A bunch of this came as total news to me. I thought I knew a little something about Russia. I didn't.
When Putin crows about how rich Russia is, he's just bragging about having stolen practically everything they "own".
You think Manifest Destiny was bad - holy fuck. You ain't seen nuthin'.
Here's just a small taste, which doesn't make much of anything any clearer for me, except the part that points out that the thing was built by colonization and genocide.
Russia has been a flaming hot mess for 9 or 10 centuries. It may take another 9 or 10 to sort it out.
Trump has repeatedly made statements very similar to what the Project 2025 playbook says.
But the Daddy State lies - all the time about everything - so when he feels the need, he claims he knows nothing about it at all.
Trump seeks to disavow 'Project 2025' despite ties to conservative group
July 5 (Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump tried to distance himself on Friday from a conservative group's sweeping plans for the next Republican presidency, days after its leader claimed a second American Revolution was underway that would "remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
(Emphasis added)
The Republican presidential candidate renounced any connection with Project 2025, a plan Democrats have been attacking to highlight what they say is Trump's extreme policy agenda for a second term should he beat President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 election.
Many people involved in the project lead by the Heritage Foundation, America's top conservative think tank, worked in the Trump White House and would likely help fill out his administration if he wins in November.
But Trump said on his Truth Social platform he had nothing to do with the plan.
"I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it," he wrote.
"I disagree with some of the things they're saying," he continued, adding some of their assertions were "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal."
Trump's post came three days after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts' comments on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast about a second American Revolution. Democrats and others criticized what they viewed as a veiled threat of violence.
In a statement provided by a Project 2025 spokesperson on Friday, Roberts repeated his claim that Americans were carrying out a revolution "to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats" and said it was the political left that had a history of political violence.
The spokesperson said that while Project 2025 provided recommendations for the next Republican president, it would be up to Trump, should he win, to decide whether to implement them.
Trump's move to create distance with Project 2025 could in part reflect an effort to moderate his message in the final months of the race, especially with Biden's campaign faltering after the Democratic candidate's June 27 debate, said James Wallner, a political science professor at Clemson University.
"Trump is basically now seeking to appeal to a broader audience," Wallner said.
The Biden campaign has stepped up its efforts to tie Trump's campaign to Project 2025. “Project 2025 is the extreme policy and personnel playbook for Trump’s second term that should scare the hell out of the American people," campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement.
The 900-page blueprint calls for drastic reform of the federal government, including a gutting of some federal agencies and a vast expansion of presidential power. Trump's statements and policy positions suggest he is aligned with some but not all of the project's agenda.
The plans have been drawn up by the Heritage Foundation in coordination with a collection of other like-minded groups.
A number of people who worked on Project 2025 have close ties to the former president. Russ Vought, who was Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget and is heading up a key committee at the Republican National Convention, authored one of the project's chapters.
Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump who is widely expected to be tapped for a top job in a second Trump administration, heads up a legal group on Project 2025's advisory board.
One side says a woman has the right to make her own decisions about having babies or not having babies, while the other side insists that the government should step in and make the call on whether she can or can't continue a pregnancy, or even prevent one.
Papa Joe and his gang say it's up to the pregnant woman, and everybody else can STFU about it.
Trump and the blue-nosed, pinch-faced MAGA Taliban are arguing over how severe they want the punishments to be if anybody defies the restrictions on women.
So let's be clear on this
★ The Democrats are trying to find ways to re-established the rights of 170 million Americans now that SCOTUS has fucked them over with the Dodd decision.
★ Trump doesn't give one empty fuck about the issue - he cares nothing about doing what's right. He's negotiating - bargaining with women's rights. ie: How much can I get the Puritans to pay me in exchange for a promise to impose a nation-wide ban on abortion and contraceptives?
And remember, he's already floated a deal with the Dirty Fuels Cartel for $1 billion - and he's been talking it up.
Tempers flare as Trump reviews revised abortion plank for Republican platform
The former president wants the platform to endorse leaving the issue to the states rather than a federal ban in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise.
Donald Trump has begun to review draft language for the 2024 Republican platform that antiabortion leaders expect will abandon the party’s decades-long call to amend the U.S. Constitution to extend personhood protections to the unborn, according to multiple people involved with the discussions.
