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The Sudden And Remarkable Resurgence Of 'Sleepy Joe' Biden

The Sudden And Remarkable Resurgence Of 'Sleepy Joe' Biden

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

To readers of a certain age who grew up watching cowboy movies on TV, that timeless phrase signals a major plot development. Maybe the scheming rancher with the mustache is ordering his henchmen to saddle up. Alternately, a hero in a white hat may be entering the fray.

Either way, somebody’s about to get a surprise.

Sometimes politics works that way too.

One year ago, I posted the following on my Facebook page: “Regarding Biden's speech about the Afghan collapse: I haven't seen such passionate unanimity among the DC commentariat since they went all-in on the absolute necessity of invading Iraq.”

Pretty much from that day, Joe Biden has been depicted in the national political press as the proverbial Dead Man Walking. “Sleepy Joe” as Donald Trump dubbed him, was headed for a mid-term shellacking.

Come November 8, 2022, resurgent Republicans would take over both houses of Congress and spend the remaining two years of Biden’s futile presidency investigating his troubled son, Hunter. Maybe Hillary Clinton too.

In retrospect, the Afghan retreat wasn’t such a catastrophe after all. After Trump surrendered to the Taliban, agreeing to leave Afghanistan without consulting its U.S.-backed government, the die was cast. Biden either needed to re-escalate or get out fast. One thing you won’t hear today is anybody keen to go back in. It’s both unthinkable and un-thought.

Then came sky-high gas prices and commodity inflation, making the president’s political future look dim. No matter which channel you watched, every TV news broadcast featured somebody griping at a gas pump or bitching about expensive eggs. On supposedly liberal CNN, Wolf Blitzer practically snarled “inflation” at every Democrat he interviewed.

And it was all Biden’s fault, particularly the parts he had absolutely no control over, such as the worldwide price of crude oil.

Let’s Go, Brandon.

Back at the ranch, however, Brandon got going. Or something. Due to additional circumstances beyond the U.S. president’s control, such as China’s sputtering economy, oil prices --and with them the cost of gasoline -- began to drop. And largely due to actions by the Federal Reserve, also outside Biden’s jurisdiction, inflation began to level off.

Syndicated columnist Froma Harrop noticed the supposedly liberal New York Times—sometimes I think that should be the newspaper’s official name—giving the president grudging praise: “Slowing inflation gave Biden a reprieve buthigh prices remain a political problem."

Still high, yes, but moving in the right direction.

Job growth, meanwhile, remained strong. Fully 500,000 Americans found new jobs last month. The news media started to notice that the national unemployment rate had reached a 50-year low. With gas prices dropping, how long before Americans noticed that the U.S. economy is actually quite strong? In politics, momentum counts.

And then came the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, essentially ruling that citizens in different states have different constitutional rights, and that women have fewer of them than men. Kansas voters turned out in record numbers to show what middle America thought of that—an electoral thunderbolt that imperils far-right Republicans.

“The situation has changed with astonishing speed," wrote New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “In the span of a few weeks, Biden’s presidency is back from the dead and looking something close to triumphant.”

Even before the Democrats’ recent extraordinary legislative achievements —the Inflation Reduction Act, enacting higher taxes on profitable corporations, enabling Medicare to bargain down drug prices, giving the IRS resources to pursue wealthy tax cheats, and boosting green energy while supporting fossil fuel production in the meantime—polls had begun to show a marked shift in the Democrats’ direction.

Yes, a lot of it’s due to Sen. Joe Manchin’s extraordinary change of heart, but it was old Sleepy Joe who urged Democrats to understand where the West Virginian was coming from. Many progressive Democrats wanted to purge him. Fat lot of good that would have done.

Democrats have even gained a lead over Republicans nationwide in the so-called “generic ballot” asking voters which party they’re inclined to support in congressional elections. As the Washington Post’s Dana Millbank points out, it’s “the first time in the modern era" that “momentum has shifted toward an incumbent president’s party at this point in a midterm election year.”

