In 1976 (I was there) Harold Wilson resigned as PM. All the evidence now suggests he was aware of the onset of his dementia. At the time we had no idea. There was no mechanism in the party process for dealing with such things. There still isn’t and there isn’t in the Democratic Party either (as far as I can see). The reality you find yourself in is a series of Catch 22s and loyalty traps where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Hindsight is great of course, but it still doesn’t explain any practical course of action, nor the consequences had the road not taken been taken.
Technically the 4th clause of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice-President and a majority of the cabinet to declare the President as unfit.
But had Harris and the Cabinet attempted to and failed it (ie the majority of the Cabinet disagreed or Congress sided with the President) then I guess Harris would have to resign
Is there no one who will recognise that Trump’s two victories were over women candidates? AOC should be aware if she manages to get the Democratic nomination in 2029 and is up against Vance that she needs at least a 5% advantage to have any chance of being the first POTUS.
I am not sure you can separate out Hillary’s unique position as the central villain of decades of rightwing mythology (“the Clinton murders”) from her sex, in order to know what made the difference. Ditto with Kamala Harris being perceived *within* the White House as sub-par, and her inheriting a campaign theme (democracy on the ballot) that didn’t work.
If we could re-run the election I'd love to see how a Whitmer-Moore ticket (after a single-term Biden) does against Trump-Vance. It would at least be a much better indication of sex as a hindrance in presidential races.
Srsly. Being a lady-person had so much less to do with their losses than what Helen mentions. If one is old enough to remember, the massively popular Rush Limbaugh spent years vilifying the Clintons, well before Bengazi was added to the mix. And neither of those two were effective presidential campaigners.
She also managed to shoot herself in the foot by refusing free access by the Social Media sites and free advice on how to use them effectively. Trump accepted both. It is also asserted that Hillary had a feud with some members of the Press Pack. Was it her gender that influenced both these aspects of her campaign? Her inability to deal with Trump’s stalking in the TV debates was also down to her gender. Al Gore tried stalking Bush in one of his TV debates. Bush turned on him and challenged him with “what are you about?”
"...streets so wide that the buildings seemed to be stepping aside for me to pass"? She's obviously speaking of a London bearing no resemblance to the one I've lived in for 23 years. The width of the major thoroughfare connecting Richmond-on-Thames to Kingston-on-Thames is approximately a third that of 30th Avenue in San Francisco's dismal Sunset district, where I resided for nine years. Traffic is snarled a great deal of the time because the road isn't wide enough for two London Transport buses.
I'm the exact opposite. I can't stand London, and find it really oppressive, the way it goes on and on forever. But I love Manhattan because it is so full of energy - and when you've had enough of the energy you can so easily get to the edge. It's fair to say that when we lived in the city it did also make me extremely bad tempered and rude - as I discovered when visiting Seattle six months in! - but having noticed it, I learned to balance it with more time by the river.
Plenty of wide roads in Whitehall. Regents Street is wide as is Portland place, Baker Street, Oxford Street….then there are the achingly expensive residential places like Knightsbridge, Regents Park, Bayswater, South Kensington. They all have wide streets. Basically places nobody can afford to live in except oligarchs sons and Lena Dunham.
Couldn’t agree more. Dunham mustn’t have been to a continental boulevard or Ginza in Tokyo with pavement suitable for actual walkers, at differing speeds.
The 47th president of the United States is Donald Trump as a result of Republican choices. They didn’t impeach and they selected him as candidate twice. Democrats’ choices may have contributed but the counterfactual is unknowable. Incumbent parties were punished in 2024. They’re mostly doing better in 2025 thanks to the cautionary tale of this Republican President. Why are Republicans not held responsible but Democrats are?
Because it was their election to lose. By going against all reason, despite the polls and the evidence of their own eyes and ears, they allowed a senile old man to give it away. It was a vain and contemptuous thing to do . The American public saw that the Dems attitude was basically ‘They’ll get what they’re given, we know best’, and either voted for Trump or abstained on that basis.
Sorry, that’s still just a hypothetical/counterfactual. No election is ever “theirs to lose”, especially if you are saying the incumbent should have stood down.
The only certainty is that the Republicans selected and enabled Trump. They bear 100% responsibility.
…sure. Sure they do. People are just stupid that’s all- they believe their lying eyes when they see a confused old man with his mouth open wandering towards an imaginary exit on live tv. They believe their lying ears when they hear him confuse Mexico with Egypt and talk about his dead son as if he’s still alive. You’re kind of proving my point here when it comes to the arrogance of the Dems. They can’t ever be wrong. Trump was a ridiculous candidate whose popularity within the party would never have translated into votes if he hadn’t been running against someone who made even him look coherent. The Dems kept Kamala Harris hidden for 4 years because they never even thought of Biden stepping down after one term. As a result she came in at the last minute and faced an already hostile public who were pissed off that they’d been lied to about Bidens competency. She never stood a chance (even if she had been the right candidate. If they had any sense they’d learn from this instead of closing ranks and blaming everyone but themselves.
