Joe, We Knew Ye
If Biden hands the presidency to Trump, Buchanan will rise one notch in the rankings.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
The Obama courtier David Axelrod tiptoed near a truth recently: If Donald Trump is everything Democrats say, they ought to nominate a candidate who is better able to beat him.
Mr. Axelrod fell a few yards short of a full truth yet now the full truth is embodied in the connective logic of two of Joe Biden’s statements during a recent fundraising trip. Said Mr. Biden: “50 other” Democrats could beat Mr. Trump. Also said Mr. Biden: He might not be running himself if Mr. Trump weren’t the probable GOP nominee.
The implied logic, even if Mr. Biden didn’t mean it, is absolutely correct. Mr. Trump was assumed to be so beatable that even a weak Mr. Biden could beat him. Alas, polls increasingly suggest that Mr. Biden has become so beatable that even a weak Mr. Trump might beat him.
Messrs. Axelrod’s and Biden’s comments implicitly acknowledge just how much Mr. Biden’s re-election strategy has played dice with the country. Tactfully omitted is the full monty: Democratic officials actively put their backs into trying to make sure Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee. The flimsier their many criminal charges, the better they actually serve the purpose of rallying GOP voters to Mr. Trump.
Now the worm is turning further than Democrats intended. In fact, if they had paid attention to voter contempt for the establishment over the past 15 years they would have seen it coming. Mr. Axelrod is mum from professional courtesy but professional Democrats on TV, and in the House and Senate, aren’t stupid. They register how severely the Biden strategy is coming a cropper, with the Trump candidacy Mr. Biden hoped to foment looking increasingly likely to sweep Mr. Biden out of the White House.
If so, it will be the most indefensible botch in presidential history. The James Buchanan comparisons will be unfair to Buchanan who had to contend with slavery.
Mr. Biden is like a President Clouseau fumbling around a room and breaking everything he touches. Gone is the pundit bubble of last January when Mr. Biden was LBJ-like, even FDR-like, in his record of achievement. Crime? Friendly commentators belatedly credit him with standing up to the Democratic chant of “defund the police” when no one can remember him doing so at the time. On the economy, his advisers hopelessly try to credit him with the recession that didn’t happen. All voters see is the inflation that did happen.
Remember how well Mr. Biden was set up, whether you care to credit Mr. Trump or not. The post-Covid economic boom was beckoning. Peace deals were being struck between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Vladimir Putin seemed to be checkmated by the provision of antitank missiles to Ukraine, Washington’s scuttling of a Kremlin-desired pipeline, and the Pentagon’s crisp and brutal annihilation of a rampaging Wagner force trying to loot Syria during the Putin-sponsored chaos in that country.
Call Mr. Biden a victim of fate for the uglier world now facing voters, but don’t underestimate the symbolic resonance of the Hunter Biden scandal: How oafishly Hunter went about milking the family name, how oafishly Joe abetted him by hobnobbing with Hunter’s clients and letting him exploit the trappings of Joe’s then-vice presidency.
How oafishly Hunter memorialized all this plus his prostitutes and drug-taking on a laptop, how oafishly his father lied to the country and allowed 51 former intelligence officials to hijack America’s diplomatic interests to frame a foreign power for a purely private, self-created Biden family embarrassment.
Millions of voters indulge Mr. Trump’s claims about a stolen election, whatever they really think of those claims, because of a big landscape feature, the Russia collusion episode of 2016-19, which they believe was fabricated by the Clinton campaign, FBI and news media.
The establishment can take a bow for all this. Even Mr. Trump knows it. In defiance of a lifetime habit, he’s been toning down his shtick lately, he tells associates, for fear of breaking the spell. He’s letting the “dictator” meme-of-the-moment go largely unanswered because apparently he learned at least one thing from the real dictator Napoleon: Don’t interfere when your enemy is beating himself.
Messrs. Axelrod and Biden, in his fundraiser comments, are more right than they admit. The establishment will finally earn your full contempt if, having painted Mr. Trump in lurid colors as America’s Hitler, it nonetheless persists in risking a Trump presidency to supply Mr. Biden the hope of a second term he evidently covets. Democrats can yet pray Mr. Trump will self-destruct but I doubt this will be good enough for Democrats who consider themselves patriots. Maybe I give the people around Mr. Biden and Mr. Biden himself more credit than they deserve, but each passing day makes it more implausible that he will be his party’s nominee when November 2024 comes around.
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So true, unless the father is a lout.
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The Biggest Root Cause of Crime Is Fatherlessness
Children are likelier to finish high school and stay out of trouble if they’re brought up by two parents.
A decade ago, New York City launched a campaign to combat teen pregnancy. It featured ads on buses and subway cars that read: “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.”
That advice, more popularly known as the “success sequence,” is often credited to research done by Brookings Institution scholars Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, though others have made similar observations. In his recent book, “Agency,” Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute writes that the message “has attracted many admirers because of the simplicity of the three steps that young people, even if born into disadvantaged circumstances or raised by a young single parent, can themselves control and take in their lives.”
The effort nevertheless faced significant backlash from detractors who accused then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg of stigmatizing teen pregnancy and pushing a “moralistic, conservative agenda to revitalize marriage,” Mr. Rowe writes. Mr. Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, ultimately abandoned the effort. Public moralizing has since fallen further out of favor and been replaced by a kind of self-congratulatory nonjudgmentalism. In today’s New York, you’re likely to see ads for free syringes and directions to “safe” injections sites for junkies, even as drug overdoses have reached record levels.