Of course, polls are only polls, and anything can happen between now and November. The Biden administration has also gotten a lot of help from Republicans. Whatever possessed GOP Senators to vote against health care for veterans sickened by military “burn pits?” Or to kill legislation capping the price of insulin for diabetics?

Then there’s Old Unreliable, Donald J. Trump forcing himself into the spotlight again, the spittle-flecked face of Republican rage. So, what’ll it be, America? Steady Old Good-Government Joe or the Sideshow Ape Man, hooting and flinging feces?

America made this choice once, and decisively.

Must we really do it again?

'Like Throwing Your Life Away': Greene's Latest Rant Insults US Troops

'Like Throwing Your Life Away': Greene's Latest Rant Insults US Troops

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) recently delivered an offensive blow targeting the United States armed services. The far-right Republican lawmaker made the remarks during her April 9 appearance on former Fox News host Lou Dobbs' podcast.

According to Newsweek, Dobbs raised questions and concerns about the "quality of people" leading the U.S. Department of Defense under the Biden administration.

In response to his remarks, Greene named a number of reasons why Americans should not enlist in the military under President Joe Biden's policies. She also suggested that the military's challenges in gaining the interest of potential recruits are due to people seeing "the way they're treated."

In the wake of the pandemic, the military has acknowledged its struggle to recruit new members. In fact, the U.S Armed Forces did admit that it did not meet its new recruitment goal for 2021.

However, Dobbs raised another question about recruitment asking why would individuals be interested in enlisting now with "boots on the ground" as approximately 100,000 U.S. service members are now overseas in Europe. Without evidence, Dobbs also believes potential recruits might be deterred from enlisting following Biden's withdrawal of troops that were stationed in Afghanistan.

"Can you imagine explaining to a recruit, you're gonna be just fine, just like those Marines in Kabul," Dobbs said of the 13 armed forces members who died at Afghanistan's capital airport during the withdrawal back in August of last year.

"We may not have time to come back and get you. But you know, it'll work out all right [...] We're going to fight a third world country for two decades and walk out with our tail between our legs," Dobbs added. "Who in his or her right mind would say 'sign me up for that, Sarge?'"

Greene responded, "Not my son, and I know a lot of young people don't want to have anything to do with that. It's like throwing your life away.

"Not to mention how they've been forced to take the vaccine and the ones that didn't want to take it have been discharged. Who wants to be treated that way?"

Greene went on to offer a flawed assessment of the "rules of engagement" insisting people "are 'shot at, killed and maimed' before they're allowed to fire back and defend themselves."

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

Jeff Zucker's CNN Legacy: Selling Drama Over News

Jeff Zucker's CNN Legacy: Selling Drama Over News

News that Jeff Zucker, CNN’s longtime, larger-than-life chief, has been forced out for failing to disclose a consensual relationship he was having with a colleague, signals the end of an era for the all-news channel. One of the most celebrated TV programmers of his generation — he was Today’s executive producer at age 26 — Zucker leaves an indelible mark on CNN. He exits as the network struggles through a steep, post-Trump ratings slump, while desperately trying to manufacture Biden-era theater by relentlessly hyping “crisis” coverage. (Afghanistan! Inflation!)

His messy departure gives CNN executives a chance to review the network’s addiction to selling drama over news — to manufacturing storylines for the sake of viewer continuity.

Zucker is a storyteller first and foremost, a newsman second. Learning a key lesson from Roger Ailes at Fox News, Zucker preferred that there be running storylines with easily identifiable characters that ran for weeks and months on end, which made it easy for viewers to follow along the moment they tuned in because they already knew the plot line and the main characters. Why do you think this week Fox News is back pushing the phony story that Hillary Clinton is going to run for president again? Because for the Fox audience, Clinton serves as a popular, instantly recognizable villain.

Under Trump, it was easy for CNN to execute that strategy because his presidency was a long-running drama, often with unbelievable plots twists driven by an array of outlandish characters. The most important thing to understand about CNN and Trump is that the network’s profits doubled after he became president. Doubled.

