"Obama is said to have viewed himself and Clinton as the ones that do 'the reading'.
'In Situation Room meetings, she had the thickest binder and had read it three times,' one Clinton aide told Politico.
While in office, young Obama aides are reported to have dismissed Biden, even 'eye-rolling' when the VP would begin speaking, while former members of the administrations have also treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.
'In the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile,' Ben Rhodes, Obama's former deputy national security adviser, wrote.
Former FBI Director James Comey also said that 'Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, 'Can I ask something, Mr. President?'
'Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z,' Comey added.
'After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.'
Biden himself revealed that Obama 'had been subtly weighing in against' a 2016 presidential run in his 2017 book 'Promise Me, Dad'." daily Mail
————–
Yes, not the brightest bulb in the pack, never was. Delaware is a tiny place in which factional politics aimed at the dumbest in the herd on the basis of patronage and fear is easily practiced.
Hopefully he and Harris will prove to be a completely incompatible couple. pl
He should know. Obama did a pretty good job of f***ing things up himself, especially by not even investigating, let alone prosecuting the banksters for the literally millions of perpetrations of perjury, forgery and fraud that let up to the meltdown of 2008. So now the TBTF vampire squid, to use Matt Taibbi’s term, has open season to prey on the rest of the American public like there’s no tomorrow. For many of whom there probably won’t be.
Right on cue, Kamala becomes surrogate gaffe machine. The new and improved Dems are phasing out Cankles and moving in Cackles: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/08/15/watch-harris-gives-a-pathetic-explanation-for-why-she-went-from-pouncing-on-biden-to-supporting-him-n2574427
I recall Joe’s last campaign blowing up for plagiarism. Now in the age of wokeness Joe claims he marched for civil rights. But then there’s video of him disputing that claim.
https://twitter.com/artvalley818_/status/1294800855263260672?s=21
Then there’s the phony Kamala.
https://twitter.com/raheemkassam/status/1294640778988457985?s=21
How will the wokesters rationalize a team that incarcerated blacks for petty crimes?
re:
“Biden is said to have hit out of the fact that Obama didn’t ‘lift a finger’ to help him take the primary in South Carolina and that he had won the support of black voters in the state on his own merit.”
Limeys at the Daily Mail come up with some total nonsense. It was widely reported that Obama phone calls to Buttigieg, Klobuchar, etc., just before the SC primary, cleared the field for Joe. At Obama’s request, the also-rans dropped out and let Joe get that joementum (ha).
Sure, it’s true O’Bambi knows that Joe is worth no more than a bucket of warm spit. Be that as it may, Brother O apparently thinks he’s made the best move possible from a series of lousy choices.
Perhaps O is banking on a quick transfer of power to Kamala, in which case he’d have a more competent mannequin. Although who actually might control Harris as a puppet is open to debate.
All choices lead to right wing kooks. Kamala is no leftist.
Late in the summer of 1861, William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner from Illinois visited him at the White House. Lincoln told him of the constant lobbying of office-seekers who continually hounded him, seeking positions. He said if the government passed through the war there was the strongest danger of its falling prey to the rapacity of the office-seeking class. “This human struggle and scramble for office.” were his words, “for a way to live without work, will finally test the strength of our institutions.”
Biden’s career of 40-some years as a public serpent, er, ah servant, seeking to enrich his family while doing the public’s business, is apparent to most Americans and will result in little enthusiasm for his election. This, combined with the constant drum beat of the dangers of the Corona virus news on the liberal ‘news’ networks, will result in a very low turnout among the Democrat voters.
Trump’s campaign needs to start showing that the Biden-Harris ticket will only extend what has happened in NYC to the rest of the nation. They need to show just how bad that Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio have wrecked NYC in their appeasement of ANTIFA/BLM and their incessant unwarranted lock-downs that have destroyed NYC’s businesses and economy.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1291717913980747776
Question: Didn’t Harris enter politics through the bedroom of Willie Brown as his mistress?
Biden is certainly not an angel, let alone fair and objective (legally & morally) on the Palestine-Israel issue.
Still, and that is hardly a comforting recommendation, he still is unlikely, when babbling about the Spanish Flu, to say that … it ended with the end of World War II (so just getting it some 26 years and one World War wrong – but then – it’s just a quarter century).
