Pardon Me, Boys

Is that the Mar-a-Lago Cuckoo?

From Sun Valley Serenade (1941), with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the always unbearably smug-faced Tex Beneke, in a stupid baseball cap, on vocals, redeemed later in the cut by the appearance of Dorothy Dandridge and the tapping Nicholas Brothers.

My dad's dad jokes tended to follow an exclusively linguistic pattern, as I guess they mostly do. If you gave him an opportunity to ask you, "What's an armored personnel carrier?" you'd answer "Tanks" and he'd say "You're welcome." And if you bumped into him and said, "Pardon me," he'd say, "Son, only the governor can do that." That's an index, by the way, of how rare the presidential pardon used to be.

So Joe Biden issued an official presidential pardon to his son Hunter for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, including the ones he was in fact convicted for (false statement on a federal form seeking permission to buy a gun he turned out not to actually want, and a very late income tax payment). Crimes that wouldn't normally be charged (nobody would know they'd been committed if the defendant hadn't told on himself by acknowledging he was a drug user in the first case and paying the damn tax bill in the second place, as he did before the charge was filed).

Netanyahyu's Other War. III

 

Following the Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, October 28, 2024. Photo by AFP via Times of Israel.

At a certain point Biden reached a conclusion: that the only way to stop the Gaza war and prevent a wider war all around the Middle East was to get rid of Netanyahu. I don't know when that happened, though an incident reported by Franklin Foer looks to me like a likely candidate, in late 2023, when Biden was entreating Netanyahu to turn over to the Palestinian Authority the tax money that Israel collects in the West Bank to finance the PA's work, such as it is (I'm not going to claim it's a very effective government), but Netanyahu doesn't care about the fact that it's the PA's money: on December 23

Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state there.

“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”

As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked into the phone, We’re done.

They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.

That rhymes, in a way, with the story of Biden's worst blowup with Netanyahu, back during his vice presidency. That was about the West Bank too, as remembered by Michael Hirsh in Politico Magazine:

Joe Did What? Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Joe Did What? Trafalgar Edition

The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, via Wikipedia.

 Well, I guess this certainly does change everything, and that's refreshing. 

I'm going to stay angry for a long time at The Times and Politico and other big media and the "liberal" tech billionaires for the dishonest backdoor trick they pulled, when they couldn't succeed in turning the public against Biden and shifted instead to convincing us that we had turned against Biden by ourselves, or rather that our neighbors had, through the bogus "age issue", warning us not that Biden was a bad president, but that he'd lose because other people thought he was too old, and our punishment for supporting Biden would be another Trump term (on the basis of a polling model that has consistently failed by underestimating the Democratic vote for six years now). They recognized our deep fear of the consequences of another Trump term and exploited it, in a way that actually made Trump's reelection more likely, using the debate disaster as evidence of a permanent degeneration (which it obviously wasn't—Biden had never showed up in that condition before and never has since). It was irresponsible and disgusting.

I'm not too angry with the congressional party leaders, or the "centrist" representatives in their precarious suburban seats, or even the bedwetter commentariat. The fear is real, and it's justified. What could be lost in another four years of Trumpery is almost incalculable; I'm thinking especially of the backsliding in the elimination of fossil fuels, but the "deconstruction of the administrative state" as prefigured in the Project 2025 document turns the entire civil service into an easily corrupted tool for tearing down regulations, and reduces the Justice Department into the president's personal police agency. It really is the end of the republic, alongside plans for a federal ban on abortion, vigilante takeovers of school libraries, the insane powers for evil conceded to the presidency by the Supreme Court even as it strips the office of its power to do good. The thing is, fear is a lousy counselor, and their Fantasy Politics League plan to get rid of Biden by obliterating the primary results with some kind of pantomime competition, before or during the Democratic convention, as somebody leaked the plan to the abominable Mark Halperin (now working for Newsmax), was a terrible, senseless plan that would have flung us into even worse uncertainty than we already had. Don't panic.

If You're a Star They Let You Do It

 

Poster for The Frogs, Trinity College Dramatic Society, Toronto, 1902, via Wikipedia.

My theory of what makes Biden the best candidate to beat Trump is pretty simple, and ought to be cynical enough for anybody: it's that he's the only possible candidate at the same level of celebrity as Trump, with the same degree of star quality and a similar ability to work an audience, his reducibility to a three-stroke line drawing or a meme image (as the smiler in the aviators), or a comic book hero (Sunny Joe as the secret identity of Dark Brandon). Elections are reality shows now, and while that's deplorable in many ways it's where we are at the moment, and the only way out is through.

