We live in an age of narcissists: Biden is as narcissistic as Obama or Trump and much less competent than either

 This is Freddie Gay two days ago, quoting the senile US President:

“I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term,” he said. “But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”

"Oh, the humility! Everybody knows, however, that Biden should have given this speech years ago, when he was less far gone. But his “personal ambition”, his lust for power and his epic self-regard meant that he refused to give way until he had no choice....

"But the American people have not chosen Kamala Harris. She would not have won the Democratic primary through democratic means. She has instead been foisted on a party that is desperate to stop Donald Trump and doesn’t really know how to do it. “History is in your hands,” concluded Biden. “The power’s in your hands.” In the large and crowded field of Biden lies, that stands out as the biggest."

I agree completely.

We live in an age of narcissists: Messrs Biden, Obama, Trump, Macron, Johnson, Liz Truss and Theresa May (she was entirely motivated by vanity). Even the Pope has this vice. 

I have not detected it in Kamala.

I can't think of US presidents before Obama who were narcissists, any earlier British prime ministers or any pope. 

I suppose it's a symptom of what the Kremlin in the Cold War used to call Western decadence. The West was not so very decadent them, but is now.

I could say much more about Joe Biden's inadequacies, his indecisive, weak leadership, his contribution to Russia invading Ukraine and to what is happening in Gaza. His sister said he was not mentally fit to be president in 2020, though she changed her mind recently. 

Then there is what his daughter wrote in her diary about showering with him.

A number of feminists in 2020 said they believed the rape allegation in 2020, although they were still going to vote for him.

Now even MI6 outlets like Con Coughlin in the Telegraph think Kamala Harris a bigger threat to the West than Trump. Maybe that's UK deep state thinking, that Trump accepts Nato and will not make peace with Russia, while Miss Harris does not like Netanyahu. Perhaps they think the Palestinians somehow endanger British interests more than Russia (obviously neither do).

I hope Donald Trump, with all his faults, wins because he might end this stupid, pointless cold war with Russia and China. 

As for the Middle East, there is no point in hoping for peace there. 

It is the tragic legacy of a mistake in British colonial policy which cannot be undone.

David Goldman writing as 'Spengler' in Asia Times yesterday

In 2022, I argued that a demographic imperative—the declining population of non-Muslim parts of Asia versus the growth of Muslim populations—would push India, Russia and China toward a strategic rapprochement.

The Ukraine war has driven these prospective rivals together. India’s bottomless appetite for discounted Russian oil propelled its imports from Russia to US$67 billion in 2023 from only $8.7 billion in 2022. India, moreover, acts as Russia’s distribution agent, re-selling Russian oil and distillates to third countries.

It is noteworthy that although India and China have an ongoing border dispute, India has never joined the US and its allies in condemning China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim population. The United States meanwhile has accused India of human rights abuses against its Muslim minority.

The article is here.

How much misery and destruction American sanctimony causes in the world. 

I admit that this was a charge levelled against England when we went around suppressing slavery and suttee. This time it's true and England is America's most loyal satellite.

I have a feeling Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump

I have a feeling Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump. 

She knows how to come across on video. She looks like she'd be amusing to have a drink with. She has a wonderful, exuberant laugh and is good looking. She is another generation from Mr Biden and Mr Trump.  

I imagine young women will often love here.

She is not fresh but seems it. 

She gives no signs of being exceptionally intelligent but is much more so than President Biden.

She was a prosecutor not a human rights lawyer, which is to her credit.

She comes of bad parents who, having had the good luck to be allowed to immigrate to the USA and be made American citizens, were nevertheless left-wing activists, protesting against the country which admitted them. 

Her father was a Marxist academic, exactly the sot of immigrant who should not have been allowed into the country.

She has been a terrible failure as border czar, has horrible opinions on most things, but after presidents like George W Bush and old man Biden who can say she is not able to do the job?

She is in hock to big business and billionaires, but that is true of almost all US politicians, especially JD Vance. (I wonder where the $80 million in donations to her campaign came from - foreign governments?)

Why is America making economic war on any of these countries?

 From the Washington Post.

American oligarchy

The American presidential election in November will be the first since 1976 not to have a Biden, Bush or Clinton on the ballot. 

It will however have a Kennedy and he'd make a very good President. He'd rid the Democrats of woke. Unfortunately the Democrat establishment sabotaged his attempt to run against Biden and he left the party.

The election will be only the second since 1948 not to have one of five names, Biden, Bush, Clinton, Nixon or Dole, on the ballot. The other one was 1964.

I don't think Joe Biden is a good man

Now suddenly power has ebbed from him and we see the foreign policy disasters of his administration as the result of his senescence. 

Men and women

'Not long ago Harvey Mansfield took a call from a journalist. She wanted a comment on a former colleague. Mansfield, a 73-year-old professor, said: “What impressed all of us about him was his manliness.”

