"At 76, [Joe Biden] has enviable sharpness and physical fitness. But at 76, there are limits. And somehow, at 73, Trump’s psychological sickness..."

"... gives him an edge: a gob-smacking drive to keep going and going and going, with no signs of flagging at all, and many signs of mania. Who in their 70s is crazy enough to keep up? Even as he claimed he was seeking healing and unity this week, Trump was still tweeting insults, filming a shameless campaign video, and comparing crowd sizes with Beto O’Rourke’s. The sheer sociopathic narcissism in the face of such grief and trauma beggars belief. But it sure makes Trump seem younger than he is."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "Biden Knows How to Make the Moral Case Against Trump" (NY Magazine).

What if the secret to maintaining youthful vigor while getting old is mental illness?!

Finally, another chance to use my "charming bad logic" tag!

By the way, Sullivan indulges in fat-shaming:

If I were Biden, I’d [emphasize substantive policy issues].... But avoiding the lardaceous orange elephant in the room seems like a defensive dodge to me. It gives the impression of weakness. It cedes too much to Trump and normalizes him. It is not the relentless, epiphanous stare-down of Trump that a successful 2020 opponent needs to muster, and that so much of the country is yearning for. And it misses what is in fact the central issue in 2020: the unique danger this bitter bigot poses to this country’s liberal democracy and civil peace....

Vocabulary Lesson of the Day: Wow readers by adding endings to easily comprehensible nouns to achieve adjectival speed bumps. "Lard" can bulge expansively and metaphorically into "lardaceous," and "epiphany" will perversely resist sudden, intuitive perception as "epiphanous."

Biden... reminded us that in politics, words are acts, and they have consequences when uttered by a national leader: “The words of a president … can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy … They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” And this, Biden argues, is what Trump has done: tap that dark psychic force, in an act of malignant and nihilist narcissism.

Yes, Biden powerfully argued that Trump was an enabler of “white supremacy” in the sense understood by most people, and not the absurdly broad, new left definition that counts as a white supremacist nearly everyone not actively virtue-signaling on left Twitter....

So President Biden would deploy the super-power of presidential speech to get just precisely the right degree of racial critique into the mind of the people? That's very hard to believe. He's already fuzzed everything up badly. What is the right sense of "white supremacy" that's already understood by the people? I can see wanting to fend off  "the absurdly broad, new left definition" of "white supremacy," but I don't see precision or clarity in Biden's speech or in the mind of "most people." Sullivan insists that he sees it, but I find that incredible.

And although some of this might once have seemed like pabulum, in the Trump era, it comes off as fresh. There was even a nice line designed to get under Trump’s skin, ridiculing the listless condemnation of white supremacy Trump recited in the wake of the El Paso massacre: that “low-energy, vacant-eyed mouthing of the words written for him condemning white supremacists this week.”

Biden really said that? I guess he, ironically, was mouthing words written for him. Let's see how that looked and sounded:



He's trading in deep deceit and purporting to stand on the high ground. What a nauseating fraud!

And more importantly, Biden was able to express all this with authority.... 

Lying and race-baiting — with authority. That is the Biden campaign. He's doubled-down and committed. And we're supposed to see that as the antidote to the poison of Trump?

I’ve never been a huge fan of the logorrheic, egotistical grandstanding Biden sometimes engages in; I don’t agree with him on some issues; his treatment of Anita Hill was disgracefully off-key. But I have never doubted Biden’s core decency. Maybe I have a soft spot for a well-meaning Irish-uncle type. 

What if all you wanted for President was a "well-meaning Irish-uncle type"? Frankly, I don't know what an "Irish-uncle type" is and this use of ethnicity to describe an individual's personality traits makes me want to go "all absurdly broad, new-left" style and say that this too is white supremacy.