Kamala Harris comes closest to Biden in reality-show capacity, as she has become in the last months, with the fiery oratory and that warm relaxed laugh, and I'm very glad she's there, but she hasn't been exposed enough, and there are the other issues to consider (is she entirely ready for the racism and misogyny she'd have to cope with at the top of the ticket? Is it even fair to her?). The nice governors seem nice, if you're enough of a news junkie to know, but they don't have any established character as performers; we haven't seen them campaign, and still less have the people who count, the members of the electorate. And there's so little time to do it in! (A season of American Idol takes about eight months to put together, from auditions to finals.) And so little evidence that any of those supposed candidates are even willing to jump in—people, that's not because Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker is too shy, or afraid of looking disloyal, they're politicians; it's because they've calculated they'd be most likely to lose, they're young enough to save themselves for a more auspicious year, and I think they're almost certainly right.

If Biden were really seriously diminished in capacity to the point where he couldn't do the job, it would be different; it would be his duty to resign (and President Harris, I would add, would be a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Harris), but everybody knows that's not the case—that's why there've been no calls for him to resign. All the more since his meeting with the press after the NATO conference on Thursday, which took a remarkable turn; it seemed to be going the way you'd expect, a debate between Biden and a Greek-comedy chorus—

FROGS

Do you really believe you're up to the job? You think you can convince us?
Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx! Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx!

BIDEN

Look, I'm doing the job right now! I'm not being facetious!

—when rescue appeared from an unexpected deus ex machina, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, David E. Sanger, who came up with an idea I'd had myself

My fantasy for tomorrow's presser Biden: OK why don't you test me? Ask me a substantive question and see if I'm capable of answering. Press corps: Biden: OK, person, man, woman, TV, camera, that good?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Jul 10, 2024 at 1:22 PM

and asked Biden a question about the policy environment of the NATO summit, as a way (as he later explained it to CNN) of testing his cognitive capacity:  

The Gaza News Is Biden News

All of a sudden this morning the Gaza ceasefire seemed to be back in the air. I was determined not to let them sucker me again

but right now an awful lot of things really seem to be happening, starting with yesterday morning's Biden-Netanyahu call, which went on for half an hour, according to NPR, and during which, according to the White House readout,

President Biden and the Prime Minister discussed ongoing efforts to finalize a ceasefire deal together with the release of hostages, as outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council, the G7, and countries around the world.

The leaders discussed the recent response received from Hamas. The President welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to authorize his negotiators to engage with U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian mediators in an effort to close out the deal. 

or going back beyond that to Tuesday's reports in The New York Times and Jerusalem Post that the Israeli military leadership is starting to get seriously fed up with Netanyahu's apparent insistence that they should have to fight two wars simultaneously, against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and demanding that the government start prioritizing getting the hostages back, even if it means accepting Hamas's terms and withdrawing from Gaza entirely, and apparently saying so sort of openly, to The Times:

Lampenfieber

 

Cast party at the Waffle House, via New York Times.

John Ganz:

Still, there’s a lot of time before the election. Maybe Biden will spring miraculously back to life and thrash Trump in a later debate. Maybe one day we will all laugh about how everyone pissed their pants. But then again, maybe not. God does have a sense of humor, but it often seems at our expense.

He sprang back to life the minute it was over, at least if your TV was tuned to MSNBC, which showed him glad-handing the entourage and giving a brief improvised speech. Even his voice was back. He was a happy warrior. He looked positively joyous.

The commentators don't seem to know what was wrong with Biden during the "debate", but it was obvious to me in the first, and as it turned out only, sentences I typed about him in the notes I started taking:

Biden seems pretty nervous, his voice is so hoarse and he's speaking so fast it's not fully intelligible. Better in the follow up when he's not reciting from memory.

(I took more notes after that, but they were all about Trump’s stunning torrent of lies and misdirections.)

Performance anxiety. Stage fright. Le trac. Lampenfieber ("spotlight fever"). He's not really good at this bizarre ritual of American politics, though most of the time he's good enough. It's what sunk him in his first presidential run 36 years ago (he was talking too fast then too, spitting out memorized bits of his stump speech, which included those quotes from the UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and he left out Kinnock's name in the rush, leading the press to accuse him, ridiculously, of plagiarism, as if they hadn't heard him attributing the material a dozen times before), and the memory of that failure only serves to make it worse. And this time the stakes are incredible. It's him or it's Project 2025! It has little or nothing to do with his age!

I've been there. I did a bunch of acting in my youth, which I was not too bad at, and a certain amount of music, in which I was not so good, and I know how it feels. One real disaster: accompanying a British baritone in a song by Ralph Vaughan Williams which was probably not too congenial to me. The piano part was mostly not that hard, but there was a solo bit at the end, after the singer's part was finished, that I could not master; I choked there at the actual performance and couldn't go on—banged out a C major chord (at least it was the right key) and stopped, and I never played the piano publicly again, which is probably a good thing.

In Biden's case it unquestionably has to do with the stutter. He literally choked (now I know where the expression comes from), which is why he was so hard to hear.