'There was silence at the other end of the line. Finally the female voice said: “Could you think of another word?” It was then that the professor realised that manliness has become a dirty word. And if “displaying qualities considered admirable in a man” (as the dictionary has it) has become unacceptable, then presumably being a man is unacceptable, too. Wondering how this could be, he

Happy birthday, sir!

Group Captain John Hemingway, DFC, AE, a Dubliner who is thought to be the last of 'the Few', celebrates his 105th birthday today. He was shot down four times during the war.

Joe Biden in 1997 said that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded to the Baltic states

Here is Joe Biden in 1997 saying that "the one thing" that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded to the Baltic states. 

How right he was.

Compare how he was 27 years ago when he was in his prime, aged 55, with how he is now.

He was impressive then, though never good enough to be president. That is why he never came better than fourth in a primary until he won South Carolina in 2020, when President Obama and the Democrat grandees intervened to arrange that he beat Bernie Saunders.

After the attempts to kill them, Reagan told John Paul II 'We were saved for something.' The Pope replied 'I know what it is. To free Poland'

Father Jason Charron, a Ukrainian Catholic priest, was asking by Trump to open the rally with prayer which he did by invoking divine protection…..

"The US Came Close To Having TWO Presidential Candidates With No Brain."

"The US Came Close To Having TWO Presidential Candidates With No Brain."
Tom Foley


Brendan Cox whose MP wife Jo was murdered because of her views on immigration and Brexit condemned the attempt on Donald Trump's life but said "Donald Trump also has some culpability in creating an environment where violence is more likely." This is the first person I've seen who blames Trump. He'd hate it if somebody said his late wife's speeches had some culpability for creating an environment where murder is more likely.


"One can judge a man by how he reacts to being shot. In 1835, a house painter attempted to kill President Andrew Jackson, Trump’s hero. Both his pistols miraculously misfired; Jackson, despite being 67 and in ill-health, charged the villain with his cane. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt – to whom Trump bears closest

Attempt to murder Donald Trump

"We do not believe that the attempt to eliminate and assassinate Trump was organised by the current authorities, but the atmosphere around candidate Trump … provoked what America is confronting today. After numerous attempts to remove candidate Trump from the political arena — using first legal tools, the courts, prosecutors, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate — it was obvious to all outside observers that his life was in danger.” Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman

"Most importantly, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation." Joe Biden yesterday

"The assassination attempt on Donald Trump comes as 10 per cent of American adults said violence was justified to stop him from retaking the White House. Robert Pape, a professor in terrorism threats at the University of Chicago, carried out the survey in June which also found that a third of that number carried guns." The Sunday Telegraph today

Trump is not badly hurt. Soon journalists will start blaming him for the attempted assassination

Donald Trump has been shot.

We could have been reading his obituary this morning.

Instead we listen to Joe Biden deploring violence and observe no indication of dementia this time.

From Ed West's latest newsletter

'Successful late bloomers are all around us. Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s. Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s. Isak

Talking about Joe Biden

'Like the late-stage Brezhnev, Biden is now a president in name only.'
Victor Davis Hanson

'Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f--- things up.' Barak Obama, according to an anonymous Democrat speaking to Politico in 2020

From an article in Responsible Statecraft by Blaise Malley: Declassified Docs: US Knew Russia Felt 'Snookered' By NATO

'In 1995, then-national security adviser Anthony Lake warned President Bill Clinton that Russian leadership would not accept the expansion of the alliance to the East.

'“Russian opposition to NATO enlargement is unlikely to yield in the near or medium term to some kind of grudging endorsement; Russia’s opposition is deep and profound,” Lake wrote. “For the period ahead, the Russian leadership will do its level best to derail our policy, given its conviction that any eastward expansion of NATO is at root antithetical to Russia’s long-term interests.”

'Two years later, as Washington and Moscow were entering negotiations on the future of NATO-Russia cooperation, State Department official Dennis Ross wrote what the Archive calls an “astute and empathetic analysis” of the Russian position on NATO expansion.

'“To begin with, the Russians for all the reasons you know see NATO expansion through a political, psychological, and historical lens,” Ross wrote in a memo to Strobe Talbott, then the Deputy Secretary of State.

'“First they feel they were snookered at the time of German unification. As you noted with me, [former Secretary of State James] Baker's promises on not extending NATO military presence into what was East Germany were part of a perceived commitment not to expand the Alliance

Quotations

“You'll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” John Maxwell

"I think that Biden debated as well as Abraham Lincoln, if you dug him up right now." Stephen Colbert

"Most reasonable people, because they are reasonable, cannot believe that the goal of the far left is to end America." Elon Musk

"75 years ago, NATO was created as a peace project. On behalf of Hungary, I will argue that we should preserve NATO as it was meant to be: a defence alliance." Viktor Orban

"The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer." Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Biden has Parkinson's

A Parkinson’s disease specialist (who's a Democrat) told NBC that Biden clearly has the disease.







