Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Part I

---

President Biden’s Long Goodbye: A Look at Biden’s DNC Swan Song and its Place in History

Well, for good reason, all eyes right now are on Chicago, Illinois in the meeting of the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Now that doesn’t mean that as the Democrats are meeting in Chicago, everything else in the world just stops any more than when the Republicans met just a few weeks ago in Milwaukee, but it does mean that this is a focus of national attention and deservedly so. We’re talking about a major political party, one of the two big political parties, and big issues of course are very much in play as well as on the stage.

But there’s another thing for us to remember and that is that when it comes to these big political party conventions, they are part convention and largely they are show. In one sense, they are one big parade, one big spectacle, one big media opportunity. There’s a lot of entertainment going on. Even yesterday, as there was a lot of press coverage during the day, the background was major music artists who were practicing there in the convention hall. It’s just a reminder of the fact that it really is a show, and that’s particularly true of the Democrats, to be honest. Given the ties with Hollywood and the entertainment industry, it tends to come out just a little bit more, but we need to look at what’s really weighty and what’s really important.

We keep in mind the schedule, the big event tonight is going to be the speech by the vice presidential nominee, that would be Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. That acceptance speech is in one sense the biggest speech he has ever given. That’s almost assuredly true, and there’s a sense in which it could be the biggest speech he ever gives because when you’re talking about a vice presidential nominee and you don’t even know which ticket’s going to win, it’s not necessary that this is a ticket to national destiny. It is a sign that it’s a big opportunity for someone like Tim Walz, and we’re going to be listening closely with you because you already know, huge worldview implications are very much in play. The biggest event, of course, comes tomorrow night when the vice president of the United States will be delivering her acceptance speech as the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Office of President of the United States.

But we’re going to have to take all this in turn, and today the most important thing we can do as is related to the Democratic National Convention is understand in an historical and worldview context what it meant for Joe Biden to be the big speaker on Monday night, the president of the United States giving his address.

Now what’s really interesting is that advanced copies of the manuscript of the text of the president’s remarks were at least available to many in the press, and one of the first things they noticed is that at least about 60% of the speech was probably not new. It was probably what the Biden team had been working on not as the Monday night closing speech of the first night of the convention, not as the goodbye speech from Joe Biden from the Democratic stage, but rather his acceptance speech when he thought he was going to be the nominee for president of the Democratic Party, and of course, he had very good reason to think so until there was, and I still stand by this, basically a coup on the part of party leaders to remove him. But nonetheless, let’s just back up and say big expectations on Monday night. A lot of the speech was the speech he would’ve given had he been the Democratic nominee.

The other part of the speech was the part in which he did two things. Number one, he gave a very eager support to his vice president, Kamala Harris, as the top of the ticket in 2024. That was very important for the party’s prospects at the ballot box, no doubt about that. But the second thing he did was to deliver something of a goodbye, something of a valedictory speech, something of a speech when he knows he’s running the very end of his last lap in a life that’s been lived out for all of his adult life basically since he was 29 years old, let’s face it, on the stage of national politics. So there’s a lot going on there.

Now already, I’ve explained that the formula that was used in the argument that got Joe Biden out of the race was not so much that he could not win the race. That was pretty much abundantly clear, although it’s also clear that the current president, the incumbent, did not see himself as losing the election. He kept insisting he was going to win, but it’s hard to believe that anyone, even including the loved ones who were around him, members of his family, could actually have believed that he had much of a prospect to win. And frankly, he faced the prospect of an absolute electoral disaster after his complete disastrous debate performance, a matter of just now weeks ago.

But nonetheless, the argument that persuaded him to leave, at least he says, and those around him say, is that it would’ve been a big problem for down ticket Democratic candidates if he had been at the top of the ticket which is to say, looking at the prospects of Democrats holding the Senate, that’d be the word they would use, and regaining the House, that’s what they would use, then the argument was, President Biden, if you’re at the top of the ticket, the Democrats are going to lose everywhere. So we are told he voluntarily decided to leave the race even though it is he who had won the nomination, no doubt about that.