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/08/10/trump-1918-spanish-flu-probably-ended-wwii-which-happened-two-decades-apart/3340770001/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
Trump likes to blather that Biden, like the WHO, is in China’s pocket (ignoring Ukraine for a change) and Germany by buying Russian gas (and not US fracked oil and gas) is Russia’s slave etc pp.
Well, I doubt either, and as a one trick pony Trump has a problem here … inanity and ignorance cannot be seriously … penal taxed, repeatedly insulted or called a threat to national security.
Trump’s current blonde whitehouse speaking person Kayleigh McEnany underlines my problem with the Trumpetery. She commented on Mary L. Trump’s actual book “Much and Never Enough: how My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”, saying roughly: I have not read it, don’t know the hell (… wait, Pence won’t like that …) what’s in it except, of course, that’s it full of invented lies and tales!
I don’t think I could say such nonsense sober. That is, I thought that Sean Spicer (currently a grill influencer) and Anthony Scaramucci were really bad. Nope … schlimmer geht immer (~ things are never so bad that they can’t get worse).
Given the low half-life of that job, if the US are unlucky they’ll soon get Trump’s fan boy Grenell in her position – now working in his re-election team, and a man who was iirc tweeting his first (of many many) anti Nord Stream pipeline threats even before he arrived in Germany.
He eventually had to pay the Bild Zeitung (cheap and read on the way to work in 5 min before thrown away) to print his maximum pressuritis since nobody with a job to do had the time or desire to speak with him. IMO an utter failure as a diplomat, but presumably just perfect as a whitehouse speaking person, living Giulini’s ‘truth isn’t truth‘ (IMO a really unwise thing for a lawyer to say) assertion in reality.
My prayers are with POTUS Trump and his family. We as a nation need to pray for POTUS Trump loosing his brother. The liberal leftist Democrats are showing just how vile and disgusting dregs of humanity they can be with their spewing vile statements against POTUS and his personal loss.
Again, let’s pray for our President in his hour of loss.
Jay-Juan Shakur Jones says it best:
Jay-Juan Shakur Jones
@iamjayshakur
·
5h
When liberal-leftist Democrats show you who they are believe them…the FIRST TIME! The tolerance & empathy they demand they refuse to give.
PRAY don’t prey!
My condolences to the #Trump family. #RobertTrump
https://twitter.com/i/status/1294857910921711616
CP
“Trump’s current blonde whitehouse speaking person Kayleigh McEnany..”
Do you have something against blondes? McEnany may be afflicted by photogeneity, but that just makes it more fun to watch as she ruthlessly savages the wildly partisan press corps. Bimbo she ain’t.
There is such immense potential for Biden to f*** things up between now and November, simply by opening his mouth, it will be entertaining to watch how he is corralled hither and thither by his minders in the meantime.
As to J’s sentiment; “Trump’s campaign needs to start showing..” I would assume team Trump will keep its powder dry until 20th in case the DNC realize their colossal error and try a last minute switcheroo before the presumptive nominee gets confirmed.
Would it be such a far-fetched idea to assume that Biden is nothing more than a political surrogate for Kamala Harris, especially for 2024?
These Obama democrats know exactly what they are doing. Imagine what happens to Democrats if their ticket actually loses to Trump in November…all their plans, policies, etc…puff into thin air.
https://theunionjournal.com/joe-biden-could-step-aside-for-kamala-harris/
confusedponderer, thanks for presenting your alternate viewpoints. I would also like to hear the positive reasons you support the Biden-Harris alternative to Trump-Pence.
BTW: Grennell has been a fresh and welcomed new voice. Not sure in the current frozen climate of German-US relations, allegedly “paying Bild” to run an op ed piece is a material crime. Plus does anyone actually read Bild, or just gaze on the naked ladies which has long been its one claim to fame and five minute readership.
Also can you give us any insights regarding the very odd Obama-Merkel private F2F meeting in Berlin, right before SpyGate matter was finally unraveling in the US headlines a few days later?
confusedponderer,
Sounds like you really don’t like the US Ambassador to Germany. Perhaps he was wrong about Nordstream pipeline. I think that pipeline shows just how little threat Russia poses to Germany, and thus the rest of Europe, and we should remove the majority of the armed forces from the country we had to defeat and occupy, twice, and bring them home rather than march them East to the edge of the Russian border. Europeans should defend their own borders, or open them, as Angela Merkel did. It’s your union, not ours.
