Althouse

Remarkably, Biden again returned to the subject of ice cream with another shout-out to a rep from Jeni’s....

“The businesses represented in this room stretch across industries, from restaurants to architectural firms to hardware stores, plus Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream. And by the way — by the way, it is splendid,” Biden gushed.

“If I were allowed to take you upstairs, you got a whole freezer full of Jeni’s chocolate chip ice cream,” Biden went on — closing his eyes slightly as if to reminisce about taking a bite. “You know it’s pretty dull when you’ve been in public life as long as I have and you’re known for two things: chocolate chip ice cream and Ray-Bans sunglasses, but what the hell,” the president added.

There are light and heavy things swirling all of the time around a President, so there are always opportunities to catch an awkward juxtaposition. Now, watch this drive:

(The photo I shared with Meade comes from my son Chris. You can see a larger version of that picture here. From there, you can get to more of his photos from Kobe (and Kyoto), Japan.)

My grandfather — Pop — used to read the front section of the evening newspaper and — upon finding something interesting — would read the headline to the rest of us who were either waiting to get our hands on the front section or didn't really care about reading the news at all.

And nowadays, I still participate in spoken news alerts. Here at Meadhouse, we're both often reading the web miscellaneously, and we each like the keep the other up to date on the latest items of interest. 

But lately we're calling out nonsense like this:

Did you see they found more documents at Biden's house?/Yeah, I told you they they found more documents/But these are new additional documents/And I told you about the new additional documents/But these aren't the new additional documents you told me about, this is from 2 minutes ago, newly found new new documents....

As I'm writing this post, Meade calls out to me, "What's happening in the news?" So I say, "They found more documents." And he's all: "Yeah, I saw that." So I say — in the interest of taking this post in a fanciful direction — "But these are new new documents, they just found them." And he said: "WHAAAAAT?!" 

So I questioned him about where that "WHAAAAAT?!" came from and he said he had this vision of Biden walking around and wherever he goes, papers are falling off him.

Me: "Did you picture the papers falling out of his pockets or shedding from his body like pangolin scales?" He says, "Both." And also, he's picturing Biden doing a sort of magician's act, sniffing some little girl's hair and then "Whoa! There's a document in there!" 

Politico reports on what's in a new book ("The Fight of His Life," by Chris Whipple). 

[W]ord got back to [Biden] that second gentleman DOUGLAS EMHOFF had been complaining about Harris’ policy portfolio — which her allies felt was hurting her politically....

“[Biden] hadn’t asked Harris to do anything he hadn’t done as vice president — and she’d begged him for the voting rights assignment.”...

Well, why wasn't Harris given what she wanted? Why didn't they try to help her build her reputation? If they thought she was a "work in progress," why didn't they help her progress? Did Biden make her Vice President to impede her progress? 

The book doesn't sound terribly enlightening. We're told it "features extensive interviews with Biden’s current chief of staff, RON KLAIN, whom he credits with 'patient, nose-to-the-grindstone stewardship.'" We're told the "interviews with top senior staff were done on deep background, with quote approval." 

And Biden and Harris only agreed to answer questions submitted in writing. (Whipple wrote that Harris declined to answer a question he sent about “turmoil and morale problems among your staff going back to your time as California attorney general,” and a question asking about her worst day as vice president.)

There's some material about Afghanistan, best summed up in this sentence: "The book includes several on-the-record interviews with top officials pointing fingers at one another over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan." 

ADDED: Was Harris not given what she wanted? As noted above, she wanted the voting rights assignment and she got it. Was Emhoff complaining about that part of the portfolio or something else? The Politico article does not help at all and I wonder what the book has to say. Is the book a hit job on Harris?

I think the Democrats do have a huge problem looking forward to the 2024 campaign. If Biden does not run, the heir apparent is Harris, but she, in all likelihood, will be a poor candidate. Does Biden have to run simply to keep her from stumbling into the nomination (the way he stumbled into the nomination)?

Excerpt:

It is a truism of American politics that money swills around the top candidates to an alarming degree. And it is also true, and inevitable, that many candidates trust their family members above anyone else to deal with money and other perks that can come their way. Yet even by these standards, the Biden emails showed a family involved in far from normal influence-trading.

For example, Hunter Biden had sat for years on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. Why Hunter Biden sat on that board and was so well remunerated for it — around $50,000 a month — was hardly a secret. Hunter has no expertise in the energy sector, nor in anything much else. But proximity to the former vice-president — at the time possibly the next president — brought irresistible cash advantages. (As it did for Joe’s brother, James. He and Hunter signed a deal in 2017 with a Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC, which paid $4.8 million over 14 months to entities controlled by the two Bidens.)

Hunter’s laptop included messages from Burisma executives going back to 2014, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message”. Other emails described how a “provisional agreement” between Hunter and CEFC would include 10 per cent of equity held back by Hunter for “the big guy”. Who was “the big guy”? It was possible to guess. Elsewhere in the laptop, in January 2019, Hunter could be found sending an angry text to his daughter Naomi, scolding her for having no idea what demeaning things he said he had had to do to support his family. But, he told her: “Don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.” People had imagined that Hunter was using Joe. But no, it appeared that Joe was using his son to make money. If ever there were questions to be asked of a candidate here were some....