There’s another angle to this. It’s just really interesting and I’ve mentioned this but it’s not going to go away, and that is what exactly did happen. Will we ever know exactly what did happen as the conversations were made with President Biden with intervention from people such as former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi? This is one of the big questions of history. Sometimes we know, sometimes we think we know, sometimes we never know, but there are big legitimate questions.

But what is not in question now is what President Biden would do in the speech because it’s over, he gave it, and in one sense you have to feel some poignancy in this, considering the fact that he’s been on the national stage since he was 29 years old. There’s a big question as to whether Joe Biden will ever give a speech like that again. That’s just a fact of history. But he did give the speech and there are some really interesting things to think about, and the first thing we’re going to think about is not anything that was said in the speech, it’s that the speech didn’t begin until, well, right at 11:30 Eastern Time. What does that mean? How did that happen?

Well, on the one hand, it’s a Democratic story, I mean a Democratic Party story because the Democratic Party has shown itself to be absolutely prone to running very long. The worst example of this on the party’s memory will be the 1972 Democratic National Convention when the then nominee, 1972, very liberal US Senator George McGovern was actually introduced to give his acceptance speech shortly before three o’clock A.M. Eastern Time which meant that the Democratic nominee for president in 1972 gave the most important speech of his career to an audience that was mostly already in bed and quite asleep.

On yesterday’s edition of The Briefing, I mentioned that it was something of an insult in the context for Joe Biden to be put on Monday night, but you can understand given the strategy of the Harris campaign why he would be put on Monday night. It is because Joe Biden is emphatically now a factor in the Democratic past, not the Democratic future, not even really the Democratic present. So there was a sense in which they needed President Biden to speak and they needed him to do what he did, but they also need him to do that and then leave, thank you. But even as it was already something of an insult to speak, as the incumbent president of the United States, the incumbent Democratic president to speak on Monday night, it was really even more insulting that they let the program run so long that millions upon millions of Americans had certainly checked out long before Joe Biden took the stage.

As you look at that, you recognize, well, if the Democrats had never let that happen before, maybe they’d be excused for just one night of letting things get out of control. No, that is a long story and that is no excuse, especially when you look at the fact that so many of the speeches that were given before were just absolutely unnecessary. And so you have to believe that Joe Biden saw this as an insult, but nonetheless he gave the speech, and the speech, by the way, was very long. I guess President Biden figured they can hardly complain. If they’ve given me the time so late, they’re going to sit here and listen to the whole thing.

And yet there was another issue, and that is that when you had so many people in the press looking at the manuscript, it was clear that the president was ad-libbing. He was departing from his script. That’s something Joe Biden’s been prone to do going all the way back to his years in the Senate. But nonetheless, he spoke long, and here’s the interesting thing. It was not a very hopeful speech. It was not a very positive speech. It wasn’t until the end, frankly, that it was something of a self-aware speech. In one sense, it was a list, a laundry list of all the things he wanted to brag about about his administration, and of course there was no fact-checker there saying, “Oh, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong.” If you are the incumbent president, you’re speaking in this context, nobody’s going to interrupt you.

But let’s just say that he was presenting his own remembered vision of his administration and its achievements, and frankly, he was claiming things, he was claiming credit for things in which he had no part and over which the White House has no control, and he was also ducking things that were very much a part of his administration and his policies. But then again, it was his hour, he got the microphone late and he did what he wanted to do.

The other thing we really need to note is that the president had to be thinking he was trying to paint a portrait, an historical context, and as he was painting that portrait he was trying to present himself as he wants to be remembered by his party, and that turns out to be really big. If you are a president of the United States, then certainly you must be very worried about your place in history. And it’s not as if the historians don’t play this game, regularly ranking the presidents from the worst to the best, and especially since as you’re looking at liberal academics they’re going to be doing a lot of this rating, and so President Biden certainly knew that as he was giving his address. He seemed to be trying to make his point, his case for his place in history, and he painted himself as a very progressivist politician. That’s actually how he ended his career in the White House, very progressivist, very liberal, basically surrendering to the left wing of the Democratic Party over against even some of the restraint he had shown during the time he was in the Senate.