The worst is what a stupid ritual it is, as Lawrence O'Donnell was saying. The TV debate is in every way irrelevant to what presidents do, which is with a roomful of advisors expected to remember everything you might not remember, and not in 60- or 120-second bursts. (I'm pretty sure the time limits were a real difficulty for him—it seemed to me the moderators were cutting him off a lot more than they were Trump, and probably with cause, because Trump doesn't need a lot of time to do what he does, tell a lie or violently change the subject, while Biden needs to work his way through a thought, because thinking is one of the main things presidents have to do, and Trump wouldn't even know where to start on that). There is no reason to ask candidates to do it, nothing about it that relates to a qualification for the job. It's no more relevant to the presidency than a hot dog eating contest.

I don't know what should happen now, other than hating the whole thing. It seems to me that the mechanics of finding a new candidate now, with all the primaries over and all the delegates committed, are just insuperable, unless they choose Harris, and the sniveling centrists producing most of the calls for Biden to step down—Claire McCaskill to Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof—won't like her either. Krugman, no centrist, is an exception:

Joe Biden has done an excellent job as president. In fact, I consider him the best president of my adult life. Based on his policy record, he should be an overwhelming favorite for re-election.

But he isn’t, and on Thursday night he failed to rise to the occasion when it really mattered....Kamala Harris was, by all accounts, an effective district attorney and attorney general, and she has also been quietly effective as vice president, promoting Biden’s policies. Choosing her as his successor would in no sense be settling for less.

It’s true that she didn’t do well in the 2020 Democratic primaries, but her problem then, as I saw it, was that she had a hard time making the case for choosing her over other candidates. She would have no problem making the case for choosing her over Trump.

Biden is the best president of my adult life too, and it kills me to think we might give him up over such idiocy as this. I love the thought of a Harris presidency too, especially as associated as she is now with Biden's agenda, but I have little hope that she can defeat a tag team of American racism and American misogyny, especially in the tumult you can expect within the party if Biden drops out. I don't know what happens next, but I kind of hope it's nothing.

Joe Did What? Stand up to Zionists Edition

Joe Biden suggesting Israel pull back rather than permanently occupy the conquered territories in 1973, when he was a 30-year-old freshman senator:

The unnamed official said Biden told Meir that during meetings in Cairo prior to his arrival in Israel, officials there assured him they accept “Israel’s military superiority.”

Golda Meir smokes a cigarette during an interview. (Kan Archive)

Biden warned that Israel’s actions in the territories it had captured during the Six Day War, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were leading to “creeping annexation.”

Since he believed Israel was militarily dominant in the region, he suggested the Jewish state might initiate a first step for peace through unilateral withdrawals from areas with no strategic importance.

The official said Biden criticized the Nixon administration for being “dragged by Israel,” complaining that it was impossible to have a real debate in the Senate about the Middle East as senators were fearful of saying things unpopular with Jewish voters.

Meir rejected Biden’s call for unilateral steps, launching into a speech about the region and its problems (possibly the spiel Biden alluded to in his own comments years later). 

It's an outstanding story published in Times of Israel during the 2020 campaign.

What's Going On. II

From the Livre d'Or des Voyages of Louis Mainard, 1890, via picryl.com.

Déjà vu all over again? Biden (the day after the guilty verdict for convicted felon Donald Trump, some people think that's relevant) announces proposals for a ceasefire in Gaza, to be carried out in three phases: six weeks during which all Israeli forces withdraw from the Strip, hostages in Gaza (especially women and elderly, and remains of the dead) will be exchanged for detainees in Israeli prisons, Gazan civilians will return home, supplied with temporary shelters, and delivery of food, water, medicine, and fuel will get back to full strength, and the parties will work out the details of a probably lengthier second phase; a second phase in which the exchange of hostages and prisoners will be completed and the parties will negotiate a final, permanent ceasefire; and a third, which is supposed to last forever, when Gaza is rebuilt and the last remains are transmitted.  

Isn't this approximately where we arrived three weeks ago, when Haaretz reported that Hamas had accepted a deal proposed by Egypt with a very similar shape, and Israel appeared to have turned it down?

Not exactly. The big difference, to my mind, which isn't getting a lot of press attention, is that this one is billed as an Israeli proposal—Biden is very insistent on that:

For the Record

TV lawyers keep fretting about how key witness Michael Cohen is a noted liar—he's even got a felony conviction for it—so juries might have trouble believing him. I don't know, if it's a "he-said-he-said" between him and Trump and he's explaining the deceit Trump was paying him to practice...

Also, the only important Cohen lie in this case is the one COVERING UP FOR TRUMP in his guilty plea, when he claimed he'd made an illegal campaign contribution (the Stormy payment), hiding the fact that Trump had reimbursed him (as Cohen proved in 2019 with the canceled checks).

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) May 16, 2024 at 9:34 PM

(cite from Politico in August 2018 www.politico.com/story/2018/0...

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) May 16, 2024 at 9:41 PM

***

Newsletter: Palestine Diplomacy

  

New  Substack post.

Word and Deed

Gaza around the turn of the 20th century, via Palestine Remembered.