The escalating behind-the-scenes disagreement over the abortion language has become so tense and acrimonious in recent weeks that some social conservative leaders have issued public warnings of a coming split within Trump’s coalition. Others have started to discuss an effort to issue a “minority report” to the platform at the convention, according to the people involved, who like others for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Trump advisers, in turn, have been angered by the public pressure from antiabortion activists, according to people familiar with the campaign’s internal discussions. At the same time, Trump allies are not overly worried about the platform skirmish, because evangelicals strongly opposed to abortion have remained among his most fervent supporters regardless of his evolving positions on the issue.
“If the Trump campaign decides to remove national protections for the unborn in the GOP platform, it would be a miscalculation that would hurt party unity and destroy pro-life enthusiasm between now and the election,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement on Wednesday. “We are now just one business day away from the platform committee meeting and no assurances have been made. Instead, every indication is that the campaign will muscle through changes behind closed doors.”
Trump advisers — who selected the platform committee’s delegates — have made clear in private discussions that they want a shorter platform document, with abortion language consistent with Trump’s current position, multiple people said.
Since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide, Trump waffled on whether he would support a federal abortion ban. But Trump now says he wants each state to make its own decision on abortion regulation, while resisting calls for new federal limits that he once supported.
“Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have [sic] more conservative than others,” he said in April. “At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people.”
Trump allies have argued that letting states decide their own abortion limitations helps the former president seem more moderate on the issue. Democrats contend that, instead, it weds Trump to the most extreme abortion limits in the country, including some states that have enacted near-total bans on the procedure.
In the face of the activist backlash, Trump’s advisers have barred the press and C-SPAN cameras from next week’s scheduled meetings of the platform committee, a break in tradition that has alarmed some delegates. Members of the Republican National Committee not directly participating in the platform debate will be able to attend the meetings, which start Sunday afternoon at the Baird Center in Milwaukee, with a meeting to offer amendments scheduled for Tuesday.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a platform committee member, wrote a letter Monday to RNC Chairman Michael Whatley dismissing the private discussions as “stalling tactics” by Trump advisers. He called the decision to restrict the press from the platform committee discussions “un-American,” and warned that the platform could be watered down to “a few pages of meaningless, poll-tested talking points.”
“We reach consensus by presenting our ideas and playing by the rules. And I am very concerned about closing down the process,” Perkins said Thursday. “The Republican Party should not be operating as we point out the left so often does — wanting to silence opposition.”
The Trump campaign said the final abortion language has not been determined. Some campaign officials have suggested that the eventual language will appease many antiabortion activists.
“The Platform Committee has yet to convene to discuss what language should be in the final document,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said in a statement.
Trump signed a letter to antiabortion leaders during his 2016 campaign promising to support the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” federal legislation that would have outlawed abortion nationwide after 20 weeks of gestation with some exceptions. He supported that legislation in his first term, but his policy changed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe.
Antiabortion activists reject the idea that the high court’s reversal changes the need for federal legislation or a constitutional amendment process, as they have expanded their efforts to challenge federal regulatory approval of abortion medication.
They argue that a constitutional amendment on abortion — a feature of the GOP platform since the 1980s — can be seen as a state issue, since any amendment would ultimately need to be ratified by at least 38 of the 50 states. They also say that Trump’s recent statements on abortion fail to address the abortions performed in more liberal states that allow the procedure with relatively few limitations.
Eight antiabortion and social conservative leaders wrote a June 10 letter to Trump demanding that the platform include support for federal legislative limits on abortion, and it contained the following sentence: “We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”
“This is the language that both you and Ronald Reagan ran on and won,” the leaders wrote. Among the signatories were Dannenfelser, Perkins, Faith and Freedom Coalition President Ralph Reed and Penny Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America.
One antiabortion activist involved in the discussion with Trump’s team said there has been little recent communication with antiabortion leaders beyond broad assurances that the platform “will be fine, and it will be pro-life.”
“Our posture was, ‘Let’s fix this behind the scenes,’” this activist said. “Once it became more apparent to us that they didn’t want to work with us and seemed inclined to want to pick a fight with us, we have been more vocal.”