CNN famously helped Trump get elected and then treated him as a reality TV star. According to a leaked phone call from the height of the Republican primary season, Zucker buttered up Trump's longtime attorney Michael Cohen: "You guys have had great instincts, great guts, and great understanding of everything." (I guarantee you Zucker was not having similar phone calls with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.)

Zucker stressed how "fond" he was of Trump, wished he could talk to him "every day," and then floated the idea of giving Trump a "weekly show" on CNN during the campaign. The whole thing was inconceivable, unless you view American elections as nothing more that entertainment, and your job as the head of CNN is to secure pleasing content. (Zucker turned Trump into an Apprentice TV star a decade earlier when he oversaw NBC.)These were some of the questions put to Trump by Anderson Cooper during a CNN campaign town hall:

•"What do you eat when you roll up at a McDonald's, what does - what does Donald Trump order?"

•"What's your favorite kind of music?"

•"How many hours a night do you sleep?"

•"What kind of a parent are you?"

•"What is one thing you wish you didn't do?"

In an unprecedented campaign move, CNN aired endless Trump rallies live and in their entirety. No explanation was ever given why the events were covered as "news," while no other candidates’ rallies received that kind of uninterrupted airtime. “I like Donald,” Zucker told the New York Times in 2017. “He’s affable. He’s funny.”

During his presidency, CNN refused to pull the plug on Trump no matter how outrageous and dangerous his behavior became, like after one of the most bizarre televised performances by a sitting president. That planned rant from April 2020 featured a campaign-style commercial that aired in the White House briefing room and attacked the media as well as Trump's critics. Immediately following the meltdown, CNN anchor John King admitted, "That was propaganda aired at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room."

So why did CNN keep airing Trump briefings? Because the network saw it as a compelling storyline — it was dramatic.

Also, why did CNN keep hiring congenital liars who were paid by the network to fabricate nonsense in the name of defending Trump?

In 2019, the network hired Sean Duffy as a commentator to blindly defend Trump during his first impeachment. The former Republican congressman quickly created problems by constantly fabricating facts and spreading reckless and dangerous conspiracy theories.

That same year, CNN for weeks stood by its inexplicable decision to hire as its national political editor Sarah Isgur Flores, who spent her career flacking for Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, and Carly Fiorina. Flores had absolutely no journalism experience. As Norman Ornstein succinctly put it, “Time after time, to curry favor with the right, Jeff Zucker and CNN soil themselves.”

Addicted to that drama and the Breaking News culture of the Trump years, CNN has desperately tried to recreate that frenzy under President Joe Biden, even though his administration represents the antithesis of the chaotic, criminal enterprise that Trump oversaw.

During the Afghanistan troop withdrawal, CNN’s Kabul reporter famously announced the U.S. would never be able to airlift 50,000 people out of the country (“it can’t happen”), and the network claimed the U.S. was inflicting “moral injury” by “abandoning” allies. Yet the U.S. ended up evacuating 130,000 people, in the most successful post-war operation of its kind. CNN also claimed that Biden’s long-expected troop withdrawal meant the U.S. was “walking away from the world stage” and “leaving Europe exposed.” Fact: Most European troops left Afghanistan eight years ago.

On and on it went as CNN insisted on injecting hysteria into an already compelling event, all in the name of chasing ratings and selling drama over news.

Reprinted with permission from PressRun

Testimony By Military Chiefs Vindicates Biden's Afghan Decisions, Evacuation

Testimony By Military Chiefs Vindicates Biden's Afghan Decisions, Evacuation

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

Top military leaders appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, taking questions from lawmakers about, among other topics, President Joe Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden has faced heavy criticism for the chaotic evacuation and has seen his approval numbers decline since it was carried out. But despite much of the media's framing and the Republicans' spin, Biden's actions and choices were largely vindicated by the day's testimony.

CNN, for one, didn't see it that way. It aired a segment Tuesday afternoon focusing on the fact that officials testified that they advised Biden to leave 2,500 troops in Afghanistan rather than pull out completely at the end of August, as he did. Host Jake Tapper said this contradicted Biden's remark in an ABC News interview that he hadn't acted against the generals' advice.