Jonathan Capehart was on my radio yesterday morning, talking about his NBC interview last week of President Biden, and they came to this exceptionally fraught moment:

Jonathan Capehart (06:22):

Some have suggested you should go back to Israel and address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Is that something you would do?

President Joe Biden (06:31):

Yes.

Jonathan Capehart (06:35):

Would that have to be at the invitation of the Prime Minister or could that be at the invitation of the President?

President Joe Biden (06:42 [after a pretty substantial pause]):

I’d rather not discuss it more.

Biden didn't mind saying he might address the Knesset, but he didn't want to say who might be inviting him. Or rather, since you wouldn't expect it to happen other than by an invitation from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is by definition the head of the government in the Knesset, and runs the things that happen there, he didn't want to say that it might be from somebody else, such as President Herzog, the head of state (whose only direct interaction with the Knesset is when he's accepting the resignation of a prime minister, or inviting a politician to try to form a new government). Or he couldn't or at least didn't want to deny that he might have an invitation from President Herzog, let's say, so he preferred to drop the subject and let Capehart make of it what he would.

Brian Lehrer, the host of the radio show, was suitably gobsmacked, and expressed himself, as people so often do, with a "can you imagine" scenario, like "Can you imagine if some foreign leader came to Washington and addressed Congress over the head of President Biden?"

But Look, Clearly

 

Screen capture via Fox 5 San Diego. Rep. Greene looking a little like Spike Lee at a Knicks game, if the Knicks wore red, except Spike knows the difference between a basketball game and a joint session of Congress.

I'm just not ready to stop talking about the SOTU, because there are still more ways in which it was totally unique that I haven't gotten to, in the laundry list body of the speech as well, like when he warned the attendant justices of the Supreme Court that overturning Roe v. Wade had been a serious political mistake, throwing their own words in their faces:

Look, in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect, justices, “Women are not without electoral, electoral power” — excuse me — “electoral or political power.” You’re about to realize just how much you got right about that.

Clearly, clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women. But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot. We won in 2022 and 2023, and we will win again in 2024.

If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.

Some nominal supporters of abortion rights were stomping on this because Roe v. Wade wasn't, in fact, all that radical, allowing states to set whatever restrictions they wanted on terminating pregnancy after 24 weeks, but those critics might not be aware of what "codifying Roe" has come to mean since Dobbs. It's not your grandfather's Roe, as evidenced by the formula advanced by Abigail Spanberger (D-VA, not known as a wild-eyed leftist):

The Spanberger-backed legislation would create a statutory right for providers to provide and patients to receive an abortion — without facing medically unnecessary restrictions. The bill would also block the government from requiring providers to provide inaccurate information to patients, remove the ability to require that patients make medically unnecessary in-person visits before receiving an abortion, and restrict the government from forcing patients to disclose their reasons for seeking an abortion before receiving care. 

Proponents are now rejecting the ahistorical idea that fetuses have rights that compete with those of the pregnant person, regardless of Justice Alito's bogus arguments. The new version is an unqualified right for the person with the womb.

He's also taken heat for referring to the man who has been charged with murdering a University of Georgia nursing student last month as "an illegal" in the speech, during his back-and-forth with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, although the way he used the word suggested he wan't entirely familiar with it (I think he picked it up from whatever Greene howled at him, but I'm not finding a report of her exact words):

Lincoln [recte Laken] Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal, that’s right. But how many thousands of people are being killed by legals?

What are "legals"? Sounds like he means legal immigrants, who are of course the least likely people in the United States to commit a violent crime, or any crime at all. The most likely are those who are citizens by birth, with the undocumented being somewhere between. (The best-confirmed example is homicide convictions: 2.8 per 100,000 US-born residents, 2.4 per 100,000 undocumented foreign residents, and 1.1 per 100,000 for the documented foreign-born.) Given that there are maybe 13 million undocumented  migrants and 30 million documented ones vs. about 285 million US-born, that certainly adds up to thousands of killings by the last group for each one by the first.

José Antonio Ibarra, the alleged murderer, is a Venezuelan asylum seeker, and thus not exactly "illegal" anyway. He and his then wife and her child crossed the border at an unlawful spot near El Paso in September 2022 and surrendered to CBP, which paroled them, and then somebody, presumably Governor Greg Abbott, had them bused to New York, where they were given court dates, and where he found work delivering meals and maybe got busted in Queens for endangering the welfare of a child, riding his moped with the wife's kid on his back, with no helmet (but NYPD has no record of the arrest). He eventually left New York to join his brother, who was living with a fake green card in Athens, Georgia, and found work there, but made his immigration court appearance in New York in December, and then apparently did this horrible thing, killing Laken Riley with a blunt instrument and dragging her body into the woods, though the wife continues to doubt he was the one who did it:

“We got married so we could join our asylum cases,” she told The Post. “He was the person I thought I could see through. We’ve known each other our entire lives. He wasn’t aggressive, none of that,” she said. “We had problems as a couple but our problems weren’t physical. We wouldn’t punch but we’d raise our voices."