And it's not just women. These assholes are coming for the whole shebang.
Some RNC members are also concerned that the Trump team will back away from the 2016 platform’s declaration that denounced the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision allowing same-sex couples to marry. The previous platform called marriage between one man and one woman “the foundation for a free society” that “has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values.”
Trump advisers say privately that they do not want a fight over same-sex marriage and consider it a settled issue not worth re-litigating, according to people familiar with the conversations.
“It would not be a smart move to define it any other way,” one RNC member said of marriage. “I’m a little bit concerned about what might transpire.”
Press Poodles love to stir the shit for the sake of stirring the shit - because calm, steady, and practical doesn't sell dick pills and panty liners as well as "Democrats In Disarray!"
I'm not saying Biden has absolutely no problems. I've never said that, and I never will, so this time, I'll say it this way: The guy dodders, and he goes on side trips to Grandpa Land on occasion. That's Biden - and that's always been Biden.
And this:
For me, it's Biden -
until Biden tells me it's not Biden
Take a listen to Tennessee Brando talking about ratings, and then tell me the WaPo piece that follows couldn't possibly have anything to do with keeping up the drama for the sake of clicks, and the revenue they get from pimping the show to drive that traffic, to peddle their advertisers' shit.
In the end, it won't be an asshole fascist like Trump that blows it all up. It's going to be some schmuck in the Marketing Dept who's convinced the boss that simply getting eyeballs on a website is more valuable than providing voters a little boring truth about what's at stake in the election, and how mailing in one ballot can make enough of a difference that maybe we change things enough that we don't have to feel like we're at the broken end of the bottle every fucking minute of every fucking day.
And now it's time for WaPo to shit on Biden's head in a piece that spills a gallon of ink on a story that boils down to He Said / She Said.
They name names when there's something to say about how the old guy is sharp and involved, and asking pointed tough questions in (eg) a foreign policy meeting that was scheduled for 90 minutes and then goes for 3 hours, but all the shit-talk is from anonymous sources.
Biden’s aging is seen as accelerating; lapses described as more common
Aides, foreign officials, members of Congress and donors say President Biden has seemed slower and more often loses his train of thought in recent months, though close aides insist he remains mentally sharp.
President Biden, who at 81 is the oldest person ever to hold the office, has displayed signs of accelerated aging in recent months, said numerous aides, foreign officials, members of Congress, donors and others who have interacted with Biden over the last 3½ years, noting that he moves more slowly, speaks more softly and has moments when he loses his train of thought more often than even just a year ago.
None of those who spoke to The Washington Post said they had seen Biden appear as lost and confused as he did at the presidential debate against Donald Trump on June 27, where his halting performance sent panic through the Democratic Party. They largely did not question his mental acuity, and several senior White House aides who interact with Biden regularly said that he continues to ask probing, detailed questions about complicated policy matters and can recall facts from previous briefings in minute detail.
Nevertheless, Biden has slowed considerably over the last several months, according to 21 people, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic and share candid assessments.
No names - cuz we wouldn't want any verifiable sources now would we.
And 21 people - now there's a big time cohort. I guess we can't possibly get any kind of skewed results form a sample so huge.
They said Biden’s physical signs of aging have become more apparent — the stiff gait; the need at times for assistance in moving from place to place; a raspy, softened speaking voice that can make the lifelong politician known for impassioned and at times seemingly unending speeches now difficult to hear and understand. In addition to these traits, he has exhibited occasional lapses in which he has appeared to briefly freeze up or suddenly veer off topic, instances some said they easily dismissed before the debate but have now caused them to question his ability to do the job for another four years.
During the Group of Seven nations summit in Italy last month, several European leaders came away stunned at how much older the president seemed from when they had last interacted with him only a year, or in some cases, mere months earlier, several officials familiar with their reactions said. “People were worried about it,” said one person familiar with leaders’ reactions.
At an immigration event at the White House less than two weeks before the debate, some participants worried about the president’s frailty and how his energy ebbed and waned, wondering how he would be able to debate Trump. One person who attended termed Biden’s performance “terrifying.” Others said they thought the president seemed physically diminished but otherwise fine. At an internal meeting at the White House this spring, an official recalled struggling to hear Biden speak even though he sat just a few feet away and noticed that the president answered some questions with puzzling non sequiturs.
