Thursday, February 22, 2024
Good morning.
As a news columnist, I’m always on the lookout for pithy items which encapsulate the past month’s events. If they’re funny, better yet.
The joke below (passed on by a reader) serves that dual purpose quite nicely.
“I love February because it contains two of my most favorite annual events: Ground Hog Day and the State of the Union Address. One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a notoriously unreliable mammal for prognostication with no basis in reality. The other involves a groundhog.”
Among the two mammals competing for February’s Best in Show, it looks like Punxsutawney Phil bested White House Joe (who this year has delayed his State of the Union Address until March).
Phil nailed this year’s weather prediction. For the first time since 2020 – and only the 18th time in the past century – the furry forecaster told his handlers on Gobbler’s Knob that winter would end in two weeks. Our sunny and generally winter-free month since February 2 makes Phil look like Nostradamus.
Perhaps the White House may want to add a rodent to their election-year forecasting team?
As for the other February contestant, the only thing that can be reliably said is President Biden surely had a worse month than Phil.
February’s presidential challenges included the report released earlier this month by special counsel Robert Hur, who’d been investigating Biden’s mishandling of classified documents after leaving the Obama White House but before becoming president.
Hur was appointed to this position by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden cabinet member. While Hur recommended that no criminal charges be brought against the president, his report included this problematic summation of Biden’s mental acuity (or lack thereof): “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Then, in a hastily called (and rare) 13-minute press conference, immediately after the report was released on February 8, the president confirmed Hur’s exact point. While sticking to his prepared remarks for the first nine minutes, Biden seemed okay. But after leaving the podium and then suddenly returning to it in the ninth minute, big problems emerged.
Speaking haltingly and looking confused, the president abruptly reversed his administration’s own previous support for Israel, calling their response to Hamas’ vicious terrorist attack on October 7 “over the top.” He then identified Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico.
Confusing the identities of the two presidents is perhaps understandable, given that he’s engaged in simultaneous negotiations with the presidents of both Egypt (over the continuing crisis in Gaza) and Mexico. This second situation is the other border crisis that consumes much of his attention right now, the thousands of illegal migrants pouring across the U.S. border from Mexico each day.
Below is the video of his press conference two weeks ago in which Biden insists his “memory is fine.” Judge for yourself. I suggest you move to minute 9 in the video to observe where his confusion becomes most apparent.
Despite the president’s regrettable faux pas (or perhaps because of it), many Democrats leaped to his defense, slamming the Hur report as a politically-motivated cheap shot. His surrogates in the news media rushed to defend our commander in chief.
The report may have focused attention on Biden’s cognitive decline, but is Hur qualified to make such an assessment, the news lapdogs asked? Is Hur a gerontologist? Only certified “experts” can assess the mental frailty of an 81-year-old, not someone actually listening to his feeble response to questions asked of him.
Here is what NBC News said: “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”
And the Associated Press: “Health experts caution that neither verbal gaffes nor a lawyer’s opinions can reveal whether someone is having cognitive trouble. That takes medical testing.”
And the New York Times: “Memory loss requires careful diagnosis, scientists say.” Nellie Bowles, in last Friday’s TGIF report (herself a former Times reporter), acerbically recalled that in this 2019 column, then President Donald Trump was pronounced “mentally unfit, no exam needed.”
Then there was MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who said Hur “couldn’t indict Biden legally, so he tried to indict Biden politically.”
At first, I thought that might be plausible, until I read this commentary in the Wall Street Journal. The column explains why special counsel Hur offered an assessment of Biden’s cognitive state. The author, John Sciortino, a former U.S. assistant attorney in two federal jurisdictions, says that Justice Department rules require prosecutors to take into account whether they can convince a jury of guilt.
