Dear Weekend Jolter,
Jack Crowe here, filling in for Judd Berger, who will be back next weekend.
It is fashionable, just now, to say that Americans get the leaders we deserve. As a people, we have our problems, and this magazine spills a lot of ink diagnosing and proposing solutions to them.
But looking around at the state of the country and all that’s great about it, I just can’t believe that we deserve this.
We are an unbelievably dynamic, innovative, and wealthy country that is currently engaged in a heated national debate over whether our government — the largest and most complex organization of human beings ever assembled — should be presided over by an 81-year-old man whom most people would not trust with the car keys, or Donald Trump — the less said here about him, the better.
Those are our options.
Meanwhile, as the editors detailed in our July 4 editorial, we are:
still the nation of Elvis, Mark Twain, and the rhetorical brilliance of "I have a Dream." Americans are still the people that produce giants such as Willie Mays, Thomas Edison, and Harriet Tubman.
Americans are still the people of Joshua Chamberlain's "fix bayonets!" charge at Little Round Top and John Paul Jones's "I have not yet begun to fight!" defiance and General Anthony McAuliffe's sending back the one-word reply "Nuts!" to the Wehrmacht's demand that the surrounded 101st Airborne Division surrender at Bastogne.
The discordance is maddening: How can such an incredible country, full of people capable of such indelible achievements, allow itself to be governed by either of these two men?
It’s not as if Americans are on board with this situation, sleepwalking toward November in a state of passive acceptance. As David Zimmermann reported earlier this week, 80 percent of voters say Biden is too old to run, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll. Biden’s debate performance seems to have jarred progressive opinion makers into a realization most Americans seem to have had some years ago: Biden is simply too frail to continue. The prominent columnists and anchors were shocked — just shocked! — by how bad things had gotten.
The Biden campaign seems to understand that their candidate is barely treading water. Once Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas broke ranks on Tuesday and became the first sitting Democrat to publicly call on Biden to withdraw, the campaign began calling around to congressional offices in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding, as Zach Kessel and Audrey Fahlberg reported on Wednesday:
The Biden campaign is in damage-control mode. The president's campaign team has been contacting Democratic lawmakers and their senior staff in an effort to shore up support for the president and reassure members that Biden is capable of staying on the ticket.
Those phone calls, text messages, and emails from the president's campaign team, relayed to National Review by multiple sources familiar with the conversations, reflect the sense of desperation setting in within Biden-world as the president's staff tries to assuage fears about the presumptive Democratic nominee's post-debate viability.
Having passed through the denial and bargaining stages of grief, Democrats outside the Biden campaign have begun to accept that they need to start at least imagining what a post-Biden world would look like. Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the man who is perhaps most responsible for elevating Biden to the presidency, endorsed the idea of holding a “mini-primary” ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August, should Biden drop out.
"You can actually fashion the process that's already in place to make it a mini-primary, and I would support that absolutely," Clyburn told CNN anchor Erica Hill. "We can't close that down, and we should open up everything for the general election."
Under Clyburn’s proposal, if Biden were to withdraw — a course of action his team insists he’s not even considering — his replacement could be chosen during a virtual roll call of Democratic delegates in mid July.
So, Americans may be spared the indignity of choosing between Biden and Trump, only to have a replacement foisted upon them by the same party elites who have, in many cases, covered for and excused Biden’s infirmity for the past four years. And, more than likely, we’d end up with Kamala Harris, whom White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre touted as “the future of the party” during a briefing earlier this week.
Again, we deserve better. It’s time our two major parties started acting like it.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Watch and learn — what not to do: Trump Shouldn't Repeat the Kamala Harris Mistake
Just how “official” were Trump’s 2020 election-subversion efforts?: Trump's Partial Victory at the Supreme Court
A win for the Constitution, just in time for the Fourth: The Administrative State Is Put Back in Its Constitutional Place
A failure of historic proportions: The Biden Debate Debacle
ARTICLES
Brittany Bernstein: Labour Party's Keir Starmer Becomes U.K.'s New Prime Minister after Landslide Victory
Ryan Mills: Should Government Hinder Private-School Growth? Wisconsin District Calls It 'Fiscally Responsible'
Haley Strack: Trump Sentencing Delayed Until September as Judge Weighs Supreme Court Immunity Decision
James Lynch: White House Confirms Hunter Biden Prepped the President for Brief Primetime Address
James Lynch: 'So Elderly': Disheartened Democratic Voters React Live to Biden's Debate Performance
Andrew Follett: American Ingenuity Is Beating China in Space
Charles C. W. Cooke: Axios Bungles the 'Imperial Presidency'
Zach Kessel: Major Teachers' Union to Vote on Resolution Accusing Israel of 'Genocide'
Zach Kessel: Jewish Groups Bring 19th-Century Weapon to Legal Fight against Antisemitism at Columbia: The KKK Act
Philip Klein: New York Times Now Claims Video Footage Is Evidence of Biden's Decline
Dan McLaughlin: Actually, Presidents Still Can't Murder People with Impunity
Andrew McCarthy: My Immunity-Case Prediction, Right and Wrong
Noah Rothman: Democrats Have Become What They Claim to Hate
David Zimmermann: Judge Blocks Biden Ban on Natural-Gas Exports in Win for Red-State Coalition
David Zimmermann: Rudy Giuliani Disbarred in New York over False 2020 Election Claims
John O’Sullivan: Voting for the Opposite of What You Want
Caroline Downey: Non-Binary Ex–Biden Official Sam Brinton Gets Plea Deal with No Jail Time
Audrey Fahlberg: Jill Biden's Former Spokesman Reflects on First Lady's Role in the President's 2024 Decision
CAPITAL MATTERS
Vance Ginn explains how state tax cuts are reshaping the American economy: The State Tax-Cut Revolution: Sustainable Budgeting for Long-Term Prosperity
Republicans should go around union leadership to get to their members, argues Akash Chougule: Republicans Don't Need to Embrace Union Leaders to Win Union Workers
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
David Zimmermann asks whether Angel Studios can recreate the success of Sound of Freedom with its latest child-focused film: Can Sound of Hope Recapture Lightning in a Bottle?