“There’s been a decline over the last year. He was much more vigorous in 2023,” one former administration official said. “His age is progressing, and I’m pretty sure that’s normal. … The question is how long can he do this job for, and I don’t know the answer to that.”
Biden has said he had a cold on the night of the debate. There is no indication he is more seriously ill, and a White House doctor declared him “fit for duty” after an examination in February 2024.
The White House has pointed to Biden’s long record of legislative successes and his management of complex foreign policy matters in numerous countries as evidence of his ability to continue for another four-year term.
“As he has proved by earning the strongest record of any modern President, Joe Biden is unflinchingly capable and fighting for American families, with sharpness and resolve, every moment of every day — whether it’s managing rapidly-evolving national security events in the Situation Room or working with members of Congress late to pass the biggest climate investments in history,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
Several White House aides who work with the president regularly and accompany him on foreign trips said that while he may move slower and look older, they do not see signs that he is mentally diminished and say his physical aging has no bearing on his ability to continue the job of president. And many Democrats and White House aides who interact with Biden regularly said they were stunned by his debate performance because he had appeared far sharper and more energetic in private meetings.
But during the Group of Seven nations summit in Italy last month, a number of European leaders were struck by Biden’s appearance and demeanor, according to four people who spoke directly with multiple leaders. The general impression among leaders, the people said, was that while Biden appeared capable of carrying out his duties today, they were concerned about how he would be able to serve another four-year term.
The leaders noted that Biden seemed more tired, frail and less lucid at certain moments. Several said he was hard to hear, prompting meeting participants to ask him to speak up at times, according to a summit participant. The president also sometimes lost his train of thought, though he would return to the point quickly, three of the people said.
Biden’s appearance at the G-7, coupled with his debate performance, has further heightened anxiety among European leaders about a possible second Trump term. European capitals have long been preparing for another Trump presidency, but Biden’s halting debate performance has put those efforts into sharp focus and made the stakes “more real,” one person familiar with the conversations said.
“The impression was, we don’t see him being able to run the country for four more years. How are you running this guy for four more years? How are you going to win this election?” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, who was familiar with several leaders’ reactions. “It’s very, very rare in a democracy that the person you run for an election is someone that you all know can’t lead the country for four more years.”
One person familiar with the conversations among leaders said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni observed that Biden was “mentally on top of his game” but physically weak, leaving her worried. The person said those concerns became more pronounced after the debate. A spokesman for the Italian Embassy did not provide a comment.
“What has changed the discourse here in Europe is not the G-7. It’s the debate,” the person said. “Leaders were dismayed by Biden’s performance — they told themselves they should have realized at the G-7 … and came to the conclusion that he cannot win in November.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was with Biden at the G-7, and Amos Hochstein, a senior national security official also on the trip, said all the leaders at the G-7 looked to Biden for leadership on complex matters including Israel’s war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and China. Blinken said Biden held at least a half-dozen working sessions with other leaders, and Biden often came back to offer additional thoughts on various matters.
“What I saw and experienced at the G-7 is a president who was plunged into the work,” said Blinken, who like several others was made available by the White House to vouch for Biden’s fitness. “The question — and it’s a fair one — is ‘Does he have command of the job and is he getting results?’ And the answer to that is yes.”
But others who have interacted with Biden in recent months said they have been struck by changes in his demeanor.
One White House official said he noticed Biden had aged significantly over the past year during a meeting this spring when he found it difficult to hear and understand the president. In another meeting, a senior aide was telling Biden the order in which to call on people in an upcoming event. Biden was alert and engaged but jotted the names down slowly, the official recalled. “That took longer than one would expect,” the official said. “It wasn’t that his mind was trailing off. He was slowing down.”
While campaigning in 2020, Biden said he viewed himself as a “bridge” to the next generation of Democratic leaders. But after a string of legislative victories and a better-than-expected showing by Democrats in the 2022 midterms, Biden announced his intent to seek a second term.