Completely lost in the discussion is the thing Biden actually said to Greene after that, his important comment on the case, improvised away from the written text, which a lot of listeners may not have understood, though the congressmembers definitely should have:

To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you having lost children myself. I understand.

But look, if we change the dynamic at the border — people pay these smugglers 8,000 bucks to get across the border because they know if they get by, if they get by and let into the country, it’s six to eight years before they have a hearing. And it’s worth the taking a chance for the $8,000.

But if it’s only six weeks, the idea is it’s highly unlikely that people will pay that money and come all that way knowing that they’ll be able to be kicked out quickly.

Most asylum applicants are going to lose their cases, even in New York, where immigration judges tend to be a lot friendlier than in Texas, and in many or most of those instances they probably don't really deserve to win, at least in terms of the law as it's written. But the law as written also demands that the cases be heard. 

Biden is saying that the incredible bottleneck that has existed for some time in the system, while Congress fails to pass a comprehensive reform, actually encourages people without credible fears to come to Mexico and cross into the waiting arms of a CBP agent, because they know that, while they will eventually lose and get deported, they'll have six or eight years to make and save some money before that happens, enough perhaps to turn into landlords when they get home. If José Antonio Ibarra's asylum case had been heard in El Paso a few weeks after his arrival, in October 2022, Abbott wouldn't have had an opportunity to bus him to New York, and Ibarra wouldn't have had an opportunity to commit any crimes there or in Athens. More than that, as Biden suggests, if he knew he'd be sent back to Venezuela that soon, he'd likely never have left.

That's a major part of the reason Biden's proposals for "fixing the border" always depend so much on beefing up the resources of the system, the CBP agents and immigration judges, along with trying to get people to apply for asylum without coming to the US, from consulates in their home countries, or from the Mexico side of border using the phone app. And (the legally and morally questionable aspect) making it easier for CPB to deport them straight away. It's because our immigration system is broken, as they say, and when they say it's broken they don't mean it's evil, though its consequences often are evil, hurting innocent people for no good reason; they mean it doesn't work any more—it's in need of major repairs that Congress has been putting off for many years, mostly because Republican members are afraid their voters won't like it.

Though there are Republicans, often in Great Plains states like Oklahoma that have been bleeding population for a century, who realize that we need more immigration, not less, which is why James Lankford worked so hard on the bill currently languishing in the House because Trump ordered Mikey Johnson not to put it on the floor.

I could wish Biden wouldn't work so hard insisting that Lankford's bill is "conservative"

In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen. Oh, you don’t think so? Oh, you don’t like that bill, huh? That conservatives got together and said was a good bill? I’ll be darned, that’s amazing.

but I understand why he does it: to highlight the perversity of the Republicans rejecting it, after wailing all year about the situation at the border, out of nothing but Trump's fear of giving Biden a W.

But it would be better to highlight the way these "bipartisan" feats of legislation always require Democrats to make all the sacrifices—while Republicans demand to be bribed, as they have been in all these matters involving immigration and foreign policy this year, to do the things they claim to want. It would be better to handle this the way he handled the abortion rights issue, asking voters to send him a better Congress so he can do a better job.

Somewhat edited version at the Substack.

It's Not Hyperbole, Man!

 

Holding babies in Rose Valley, PA. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via Citrus County Chronicle.  

As I was saying, the last SOTU of Biden's first term was an extraordinary departure from the SOTU norm, which I've been observing off and on since I was a teenager in the Johnson administration (likely for the first time in 1964, when LBJ announced an "unconditional war on poverty in America"), but I don't think I got all the way to what made it so extraordinary. 

Of course one of the reasons it's different is that there's an overriding purpose to this particular speech tied directly to the presidential campaign, as Josh Marshall explains in his Backchannel:

there was one overwhelming sina qua non objective and that was to demonstrate that Biden is vigorous, up to the fight and can deliver on the key requirements of running a national campaign.

Biden clearly did as well with that as you could have hoped for, showing himself to be sharp, energetic, and a master of the detail, displaying passion, humor, and a very good memory. he's absolutely on top of it, as staff has claimed. Nobody who watched it could say he was frail, out of it, or suffering dementia, and we can be confident as he puts himself out to the public in the coming weeks and months that he'll be able to sustain that and an increasing number of voters will get it. He's plainly capable of doing both jobs, of presidential candidate and president; if there's a problem, whether it's bias against the elderly or Fox News or New York Times propaganda, it won't be because of anything actually wrong with him.

So that had been a huge worry among all kinds of Democrats, and I thought it should be a big point in the reaction to the speech, which it has been, and that's great.

But it's not the only point that deserves to be talked about.

Joe Did What? Welcome, Welcome, Welcome

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images via Wisconsin Examiner. Rumor has it that when Donald Trump sent out a post "WHAT HAPPENED TO NANCY?" last night it's because he'd forgotten why the guy in glasses was sitting in Speaker Pelosi's chair.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were—are, I suppose—masters of oratory, in their different ways, artists of the art of public speaking, Clinton charming you into his vision, Obama rousing you to fervency, but their State of the Union addresses were never their best speeches, weighed down with all the exhausting details they felt compelled to include. 