We could use more of that moralizing from public officials, whether the issue is solo parenting, substance abuse or crime. The success sequence works to keep people not only off the dole but also out of trouble with the law. High-school graduates and children raised by both parents are much less likely to end up in jail. “Virtually every major social pathology,” political scientist Stephen Baskerville writes, “has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty.”
America’s crime debate tends to focus on so-called root causes, such as joblessness. But it’s worth remembering that the sharpest increase in violent crime began in the 1960s, a decade that saw low unemployment, strong economic growth and a doubling of black household incomes. As notable, labor-force participation rates of young black men fell during the 1980s and ’90s, one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth in U.S. history.
A new academic paper from the Institute for Family Studies doesn’t deny that economic conditions play a role in criminal behavior. And co-authors Rafael Mangual, Brad Wilcox, Joseph Price and Seth Cannon write that “changes in law-enforcement and the prosecution of criminals have also had a hand in the recent uptick in violent crime in American cities.” The paper’s main argument, however, is that family instability may be the biggest factor of all and that it’s not receiving the attention it deserves.
“Cities are safer when two-parent families are dominant and more crime-ridden when family instability is common,” the authors write. Nationwide, the total crime rate is about 48% higher in cities “that have above the median share of single-parent families, compared to cities that have fewer single-parent families.” Even when controlling for variables such as race, income and educational attainment, “the association between family structure and total crime rates, as well as violent crime rates, in cities across the United States remains statistically significant.”
Having a father around, the authors note, is about more than an additional paycheck. Fathers teach their sons responsibility, self-control, how to carry themselves, how to treat women. They tend to be more effective disciplinarians, and their involvement in childrearing is linked to positive outcomes in the academic development of their children, “especially in mathematics and verbal skills.” That finding “has been established for both sons and daughters but, unsurprisingly, it is especially pronounced among boys. The presence of married fathers is also protective against school suspensions and expulsions, as well as the risk of dropping out of high school.”
Between 1960 and 2019, the percentage of babies in the U.S. born to unwed mothers grew from 5% to almost 50%. “Shifts from the late-1960s to the 1990s away from stable families have left some cities, and especially some neighborhoods, vulnerable to higher rates of crime, especially violent crime,” the study concludes. “We need to realign material and cultural incentives in our cities to favor marriage and stable families, not undercut them.”
We all know single mothers—some of us even may be related to them—who heroically beat these odds and raised children that have gone on to lead productive lives. The public-policy goal should be to reduce the number of people who will have to face those odds. And that means calling out behavior that is objectively harmful to people and society in general.
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On the last night of Hannukah, we attended a presentation by two Kibbutz Israelis who lived through attack by Hamas. The first to speak was the daughter of a mother who was not feeling well.
Their Kibbutz was large (900 inhabitants) and in the northern border of Israel directly across from Gaza. The attack was executed based on excellent planning and information and caught both the residents and nearby IDF base totally by surprise.
She did not use a microphone and these are key points as best I was able to hear.
1)The terrorists depended upon information gleaned by Palestinian workers at the Kibbutz
2) The terrorists came in from tunnels as well as airborne. No IDF planning had anticipated this tactic.
3) The daughter had two children and they went to their "safe" room which the Hamas terrorists penetrated.
4) Fortunately, these terrorists were interested in killing IDF troops who came to rescue and she and her two children survived.
5) Of the 18 taken as hostages 11 have been since returned.
6) Her neighbors and many others were wantonly killed. I am not clear on the number.
7) The terrorists were heard calling their mothers and bragging how many Israelis they had killed.
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The second presenter was a male from another Kibbutz that was inhabited by a lessor number.
1) Both Kibbutz's were engaged in farming, raising various crops. The smaller Kibbutz had 300 cows which needed to be milked 3 times per day.
2) The terrorists went immediately to kill the small internal staff assigned to protect the residents and then began to attack those engaged in the dairy facility.
3) The speaker recited his urgent calls to a nearby IDF base and was repeatedly told troops were being sent but they failed to come in time.
4) Eventually, those rescue troop who arrived were ambushed and killed because the terrorists knew the cows needed to be milked and they positioned themselves accordingly. Eventually the IAF flew over the the Dairy and killed all the cows etc..
The speaker was also able to survive. Both will be travelling here to tell their horrendous story.
After their presentation the audience (about 75 plus) were able to ask questions.
a) Suffice it to say the consensus seems to be the Israeli mood remains somber and, again, the American Media appears committed to supporting Israelis who want to blame BIBI and force him out of government. Obviously it appears, Biden is unsheathing his knife and handing it to Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan who keep resurrecting a two state solution. They forget this was Israel's hope when they ceded Gaza to the Palestinians who invited Hamas to govern them..
Blinken already proved he is prepared to do dirty work because he obtained signed letters from 51 intelligence officials who warned about a Trump re-election days before the 2020 election.
b) There is no doubt Israel was caught by surprise and eventually must decide whether they can safely employ Palestinians. They assumed by doing so, and since Palestinians need income, they would be averse to losing what they needed to care for their families. Hatred blew a hole in Israeli logic.
c) The female Israeli began her presentation by stating that she thought Palestinians would eventually come to live side by side and, overtime, in a peaceful manner. She admitted to being proven naïve.
Buddy Carter was kind enough to try and make the meeting but his plane came in 2 hours late but his local senior staff representative did a superb job.
We both left the meeting wondering how, after such a traumatic experience, the speakers were able to repeat the facts of their experience.
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If you believe the demographic video I recently posted that depicts the fact all of Europe will soon become colonized by Muslims etc. you should rethink any view the future will be peaceful.
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