Trump, who is 78 and prone to non sequiturs of his own, has also faced questions about his acuity, particularly as he has rambled incoherently at several recent public events. Still, polls show voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s. In a post-debate CBS News-YouGov poll, 72 percent of voters said they did not believe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, compared with 49 percent who said the same about Trump.
Biden’s age has been a frequent target of Republican attacks. They frequently take videos from public events — often with critical context missing — that make Biden appear confused and inept. White House aides have fiercely pushed back on any suggestion that Biden is too old to do the job, saying he aggressively asks questions in briefings and speech preps. They also point to his continued ability to work a rope line and talk about complicated policy matters on the fly.
Emmy Ruiz, the White House political director, recalled a meeting with Latino leaders that Biden held this spring that covered policy issues including housing, immigration and the border. She said Biden walked in with one card of notes, initially intending to simply drop by and say hello, and instead held a 45-minute unscripted policy meeting.
“He’s constantly pushing us,” Ruiz said in an interview. During speech preparation, she said, Biden often asks what people are expecting to hear from him and requests to speak with local politicians to better understand their constituents.
After a group of senators returned from the Middle East after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, they went to the White House one evening to brief the president for a meeting they expected to last 30 minutes, said Jonathan Kott, an adviser to Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a key ally of the president.
“They had a detailed conversation about foreign policy for over two hours and thought he was sharp, alert and in command,” Kott said.
Neera Tanden, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said she attended a recent meeting where she briefed Biden on the minutia of the administration’s health-care policy, a plan to lower the cost of inhalers and talked through how the Medicaid rebate program works. Biden asked detailed questions about the policy and its real-world impact, she said.
“My experience with the president is that he is demanding on facts and policy and wants to deliver for the American people so he asks tough questions,” Tanden said.
Mark Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family who spent a day with Biden at the White House in March, said he “doesn’t move around like an athletic 55- or 60-year-old.”
“But he had a lot of energy. He was telling jokes and showing off the White House and was completely fine,” Shriver said.
Those who do not interact with Biden regularly, such as Democratic donors and foreign leaders, are often the ones who notice the change most acutely. Senior aides who interact with Biden regularly said they have not noticed stark changes.
And some of Biden’s lapses have taken place in public.
While addressing a crowd on the White House lawn during a commemoration of Juneteenth last month, Biden briefly became unintelligible, as he slurred his words before regaining his footing and completing his speech. At a White House meeting on reproductive health in January, Biden directed the crowd’s attention to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who the president said was “sitting” in the room — but it was actually Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The two Cabinet secretaries do not look alike; Mayorkas is bald, while Becerra has a full head of hair and wears glasses.
During an impromptu news conference in February, Biden referred to Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, the president of Egypt, as the president of Mexico. Biden had called the conference to try to allay concerns about his age and memory after special counsel Robert K. Hur determined that he should not be prosecuted for careless handling of classified documents, in part because a jury might conclude that he was a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden had a childhood stutter that aides say sometimes resurfaces. Experts say lifelong speaking challenges are separate from lapses of memory.
Since the debate, Democrats have expressed frustration that Biden has been slow to forcefully come out and show to voters he is up to the job. He held a rally in Raleigh, N.C., the day after the debate, reading scripted remarks from a teleprompter, where he was energetic and impassioned, briefly allaying some concerns. But many Democrats and White House allies were befuddled as to why Biden and his team had not quickly scheduled a television interview that would demonstrate that Biden could handle unscripted settings and added more events to his schedule this week.
Biden is now set to record an interview with ABC News on Friday and has a series of campaign events in Wisconsin on Friday and Philadelphia over the weekend. Next week, the president is expected to hold a solo news conference during the NATO summit being hosted in Washington. Biden and his senior team have said they understand that the president must demonstrate his fitness for office to salvage his candidacy.
Much of the anger inside the White House and on Capitol Hill has been directed at Biden’s closest aides, who have largely kept the president away from spontaneous and unscripted events, sparking suspicion among those who interact with him less often that his condition may be worse than aides have acknowledged.
Bates, the White House spokesman, noted that Biden has done interviews with major networks and speaks in more informal settings with reporters, such as when he is boarding Marine One at the White House.