Accordingly, Hur wrote the following assessment of Biden (on page 6 of 345 in his report, accessible here): “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of [President Biden], he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Most Americans also have concerns about Biden’s apparent cognitive decline. In this new poll, 86% of respondents say he is too old to serve a second term (a majority of those polled said the same about Donald Trump). To put the 86% in perspective, there are more Americans who think the earth is flat (18%), per this social-media post from law professor Jonathan Turley, than the 14% who now believe President Biden is capable of serving a second term.
Hur’s investigation into the mishandling of classified documents included a five-hour face-to-face interview with the president, which took place in early October. For a president who disdains unscripted public appearances and holds very few press conferences, Hur “opened a rare window on the president in private,” the Wall Street Journal wrote the day after the report was released.
Hur’s assessment wasn’t reassuring, the Journal concluded.
The editorial was headlined: “A tipping point on Biden’s decline.” It noted what polls indicate the public is increasingly thinking: that the president’s “failure to recall basic facts of his life and Mr. Biden’s multiplying public lapses are ample reason for urging him to withdraw from the 2024 race.”
The Hur report revealed some stunning memory lapses of the president. Biden couldn’t recall which years he was vice president (2009-2017) or even when his son Beau died (May 30, 2015). Twice Biden is quoted in the report as failing to recall which years he was America’s veep. “If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice president?” And: “In 2009, am I still vice president?”
In a letter of rebuttal attached to the Hur report, Biden’s attorneys attributed his failure to recall such details to the fact that the interview took place the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel, while contesting specific points about the interview.
“There’s an easy way to clear up the record,” the Journal retorted in a second editorial. Biden “could call on the Justice Department to release the transcript of his five-hour interview.” No such offer has been forthcoming from the White House.
“Hur’s team spent five hours with the president,” the Journal continued, “and his assessment is shifting the public debate on the wisdom of giving an 81-year-old the nuclear launch codes for another four years.”
Biden’s (or Trump’s, for that matter) proximity to the nuclear launch codes is among the reasons I think tough scrutiny of both is warranted. President Biden is the leader of the Free World at a very precarious time. Our enemies – state-sponsored terrorism emanating from Iran, in the form of drones and jihadis; menacing dictators in Russia, China and North Korea – are exactly that: our enemies.
The Journal continued in its editorial: “Pardon us for saying that Americans deserve a better choice than Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump. Most of the public is ready to turn the page on both men. Which of them would win in November is hard to predict, but the polls today suggest Biden would lose. He doesn’t want to admit that. Who would? The question isn’t whether changing Biden’s mind is likely. It’s whether, if his dismal polling continues, Democratic bigwigs will try.”
Could Biden drop out? It could happen, but I don’t think it will. The bigwigs don’t appear to have abandoned him – yet.
The last time an incumbent president announced he would not seek a second term was Lyndon Johnson, whose decision came amid the tumult of 1968, after the unsuccessful Tet Offensive in Vietnam and a weak showing in his party’s New Hampshire primary. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy challenged LBJ in the primaries. No one of the same stature has challenged Biden this time (though Kennedy’s 70-year-old son Robert Jr. is running as an independent).
There’s no doubt, however, that since the Hur report, serious questions have been raised about Biden’s health and vitality.
“What amazes me is that as feeble as [Biden] obviously is, no one is willing to come out and seriously challenge him other than a member of the House nobody’s heard of and some very minor candidates,” LBJ historian Luke Nichter, author of The Year that Broke Politics, told the Free Press in this interview.
Then there’s Donald Trump.
Who could have possibly predicted three years ago that he’d overcome the events of January 6, 2021 to return back to the top of the Republican ticket? Whether you judge what happened at the U.S. Capitol on that day as a “riot” – the term Trump supporters prefer – or the “insurrection” that Democrats call it, there can be no denying that Trump is the most resilient politician of our time or perhaps of all-time.
When he boasted while campaigning in Iowa during his first presidential run in 2016 that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” that wasn’t hyperbole.