Joe Biden's art is not oratory but the art of governance, of which the State of the Union is a (sort of) constitutional part (of course the Constitution only requires him to send Congress a letter, of which he made a tremendous pantomime last night, passing the Vice President and Speaker their leather-bound copies before bringing his own to the lectern, I've never watched that happening before, but the camera loved it as he was doing it), and that maybe accounts for why they're paradoxically his best speeches, even though they may be his longest; he's so deeply aware that he's not just talking about governance, he's doing it, and democratically drawing us into the process, and the details are a fundamental part of that (and not just the part where, as the pundits like to say, the Devil is). The pleasure he takes in it is so evident that we can't help sharing it, and it rarely gets boring.

I dwell on it because it's something people often make a mistake about when they're observing Biden: so many times in the course of the Gaza war they've complained that words are not enough, actions are needed, when words are what they're really asking for (the oratorical call for a ceasefire), and actions are what we're getting (the political work of making a ceasefire happen, going on mostly behind closed doors).

Joe Did What? Signs of Spring

I can't fault the movement in Michigan's Democratic primary tomorrow, mostly I think of Arab Americans but also of other Muslim and/or Black and/or young people, to vote for uncommitted delegates instead of the Biden slate, in protest against Biden's perceived lean toward Israel in the Gaza conflict—I mean, I can and will complain that they're reading Biden wrong, but I think it's right for them to communicate the distress on behalf of the Palestinians in Palestine as well as the Palestinians in Dearborn.

We've been told repeatedly, and rightly, about how traumatized Israelis have been by the horrible events of October 7, but I'm not sure how much the broader US public is getting on what's been happening to Arabs in Gaza and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank since October 8, but the number of killed in Gaza is now approaching 30,000, that's well over one out of every 100 people, not to mention those starving and killed by the lack of medical care and polluted drinking water.

The 1200 dead of October 7 were killed in unspeakably disgusting ways. I don't usually use the term "barbaric" because I think it's unfair to barbarians to suggest they are somehow similar to Colonel Chivington's force at the Sand Creek Massacre of around 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho people in 1864

Late Style in Biden

 

Adlai Stevenson and Mayor Richard J. Daley at the podium in the 1956 Democratic convention, via Chicago Collections. 

Heard Mr. Damon Linker on the radio this morning plugging a post he'd sold to The Atlantic, recycled from his Substack ("Notes From the Middleground"), where he argues that the only way to defeat psychopath Donald Trump is for President Biden to drop out of the race to reelect himself, right away. Apparently (he's a little light on the procedural details), we'll just carry through all the primaries electing an insuperable majority of Biden delegates, except when they get to Chicago on August 19 they'll be able to vote for anybody they want.

Except the one they're pledged to, of course, who won't be running. It'll be just like that other Chicago convention, in 1968! Good times! And not at all guaranteed to elect the Republican, the way the other one elected Richard Nixon. Linker kept saying on the radio "But Nixon barely won!"—which is formally true, he had to split the racist vote with the independent candidacy of George Wallace; I guess he thinks Trump will really get beat in the way Nixon almost did, by his fellow anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though I don't know which states he thinks Kennedy will win (Wallace's were five in the Deep South; AR, LA, MS, AL, and GA).

Or not exactly. When Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the race at the end of March (not the middle of February), it was a pretty different kind of race from this year's. For one thing, only 13 states had presidential primary contests of the kind that dominate today, two of them owned by "favorite sons" who would hold the delegates in reserve until the convention, and Johnson's designated successor, Vice President Humphrey, was able to accumulate enough delegates to win without personally entering any primaries, with LBJ's expert help in the traditional smoke-filled rooms of states conventions and caucuses, and "delegate primaries" where Uncommitted had an excellent chance of winning.

Johnson had had just one serious opponent, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, at the time of the New Hampshire primary,  but McCarthy's extraordinary second place finish there, 50-42, was the thing that persuaded LBJ's former attorney general Senator Robert Kennedy to enter the race (too late to enter any of the April primaries), and that was the thing that persuaded Johnson to make his extraordinary decision to withdraw in Humphrey's favor. 

Then came the trauma of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, while McCarthy and Kennedy were battling it out in Indiana. And then, of course, on June 5, while he was celebrating his victories in California and South Dakota, Robert Kennedy was murdered too, with the consequence, which seemed almost like a secondary matter, that Humphrey would certainly win the nomination—there would be no "brokered convention" like the good old days going back to as recently as 1960, but there would be a deeply distressed and alienated community of the young and the Black (12% of the people dying in Vietnam were African American, but nearly all of them were young men of every race), whose rages and fears would not be represented on the convention floor but rather in the street theater and accompanying police riot (and more "unrest" for the northeastern and western Republicans to focus their racism on as an alternative to the Southern-style version, as "law and order" voters for Nixon and Agnew, following the urban riots of 1967).

