https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fskCiuegmPo

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks to Megyn Kelly and Sage Steele about their reactions to the first presidential debate for the 2024 election. They give their reactions to all the best and worst moments of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Washington: As far as performances go, it was an unmitigated disaster.

Joe Biden had one job in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election: to persuade voters that he is mentally and physically capable of another four years in the White House.

But with the eyes of the world watching – and many for the first time since the campaign began in earnest this year – America’s oldest-ever president failed to meet the moment.

The 81-year-old looked slow and sluggish from the minute he walked onto the stage.

His voice was soft and raspy as he gave his first answer, although the White House would later claim he had a cold.

He missed numerous opportunities to articulate his policies and contrast them with Donald Trump’s.

And twelve minutes in, came the most awkward moment of all: when he froze for a few seconds after he lost his train of thought while discussing the economy.

It didn’t take long for the panic to set in.

“That was painful,” said Van Jones, a Democratic political analyst for CNN. “I think there’s a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now.”

Andrew Yang, who debated Biden as a presidential primary candidate for the Democrats in 2020, echoed the sentiment.

“What’s Joe Biden’s superpower? That he’s a good guy who will do the right thing for the country,” he said. “In this case, that’s stepping aside and letting the [Democratic National Convention] choose another nominee.”

And David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to former president Barack Obama, was equally blunt.

“There are gonna be discussions about whether he should continue,” he said.

This stoush was always Donald Trump’s to lose.

Indeed, as Biden stepped onto the stage at CNN’s studios in Atlanta, polls showed only 38 per cent of Americans believed he was doing a good job as president, with Trump nudging ahead in key battleground states – despite his newfound status as a convicted criminal.

The president had sought this historically early debate hoping to build fresh momentum to make November’s election less of a referendum on him, and more of a choice about two starkly different visions for the future.

He had even spent a week prepping for the debate with a team of advisers. But by the end of the 90-minute prime-time event, Biden hadn’t allayed general concerns about his age at all - he had made his age the central focus for voters.

With only weeks until the Democratic National Convention in August – when the party formally nominates Biden as their candidate – members are now facing an existential crisis.

D

o they continue with the incumbent president, knowing there’s always the risk of Trump returning to power?

Or do they ask him to step aside in favour of a younger candidate? The party has no shortage of new generation options, starting of course with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is next in line, along with Biden surrogates such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

However, no incumbent president has dropped out this late in the campaign cycle, and it is not quite clear what might happen if Biden decided to.

Trump, meanwhile, didn’t exactly put on a stellar performance either. He consistently evaded answering questions directly, repeatedly lied or exaggerated about issues such as the border crisis, abortion and climate change, and got increasingly nasty as the night wore on.

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” he quipped as Biden, who has a stutter, struggled to make a point. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

After the debate, it was left up to Harris to clean up the mess, admitting that the president had a “slow start” but ended with a “strong finish.”

“I’m not going to spend all night with you talking about the last 90 minutes when I’ve been watching the last three-and-a-half years,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, when repeatedly pressed about the panic in her party.

The tragedy is that Biden has indeed had many policy achievements over the last three and a half years – but very few of them would have cut through to the millions of viewers watching tonight.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/democrats-with-no-shortage-of-replacement-options-after-biden-s-unmitigated-disaster-20240628-p5jpmb.html

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By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

It’s very revealing how everybody’s focusing on what Joe Biden’s dementia-addled debate performance says about his ability to win re-election instead of on the fact that the current, sitting president of the United States has dementia.

If you were lucky enough to have missed the debate, Biden was so confused and zoned outthat not only did CNN’s audience overwhelmingly say former U.S. President Donald Trump won while the word “dementia” was sent trending on Twitter, but it was also uniformly acknowledged to have been a horrifying catastrophe by Democratic Party operatives and liberal media pundits, who are now widelysuggesting that the president should withdraw from the race.

But the conversation has almost entirely revolved around Biden as a presidential candidate, with relatively little attention going to the fact that this person is the president right now. Everyone’s talking about whether Biden can assure American voters that he has what it takes to be president, and nobody seems all that concerned about the fact that he is already president and will remain so for half a year.

What this suggests is that people already kind of know on some level that the president of the United States doesn’t really run the United States, but are still mentally compartmentalized away from this reality enough to care who wins the presidential election. 

If people really believed the president runs the country, they’d be freaking out that Biden in his demented haze might order an attack on what he may think is still the Soviet Union or nuke Libya to kill Muammar Gaddafi or something.

They’re not worried that this will happen because they know their government is actually being run by unelected empire managers from behind the scenes, and that Biden is just the official face on the operation.

So in order to hold their mainstream worldview together, liberals are simultaneously straddling the two completely contradictory concepts that (A) it doesn’t matter who the president is because the country is actually run by unelected empire managers, and (B) that Biden’s debate performance was very concerning because it means Trump will become president. 