Since the withdrawal, many commentators in the media concluded that the chaos that resulted must be blamed on Biden. Backed by military hawks, many of whom helped launch the disastrous War on Terror in the first place, pundits grasped for concrete failures they could pin on Biden. CNN and Tapper seemed happy to latch on to this one: Biden didn't listen to the generals. And to make it worse, he lied about it.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz seized on this issue too:

But this framing of the hearing was superficial and misleading.

When Biden was asked by ABC News about reports about the generals advising him to leave troops in Afghanistan, he gave a defensive and admittedly confusing answer. At one point, he said he couldn't recall anyone giving him this advice. But he also said that the generals were "split" on the issue, directly implying that some of them had, in fact, given this advice. It was a squirrelly answer, to be sure, but it's not a major cover-up.

And the reality isn't a mystery at all. In fact, the central narrative of Biden's decision to pull out of Afghanistan was precisely that he was going against the mainstream views of the hawks in the national security community and the top military brass. Many argued that this was what made the decision bold and difficult for Biden, and it's why Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama before him were never able to leave the country, despite their stated desires to end such conflicts. Biden finally stood up to the generals.

After all, the general's advice to leave behind 2,500 troops wasn't a piece of tactical wisdom that Biden ignored. They were asking him to abandon his central policy objective on Afghanistan, which was to get out. They were also asking him to abandon the deal Trump had made in 2020 to finally leave the country.

For the media to latch on to this criticism is to give away the game so many of Biden's critics in the commentariat have played. It was a constant refrain from critics during the withdrawal that Biden's choice to leave — a highly popular position among voters — wasn't the problem; the problem was the way Biden did it. That argument completely collapses if one takes the position that the thing Biden could have done to withdraw better was not withdraw at all.

Indeed, despite the fact that so many of Biden's critics were desperate to say he botched a withdrawal that, in theory, could have been run properly, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley gave testimony completely contradicting this view.

"From an operational and tactical standpoint, [the evacuation] was successful. Strategically, the war was lost. The enemy is in Kabul," Milley said. "It was a logistical success but a strategic failure."

This is precisely what many in the media and the GOP refuse to acknowledge. The evacuation actually went off remarkably well, given the conditions it was carried out under. The military didn't expect the Afghan government to collapse as quickly as it did, but once it fell, the U.S. implemented a high-stakes plan to evacuate more than 100,000 people from a hostile country with impressive agility.

The strategic failure, such as it is, also isn't Biden's. It was a failure of the war itself, which began 20 years ago. But that fault doesn't lay with the Biden presidency. He came in with the Trump administration's agreement to leave the country already in place and with an American people who were ready to see the war end. And under his leadership, the military carried out a successful evacuation from a dismal situation.

Milley even admitted that, had the president followed his and others' advice to leave in 2,500 troops, the Afghan government wouldn't have been able to sustain itself when U.S. forces withdrew.

"The end-state probably would've been the same, no matter when you did it," he said.

And Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admitted that, had the U.S. stayed behind past August, it would have reignited the war and required more troops to be sent in:

These facts effectively demolish the mainstream criticisms of Biden on Afghanistan. The evacuation was a logistical success. The main alternative Biden was presented with by the generals was leaving 2,500 troops behind. That would've reignited war with the Taliban, required more troops, and it wouldn't have fortified the Afghan government to better resist the Taliban in the future. It would've just been kicking the can down the road, and whenever the U.S. finally decided to pull out for real, the "end-state probably would've been the same."

But Biden's critics refuse to learn these lessons, even when they're presented under oath.

There is one major criticism of Biden on Afghanistan that does have merit, though, but Republicans and members of the media rarely raise it. He was much too slow in issuing Special Immigrant Visas that were already in the pipeline for Afghans who had helped the U.S. military and wanted to leave. And he should've made it much easier for refugees of all kinds to leave the country and come to the United States. Biden was far more permissive of accepting Afghan immigrants than the Trump administration was, but not nearly to the extent demanded by the circumstances and justice.

That's a very different story from the one we're hearing. But it's what the public should know.