By Jay Fitzgerald – A blog about Boston, Hub of the Universe, and everything else.
Reading this NYT piece on Jill Biden and Bari Weiss’s piece on Biden’s health and who knew (or should have known) he wasn’t doing so well, I thought of … Woodrow Wilson.
Granted, growing old (fast) isn’t the same as suffering a debilitating stroke. But there are eerie parallels, including the spinning, denying and hiding of truths about a president’s well-being.
Joe Klein on last night’s disastrous debate for Biden: “It was worse than disastrous. It was sad, it was humiliating. Biden looked like a hospice patient who got lost on his way to the bathroom. … Trump was Trump. A lying, petulant charlatan. But that won’t make much difference. He didn’t even need to point out how frail Biden seemed—although at one point, he said, ‘I don’t understand what he just said.’ Neither did I, neither did anyone.”
If you hate network TV’s God-awful ‘personalized’ coverage of the Olympics – where there’s a sentimental, tear-jerker story behind every overcoming-adversity athlete – then brace yourself for the NBA’s coming Bron Show. … Have the Brons signed a Netflix contract yet? … I wonder what JJ Redick is thinking. Has it dawned on him yet what he’s truly gotten into?
You wouldn’t know it from the story’s innocuous headline, but the Globe’s James Pindell gives President Biden a big fat ‘F’ for his debate performance last night. … And here’s why Dems can’t and won’t replace Biden against his will.
Update – But it sure is fun thinking of all the fantasy draft possibilities. I’d like to see Gov. Whitmer get the nod. Not so Harris or Newsom.
Update II — The headline on Joan V’s post-debate assessment says it all: “Trump’s craziness might not matter if Biden looks this old.”
Pamela Paul, who considers herself a liberal Dem (and she is), has a good column on what too often occurs when moderate Democrats disagree with PC progressive Democrats. I’m definitely with Paul on this one:
“Those on the Democratic side of the spectrum have traditionally been far better at nuance, complexity and compromise than Republicans. It would be to our detriment if policies on which a broad swath of Americans agree are deliberately tanked by a left wing that has moved as far to the left as Republicans have moved to the right. Those who denounce militant fealty within the Republican Party shouldn’t enforce similar purity tests in their own ranks.”
The Herald’s Howie Carr often refers to the Massachusetts State Police as not unlike an organized-crime outfit. That’s obviously going a little too far. But there are days when you have to wonder about the culture that can produce so many criminal scandals at the agency, as NBC Boston recently chronicled: the CDL bribery case, overtime fraud, union embezzlement and kickbacks, etc. Five years ago, amid an embarrassing trooper exposure incident at Gillette Stadium, CommonWealth Beacon was asking: “When will State Police scandals end?” … Five years later, we’re still asking the same question as the Karen Read trial winds to a close (see “The State Police are already big losers in the Karen Read trial”).
Personally, I think much, if not most, of the agency’s woes trace back to who they’re hiring at State Police. Specifically, those who survive the brutal cadet training at the State Police Academy. Nearly 20 years ago, the Herald published a shocking series of stories about savage hazing at the academy, as summarized in this non-archived UPI piece from 2005. Skipping over the 2018 academy porn controversy, fast-forward to 2021’s “slip-and-slide” incident or 2022’s “bear crawl” at the academy. With the academy’s heavy emphasis on militarized “stress exposure resiliency training” – which some say too easily crosses the line into hazing – no wonder there’s a high dropout rate at the academy.
The bottom line: the agency has prioritized brawn over brains for years, no matter how much they deny that’s the case. They haven’t just weeded out the physically weak. They’ve systemically weeded out those too intelligent to put up with the frat-like antics at the agency, where the “rigorous” training is viewed as a sort of rite of passage, a badge of honor, a tradition that needs to be passed down to younger generations of cadets so they’ll think and act just like their future trooper colleagues.
And that’s how institutional cultures are created and maintained.
My early nomination for headline of the week, which includes the subhead: “I never asked for this role.”… And, yes, I’ve been enjoying The Atlantic of late. It’s been on a roll.
At least one African country still likes France: Rwanda. Otherwise, it’s been a near constant string of setbacks for France in Africa, as former African colonies cut their final ties to France. One of the latest to tell France to get lost: Senegal. … I’ve been fascinated with France’s post-colonial role in Africa, particularly West Africa, ever since I lived in Cameroon for nearly six months in the early 2000s. Anyone who has spent time in one of France’s former African colonies learns that France never really let go of its former African colonies, continuing to exert tremendous military, economic and political influence over nations across the continent.
Now that influence is waning fast, creating voids filled by Islamic extremists, Russia, China etc. It’s as if an entire continent is now up for geopolitical grabs. The U.S., which has effectively backed France, is scrambling to reset its continental strategy.
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