How Do We Make Biden Look Younger?
We can’t. He is what he is. Biden sounds and acts old. I did not like him as a senator, He opposed any student loan relief. He also made it more difficult to get relief. As a president, he is different.
If we are to pick a president who has shown rather weak thinking, I would pick on George Bush Jr. To back this up, I offer you the marriage quotes. I will not offer you any of them, the link is there, and on every quote (83), he claims the man married well just like he did. I sometimes wonder who ran the office for him. Supposedly 911 threw him for a loop. In comparison, Bush Biden has managed a pandemic, the economy, a poorly planned withdrawal by a former president, etc. And we may not slip into a severe recession (New Deal democrat).
Kevin Drum has some thoughts also.
There is, obviously, not much that can be done about the fact that Biden reads as old. But having now listened to a number of Biden’s recent speaking gigs, there’s really no question that this is solely about his physical appearance. Cognitively, Biden is perfectly normal. The worst he ever does is the occasional verbal flub, a longtime Biden habit.
Agree with him or not, he says what he means to say and has obviously run the White House to his own specifications. He withdrew from Afghanistan despite internal qualms. He continued negotiating with Joe Manchin even though much of his staff hated the guy. He is staunchly pro-Israel in the face of a virtual staff revolt. He thinks Xi Jinping is a dictator and has repeated this through the grimaces of his Secretary of State.
Contrast that with Donald Trump, who doesn’t read as old but can barely remember who the president is, who he’s run against in the past, and how many world wars we’ve had.
We can either have the charade of an active president with a deteriorating mind behind it, or we can have an actual active president with a strong mind but physical limitations. Which would you rather have?
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AB Again: I do not believe his mind is deteriorating as much as he is forgetful due to the amount of pressure on him. He has done more than many younger presidents.
I left a correction in my words. Ten Bears noticed my error and shot me an email. I had already corrected it as I received his email.
Being old means I also miss some things which the super sharp young guy I used to be would not have missed. My mind tussles with how to make AB better, keep it alive, and attract new writers. Correct wording fits in there somewhere. I think I lack for enough RAM to handle all the input.
EYeah ~ we went into this with three strikes against him: his part in the end of the northwest timber industry, blocking the discharge of a bad educational investment afterward and then taking the last bit of emergency unemployment when left in a van down by the river by it all …
But he’s The Man for This Job. For These Interesting Times
Ten Bears:
I hope you caught my additional comment at the end of Kevin’s remarks.
I was just reading in the Globe that we Americans prize authenticity.
That explains both Biden & Trump, perhaps.
The Globe op-ed brings up the current importance of Reality TV. Trump was a big part of that, supposedly. But, Biden is authentically old. Trump would have us believe that he is less old.
I’m sticking with Biden.
It’s easy enough to find evidence that the United States are hardly that: a politics polarized and paralyzed beyond repair, any common ground of culture algorithmically splintered into countless media fragments. Even a steady erosion of religious affiliation suggests an increasingly faithless people, unbound by belief. But America does still share one ideal of worship, a passion for self-discovery that has become the central moral framework of our time.
Its name is authenticity. …
The last two paragraphs above are from the Globe piece. So is this…
(Mark Burnett gave us Donald Trump, tv star, and The Apprentice.)
How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success
The NYer – December 27, 2018
With “The Apprentice,” the TV producer mythologized Trump—then a floundering D-lister—as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency
I choose to think that George Bush Jr paved the way for Donald Trump.
Mainly with his classic line ‘Fool me once… Um, err… Can’t git fooled agin!’
(It’s supposed to be ‘Shame on me!’ But he went on to prove otherwise, sort of.)
We did, after all, re-elect him.
“Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me!” as the saying goes.
Can’t Get Fooled Again.
(George Bush, channeling The Who!)
“Won’t Get Fooled Again” is a song by the English rock band The Who, written by Pete Townshend. It was released as a single in June 1971, reaching the top 10 in the UK, while the full eight-and-a-half-minute version appears as the final track on the band’s 1971 album Who’s Next, released that August. …
You’re right, except for one thing: he was never ‘elected’ in the first place
Couldn’t be ‘re’-elected … and there’s still questions at that
Even if you claim it was the Supreme Court that did the voting, Bush was elected. But if they had left things alone, it we still elected Bush. Only if Gore had requested a full Florida recount, which is not what he did, would the result have changed.
Yeah, it’s moot in the generally accepted vernacular; it is what it is, what’s done is done, no point in rehashing it. To Fred’s point, I lump it all into together: Bush/Cheney getting away with bullying their way into it, letting Fox get away with pushing what had been the norms, Facebook pushing the norms … if it were possible for a cusp to cover a handful of years there it is.
When it became acceptable to be rude …
The most I’ve ever seen about who ‘would’ have won Florida was not that Gore got more votes, but that a whole lot of Palm Beach county voters were confused by their ballot design and voted for Buchanan when the probably thought they voted for Gore and those numbers sure seemed enough to put Gore over the top. “Ballot intent” items might have been close to a wash, since the voters were so closely split that kind of random stuff might not change anything. But that Palm Beach ballot cost Bush zero votes, but Gore a lot.
There’s a pretty good chance the next president isn’t going to be ‘elected’ either, because of how the Electoral College works. Until it’s fixed, we have to pretend that this is a functioning democracy. Or just hope for the best.
There was a time when the best/only way for Dems to get a president elected was to nominate a southerner. No luck with northerners. The GOP figured out how to deal with that, however. Until Obama. But then Trump came along.
I keep trying to get OEM for this, and am being told that they no longer make it.