No "Stopping the Steal" with Democrat power-brokers. In 2020 they decided that a dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet served their purposes, and in rapid succession forced out Bernie, Fauxcahontas, the gay guy, the sensible-shoes gal and the rest of the gang, and forced the dead husk in. Four years later they have decided the husk is a little too dead, and so...
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it's been the best... pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
So Biden gets served the Ultimate Anyway, and we are now supposed to get excited about which white-male governors in the Democrat Party are willing to challenge the first female... first black... first "Asian-American"... first Montreal schoolgirl... first Canadian since Chester Arthur to be nominated for president.
Oh, no, wait - he wasn't nominated; he succeeded after the incumbent was assassinated. Hmm.
If anyone thinks this is the last plot twist, you're forgetting we're in the final seasons of Dynasty here - the Fallon-abducted-by-space-aliens Moldavian-massacre phase.
All bets are off. Anybody who tells you they know what is going to happen is a liar.
There is going to be another series of black swan events before Election Day that throws everything off again.
The only thing that we know for sure is that there is corruption on the inside.
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) July 21, 2024
Indeed. The guys pulling this stuff have a way to go before they arrange the scenery for the final act. In the last month, we have had the Mister Magoos of the US media mysteriously deciding to notice, instantly, what had been obvious to everyone else on the planet, including six of the G7 leaders, for the last four years - immediately followed by a would-be assassination of the Leader of the Opposition that came within a millimeter or two of success, plus that Crowdstrike Election Day dress rehearsal, and a supposed internecine Democrat Party struggle between Team Biden and Team Obama that's about as authentic as the Benny Hill sketch about the shoot-out between the Halitosis Kid and the Gay Caballero. One for the road - Joe back when he was on his game:
In case you've forgotten, here's Joe Biden casually implying that Barack Obama is gay. From June of 2007. pic.twitter.com/G6GAyXeBKg
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 21, 2024
If you're a Mark Steyn Club member and read Diane Calabrese in our comments, you'll know that she has been predicting the events of the last couple of hours since ...well, since about ten minutes after Biden was sworn in. Random example from Diane in January 2023:
Here is [another commenter] imagining that our vino [Vice President in name only] is all innocence because she is simply too incapable to be involved in rigorous scheming. Dear me, dear me. Review vino's ascension in the Golden State. And recall the curious end to her campaign for president that landed her as vino. And now pino [President in name only] scorned her with the suggestion he would jettison her...oh my...
Someone will be jettisoned, but it won't be pino Harris. No Valley Girl she.
And so it has proved. The stream-of-unconsciousness airhead shtick is, like almost everything else in American politicking, a useful affect:
In case you missed that preview of her stump speech:
It is critical that we work together to understand where we are, to recognise and have the courage to speak truth about what is obsolete, and then to partner to ensure that we are speaking the same language with the same motivation inspired by the opportunity of it all.
And as I responded:
I know what you're thinking: you're thinking is our entire political discourse just one almighty leg pull? No, not at all. Kamala Harris has hundreds of staffers and a full team of writers. They wouldn't put her out there in public saying stuff like that if they didn't think it reassured people that she's just the person to take over from Joe Biden a couple more cases of Rebound Covid down the road.
And here we are, a couple more Covid cases down the road. Golly, even Joe's Big Finish sounds like it was drafted by Kamala:
I believe today what I always have: that there is nothing America can't do - when we do it together. We just have to remember we are the United States of America.
It's not clear Joe remembers we are the United States of America, so, alas, we'll have to do it together without him.
There are a lot of voters who like the Higher Bollocks Kamala can slough off so effortlessly. The stuff about working together to understand where we are can, in the right hands, be an appealing simulacrum of profundity. Particularly when sluiced through the court eunuchs of the Washington press corps - the same guys who've been telling us these last couple of weeks that the Democrat bigshots are at war with each other and have no consensus on the way forward, rather than merely doing a bit of dime-store melodrama while implementing the plan predicted way back at the dawn of the Biden Era by Diane Calabrese.
There seems to be a lot of coordinating for a Sunday afternoon. The Clintons have already endorsed Kamala, and the Biden campaign finance chair has already moved on:
Please give what you can today (money given here will be used 100% to elect Kamala Harris President).
The King is dead (an overdose of Paxlovid?), long live the...
The official social media account for the Biden-Harris campaign on X, @BidenHQ, has now officially been rebranded to @KamalaHQ.
It is yet another sign of how quickly the apparatus around President Biden's campaign is being repurposed to support Harris.
Indeed. If only the Secret Service at a Trump rally could move this fast.
And, just to put this in a global context, Joe's farewell message sounded a lot to me like a demented version of Liz Truss, British prime minister for twenty minutes. You can't tell the palace coups without a scorecard: Liz, weeks after winning the Tory leadership, was taken out by "the markets"; Biden, weeks after winning the Democrat nomination, was taken out by the donors ("No more dough until no more Joe"). There's a lot of it about, don't you think? You'd almost get the impression "elections" are just boob bait for the rubes...
Still, let us shed a tear for the latest guy to be written out of the soap. It's only a few weeks since MSNBC's Joe Scarborough was hailing the alleged commander-in-chief as "intellectually, analytically ...the best Biden ever". Then, tragically, the analytical genius came down with Sudden Overnight Dementia Syndrome. Because that's the world we live in: Long Covid, drive-thru dementia.
Biden now assures us that he's going to finish his term - which would be a novelty as, in terms of putting in a full day's work, he's never really started it. But we shall see. I've said before that it would be greatly to Kamala's advantage to run as the incumbent.
That's still the way to bet.
~After last week's cancellation of our Sunday Song of the Week, we're not going to nix another one just because of the pseudo-election campaign. So that will be posted shortly, and do join Mark later this evening for a brand new episode of his current Tale for Our Time, Bulldog Drummond.