Can’t imagine Kamala Harris is a surrogate for anything other than she was the last one standing to chose the short straw. Who esle would really want to throw away their 2024 political future running with Biden?
Democrat establishment has no use for Kamala Harris, so unlikely they see her as the future of anything; only the easiest one to sacrifice and get rid of this year to keep the 2024 path wide open for the rest of their sterling farm club.
Harris now has the reluctant support of the big public sector unions who still remain the cash show and the GOTV stormtroopers for the DNC. But they did not back her when in mattered during the primaries; and now only reluctantly choosing her as the best of the worst. Not that she did not try her pandering best to gain their support earlier in the game – Knee-pad Kamala imagery is appropriate to insert now.
She got zero traction in this last national contest, was in jeopardy of losing badly in her own home state, so she withdrew at the last minute. She already is proving yet again why she lost the primaries, when unleashed on her own just in the past few days.
SNL early nailed her as a blowsy, manipulating drunk. How will they now back track from their initial gut instincts, and rehabilitate what cannot be saved?
The real question is why would Politico, of all places, publish *this* story at *this* time?
Trump campaign can showcase what Senator Kamala Harris did for her own home state cities of SF and LA and ask if we want all US cities to end up like those under her watch.
Following the legacy of the prior Senator Barbara Boxer were not large shoes to fill, but at least Boxer did not start running for President the very moment she was sworn in as senator. Where is the former Gentle Lady from California anyway – crickets from Boxer out west.
Certainly Senator Feinstein tried to put an early kibosh on Kamala Hsrri’s ambitious plans, not offering her any support and immediately endorsing Biden before the primaries even began. What say you, Ms Boxer about your successor in arms?
Fred
Opel was a very popular car brand in Russia because it had the reputation among Russians that, in case of trouble, one could open the hood and work on it and fix it.
When US began that senseless confrontation with Russia, GM had to withdraw from a J.V. in Russia and the Opel market in Russia disappeared.
As a direct consequence, GM had to sell that excellent car plant in Russelsheim (they had their manfacturing down pat there) and withdraw from Europe.
Grennell is not a diplomat, he lacks training but his attitude stems from a correct assessment of Germany: a semi-sovereign state that must follow the US program.
Babak,
Opel was a drag on GM for years.
“In 2017, GM finally shut the door on the continent after roughly 20 years of losses and sold its struggling Opel and Vauxhall brands. ”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/why-general-motors-sold-opel-and-vauxhall-brands-in-europe.html
CP
Certainly your first name is accurate.
Fred:
Under GM control in 2012:
“German Government: No Bailout For Opel, Management To Blame.”
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/12/german-government-no-bailout-for-opel-management-to-blame/
November 2010:
Confidential memo from US Embassy Berlin: (Wikileaks)
” BERLIN 00001395 001.2 OF 002
Classified By: ECONMIN Robert A. Pollard for reasons 1.4 (b,d).
1. (C) Summary: Just hours after Chancellor Merkel’s historic November 3 address to a joint session of Congress, General Motors (GM) canceled its sale of Opel to Canadian auto parts manufacturer Magna. The decision, which followed repeated assurances from GM that it was a done deal, came as a complete shock in Germany and dominated media coverage throughout the day. Merkel herself was reportedly highly upset over GM’s flip flop. Ulrich Wilhelm, the Chancellor’s spokesman on Opel said the German government “regretted” the decision, and reminded GM that it must now repay Berlin’s 1.5 billion bridge loan to Opel by the end of the month, while FDP Economics Minister Rainer Bruederle described GM’s action as “totally unacceptable.” The cabinet was expected to discuss the GM move on November 4. Opel’s labor unions, which had strongly backed the Magna sale because of its promise to save jobs and keep plants open, announced that workers would withdraw all concessions made under the terms of the Magna deal and start a general strike at Opel plants on November 5. While anger is widespread, there are already some voices outside the government advocating acceptance of GM’s announcement as the only viable alternative to a total collapse of Opel. End Summary.”
Weren’t you one of those railing against the GM bailouts?