I don't know exactly how Linker is imagining what's going to happen now if the party decides to obey him: he mentions half a dozen plausible candidates including obligatory diversity representatives (Whitmer's a woman, Warnock is Black, Shapiro is Jewish, Polis is gay, it's like an updated World War II combat movie) plus the white male multimillionaires he's most interested in (Pritzker and Newsom)—not gonna lie, I like them all fine myself, even the rich ones, but what are they going to do? Hold a series of 12 debates? How will it connect to the ongoing selection of Biden delegates in the primaries from March through June? Will there be a poll race in lieu of primaries going on at the same time, maybe eliminating a candidate every couple of weeks? It's a little too reminiscent, for my money, of this year's parade of Republican candidates not-named-Trump, an occasion for the press to keep changing its mind every so often about who's hot and who's not, not an occasion for somebody to democratically emerge, as Biden himself emerged four years ago in the South Carolina primary. I don't know what it is, but among the Republicans this year it was an occasion for people to notice that Trump wasn't there and the press was just being fools.

And what will happen in the convention itself, in the system designed by George McGovern for his own 1972 campaign that has endured until now, where it's a TV spectacle of unity? Are we going back to yet a third Chicago convention, in 1956? (Adlai Stevenson, the 1952 nominee, won by a mile over his rivals in the first ballot, but it took three ballots to nominate a vice presidential candidate, with an unexpectedly fierce competition between Estes Kefauver and the very young senator John F. Kennedy.) Will the state delegations be marking their space with those tall signs? What if they haven't got a decision? Will there be a real contest? Could it last 103 ballots like the 1924 convention? (They lost too, as did Stevenson.) What will the backroom dealing be like, and will we ever know? Will we feel a nostalgia of our own for the thing we've lost, the primary process in which democracy is made a part of the selection? (Primaries were invented in the Progressive era, in a reaction against the corruption of the 19th-century process; Linker thinks they yield the wrong answer.)

I'll tell you one thing: if it's a movie, and it might as well be, and you want it to end with a bang, you couldn't do better than having the convention deadlocked, and winding up dragging Biden onto the floor, because he's the character who brings the coalition together, male and female, Black and white, union members and wage slaves, woodchucks and immigrants, Boomers and Zoomers. In spite of the way some of us may be feeling at the moment on a specific issue here and there (I'm betting the migration question and the Gaza question will look somewhat different to us in August, I'll get into that in later posts). 

One of the biggest things Biden exemplifies is what's good about being old; he's got what the late Edward Said described as a "late style" (Said was thinking especially of Beethoven) completely different from his maturity 30-odd years ago: spare and cantankerous, gnarly, with too many ideas to finish any of them, with

the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them 

I'm not even kidding, that's why his policy prescriptions are so good. We'll start recognizing it, I hope, the way the Viennese public recognized Beethoven at the premiere of the ninth symphony, when he insisted on conducting though he was too deaf to know what was going on, and the concertmaster had to push him to turn around and take his bow when it was over—the tempo in his mind was slower than the tempo the musicians were using—but the audience understood the extraordinary character of the music they were hearing, and roared with applause he couldn't hear. I’m even drawing an analogy between Beethoven’s deafness and Biden’s stutter, as part of an explanation.

Cross-posted at the Substack.

Ah but I was so much older then

 

Dr. Jill Biden celebrating her 70th birthday at Rehoboth Beach. Smiler on the right evidently not ex-president Donald J. Trump, who probably hasn’t climbed on a bike since his political views were fixed around 1977. Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty, from Peop

To some commentators, President Joe Biden is an ostensibly nice old guy you couldn’t easily get a jury to convict of the crime of holding on to documents he wasn’t supposed to have, partly because there isn’t any evidence he was doing it on purpose, but also because even if he was guilty he’d probably be able to convince them he was just forgetful.

To others, he’s the most radical leftist president since at least Harry S. Truman, who refuses to let up on his determination to boost labor union membership, tax the wealthy, lift children out of poverty, protect minority voting rights, declare jubilees on student debt and medical debt, rework the immigration system so those empty counties in the Great Plains can pick up some of the population they so desperately need from among the homeless and tempest-tossed, put an end to the use of carbon fuels, and establish a Palestinian state in the Middle East.

Don’t @ me on any of those examples unless you want a sandbag heaved at your head. I am aware that Biden has not accomplished all his presidential aims.

The first set of more-or-less facts (no doubt pretty frustrating to Republican prosecutors) is now being served up as evidence for a different and unrelated case, medical rather than legal according to which he’s suffering from advanced dementia, and it’s time to send him to a farm upstate and turn the executive responsibilities over to somebody more popular among the nonpartisan or unlabeled.