No. First, Biden didn’t lose. Harris lost. The Democrats lost. Second, nobody can guarantee winning an election. You can have a good strategy and a good campaign and still lose due to external factors. Dems are responsible for their mistakes but they cannot be fully responsible for the Republicans winning.
On the other hand, Republicans are 100% responsible for protecting, selecting and enabling their candidate, Donald Trump.
So the Democrats made mistakes, deserve criticism and need to learn lessons yet the fact that Biden lost is 100% down to Republicans? Surely you can see the flaw in that take. The Republicans didn’t force people to vote for Trump. They did in enormous numbers because there was no alternative they had any faith in. The Dems caused this problem by running a senile candidate and lying to people about his competency. They lost the trust of the voters, and all this dissembling won’t win it back.
I think you can say that Biden standing down earlier would have given the Democrats a better chance of winning. But it wouldn’t have guaranteed it.
The only thing that would have guaranteed Trump not being President is if the Republicans had not selected and backed him as their candidate. Therefore they are 100% responsible for him being president and all the problems that presents for the US and the world.
A few years ago I saw two young men exchange a parting kiss at New Street station in Birmingham. I was happy for them, but also felt a frisson of horror as I was transported mentally back to the homophobic Brum, and Britain, of the 1980s, where such gestures were brave and rare. The US in the 1960s must have been far worse - I got a taste from reading Edmund White's semi-autobiographical novels - and, as the article points out, the law would have been against them as well as public opinion.
Again: It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? To YouTube, of course. That’s a 2:1 split in favor of the platform. Lord, give me strength.” The true cost of being on YouTube (Substack)
Streaming video is the most expensive thing you can do on the internet. Saying it goes to YouTube is technically correct, but it's mostly costs.
As much as we can criticize the Democratic Party hierarchy and Biden’s inner circle what do you think will happen in 2026 with Donny? He seems to be having his own decline in real time so who will suggest that his ideas about running again or staying around as mentor to the eyelinered one are wrong? The Republicans are scared of him today and will be even more so in two years time.
“Provide fresh milk and food twice daily, as per a fixed schedule” - per the possibly apocryphal job ad, sounds like you’re expected to breastfeed the cat
The irony of the Hur report is that Hur was allowed to do the investigation at all. With Trump as president no AG since Jeff Sessions would authorize an IC investigation of Trump. Certainly not Pam Bondi. Recall that even with the Mueller report Trump didn’t even have to do an interview like Biden did with Hur.
I'm a lifelong Manhattanite and have never felt the claustrophobia and freneticism described by Lena Dunham. While I've never lived in London I love spending time there as well.
I do wonder whether, even had Biden withdrawn, whether the Democratic party would have nominated someone other than the sitting VP, a woman of color. Almost same arguments that led to her getting the nomination ("What, you're going to diss our two most loyal groups of voters?") would have been used by her supporters.
The only difference would have been that there would have been time to actually run through the primary and nomination process. And perhaps that would have been enough to convince several people to run against her, to be fair.
For her to have had a decent chance of winning, the Dems would have had to take her out of the weird cold storage they put her in at the start of the Biden presidency. If they’d put her out there in say 2022, she might have gained more experience with teleprompters, learned how to stop word-salading all over the place and generally gained her confidence. She would have been able to go into 24 as someone voters were familiar with and had learned to trust. Trump would have been the swivel eyed loon coming out of left field, she would have been perfectly positioned as the natural, logical and safe successor. It’s crazy they didn’t do this.
I’ve just listened to an hour or so of Biden’s interview with Hur and it’s just as dreadful as the article describes it. It’s incomprehensible that they let him run.
Biden has always been an embellisher of tales; one is tempted to assign this characteristic to a certain Irish loquaciousness. It was his more recent diminishing story telling powers that were much more indicative of his cognitive decline.
In 1976 (I was there) Harold Wilson resigned as PM. All the evidence now suggests he was aware of the onset of his dementia. At the time we had no idea. There was no mechanism in the party process for dealing with such things. There still isn’t and there isn’t in the Democratic Party either (as far as I can see). The reality you find yourself in is a series of Catch 22s and loyalty traps where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Hindsight is great of course, but it still doesn’t explain any practical course of action, nor the consequences had the road not taken been taken.
