The Week: Voters Won't Ignore Biden's Age | June 7, 2024

Plus: D-Day at 80.

NATIONAL REVIEW JUNE 07, 2024 NATIONAL REVIEW JUN 07, 2024 ◼ What a pity that none of President Biden's periods of extended, brilliant, off-the-cuff lucidity is on camera.   ◼ The Wall Street Journal reported that Joe Biden is too old. The piece had the usual caveats: It limited its critique to "behind closed doors"; it used the euphemisms "slipping" and "appears slower"; it contained the usual Democratic Party insistences that Biden "remains a sharp and vigorous leader" and that any suggestions to the contrary must be the product of "partisan politics." To anyone with eyes, however, it rang clearly and obviously true. Five years ago, one might have had a shot at convincing the public that Joe Biden had always been like this. Now, the exercise is futile. President Biden is weak; he is slow; he is confused—and these shortcomings are the product not of a boyhood stutter, or of an unfair press, but of his advanced age. At 81, he is already the oldest person ever to have served as president. Were he to win a second term, he could continue in the role until he is 86. It is, no doubt, mightily inconvenient for the Democrats that Biden is determined to do just that, but that does not make it incumbent upon the voting public to pretend otherwise.   ◼ "I've done all I can do, just give me the power," President Biden said in January, trying to persuade Congress to pass an immigration bill. It turns out there is something more that Joe Biden can do: He can blow more smoke in a desperate attempt to hide the mess his administration created when it abandoned Donald Trump's border policies. Already, some are bragging or falsely complaining that Biden is "shutting down" the border with his executive order. The new executive order will supposedly impel administration officials to close the border once the seven-day average of illegal entries hits 2,500 per day. But many loopholes will allow the administration to avoid that and continue to admit more than a million asylum-seekers per year. The executive order does not address the 1,500 migrants per day who use the CBP One app at ports of entry. It doesn't affect the tens of thousands of migrants a month who fly directly to the United States and are "paroled" into the country via a kind of rolling amnesty for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. The executive order does little to combat the pipeline of asylum-seekers who come from outside of the Western Hemisphere. Ukrainians, Russians, Afghans, and Eritreans have been pioneering a path of flying to South America and then crossing the formerly impassable Darién Gap on foot before trekking through Mexico to the U.S. border. The U.S. encountered 6,000 Chinese nationals crossing the Mexican border in December 2023 alone. Biden is putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.   ◼ President Biden pitched what he said was a three-part Israeli plan to end the war in Gaza. It would start with a six-week cease-fire, with Israel withdrawing from populated areas in Gaza and Hamas releasing some living hostages—and returning the bodies of some dead ones—in exchange for Israel's releasing terrorist prisoners. During that period, the parties would negotiate the second phase: a permanent cease-fire and include the return of all hostages. The third phase would involve the reconstruction of Gaza. Israel had already accepted this basic structure but objected to how Biden presented it. He urged Israelis to declare victory because "Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another October 7." He also said the six-week cease-fire would continue indefinitely to accommodate ongoing negotiations on a permanent cease-fire. In contrast, Prime Minister Netanyahu, facing threats from his right to bring down his government, emphasized that there would be no permanent end to the war until Hamas was destroyed and all hostages were returned. Hamas, meanwhile, has said that any deal that excludes a permanent cease-fire is a nonstarter. It's no surprise that the terrorist group would dig in, given that each time it rejects an offer and the war drags on, Biden ramps up pressure on Israel to offer more concessions.   ◼ Prosecutors presented evidence from Hunter Biden's infamous laptop at his federal criminal trial in Delaware. That would be the same laptop that 51 former national-security officials, spurred by former Biden-campaign official and current secretary of state Antony Blinken, falsely portrayed as a product of Russian disinformation. Turns out that nearly a year before that, and before Joe Biden used that suggestion to rebut the claims of then-president Trump about the laptop's incriminating content, the FBI had obtained and authenticated the laptop data—though that didn't stop bureau officials from hinting to social-media platforms that reporting about the laptop should be suppressed. The laptop contained texts and other files proving, as witnesses and Hunter's own memoir attest, that he was bingeing on cocaine in October 2018 when he acquired a revolver in violation of federal law that bars illegal-drug users from possessing firearms. He falsely denied his drug use on a federal form and in information provided to a licensed gun dealer. Prosecutors expect to wrap up their case this week. Hunter's hope is that a Wilmington jury will be swayed more by his last name than by the evidence.   ◼ With Trump having been found guilty in his Manhattan criminal trial, Democrats are calling for Judge Juan Merchan—a Biden 2020 campaign donor, in unambiguous violation of state judicial-ethics rules—to impose a prison sentence. Merchan may do just that at the July 11 hearing—scheduled just four days before the Republican National Convention opens in Milwaukee. Trump was convicted of comparatively trivial bookkeeping offenses that were nonviolent and are ordinarily regarded as misdemeanors, though elected Democratic DA Alvin Bragg dubiously goosed them into felonies. In New York City, even serious crimes go unpunished or are otherwise pled down to misdemeanors to avoid incarceration under Bragg's "progressive" policies. Yet Bragg not only manufactured a case to get Trump in the preelection months; he pitched it to Merchan and the jury as a successful conspiracy to steal the 2016 election. That is the "crime" for which Merchan will impose sentence, and why progressives demand jail time. So far, Merchan has proven himself responsive to his fellow ideologues. ADVERTISEMENT ◼ Politics has always made strange bedfellows, but a political party is supposed to be more than one man's private club. Republican Senate nominee Larry Hogan wrote right before Donald Trump's New York conviction: "I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process. At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders—regardless of party—must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship." A noble sentiment, even if an understatement of how badly the legal system was abused to produce a conviction. But Hogan is running in deep-blue Maryland. To win, he needs both his independent, Trump-critical brand and the support (however grudging) of the pro-Trump base of the party. If the Republican National Committee were run by people who prioritized the party's best interests, they would let Hogan do what he needs to do. Instead, RNC co-chairperson Lara Trump, the former president's daughter-in-law, said Hogan "doesn't deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point, and quite frankly anybody in America." Trump loyalists are fond of lecturing others on needing to be team players in binary-choice elections. They should try the same.   ◼ Democrats have been very, very good to Bob Menendez. He has been an elected Democrat since 1986 and gained his Senate seat by appointment in 2006. The party stuck by him through a 2015 corruption indictment that ended in a hung jury. It kept him on as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 15 months after an FBI raid of his house turned up gold bars and stacks of foreign-bribe cash, resulting in a second indictment for corruption and for acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. Even with that trial ongoing, Democrats have not supported his expulsion from the Senate, unlike House Republicans when faced with revelations about George Santos. With the help of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the party's voters also beat back a primary challenge to his son, Representative Rob Menendez. But now Representative Andy Kim has won the Democratic primary to replace Menendez père in the Senate and the 70-year-old incumbent is running for reelection as an independent. That could make the race competitive in a state where Republicans haven't won a Senate election since 1972. Not only is there no honor among thieves; there are apparently no second acts in American political life, because nobody is ever willing to leave the stage.   ◼ Nobody of note in the U.S. wants to ban contraception, however much Democrats and the press are trying to persuade voters otherwise. Even Clarence Thomas, the only justice to say that the Supreme Court got it wrong when it found a constitutional right to contraception, has left open the possibility that other constitutional grounds for the right might exist. The Democrats are pretending a threat to the right exists by promoting a "Right to Contraception Act" that goes considerably beyond the unnecessary task of making sure that contraception is legal. The bill includes such policies as funding for Planned Parenthood, the nation's most prolific abortionists. If the bill were to pass, they would have been able to use the consensus for legal contraception to win further policy goals. Since Republicans have blocked the bill, however, they can portray them as stealthy opponents of contraception. Republicans are right to oppose the bill–and must do their best to expose the deceptive tactic. ADVERTISEMENT ◼ Mexico's presidential election didn't get a lot of attention in the U.S. media until it ended, and American coverage of Claudia Sheinbaum's victory mostly amounted to "yas queen!" cheerleading for Mexico's first female president. Sheinbaum is a protégé of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), and so far Sheinbaum sounds like she will keep moving in the same direction, perhaps becoming a de facto puppet of AMLO. This means a half-hearted fight, if that, against the cartels; more statist policies; and expanding the power of the presidency, steadily eroding the checks and balances in the Mexican government. Earlier this year, new evidence emerged to support the contention that AMLO had long been cozy with the notorious Sinaloa Cartel, while the record of the cartel's extensive and lucrative ties to China, through production of fentanyl and methamphetamine, grew clearer and clearer. The results of the Mexican election are likely to be bad news on both sides of the border.   ◼ Much has been made about "democratic backsliding" in India. It's not baseless. Freedom of religion and freedom of the press have come under threat under the Hindu-nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, in power since 2014. Two opposition leaders were charged with crimes in the lead-up to this year's general election. But an anti-BJP coalition significantly overperformed preelection polling to deny the BJP an outright majority in the Lok Sabha, the directly elected lower house of India's parliament. Modi will remain prime minister, but only with the aid of his coalition partners. The BJP won only 240 seats, not the 400 he hoped for on the campaign trail. The main opposition, the Indian National Congress party, embraced socialism in its campaigning, which makes its electoral resurgence a bit troubling. But if more than 600 million people can vote in an election with universal adult suffrage and stun an overconfident ruling party, with results viewed as trustworthy and fair by Indians and international observers alike, that's a democracy, even if it's a flawed one.   ◼ The New York Times recently ran a lengthy op-ed by Alina Chan explaining "Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points." Chan's five points are that Covid emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world's foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located; that in the year before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with the defining feature of SARS-CoV-2; that we have minimal evidence that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan; that the Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2; and that we lack the evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade. Chan offers no bombshell new findings, but the Times' decision to run her op-ed—and to create maps and infographics and other bells and whistles to illustrate the points—is something of a bombshell in and of itself. This is a declaration by the New York Times editorial board that the lab-leak theory is no longer disinformation, a conspiracy theory, or far-fetched nonsense. This brings the New York Times up to where some of us were in, oh, April 2020 or so.   ◼ Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (representing the main division of the institution that most people think of when someone insufferably ventures over cocktail-party chat that they "went to school in the Boston area") has announced that it will no longer require "DEI statements" from its potential hires. "Diversity, equity, and inclusion" statements—command performances by Harvard faculty aspirants who need to demonstrate the relevance of racially inclusive activist work to their scholarship on, say, agronomy in tsarist Russia—have of course been standard practice for elite universities for decades. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the first to drop them, as befits the demands of its founding imperative. Harvard once again returns to the game late, but better late than never.   ◼ When the Allies put fighting men ashore in France on Tuesday, June 6, 1944—80 years ago this week—they came as an army of free men to destroy the "monstrous tyranny" that Winston Churchill had indicted four years before. They stormed the slave state of Hitler's Fortress Europe. With their own blood, they liberated a suffering continent. The men who landed on French beaches or parachuted from the skies that June morning are now very old and very gray—the few who remain with us, that is. The average age of veterans of Normandy is over 100. This decadal anniversary may well be the last in which veterans of the action are present to be honored. Why did they do it? "We look at you," Reagan told the assembled veterans of Pointe du Hoc in 1984, "and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love." "You were here to liberate, not to conquer." VISIT THE WEEK ARCHIVE ON NATIONALREVIEW.COM. 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