Biden has traveled the country over the last couple months campaigning, but the vast majority of his events are carefully choreographed, with the president reading from a teleprompter — even for intimate fundraisers or brief remarks. He does few media interviews, and even when the president does hold news conferences, they are often with foreign leaders and limited to a small number of questions. (White House aides counter that the president holds plenty of unscripted interactions in photo lines and in impromptu meetings and drop-bys, and that teleprompters are standard for presidential events.)
Donors have complained that Biden’s team has barred them from asking questions even at small group events, unusual at high-dollar political fundraisers.
Biden’s aides also adjust his schedule to avoid overly taxing him. During a private meeting with Democratic governors at the White House on Wednesday evening, Biden said that he needs to get more sleep and had instructed staff to avoid scheduling events for him after 8 p.m., a person familiar with his comments said.
Two former and one current White House official said most high-priority meetings and key events are scheduled midday, when aides believe Biden is at his best. They also said that White House schedulers keep meetings with the president as small as possible, particularly compared with prior administrations — a sharp departure from Biden’s earlier White House stint as vice president, when the garrulous politician loved to be at the center of large gatherings. Biden also sometimes wears tennis shoes and uses a shorter series of steps to Air Force One, to reduce the chances he might trip.
One veteran leader who has met Biden several times over the years said they were surprised by how much older Biden appeared when they saw him on May 27 for a Memorial Day breakfast in the East Room of the White House that was attended by a few hundred grieving military family members, veterans service organizations and administration officials.
While there were no “red flags” in Biden’s brief remarks at the event, the veteran leader said, the president had “noticeably aged a lot” since the previous Memorial Day weekend, noting his gait and physical demeanor, when he also greeted guests and took photographs.
At the White House nine days before the debate, four people who were present said they worried about the president’s fitness after observing him at a celebratory gathering to announce a new policy to help immigrants.
Under the sparkling chandeliers in the East Room on June 18, the president seemed off. He appeared frail as he navigated to the stage before the packed crowd of more than 100 people. He sometimes mumbled. In one jarring moment, he appeared to freeze while introducing Mayorkas, and then waved it off as a joke. A White House aide said the difficulty with Mayorkas’s name in that moment stemmed from Biden’s stutter.
Aides reportedly said it was Biden being Biden.
But others at the event said lawmakers and other attendees whispered concerns about Biden’s fitness over iced tea at the White House afterward, as a mariachi band played.
“Everyone talked about it with each other,” said a former Biden administration official who attended the event. “We were all like ‘That was horrible. We’re going to lose the election.’”
An advocate who was in the room recalled saying to others after the event, “he’s not going to make it four more years,” adding “he’s walking like an old man.”
“I was in shock,” the person said. “It was like I was seeing something nobody else was seeing. … It was so obvious to me.”
Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who also attended the event, came away with a different impression. She said Biden seemed sharp, empathetic and capable of leading at the June 18 event.
Barragan said Biden at previous events has sometimes asked for her hand to help him descend from a stage. But she said she had confidence in his ability to be president.
“Joe may not walk the same. He might be stiffer,” she said. “I don’t think that goes to his inability to be president of the United States.”
But the former Biden official was struck by the moments the president seemed less like himself and worried about what it would mean about his ability to take on Trump.
The former official came away from the event thinking to themselves: “I don’t know how that man’s going to debate next week.”
Again, I'm not saying there are no problems. I am saying I'm pretty fuckin' sick and tired of Press Poodles taking the word of anonymous sources, and then reporting it as if it was Gospel, and keeping me blind with no way to check it for myself.
If it's real, then show me. And as far as the observers making comments that border on diagnostics - let's look at where those folks took their clinical training.
Finally: Biden has always gotten himself off onto tangents. Maybe what we're seeing now as "glitches" are just Biden trying to self-discipline.
The big problem with going toe-to-toe with Trump is that the lies are so thick that you have to resist the natural reflex of trying to rebut everything in the Standard Trump Gish Gallop, and stay focused on the main point.
For a guy having to deal with that stutter, if his handlers aren't prepping him properly, he's going to come off as confused - and that perceived confusion is almost sure to be interpreted as "old and fuzzy-headed and not up to it" by Press Poodles looking to drive clicks and revenue from as wide an audience as possible, with no regard for reality-based consequences.