Technically the 4th clause of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice-President and a majority of the cabinet to declare the President as unfit.
But had Harris and the Cabinet attempted to and failed it (ie the majority of the Cabinet disagreed or Congress sided with the President) then I guess Harris would have to resign
Yes, Lauréline - the constitutional process is clear, but it’s a nuclear option.
Is there no one who will recognise that Trump’s two victories were over women candidates? AOC should be aware if she manages to get the Democratic nomination in 2029 and is up against Vance that she needs at least a 5% advantage to have any chance of being the first POTUS.
I am not sure you can separate out Hillary’s unique position as the central villain of decades of rightwing mythology (“the Clinton murders”) from her sex, in order to know what made the difference. Ditto with Kamala Harris being perceived *within* the White House as sub-par, and her inheriting a campaign theme (democracy on the ballot) that didn’t work.
If we could re-run the election I'd love to see how a Whitmer-Moore ticket (after a single-term Biden) does against Trump-Vance. It would at least be a much better indication of sex as a hindrance in presidential races.
Srsly. Being a lady-person had so much less to do with their losses than what Helen mentions. If one is old enough to remember, the massively popular Rush Limbaugh spent years vilifying the Clintons, well before Bengazi was added to the mix. And neither of those two were effective presidential campaigners.
She also managed to shoot herself in the foot by refusing free access by the Social Media sites and free advice on how to use them effectively. Trump accepted both. It is also asserted that Hillary had a feud with some members of the Press Pack. Was it her gender that influenced both these aspects of her campaign? Her inability to deal with Trump’s stalking in the TV debates was also down to her gender. Al Gore tried stalking Bush in one of his TV debates. Bush turned on him and challenged him with “what are you about?”
"...streets so wide that the buildings seemed to be stepping aside for me to pass"? She's obviously speaking of a London bearing no resemblance to the one I've lived in for 23 years. The width of the major thoroughfare connecting Richmond-on-Thames to Kingston-on-Thames is approximately a third that of 30th Avenue in San Francisco's dismal Sunset district, where I resided for nine years. Traffic is snarled a great deal of the time because the road isn't wide enough for two London Transport buses.
She’s making a comparison with Manhattan, rather than any of the more sprawling cities, though. Central NY is the most claustrophobic place I’ve been.
I'm the exact opposite. I can't stand London, and find it really oppressive, the way it goes on and on forever. But I love Manhattan because it is so full of energy - and when you've had enough of the energy you can so easily get to the edge. It's fair to say that when we lived in the city it did also make me extremely bad tempered and rude - as I discovered when visiting Seattle six months in! - but having noticed it, I learned to balance it with more time by the river.
Plenty of wide roads in Whitehall. Regents Street is wide as is Portland place, Baker Street, Oxford Street….then there are the achingly expensive residential places like Knightsbridge, Regents Park, Bayswater, South Kensington. They all have wide streets. Basically places nobody can afford to live in except oligarchs sons and Lena Dunham.
Couldn’t agree more. Dunham mustn’t have been to a continental boulevard or Ginza in Tokyo with pavement suitable for actual walkers, at differing speeds.
The 47th president of the United States is Donald Trump as a result of Republican choices. They didn’t impeach and they selected him as candidate twice. Democrats’ choices may have contributed but the counterfactual is unknowable. Incumbent parties were punished in 2024. They’re mostly doing better in 2025 thanks to the cautionary tale of this Republican President. Why are Republicans not held responsible but Democrats are?
Because it was their election to lose. By going against all reason, despite the polls and the evidence of their own eyes and ears, they allowed a senile old man to give it away. It was a vain and contemptuous thing to do . The American public saw that the Dems attitude was basically ‘They’ll get what they’re given, we know best’, and either voted for Trump or abstained on that basis.
Sorry, that’s still just a hypothetical/counterfactual. No election is ever “theirs to lose”, especially if you are saying the incumbent should have stood down.
The only certainty is that the Republicans selected and enabled Trump. They bear 100% responsibility.
…sure. Sure they do. People are just stupid that’s all- they believe their lying eyes when they see a confused old man with his mouth open wandering towards an imaginary exit on live tv. They believe their lying ears when they hear him confuse Mexico with Egypt and talk about his dead son as if he’s still alive. You’re kind of proving my point here when it comes to the arrogance of the Dems. They can’t ever be wrong. Trump was a ridiculous candidate whose popularity within the party would never have translated into votes if he hadn’t been running against someone who made even him look coherent. The Dems kept Kamala Harris hidden for 4 years because they never even thought of Biden stepping down after one term. As a result she came in at the last minute and faced an already hostile public who were pissed off that they’d been lied to about Bidens competency. She never stood a chance (even if she had been the right candidate. If they had any sense they’d learn from this instead of closing ranks and blaming everyone but themselves.
