pivot and now he can't.  And the Democratic Party is supposed to spend the next three or so months enduring Joe's obsession with that debate, accepting his inability to move on?

Joe's not up for the job.  Pains us to say it but it's true.  He needs to go.  Friday's failure to present a vision of the future made it clear that Joe can't pivot and that he has no long range vision for where the country can go.

We would recommend Joe step down as the nominee.  We don't know that that will happen, but that's our recommendation.  Should he not?  As we've said for the last two years, we'll be voting for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination whomever it is.