If they let go of (A) then they’re no longer in the mainstream worldview where their country works how they were taught it works in school, and if they let go of (B) then they’re no longer in the mainstream worldview where presidential elections are super duper important and all their country’s problems are the result of Americans voting incorrectly. 

They straddle both and try not to think too hard about the obvious contradictions between them, in order to avoid the crushing cognitive dissonance they’d experience if they looked at them too closely.

In reality the U.S. empire has marched along in all its usual depravity despite its official leader having Swiss cheese for a brain this entire time. 

They got their genocide in Gaza and their world-threatening proxy war against Russia, as well as a China policy that is vastly more hawkish than that of Biden’s predecessors. 

The imperial murder machine hasn’t skipped a beat in its nonstop campaign of steadily increasing global tyranny.

This has happened because U.S. presidential elections are fake and the results don’t matter. 

It wouldn’t matter if Americans elected a labrador retriever or a bottle of Tabasco sauce; the empire would roll forward without the slightest interruption. 

The wars would continue. The economic injustice would continue. The surging authoritarianism would continue. The oligarchy and corruption would continue. The ecocidal capitalism would continue. The imperialist extraction would continue.

U.S. elections are just a diversion to keep Americans from pushing for real change in ways that pose a meaningful challenge to power, and Americans already kind of know this. 

The sooner they stop compartmentalizing away from this fact that they’re already dimly aware of and face reality, the sooner they can start bringing health to both their nation and the world.

Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes.  For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.

This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/28/caitlin-johnstone-biden-not-running-the-show/

Democrats must admit that US President Joe Biden is no longer capable of resoundingly defeating Donald Trump on Election Day in November and that is why they must find a more suitable candidate to replace him, The New York Times editorial board wrote on Friday. 

The appeal came a day after Biden delivered what many described as a disastrous performance against Trump during the live presidential debate in Atlanta, Georgia. Observers noted that Biden appeared frail and confused, struggling to finish his sentences and mixing up words when speaking. 

In a piece published on Friday, the Times cast doubt on the certainty that Biden would repeat his 2020 win over Trump. 

“That is no longer a sufficient rationale for why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year,” the editorial board wrote. “Voters… cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago.”

The board further argued that Biden appeared on the debate stage “as the shadow of a great public,” who “struggled” to articulate his own policy position and ultimately failed to adequately counter Trump. 

“There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency,” the board wrote. “It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.” 

The editorial board concluded that Democrats have a better chance of defeating Trump if they “acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place.”

While the board did not propose any alternatives, the US media and pundits have suggested that several prominent Democrats could potentially replace Biden as candidate, including Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Multiple leading liberal journalists and public figures have acknowledged that Biden performed badly on Thursday night. A flash poll conducted by CNN revealed that 67% of registered voters who watched the debate felt that Trump had won.

Several outlets cited unnamed Biden staffers who tried to justify the president’s performance by saying that he has been suffering from a cold and was “over-prepared and relying on minutiae.” 

Biden appeared to acknowledge his flaws shortly after the debate. “I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he told a crowd of supporters during a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday. “I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to.” 

Nevertheless, he vowed to continue the campaign and insisted that he is best qualified for the presidency. “I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back,” Biden said.

https://www.rt.com/news/600181-nyt-board-replace-biden/

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Joe Biden’s surprisingly bad debate performance on Thursday night has prompted panic, confusion and even sadness in the Democratic Party, including among people close to the president.

There are now serious conversations taking place at the top of the party, in the White House and in the Biden-Harris campaign about a range of options, one of which is whether Joe Biden should step down as a candidate for president.

Democratic officials, political operatives, and people close to the president paint a picture of an anxious Democratic Party that is seriously concerned about the strength of their candidate and whether he can beat Donald Trump in November.

Among some of the president's allies I’ve spoken to, there’s been hand-wringing about how the preparation for the debate in Atlanta was handled.

These people say Mr Biden was over-prepared and overworked by his campaign team - and that if he had been given more time simply to rest in the week leading up to the debate, he would have done much better. Maybe there were too many voices and perspectives and data points put in his head, one campaign source suggested to me, and that just threw him off.

While that analysis may be correct, the claim that the president was tired and overworked will do little to quell the very real fears that Mr Biden’s advanced age may impact his ability to win this election.

These fears over the president’s age, mental fitness and stamina - and the insistence that something must be done about it - are far from new.

Back in September, the prominent political columnist David Ignatius, who was a confidant of Mr Biden’s, stated that the president should step aside. In February, Ezra Klein of the New York Times said much the same in a column that generated both buzz and irritation among those inside the White House.

Until now, those voices have been one-offs. That changed after last night’s poor debate performance.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c903pqyn971o

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