This year, however, is sure to test that claim. Last Thursday, a judge set a March 25 trial date in the first of four criminal cases that will be brought against our 45th president this year that are expected to coincide with the Republican primaries and into the summer months. This first case accuses the former president of falsifying business records related to a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star.
The courtroom challenges Trump faces this year are the legal equivalent of Whack-a-Mole. Every time a ruling or decision comes down that seems to favor him – the oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court on February 8, for instance, in which nearly all of the nine justices (including two of the liberal ones) voiced skepticism about disqualifying him from the 2024 ballot for promoting “insurrection” – there’s another court case that seems harmful, to his wallet if nothing else.
The decision of a New York state judge, revealed last Friday, is a case in point. The judge ordered Trump to pay penalties of nearly $355 million for engaging in years of fraud by lying about the value of his real-estate portfolio. The decision also prevents Trump from doing business in the state of New York for three years.
Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, described the ruling as a “manifest injustice – plain and simple. It is the culmination of a multiyear, politically fueled witch hunt that was designed to ‘take down Donald Trump,’ before Letitia James [the prosecutor in the case] ever stepped foot into the Attorney General’s office. Countless hours of testimony proved that there was no wrongdoing, no crime, and no victim.”
His legal team is appealing the decision, along with another in January in which a federal jury in New York ordered him to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll more than $83 million for defaming her in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old rape.
The lone top-tier challenger left in the race for the Republican presidential nomination is former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who served in the Trump administration. She has refused to withdraw from the race, infuriating Trump and his supporters.
“We don’t anoint kings in this country,” Haley said on Tuesday in Greenville, S.C., ahead of the state’s primary on Saturday. “We have elections. And Donald Trump, of all people, should know we don’t rig elections.”
Trump surely has legitimate claims that he is being unfairly targeted by a legal system run amok, but here’s what I have learned about that system in the course of my own encounters with it as a former journalist.
Many years ago, I wrote a book about the late Jack Welch. During his 20-year tenure as the chief executive officer of the General Electric Company, Welch was lionized in the business press as the most successful businessman of his era. Having covered him for the Wall Street Journal, I had a different view of his business practices and his supposed success.
Welch didn’t take very kindly to my alternative view of him. On twelve separate occasions, his legion of attorneys sent me threatening letters which sought to eviscerate me for having the audacity to seek publishing my alternative view. This proved to be a great education for me, both journalistically and in my own spiritual formation. On episode 100 of our podcast, I revealed a year ago how my encounters with Welch formed me spiritually and helped mold me into the person I am today.
But through that experience, I also learned a great deal about our legal system. It is an adversarial system for a reason. I had a very good lawyer representing me, the late Roslyn Litman of Pittsburgh. Roslyn represented some controversial clients during her distinguished legal career, including basketball player Connie Hawkins in a suit she brought on his behalf, and won, against the NBA.
Ros was a huge champion of free speech and a fierce defender of her clients; she was also a wonderful person. I considered it a privilege that she was my defense against General Electric’s false claims about me. Letters she wrote on my behalf literally kept the book alive. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the only thing that stood between me and professional and personal ruin, during the six long years I worked on that book, was our legal system – and Jesus Christ.
Welch and General Electric never did sue me or my publisher (Alfred Knopf), though his representatives threatened to bring suit those dozen times. But the lesson I learned is that in the United States, our legal system is a great equalizer. It’s not like in Russia, where President Vladimir Putin can murder his adversaries with impunity.
The political assassination last week of dissident Alexei Navalny (who was a Christian) is a stark reminder of the extreme measures Putin will take to maintain control in Russia. He is refusing to return Navalny’s body to his widow and mother. Meanwhile, Russians leaving flowers at a makeshift memorial in St. Petersburg have been arrested.
Instead, in this country, we have constitutional protections and civil liberties, among them the freedoms of speech and religion protected under the First Amendment. Yes, those liberties have been severely infringed upon in the four years since Covid, especially during the Biden presidency.
