http://twitchy.com/brettt/2024/07/23/read-this-nyt-hagiography-of-joe-biden-from-two-days-before-the-debate-n2398757
President Joe Biden challenged Donald Trump to a debate via social media video: remember this?
Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) ~ Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020. Since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate.
Now he’s acting like he wants to debate me again.
Well, make my day, pal.
7:00 AM · May 15, 2024
Video ~ http://twitter.com/i/status/1790713878248038478
Biden performed so badly at that debate that he's been forced out of the race. It's interesting to read pieces about Biden before the debate, like this one from the New York Times. Jason Farago certainly had a lot to say about Biden two days before:
Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) ~ New York Times — TWO DAYS BEFORE THE DEBATE:
When [Biden] shouts down hecklers at the State of the Union, or kibitzes in his aviators with officials half his age, he leans into this archetype of leader as senex, like Homer’s Nestor, Titian’s Farnese pope or Alec Guinness’s Jedi. Wise, perhaps wily. Full of life, if maybe long-winded.
http://nytimes.com/2024/06/25/arts/television/biden-trump-election-age.html
Farago wrote:
“Watch me,” President Biden likes to say when he’s asked — he’s asked a lot, these days — whether he is too old to serve a second term. He is getting his wish.
For the first three years of his administration, in contrast to the last president’s chaotic omnipresence, Mr. Biden kept himself scarce. Now his smallest appearance brings with it a thousand remote diagnoses from armchair gerontologists. A major speech, like his State of the Union address in March, is assessed not for its policy but its fluidity as spoken-word performance. A minor gaffe, like bungling a single sentence at a Philadelphia rally in April, is dissected as possible evidence of decline.
He is facing an image problem that time exacts on everyone. Now the first presidential debate of 2024 is happening months earlier than usual, in part because the Biden campaign wants to overcome a mounting concern that the president, at 81, is not up to four additional years of service. “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre” — or so Philip Roth’s “Everyman” howled in 2006. Electorally, this year, it might be both.
He got his wish all right.
Shadow (@jaykay_jay) ~ These fictional writers have wild imaginations!
Pōru (@poru208 ) ~ The cheap fakes came from the news media.
Larry Sellers (@larry_sell38385) ~ Ahh, the good old days when he was the best Biden ever ... less than a month ago.
Denise (@neeceetx) ~ Did you need a cigarette after that? 🤮
Paul Lundin (@PaulLundin2) ~ Fan fiction masquerading as journalism.
Henson Stephanie (@HensonStephani2) ~
Dear Penthouse Forum,
I used to think these letters were fake until this happened to me. He was shouting down hecklers at the State of the Union when ours eyes locked, he was kibitzing in his aviators ...
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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