But the other historical context is that when you look at the shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, you are talking about the shift from the left to the even further left, and in the case of Kamala Harris, the genuinely radical left. And so you really do have a situation in which the Democrats needed the President to say what he needed to say, to give a very hearty endorsement to Kamala Harris. He went on to say that the choice of Kamala Harris as vice president was the best decision he made in his political career. That’s quite a statement.

He also went on to give all kinds of reasons why voters should vote for the Democratic ticket, and he took all kinds of swipes at the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, and at this point arises another necessary observation, and that is this: Joe Biden ran against Donald Trump in 2020. He was relishing the opportunity to run against Donald Trump in 2024. He sees himself as a white knight for the leftist democratic cause. He cloaks it even as saving democracy, and he saw himself doing it again, and now all he’s doing is giving his speech and then basically waving goodbye. As the clock was headed towards the wee hours of the morning, he waved goodbye to the party of which he had been a part for virtually all of his adult life, and he did exit the stage in more ways than one. Peter Baker at The New York Times simply summarized it by saying it was “The Speech Biden Never Wanted to Give, and that’s absolutely the case. He never wanted to give that speech.

All right, but as we’re thinking about this, I’m not going to say a whole lot more about the speech. It was very long, it was very bitter, and it was very liberal just given the policies of the Biden administration. It was focused upon himself, but that’s after all what a politician would do in this setting so I’m not really faulting him for that so much. But even when he endorsed Kamala Harris and when he went into some closing comments where he did show some emotion about his political biography, his lifetime in elected office. Remember, he entered the United States Senate back in 1973. So we’re talking about, once again, an entire adult lifetime played out on the national stage of the Democratic Party. But, even as all that was taking place, and he knew that when he left the stage it was going to be to a very different chapter in the Democratic Party’s history, the party really needed him to leave the stage because I would just remind you that even starting last night, the messaging turns very different.

You’re not going to hear the name Biden very often from now on, or if you do, it’s going to be because of that exchange which was so transparently made. You agree not to run as the candidate, you agree that Kamala instead takes the Democratic nomination, and we will speak of you in the most glowing and emotional terms. But you know what? That was Monday night. After that, they have other things they need to do. But it was also clear that there’s a continuing embarrassment along these lines. For one thing, the Democratic Party adopted, according to its own schedule, the 2024 platform of the Democratic Party, and it is the Biden-Harris platform, not the Harris-Walz platform. Again, that’s just really embarrassing. You would think they would’ve come up with some system whereby they could have at least modified the text to align it more with the current nominee for president and vice president, but as we’ve seen they didn’t, so there it goes.

Part II

---

Let’s Not Forget the Biden Scandal: Democratic Party Leaders and Biden Administration Officials Orchestrated Covered Up of President Biden’s Decline – And That Includes Vice President Harris

All right, but before leaving Joe Biden, I want to go to another issue and then I want to throw an issue on top of that, and I think all of these are important. I think the issue I want to speak of next is the one raised by Ross Douthat, columnist for The New York Times. He’s not alone in this, but he did a very good job. He wrote an article entitled “There is Still a Biden Scandal.” There is Still a Biden Scandal, and the scandal is this. Look at all the people who are saying all those nice things, all those glowing things, all those see you later Joe Biden things who were the very people who were assuring us there was no problem with Joe Biden for not only a matter of the last several months but the last few years since he has been in office.

We now know, there is now adequate reporting and it’s coming from the liberal press, by the way, it’s coming from The New York Times, The Washington Post and others, that the president was increasingly detached, that it was very clear he was suffering cognitive decline, and yet you just see how the democratic infrastructure, the democratic leadership had coalesced together. You remember what happened when the special counsel indicated in his investigation of the document issue related to the president? He said he was basically an elderly man who had memory difficulties, and the Democrats went on the absolute attack saying that this was unethical, this was untrue, that the president had all of his cognitive abilities intact, and now of course they’re saying something very different.