I went through some of the second set of facts back in early September, toward the conclusion that if that’s what octogenarian presidents do, maybe we need more octogenarian presidents, if only because of the three big bills, as I wrote then:

• the American Rescue Plan, which not only spent billions on bringing COVID under control with vaccine distribution and school reopening (people somehow can’t remember that it was under the Trump administration that all the school closings took place) but devoted much of its $2 trillion to those $1400 stimulus checks and the (unfortunately temporary) expansion of the Child Tax Credit that cut child poverty in our country by 50%;
• the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act bringing $550 billion in new spending on everything from the nation’s waterways and transit systems to its airports and electric grid, electric vehicle charging stations, and zero- and low-emissions buses and ferries (far from the original proposal of $3.4 trillion, but try finding something to compare it to that actually did happen over the last generation or two); the first serious gun control legislation in decades (toughening requirements for the youngest gun buyers, keeping firearms out of the hands of more domestic abusers and helping states implement “red flag” laws, along with funding for mental health and violence intervention programs and school safety initiatives);
• the Chips & Science Act spending $280 billion to fund expanding the nation’s semiconductor industry to help keep pace with Chinese competition and scientific research in areas like artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing, with “regional innovation and technology hubs” bringing jobs and economic growth to the most distressed parts of the country (that’s the bit that so amazed David Brooks, who’s always moaning about the Rust Belt but never thought of anything that could be done about it);
• and the “Inflation Reduction Act” making our largest ever investment in combating climate change—putting the US on track to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 2005 levels by the end of the decade, together with investments in environmental justice, conservation and resiliency programs, plus allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices for seniors on Medicare, something we’ve been screaming for forever, extending federal health insurance subsidies, and capping out-of-pocket costs for insulin at no more than $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, which is even contributing to the reduction of inflation! and
• TAXING THE RICH with new taxes on big corporations, setting a minimum corporate tax of 15%, and new funding for the Internal Revenue Service in an effort to crack down on tax evasion, reducing the federal budget deficit by about $300 billion over 10 years.

That last number is now estimated at $561 billion—$851 billion if the IRS funding is renewed, which Republicans in Congress will stop if they can. And it’s only a down payment on what could be achieved in inequality reduction with a cooperative legislature (which I realize we’re not too likely to get out of the 2024 elections—on the other hand we should also be thinking about what we’ve got to defend out of the current term, and what we have to lose if the Democratic candidate loses, and the threats of the Republican candidate who claims he only aims to be dictator for a day).

When I was worried about Biden’s age, back in early 2020, it was more about his brain habits than the physiology; the habits of a lifetime as senator from the banking industry that is such a dominant part of Delaware’s economy, the eager befriender of unreconstructed Southern Democrats trying to knit the party back together after the McGovern debacle in the 1970s, the opponent of busing, the crusader for incarceration and against “welfare as we know it” in the 1990s, the Cold Warrior who didn’t necessarily understand what had happened to the Cold War, and so on. I was also among those who really liked Biden as vice president, for the thing he brought to Obama’s campaigns and governing style, as epitomized in the apparent “gaffe” (carefully calculated, IMO) where he pushed the administration to move in favor of same-sex marriage, but I wasn’t sorry he decided not to run in 2016. (In terms of “progressive” cred, I thought Hillary Clinton had more; Biden had more in common with triangulating Bill than she did.)

But watching Biden work his way through the 2020 campaign convinced me that he was well adapted to the present: his deep attention to the Black vote (as we moved into the George Floyd summer), and the policy collaboration he gradually moved into with Sanders and Warren (and, I can’t ever say this enough, Warren’s pro-equality economists, Saez and Zucman, who were key designers of the Build Back Better program). I really began to think of him as the candidate who was young enough, next to stodgy young Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Yang. And others have noticed—like Thomas Zimmer—the people crying about Biden’s age are pretty old, or at least pretty tired, themselves:

in recent days, spurred by the Hur report, it has come in a particularly forceful, aggressive fashion from a political spectrum that I would describe as the center to as far right as you can go within the – ostensibly – anti-MAGA camp: From establishment conservatives, the center-right and people who self-identify as liberals, but with a distinctly anti-left/anti-“woke” bend, which plausibly puts them, labels aside, at the center of the political discourse. Specifically, I want to dissect the “Biden too old” arguments that have come out in the New York Times – from the already mentioned stable of opinionists (Douthat, Stephens, Dowd) and the paper’s editorial board, plus a reaction from Damon Linker, who is prominently holding down that liberal centrism space, titled “What the Hell is Wrong with the Democrats?

You know right? There are points where some of us might want to criticize Biden, as with his willingness to sacrifice asylum seekers by making the initial “credible fear interview” somewhat harder to pass, and he’s definitely taking too long to tell Binyamin Netanyahu to go fuck himself while tens of thousands (including dozens of hostages captured from Israel) die under Israeli bombs as part of his plan to force Netanyahu into allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state. That’s not what’s driving this.

Something tells me the crying about Biden’s age is coming from people who think he’s too effective on these economic issues, is all I’m saying.

Cross-posted from the Substack.