Babak – How is it possible to call Germany a “semi-sovereign” state?
Obviously it wasn’t in the immediate post-war period. A country defeated and then occupied by American, Russian, British and French troops could scarcely be called sovereign. But that’s now long in the past.
It has as much sovereignty as any other Western country and more so than most. If the German people don’t like the use Germany makes of its sovereignty then their beef is not with some imaginary foreign occupier. It’s with their own politicians.
I don’t at all like what’s happened to NATO after the cold war ended. The threat it’s supposed to be countering is mostly imaginary. But that aside, for the Germans – and other European countries – to freeload on the Americans for defence and then to resent the Americans for defending them is about as dumb as it gets.
English Outsider:
After US sanctions on Nordstream II, which German company has continued working on that pipeline?
Did Germany sanction US back?
Because that is what Sovereign States do – like China, Russia, and Iran.
UK is the only Sovereign State left in Western Europe, and only because of the Queen.
Mike46,
No. You might look into the 2009-10 comments on this blog for verification. My comment here and now is a response to Babak’s comment’s above.
Babak – We have chatted about this before. I’m afraid that when it comes to exercising or asserting UK “sovereignty” the Queen’s a busted flush. Has been, really, for several centuries.
The Queen’s constitutional function is no longer what it was. In as far as it is seemingly exercised now it’s exercised in accordance with the wishes of the government of the day. The most dramatic exercise of her constitutional role recently – the dismissal of Gough Whitlam – would have been an HMG decision. Yes, I know that’s “Her Majesty’s Government” but the authority doesn’t lie with her. It lies with whoever comes out on top in the Westminster snakepit.
At most the monarchy’s an untested Constitutional backstop – one assumes for instance that if the Prime Minister of the day decided to stay on for life the Queen would tell him go jump in the lake. Not even sure about that these days. She signed away British sovereignty back in the ’70s without so much as a raised eyebrow. Didn’t have a lot of choice, you see.
Politically the Queen is certainly a nullity. That’s as it should be. That enables her to be an apolitical focus of loyalty for the armed forces and for the rest of us.
As with any Head of State her ceremonial role is important and that she performs better and cheaper than most. And with a certain style – it was great to see her welcome your President recently and by all accounts look after him pretty well.
That’s it. There’s no monarchical power there. Far from ruling the lesser breeds without the law – the standard UK definition of foreigners – Her Majesty can’t even get proper foxhunting back in her own country. So though she embodies British sovereignty she’s doesn’t exercise it. “We the people” do that, if we ever cared to take the job seriously. Otherwise it’s down to the snakepit merchants.
That said, to your point. As you indicate the equivalent snakepit merchants in Germany have got themselves in a real tangle with Nordstream2. That doesn’t mean they’re not sovereign. Just means they’ve got themselves in a tangle.
I think we just need to limit US influence in Europe drastically. The US sees Russian as an enemy, we Europeans really do not, as we will not have a nuclear strike, because who would want to conquer ruins?
The US is not sought to be conquered, but to be utterly destroyed and burnt down.
Russia today does not have the conventional forces to take Europe (and does not plan to) but it does have enough nuclear missile to make the US a glass puddle. Vice versa of course.
What we spend on defense here in Europe is money out the window, has always been, even during the Cold War, when I served as an officer, we knew that US reinforcements would not be here in time, so another Normandy?
Thankfully it never happened, and Russia is no threat anymore, it is more lucrative and pleasant to do business, China on the other hand is arming very fast, but that is against the US.
Wars of today are not like WWII, today they are economic.
English Outsider
I am familiar with the theory that you have expounded here.
It describes aspects of the English Constitution and not all of it.
Elizabeth the Second is the person who has kept the United Kingdom sovereign since the end of the Cold War; else any of the subsequent English Governments would have sold UK’s sovereignty to the the United States; in my opinion.
I think her personal experiences during World War II (such as meeting the troops, and knowing, even then, that one third of them will not see England again) stiffened her resolve to safeguard the United Kingdom’s sovereign.
In regards to Germany, we must agree to disagree. European leaders are mid-managers, competent but not brave. Like de Gaul said: “to be a sovereign country, you must act like one.”
Americans are going around the world, for the better or for worse, making history. Where are the Europeans? Hiding under US skirt, it seems to me.