Armond White is unimpressed with Kevin Costner’s latest attempt to capture the spirit of the Old West: Kevin Costner's News-Adjacent Ambitions
INDEPENDENCE DAY EXCERPTS
Caroline Downey’s reporting on the housing of male inmates in a Washington State women’s prison has led to the transfer of at least one male inmate back to a men’s prison. Caroline reports on this small victory for sanity:
A transgender-identifying male felon with a violent criminal past has been moved out of a Washington State women's prison and placed in a men's facility after he was caught in a prohibited sexual encounter with a female inmate.
The Department of Corrections took Bryan Kim, who goes by Amber FayeFox Kim, out of the Washington Corrections Center for Women, colloquially called "Purdy," and placed him in the Monroe Correctional Facility. Kim's removal came after National Review reported on a March incident in which a Purdy corrections officer discovered him having sexual intercourse with 25-year-old Sincer-A Marie Nerton.
"The reason for Kim's transfer was due to ongoing safety concerns," the DOC told National Review.
Kim was found guilty in 2008 of two counts of aggravated first-degree murder in the stabbing of his father, Richard Kim, and the bludgeoning and strangulation of his mother, Terri Kim, the Spokesman-Review reported. Kim killed his parents at their Mount Spokane home on December 5, 2006, as they returned from work. After attempting to clean up the murder scene and hide his parents' bodies in an outbuilding, Kim went shopping the next day, using his father's debit card to withdraw $1,000 from his parents' account. For his crimes, Kim was sentenced to life in prison.
On March 14, in the Medium-security unit of Purdy, a prison guard peered into a cell during a routine check and saw Kim "laying on the floor completely nude from the waist down with their cellmate Nerton Sincer-A on top of them also nude from the waist down actively having sex," the incident report obtained by National Review reads.
Audrey Fahlberg takes a look back at the presidential campaign of that much-maligned prophet, Dean Phillips, as he enjoys his “I told you so” moment:
Things didn't go quite as he'd hoped — even with Biden relying on a write-in campaign after pushing the Democratic National Committee to grant South Carolina the Granite State's first-in-the-nation primary status. The independently wealthy Democratic congressman notched 19.6 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, but never gained steam in the polls or in primary contests. He dropped out after Super Tuesday.
"I had to do so because there was no way to raise the resources necessary to carry on any kind of meaningful campaign because that's how the system prevents challenges to an incumbent," Phillips told National Review in April. "I would have liked to, and I still think that would have been the appropriate strategy." But he ultimately suspended his campaign because he "did not want to risk a long campaign that would undermine not just Democrats' chances but the country's chances of preventing a Trump presidency."
Six months later, Phillips must be feeling an indescribable sense of vindication after watching his former primary competitor suffer one of the most disastrous presidential debates in modern memory — a crash and burn he had predicted for during his short-lived presidential run.
"I think his weakness predated my entrance," Phillips told CNN in December. "By exposing him now, is that not a service to the Democratic Party? Because he's going to be exposed on a much more difficult stage in a number of months if he becomes the nominee.
Phillips hasn't said "I told you so" — at least not yet — opting instead to invoke Gandhi in a day-after social media post: "Speak only if it improves upon the silence." But he didn't need to say anything at all. The moment spoke for itself. The very same Democrats who spent months savaging Phillips in the press are reaping what they've sown after years pretending away voters' long-running concerns about Biden's age and fitness to serve.
Michael Brendan Dougherty puts his finger on the rock-bottom state of American presidential politics:
Back in 1991, the Louisiana governor's race came down to Ku Klux Klansman David Duke and convicted criminal Edwin Edwards. The black-humor slogan of the campaign: "Vote for the crook, it's important."
Don't envy the Democratic pollsters who have to interpret what happened to Joe Biden after the debate and decide whether he is too damaged to continue on as the Democratic nominee. Huge numbers of Democrats over the past two years have been telling pollsters that Joe Biden is too old to be president of the United States. But huge numbers of those very same Democrats report that they would crawl over broken glass to vote for a man they believe is goo-brained and senile, if only to avoid Donald Trump.
A similar dynamic has been at play on the right. Everyone knows Trump's downsides. His gnat-like attention span. His bad leadership. His impetuosity, and his propensity to let subordinates undermine him while he watches television coverage of himself obsessively. There are millions of voters on the right who believe that Trump is — in theological terms — a reprobate; not among those whom God will call the blessed when the final trumpet blows from heaven. Nevertheless, they believe he is the very thing Providence has granted them to avoid rule by their enemies.
There are now other similarities. Just as conservative-media and -movement figures like Senator Mike Lee opposed Trump's nomination in 2016 only to discover that he was unstoppable, so the liberal media have now weighed in, with the New York Times' and other newspapers' editorial boards announcing, one by one, that for the good of the country Joe Biden should give up his party's nomination. They may prove as impotent as the Right's gatekeeping institutions did.
Shout-Outs
Niall Ferguson, at the Free Press: The Democratic Party Awaits Its Gorbachev
Aaron Sibarium and Jessica Costescu, at the Free Beacon: 'Amazing what $$$$ can do': New Text Messages Show Columbia Deans Sneering at 'Privilege' of Jewish Students
Noemie Bisserbe and Stacy Meichtry, at the Wall Street Journal: The Making of the 28-Year-Old Star of France's Far Right
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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