And you know, it’s not as if you have White House staffers who are here to be interrogated, but you do have, for example, the current vice president of the United States who was Joe Biden’s vice president of the United States and who was a part of covering up that reality. And so you do look at this and you recognize that when you speak of what I again will call a coup, and I mean that politically of course, not militarily, in removing Joe Biden from the ticket, it was done by the people who had been arguing otherwise in public right up until just about the moment they persuaded him to leave the race.

Douthat points out that once there was a Democratic Party decision to try to force Biden from the race, “Then and only then we got a drip drip drip of fascinating inside information.” So this is Ross Douthat, New York Times, keep that in mind, “For instance, we learned that Biden hadn’t had a full cabinet meeting since last October and that his handlers expected scripted questions from his cabinet officials. We learned that his capacities peaked between 10:00 A.M. and 4:00 P.M.” By the way, that’s 4:00 P.M., not even 8:00 P.M. here, 4:00 P.M. “And diminish outside that six-hour window.” We learned that congressional Democrats, liberal donors, and some journalists had all had exposure to Biden’s decline that they didn’t discuss publicly until the debacle of the June debate.

“We learned that none other than Hunter Biden was acting as a close adviser to his father in the crucial days after that debate.” Furthermore, “we even learned that from early in his presidency, the first lady’s closest aides worked to shield her husband from the staff that serves the first family in its living quarters, even as the aides themselves were given unusual access to the residence as though it were essential to create a cocoon of loyalty and silence around the nation’s chief executive even when he isn’t on the job.” Now, that’s just a few sentences out of a very long argument that amounts to an indictment of the Democrats and the cover-up of Joe Biden’s reality, the truth about the president of the United States. And I think this has to be kept as a live issue as we look at the 2024 presidential election because the people who are running now the Democratic side are the very same people who were lying to us about Joe Biden just a short time ago.

Part III

---

Hunter Biden Is Still a Big Issue: What Does the Withdrawal of President Biden Mean for Hunter Biden's Future?

But I want to raise another issue, and I’m not going to speak of this extensively, I’m simply going to say, as a matter of historical record, I’m going to set down a little bit of a marker here. That marker is this, I mentioned that Ross Douthat piece, and he mentioned the fact that in the last several months, Hunter Biden, I’ll just put it that way, Hunter Biden, the president’s son, has become something of a close advisor. The situation related to Hunter Biden has to be playing a part in the disappointment of Joe Biden that he is not running for reelection because you have seen how he has supported his son even against all the evidence, even against new evidence of him serving as an agent of a foreign power, an unregistered agent. Even with the major media, with President Biden departing the scene and the evidence becoming overwhelming, they are all of a sudden saying, “You know, maybe there really was a big problem here. Maybe there still is a big problem here.”

But as you look at this, you recognize that when Joe Biden is not president, he’s not president, and even as he said he would not pardon his son, there’s no absolute assurance that that was ever true. And so I guarantee you, in short order, but maybe held until after the election, people are going to ask, including people with the liberal mainstream media, was some kind of deal arranged when Joe Biden agreed not to run that whoever might be in a power to influence whether or not Hunter Biden is prosecuted or not, or pardoned or not, would do what President Biden would want done. I’m not saying I have any knowledge that was made. I’m simply saying that is obviously a huge question and it is of worldview importance that that question is not being asked by the liberal media, and it’s not something that they’re not likely to ask ever. It just tells you a great deal. They’re likely to start asking that question after the election is over. That tells you something.

Part IV

---

Governor Andy Beshear’s Political Bluster at the DNC: It Was a Morally Reprehensible Denial of the Sanctity and Dignity of Unborn Human Life

Okay, finally, as a resident of Kentucky, I feel that I just have to talk about the fact that Kentucky’s governor appeared on the platform Monday night and gave an address. Now remember that his role right now is primarily the role of someone who wasn’t chosen to be Kamala Harris’s running mate because his national profile right now is largely due to speculation about the fact that he might have been chosen. That was unlikely from the beginning. He doesn’t bring enough strengths to the ticket to fit any political calculation, but he clearly did want the job, and clearly he wants the reputation as the Democratic Party’s attack dog, so to speak, on the issue of abortion.