One of the more egregious examples of this has occurred right here in Mt. Lebanon. Filed nearly two years ago, the lawsuit against our school district alleges teacher misconduct on the enforced gender instruction of first-graders (one reason my first-grade grandson attends our church Academy). The district not only condoned that misconduct – it has maintained in court filings that parents have no right to control what their children are taught on this sensitive subject.
That suit, however, has twice gotten favorable rulings before the judge hearing the case. A petition for summary judgment in favor of the parents who filed the suit is now before the court. In other words, people of religious conviction still have constitutional rights in this country, and our rights cannot be swept away on a whim, unlike in Putin’s Russia.
We have the rule of law in the United States, from which no person or entity is exempt. Not people who make false claims, nor religious entities that endorse those claims.
The proud and mighty must submit to the same rules as the meek and lowly. Even powerful CEOs, and present and former occupants of the Oval Office, must submit to unwelcome legal scrutiny.
Documents get unearthed. Falsehoods get revealed. Claims get vetted. That’s a harsh reality our friends in the court proceeding we initiated against the Presbytery of the Alleghenies (POA) are now also discovering. And no doubt, we will discover some of the same, too. As I have often learned, the pursuit of truth does not play favorites.
I’ll close my report with Pastor Nate Devlin’s wise and inspiring words from his sermon on February 4. That date was supposed to be when our congregation voted on dismissal from the POA and the denomination it represents, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The vote is for now postponed until our attorney and theirs can meet before a moderator to see if we can settle our differences on the voting rolls. If not, a judge will decide the issue.
“Today is February 4th,” Nate began. “It is a day of decision. It was supposed to be a day of a particular kind of decision, as we all know. Today was supposed to be the day where we voted and decided on our denominational affiliation.
“Whether or not we were going to remain in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church or vote to be dismissed into independence, which would allow for the opportunity of future denominational realignment.
“But that decision has been postponed. And we will not be making that decision today. But today is still a day of decision. …
Nate continued: “But the Lord in His providence and in His sovereignty saw fit to delay that decision, so that we as a congregation could make another – a more important, a more fundamental, a higher priority decision.
“Before answering the question – does our congregation belong in the EPC? – we must first face corporately and individually the more primary question, and the question is this: who do I belong to? God is surfacing that question before us today.
“Who do I belong to? God is surfacing that question because we cannot enter in to the good future that God has for us until we first go under. We cannot go in until we first go under. There is only one way to enter God’s good future.
“I’m not saying that because that’s my opinion. I’m saying that because that’s exactly what we see in Joshua chapter 5.
“In order to enter into God’s good future, you must first come under, you have to come under the blood. You have to go under before you can go in. And so today is a day of decision, not about denominations, not about me, whether or not you like me or you think I’m a good leader.
“It’s not a decision about the Session and whether or not they’ve provided good leadership. But the decision is this: will I go under the blood? Will I come under the Lord Jesus Christ? …
Then Nate concluded: “Before the vote to leave the EPC, we all have a decision to make. And the question before us is this: whose side am I on?
“And this is not a decision between your loyalty to me or former leaders of this church. It is not a decision between the Session and the Administrative Commission. It is not a decision between the EPC and some other denomination.
“The decision is between whether or not you are on your own side or you are on the Lord’s side. This is the real vote that the Lord has brought us to today. This is the decision.
“And this is the one that has all the real consequences. Not for just the next 25 years of this church, but for eternity, for you. This is not a decision about money, about a building, about programs, about staff. The question is: who am I for?
“Am I on the Lord’s side? Have I given myself fully to the commander of my life? If you come under the blood, then a good future is possible. If you come under the blood, then you can stand on holy ground.
“And so, we must decide.”
In this Lenten season when we are commanded to focus on the seriousness of our sin, to practice repentance and to receive forgiveness, may each of us kneel before the Cross, and come under the Blood and Lordship of Jesus Christ.
That’s my report for February. May God bless you.