No. First, Biden didn’t lose. Harris lost. The Democrats lost. Second, nobody can guarantee winning an election. You can have a good strategy and a good campaign and still lose due to external factors. Dems are responsible for their mistakes but they cannot be fully responsible for the Republicans winning.
On the other hand, Republicans are 100% responsible for protecting, selecting and enabling their candidate, Donald Trump.
I never said the Democrats shouldn’t be criticised. I agree they should. I also agree they should learn lessons from this.
But don’t absolve the Republicans of responsibility. They protected, selected and have enabled Trump. They are 100% responsible.
So the Democrats made mistakes, deserve criticism and need to learn lessons yet the fact that Biden lost is 100% down to Republicans? Surely you can see the flaw in that take. The Republicans didn’t force people to vote for Trump. They did in enormous numbers because there was no alternative they had any faith in. The Dems caused this problem by running a senile candidate and lying to people about his competency. They lost the trust of the voters, and all this dissembling won’t win it back.
I think you can say that Biden standing down earlier would have given the Democrats a better chance of winning. But it wouldn’t have guaranteed it.
The only thing that would have guaranteed Trump not being President is if the Republicans had not selected and backed him as their candidate. Therefore they are 100% responsible for him being president and all the problems that presents for the US and the world.
A few years ago I saw two young men exchange a parting kiss at New Street station in Birmingham. I was happy for them, but also felt a frisson of horror as I was transported mentally back to the homophobic Brum, and Britain, of the 1980s, where such gestures were brave and rare. The US in the 1960s must have been far worse - I got a taste from reading Edmund White's semi-autobiographical novels - and, as the article points out, the law would have been against them as well as public opinion.
Helen, what happened to Quick link No 1?
Who can say? (I think i was moving stuff around and deleted it)
Again: It costs $29 per thousand to run an ad in my videos, and I get $10 per thousand. Where does the other $19 go? To YouTube, of course. That’s a 2:1 split in favor of the platform. Lord, give me strength.” The true cost of being on YouTube (Substack)
Streaming video is the most expensive thing you can do on the internet. Saying it goes to YouTube is technically correct, but it's mostly costs.
https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/video-is-impossible?utm_source=publication-search
As much as we can criticize the Democratic Party hierarchy and Biden’s inner circle what do you think will happen in 2026 with Donny? He seems to be having his own decline in real time so who will suggest that his ideas about running again or staying around as mentor to the eyelinered one are wrong? The Republicans are scared of him today and will be even more so in two years time.
“Provide fresh milk and food twice daily, as per a fixed schedule” - per the possibly apocryphal job ad, sounds like you’re expected to breastfeed the cat
Is the illustration from the NewYorker? It’s very nice, we need more illustrations and less BARpod AI hellscapes.
I've stopped using AI illustrations, even ironically.
The irony of the Hur report is that Hur was allowed to do the investigation at all. With Trump as president no AG since Jeff Sessions would authorize an IC investigation of Trump. Certainly not Pam Bondi. Recall that even with the Mueller report Trump didn’t even have to do an interview like Biden did with Hur.
I'm a lifelong Manhattanite and have never felt the claustrophobia and freneticism described by Lena Dunham. While I've never lived in London I love spending time there as well.
I find the two cities very similar.
I do wonder whether, even had Biden withdrawn, whether the Democratic party would have nominated someone other than the sitting VP, a woman of color. Almost same arguments that led to her getting the nomination ("What, you're going to diss our two most loyal groups of voters?") would have been used by her supporters.
The only difference would have been that there would have been time to actually run through the primary and nomination process. And perhaps that would have been enough to convince several people to run against her, to be fair.
I think the timing matters. They could have had a primary in 2023, but not summer 2024. And even then Harris would have been the favourite.
For her to have had a decent chance of winning, the Dems would have had to take her out of the weird cold storage they put her in at the start of the Biden presidency. If they’d put her out there in say 2022, she might have gained more experience with teleprompters, learned how to stop word-salading all over the place and generally gained her confidence. She would have been able to go into 24 as someone voters were familiar with and had learned to trust. Trump would have been the swivel eyed loon coming out of left field, she would have been perfectly positioned as the natural, logical and safe successor. It’s crazy they didn’t do this.
I’ve just listened to an hour or so of Biden’s interview with Hur and it’s just as dreadful as the article describes it. It’s incomprehensible that they let him run.
Biden has always been an embellisher of tales; one is tempted to assign this characteristic to a certain Irish loquaciousness. It was his more recent diminishing story telling powers that were much more indicative of his cognitive decline.