Recent Controversies: Biden’s Loss in ’24,’ Fake ‘Violent Settlers’ Case, and Other Developments
Conservative: When Biden Lost ‘24
“We may well look back on February 8, 2024 as the specific moment in time Joe Biden’s bid for reelection was lost,” muses Commentary’s John Podhoretz — the special prosecutor let him off the hook over stealing classified docs for being “a nice senile old man and no jury would convict him,” because his “memory was so poor and his capacity for recollection so feeble.” (Side note: “This is the end of the political jeopardy to Trump from the classified-documents case.”) But the “man we saw speaking” on Feb. 8 in a “nightmarish appearance before the press” will not be reelected. “Maybe Biden can become a new man. Maybe he’s had an off week. Maybe they can adjust his meds. Maybe. But probably not.”
From the left: Get Out There, Joe
“A long-simmering argument over the president’s abilities has boiled to the surface,” observes The Nation’s John Nichols. And “the only person who can assuage the public’s concern is Biden himself.” Joe’s “only choice is to get in front of the American people as much as possible, with more press conferences, more speeches, and more meetings with voters on the campaign trail.” Yes, “Biden will stumble,” but “historically, Americans have put his misstatements in perspective.” He must now “be a fully present, fully engaged, and highly active candidate who is prepared to talk himself up and talk his scandal-plagued and 91-times indicted opponent down. That means less time in the White House and more time on the hustings. No avoidance. No excuses.”
Mideast watch: The Fake ‘Violent Settlers’ Case
Biden’s “executive order imposing severe sanctions” on allegedly violent West Bank Israeli settlers, argues Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz, largely relies on data presented by Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, who serves as US Security Coordinator to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. But “every claim presented by the USSC” seems “lifted directly, sometimes verbatim, from the websites of highly partisan pro-Palestinian organizations,” repeating the same casualty “numbers provided by Palestinian and radical leftist Israeli organizations.” (These often include terrorists killed after striking.) Fenzel also reportedly scrubs “any mention of the daily violence directed by Palestinian terror operatives against Jewish civilians living in the West Bank.” “By rewarding and excusing Palestinian violence,” Biden “is rapidly making it illegal to be Jewish in Judea.”
Libertarian: Warren’s Inflation Blame Game
Sen. Elizabeth Warren “has come out swinging against the ‘shrinkflation’ of . . . store-bought products whose sizes have shrunk even as their prices remain the same,” blaming “big corporations,” notes Reason’s Christian Britschgi. But “another word for shrinkflation is an obscure concept economists call ‘inflation’ — where general price increases erode the purchasing power of consumers’ dollars.” So “Warren’s rant” is a “conspiratorial gloss” on the “decades-high inflation the country’s lived through.” Thank “the federal government’s $4 trillion in fiscal stimulus during the pandemic,” plus Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. “Warren supported all these massive spending bills” and “advocated for more.” If she’s “ looking for someone to blame for shrinking cookie packages, she need only look in the mirror.”
From the right: Dems Are Clueless on Crime
“Among anti-cop legislators, ‘defund the police’ may have lost some currency, but ‘demoralize the police’ is doing just fine,” snarks City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald. New York City just forced cops to “fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian” on the presumption cops question people, even for help solving crimes, based on “bigotry.” California’s data-collection rules are worse: For some stops, cops must list the “presumed” sexual orientation of the person they stop as well as their own. The goal: “to gin up antipolice narratives.” Though California and New York remain “racked” by crime, cops will do “less proactive policing now.” These identity-politics-based rules are “are glaring examples of how profoundly Democratic elites misunderstand the challenges of maintaining law and order.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