He didn't do as badly as he might have at the Nato press conference last night.


He introduced Zelensky as Putin and referred to Kamala as Vice-president Trump but we expect things like that.


They are the mistakes anyone might make. They don't show he has dementia, but in the context of the debate with Trump they looked very bad.


He was 45 minutes late, of course used a teleprompter for his opening speech, answered or failed to answer softball questions, made a mess of what he wanted to say in places, but all this is normal for him.



President Ford made similar slip ups, but much less often.


Vice-president Dan Quayle too, but he was a halfwit.

The point is that the media has (inevitably) decided that the impending fall of the House of Biden is the story.


Ian Bremmer, who attended the summit, said none of the leaders he encountered "think he [Biden] can serve another four years."


George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed him last week, told a passer-by in the street who asked him that he doesn’t think Joe Biden can serve four more years.


Here is Biden to NATO earlier this week: ‘The allies in this room... Not only share a common language... DON’T share a common language... We do... Not share a common border... But we are neighbours...’


In the 2020 Democratic primary debates, Julián Castro and Cory Booker mocked Biden for his inability to remember things, and pointed out his cognitive decline. That was four years ago. But now the media are shocked, shocked.

Glenn Greenwald says it well:


'It's been incredibly creepy watching every liberal media figure mindlessly recite: "Biden is a good, decent man of high values. But what evidence is there for that? The many wars he cheerlead? The addicts he threw in jail until his son become one? The pathological lying?"'

I agree - he finances what seems a pointless slaughter of tens of thousands of Arab civilians intended to keep Netanyahu out of prison, he provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, he is accused of rape and of unpleasant attentions to his own daughter.

That's before we speak of influence peddling.

And I completely agree with this tweet by Glenn Greenwald three days ago: 'Democrats slowly coming to terms with the fact that Biden is a full-scale narcissist who has shown throughout his adult life that the only thing he cares about is chasing power and titles, and there's no way someone like that would give that up voluntarily.'

Biden must not be allowed to win in November

The Democrats should have said in the first day after the debate that Biden was incapable of being president, but they were too frightened to be first to say that the emperor had no clothes.

By not doing so they gave him the chance to seize the initiative.

It will be much harder now.

The Republicans meanwhile are saying - not - a - word.

Many Democratic journalists call for Biden's defenestration - because they do not need his patronage and because they have been shown to be guilty of hiding the truth.

In fact, though, there is a real possibility that Biden could win, which would be a calamity for the whole American empire.

Why not have the Democratic convention do what conventions were invented to do - select the presidential candidate from several contenders? 

35 Americans killed by Russian forces in the Crimea

This is a very important news item on John Helmer's blog which has been ignored completely by the media outside Russia.  

Canadian Helmer is the longest serving foreign correspondent in Moscow, a left-wing writer who  has lots of interesting things to tell and sometimes indulges in speculations that seem absurd, like the US being behind the attack in the concert hall complex in Moscow in March for which Islamists claimed responsibility. Four Tajiks were found guilty.

The background to Ukraine and Taiwan

This passage is from an article by Anatole Lieven in Responsible Statecraft. 




The promise of NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 was another, far more disastrous case where West European opposition bowed (albeit in qualified fashion) to U.S. dictation. It brought NATO into direct confrontation with Russia’s determination to maintain a sphere of influence and security zone in its immediate neighborhood, in areas where the Soviet collapse (as with the end of most empires) had left behind actual or potential ethnic and territorial conflicts.

And yet at the same time, [neither] NATO nor its individual members, had a plan or actual desire to fight Russia. Repeated warnings that NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia would mean war were literally laughed away by Western diplomats. As a former officer attached to the NATO Secretariat told me, the Secretariat did not even discuss contingency plans for a war between Georgia and Russia after — on U.S. orders — it threw its weight behind NATO membership for that country.

As he explained, NATO expansion had been sold to Western parliaments and publics on the premise that it would involve no costs and no risks. Even to discuss the possibility of war was therefore taboo. As a result, NATO’s European members acquiesced in a program of expansion that they had been warned repeatedly would lead to war, while making no preparation for war, and continuing to rely for energy on imports of cheap Russian gas.

Every time Biden speaks he seems unfit to rule the world

Ruling the world is what old man Biden said last week that he does, offering this as proof that he does not need to take a cognitive test.

According to the log kept by the White House Dr. Kevin Cannard, a specialist in Parkinson’s disease, visited the White House eight times between August 2023 and March 2024 and on January 17 met Mr. Biden’s personal doctor and two unidentified individuals.

Here is the old man's attempt to reassure Americans. 

It is funny but it is not.

CNN and the Democratic press have decided he must go. 

The story has unstoppable momentum.

Great is the truth and shall prevail, this time at least.