2/9/24

 February 9, 2024

In bed before 10, up at 4:43 with uninvited, unwelcome thoughts of TSJ, a flooded cottage, the first visit with T and WSR, now both gone, as are RHF & WBG & DSB.  Let Lilly out.  39°,  high of 48°, a sunny & windy day ahead.  The wind is SW at 13 mph, 7-16/31.  My weather app says we had no precipitation in the last 24 hours, but a line of thunderstorms that had earlier spawned tornado warnings in Jefferson County passed overhead last night around 8:30 with much thunder & lightning.  Sunrise at 6:58, sunset at 5:14, 10+16.  Solar noon 12:05, altitude 32°.  

Treadmill; pain.   I woke with shoulder & wrist pain.  The last application of Duclofenac was at 9:30 last night.  At 2:15 p.m., 30:31 & 0.70 while watching on YouTube The Great Basin documentary about life in rural Nevada.

I'm grateful for the ease and pleasure with which I can raise and lower my right arm and the ease and pleasure with which I can move my left wrist, especially since I am left-handed.  For that matter, I have the same gratitude concerning the painless functionality of fingers, toes, ankles, elbows, neck, and (for the most part), my back and hips.  I am reminded of the vivid memory I have of going back to Iwakuni, Japan, south of Hiroshima, to receive, unpack, and repack the uniforms and other stuff (like my officer's ceremonial saber) that I had shipped to Japan planning to spend 13 months there in 1965-66, a plan changed by my unit's transfer to Danang, RVN.  What I remember of that return to Iwakuni after a couple of months in Vietnam was the lightness I felt walking on paved sidewalks while wearing shoes.  It felt like walking on air compared to walking in Korea-era, heavy leather combat boots on sand and dirt in Vietnam, carrying my holster Colt .45 service revolver and wearing my heavy cotton 'utilities' including this 'blouse' I've held on to since 1965.  This was early in the invasion before the Marines and Army switched to the lightweight camouflage uniforms and jungle boots that became standard issues during and after Vietnam, before the M14 rifle was replaced by the M16, before a lot of changes occasioned by experience in Vietnam.   Now that I think about it, just as my utilities aged and faded over the last 60 years, so have I, but I need to remember those few days in Iwakuni when I experienced how wonderful it is to walk on pavement, in shoes, unarmed, how I take for granted so much of what is wonderful, marvelous, awesome, miraculous and mystical just in being alive and conscious, how surrounded I am by much goodness and many people trying to be good in circumstances that too often make it hard.  With my persistent cynicism and pessimism, I am hardly a Pollyanna, but I guess I'm like Maggie Smith's realtor: "Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right?  You could make this place beautiful."  What I/we need is more mindfulness, wakefulness, awareness.

My memory is fine.  Just ask the president of Mexico, al-Sisi. Mexico is on our southern border; Egypt is on Gaza's southern border.  So, easy to mix them up, right?  

From this morning's WaPo:

Still, Mr. Biden’s mix-up of Egypt and Mexico came soon after a couple of slips in the last week regarding deceased European leaders. First, during a campaign swing in Nevada, he confused François Mitterrand, a former French president who died in 1996, with the country’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. Then, on Wednesday, he referred twice to having met in 2021 with Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor who died in 2017, instead of with Angela Merkel, who led the country three years ago.

Can anyone have any doubts about why the White House, in an election year in which Biden is consistently trailing in the national polls and for the second consecutive year, passed up an opportunity for Biden to have an on-air interview right before the Super Bowl?

Biden's Legal Exoneration, Political Nightmare.   The Special Counsel's investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of certain classified documents after being vice president called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and described interviews in which he could not recall when he served as vice president, what year his son died or whom he agreed with during policy debates.  In the report, Mr. Hur wrote that in a 2017 recorded conversation between Mr. Biden and the ghostwriter for his book, Mr. Biden struggled to “remember events” and was “straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” Mr. Hur said that the interviews in 2023 with investigators were even worse.

“He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still vice president?’),” the report said. “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

First thought: This seems to me to be a nail in Biden's political coffin - not only the report about his "wilfully" retaining and disclosing to his ghostwriter classified information, creating real risks to national security, though that is certainly damaging, but rather the Special Counsel's characterization of Biden, as "a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," which is to say, a doddering old man unfit for the presidency of the United States with whom a jury would likely sympathize because of his advanced age.

Second thought: the Special Counsel is a Republican, nominated by Donald Trump to be U.S. Attorney for Delaware, and this report was knowingly drafted to do political damage to Biden in his current race against Trump.

Third thought: Has the Special Counsel done the nation a service by disclosing Biden's unfitness, by virtue of age and failing faculties, to be president for another 4-year term during which his faculties would only grow weaker?

Fourth thought: What will happen within the Democratic Party in terms of pressure on Biden to withdraw his candidacy, even this late in the game, and the emergence of alternate candidates?

Fifth thought: I have long been biased against Biden.  There is something about him I don't trust or like.  It's not just his significant role in giving us Clarence Thomas or his significant role in bringing about the mass incarceration of Black men or his significant role in making student loan debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy or even his long history of self-serving lies designed to make him appear more admirable than the facts would support.  I distrust his drive for presidential power and its accoutrements and his lust for the trappings of wealth and high status, like buying a DuPont mansion.  He ran for office claiming to be a "transition" between Trump and a younger corps of future Democratic leaders, but he did nothing to advance the political standing of any other potential candidate to succeed him.  To Kamala Harris he gave mo-win jobs: taking care of the immigration crisis at the Southern border, racial inequality, Black maternal mortality, women in the workforce, etc.  What did he do to advance the visibility and popularity of other potential alternatives to Trump and Trumpism?  Gavin Newsome of California?  Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan?  Andy Beshear of Kentucky?  J. B. Pritzker of Illinois?  Roy Cooper of North Carolina?  Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Gina Raimondo?  Cory Booker?  Stacy Adams?  Anyone?  Biden is running for president again at age 81 for the same reason that Trump led the coup attempt in 2020-2021: he just doesn't want to give up the job and all its benefits.  Hail to the Chief, all rise when he enters a room, Air Force One, private  Marine helicopters, and all that.  Joe Biden, Ruth Bader Ginsberg (a blessing on her soul), Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell - why do (or did) they all hold on to power into their 80s, or in Grassley's case, 90s?  Because of concern over the public interest or because of their own inability or unwillingness to let go of power, prestige, and all the trappings?  Heaven save us from our superannuated leaders.

Sixth thought:  For Trump's defeat in 2020, Biden should get great credit.  For Trump's probable return in 2024, Biden should get great blame.