Now I say that with embarrassment here in Kentucky, and I think there are an awful lot of Kentuckians who look at their governor with incredible embarrassment. You are looking at a man who won the office, his father had been a two-term governor, he’s of a longstanding political brand. He won the office and basically has run to the left on so many issues, but he hasn’t run to the left on a lot of issues except with his mouth, and that’s because the Kentucky general Assembly with an overwhelming Republican major has removed much of his ability to do anything else. But he was running his mouth, and on the issue of abortion he ran it big time. He ran it in public comments when he was seeking to be chosen as the vice presidential nominee, and then as he spoke to the Democratic Convention on Monday night, boy, he sure went into the abortion issue. It took him a matter of milliseconds.

He spoke about former President Donald Trump as, “Tearing a constitutional right away,” and he means here from American women. He goes on to complain about Kentucky’s law. So here you have Kentucky’s governor who is making an open complaint about Kentucky’s law as he’s speaking to the Democratic National Convention. He went on to complain about Kentucky’s law and then he went on to brag that he had been re-elected to office even as he was an ardent defender of abortion rights. And by the way, to my embarrassment, that is exactly what happened. But as you look at a map of the United States, you think of red and blue. Well, now just think about Kentucky, county by county. If you color the Republican counties red and the Democratic counties blue, well, the vast majority of Kentucky is a sea of red. But when you look at the population centers, the political centers, the academic centers, well, things are somewhat different, and he won.

But when he was speaking on the platform there at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, he was not speaking as a representative of Kentucky. He was speaking as the governor of Kentucky–yes, no doubt about that–But he was not speaking in a way that was representative of Kentucky, but he was also using language that just shows how the left and the pro-abortion movement will use just about anything to further its cause. He made reference to his faith, and all he said was this, “My faith teaches me the golden rule that I’m to love my neighbors myself.” And then he went on to cite the parable of the Good Samaritan. Now just to remind you, that is from the Bible. He said that the parable of Good Samaritan says, quote, “We are all each other’s neighbors.” So he said, and I’m quoting, “I want anyone watching tonight, Republican, Independent, Democrat to know that you are welcome here. We believe in America where we live out our values, end anger politics once and for all, and move beyond this us versus them by remembering we are all Americans.”

Well, here’s the interesting thing, and that was a series of all kinds of bluster, but the most interesting thing, the most important thing to recognize is who’s not in the picture when he says we, and when he speaks of our neighbor he clearly is not speaking of the unborn. The unborn human baby just disappears entirely from the moral calculation. Now if the human baby’s not in the moral calculation, then that’s a very different question, but we’re talking about abortion so the human baby is in the calculation, is always in the calculation, from the moment of fertilization is in the calculation as a human person.

The last thing I want to say about the Kentucky Governor’s speech is that he went on to say about Kamala Harris, “She gets it. She knows we must move beyond anger, extremism, and division, that everyone has dignity and deserves respect.” Well, just think about that for a moment. Everyone has dignity? Well, not everyone. The Democratic ticket is the most ardently pro-abortion ticket in American history, and Andy Beshear, well, he’s putting himself in the front rank of those who are contending for abortion rights, and then he dares to go on and say that the vision is a nation in which everyone has dignity.

Now here’s the issue. When we are talking about dignity, the question is how in the world do you speak of dignity as connected to a human person? It has to be because the status of being human has an inherent non-negotiable dignity. I think thus far, most of the people hearing me speak there in the Democratic National Convention Hall would agree. The problem is they don’t agree that when you’re speaking of an unborn human being that that unborn human being possesses the same dignity. In other words, it is not we, but they who believe in a two-tier system of dignity. That’s a big issue we need to keep in mind. They simply deny the full dignity. If they acknowledge the unborn child at all, they deny that dignity, but boy, do they claim it for themselves and then they have the audacity to claim it as a political theme.

Well, just returning to Kentucky, it’s hard to believe that Andy Beshear has any political future in Kentucky, but it’s also hard to believe that that’s what he was playing for during this election cycle or as he was speaking to the Democrats meeting in Chicago on Monday night.

But one final thought as we’re thinking about the Democrats meeting in Chicago this week, let’s just keep this much in mind, at this point the big news hasn’t even come yet.