She Got in Line, Frankenstein

NH Journal can barely contain its glee: Hassan Is 'Ridin' With Biden,' Says Biden 'Most Successful POTUS in my Lifetime'.

Hours before President Joe Biden’s post-NATO summit press conference Thursday night, he met with a group of Democratic U.S. senators concerned about his impact on down-ballot races if he stays at the top of the ticket. And his pitch made at least one sale: Sen. Maggie Hassan.

“I have continued to support the president. This is a really strong campaign. Here’s President Biden, one of the most successful presidents — perhaps the most successful president — in my lifetime,” Hassan told reporters after the meeting.

Maggie, that's real Manchurian Candidate stuff, there. To recycle a tweet from April:

I can't tell if the amusement contained in this New York Times headline is intentional or not: On Capitol Hill, Democrats Panic About Biden but Do Nothing.

Senator Christopher S. Murphy, an ambitious young Democrat from Connecticut, went on television on Sunday with a carefully worded warning to President Biden about the viability of his campaign.

“This week is going to be absolutely critical; I think the president needs to do more,” Mr. Murphy said, arguing that Mr. Biden needed to hold a town hall and participate in unscripted events because “the clock is ticking” for him to put to rest the doubts about his candidacy raised by a disastrous debate performance. Multiple times, Mr. Murphy emphasized his deadline, saying that he, as well as voters, must see more action “this week.”

Senator Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat who briefly ran for president himself, said Mr. Biden had to “reassure the American people that he can run a vigorous campaign to defeat Donald Trump.”

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a senior member of the Democratic leadership team, put out a statement that passed for fighting words, saying that the president “must do more to demonstrate that he can campaign strong enough to beat Donald Trump.”

So far, Mr. Biden has done none of that.

Left unsaid: because he's not up to doing any of that.

Jeff Maurer is getting pretty frustrated: “Let Biden Prove Himself” Is a Fig Leaf for Inaction. In response to that NYT headline and article:

What a fucking body blow. What a humiliating confirmation of everyone’s worst stereotypes about liberals. We can’t stand up for ourselves, we’re feckless and disorganized — oh, and by the way, please vote for us to run the government! Every day that the Democratic caucus spends being publicly bullied by an old man is a day that more people become convinced that liberals are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the hard challenges of life. And the fact that most Democrats think Biden can’t win but are willing to stay silent rather than risk their personal reputation is a Profile In Dicklessness that I think could haunt the party for years to come.

I was thinking about making some sort of snark about Maggie and "Dicklessness", but you'll just have to imagine I did that, and it was both hilarious and tasteful.

Rich Lowry has, I think, his tongue firmly planted in his cheek: Maybe Biden Isn’t Such a Kind-Hearted, Wise Statesman after All.

Joe Biden is being transformed before our eyes, at least in how he’s portrayed in progressive circles and the media.

The empathizer-in-chief and savior of democracy has become, in a matter of about two weeks, a clueless and selfish threat to all that they hold dear.

Poor Joe Biden can be forgiven for not quite knowing what hit him. Just a couple of weekends ago, he and his family were at Camp David for a photo shoot with the famed Vogue photographer Annie Leibovitz — getting the favorable glossy coverage that a powerful Democrat expects — and now everyone has concluded he’s a dangerous jackass.

“Never underestimate the destructive power of a stubborn old narcissist with something to prove,” Mark Leibovich of the Atlantic writes of Biden’s insistence, so far, on staying in the presidential race.

… and Lowry quotes additionally from Maureen Dowd, Chuck Todd, et al.

Also of note:

  • With eyes wide shut, I think. Megan McArdle describes How the media sleepwalked into Biden’s debate disaster.

    In my 20 years of writing right-leaning columns at mainstream publications, I’ve made two arguments over and over. First, I’ve tried to convince my fellow journalists that liberal media bias is real. And second, I’ve tried to convince conservatives that, though it’s real, it’s not the conspiracy they imagine.

    This is a hard moment to make that latter point. Frankly, if we had been colluding to cover up the decline of a Democratic president, who then undid all our efforts by going on national television and breaking the story himself … well, how much different would our coverage have looked? And if he hadn’t self-immolated at the debate, wouldn’t our readers still be in the dark?

    That said, it really wasn’t a conspiracy. For one thing, mainstream outlets did report on the president’s age, even if too gently. Why were we so gentle? Well, there’s a broad journalistic norm against picking on physical characteristics (which is why even certified Donald Trump-hating columnists have made remarkably few cracks about his comb-over).

    Obviously, it was a mistake to treat age, which affects job performance, like hairstyling, which doesn’t. But that error was bipartisan — over the years, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about Trump’s senior moments without ever putting those thoughts on the page.

    She has a point, of course. But her employer, the WaPo, was (and is) relentless in its Trump-trashing. Adding in the combover critique would seem gratuitous.

    And you don't have to posit a "conspiracy"; willing participants don't need to meet in secret, they can pick up their marching orders by just subscribing to a few newspapers and watching a few news channels.

  • Like me, BART is showing its age. At some point in the early 1970s I visited San Francisco with friends, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit system was shiny, new, futuristic in fact. I remember that a train arrived at the station without me noticing, it was so quiet. It was like Disneyland's Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow for reals!

    But, fifty years on, the bloom is off the rose, and BART is a grumpy, neglected, geezer demanding its entitlements. The Antiplanner has some sad analysis: BART: Give Us More $ So We Can Do Less.

    Before the pandemic, the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) earned more than 70 percent of its operating costs out of fare revenues, more than any transit agency in the nation other than CalTrain. Ironically, this also made it most vulnerable to a ridership downturn, while agencies like San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority, which covered only 9 percent of its operating costs out of fares (the fourth worst among the nation’s transit agencies), were relatively immune. Now BART is pleading for more money so it won’t have to dramatically reduce service as it exhausts federal COVID relief funds.

    As part of that plea, BART published a report on its role in the Bay Area earlier this week. The report admits that BART’s ridership has dropped — as of May, it carried less than 45 percent as many riders as before the pandemic — due to increases in remote work. “BART ridership is closely linked to office occupancy rates,” says the report, with an accompanying graphic showing that ridership has moved in almost exact parallel to San Francisco-Berkeley-Oakland office occupancies.

    Despite the increase in remote work, the report notes, “traffic is back, but people are traveling in ways that result in uneven ridership retention.” In other words, they are no longer traveling in directions that BART can take them.

    Enshrining half-century-old patterns of commuting literally in concrete turns out to have been a bad idea.

  • Shame on SCOTUS. Since I am a troglodyte right-winger, at least 40% of the time, I thought there were a lot of good Supreme Court decisions this term. But I'm also 60% raving libertarian, so I'm in agreement with Philip Hamburger's take: Why The Court’s Murthy Ruling Is Probably The Worst Free Speech Decision In History.

    In the recent Murthy v. Missouri decision, the Supreme Court hammered home the distressing conclusion that, under the court’s doctrines, the First Amendment is, for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large-scale government censorship. The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history.

    […]

    All along, there were some risks. As I pointed out in an article called “Courting Censorship,” Supreme Court doctrine has permitted and thereby invited the federal government to orchestrate massive censorship through social media websites. The Murthy case, unfortunately, confirms the perils of the court’s doctrines.

    Yes. So I had to find out what Nina Jankowicz thought about it. What was that group she's with again? Oh, yeah, the "American Sunlight Project". And, yes, here it is: Nina Jankowicz Statement on Murthy v. Missouri Decision.

    Yes, unsurprisingly, Nina thought the pro-censorship ruling was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!