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]]>Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his handlers have known that he should have been out and about, weighing in daily on the issues of the campaign.
In impromptu interviews, Biden should be offering alternative plans for dealing with the virus, the lockdown, the economic recovery, the violence and the looting, and racial tensions.
Yet until Biden’s recent press outing and visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin, his handlers seem to have assumed that if he were to leave his basement and fully enter the fray, he could be capable of losing the election in moments of gaffes, lapses or prolonged silences.
So wisely, Team Biden relied on the fact that the commander in chief is always blamed for bad news — and there has been plenty of bad news worldwide this year.
That reality was reflected in the spring and early summer polls that showed growing discontent with the incumbent Trump, as if he were solely responsible for one of the most depressing years in U.S. history.
But news cycles, like polls, are not always static.
What was true in July is not necessarily so in September and especially in November. Volatile years produce volatile voters.
Now, many voters think they see a waning of the virus, a need to get their kids back in school, and a glimmer of hope that the economy is recovering.
A large segment of the public is becoming irate at the nightly looting, destruction and arson that no longer seem to have much to do with the May death of George Floyd while in police custody. Where are the police, the mayors and the governors to protect the vulnerable, the law-abiding and the small-business owners?
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Biden knows the mercurial polls now tell him that he must permanently re-emerge and cease being a virtual candidate. Yet he knows that if he does, he risks losing the race. So his surrogates talk of mandatory fact-checking of the debates — or even canceling them entirely.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently said that Biden “should not concede under any circumstances,” apparently even if he loses the November election. If the rules no longer favor Biden, then it seems time to change the rules.
So Biden has become a tragic prisoner of his own paradoxes.
He is an old centrist who forged a Faustian bargain with socialist Bernie Sanders and his hard-core leftist supporters. That alliance was felt necessary to win the Democratic nomination and the general election.
The hard left provided the urban fireworks this summer that seemed to drive down Trump’s poll numbers. Blue-state governors and mayors contextualized the violence as a “summer of love” or “largely peaceful.”
Until this week Biden stayed mum — both because the polls suggested he should remain so, and because he could hardly criticize those whose often violent acts were creating a sense of national anarchy under Trump’s presidency and thus undeniably aiding the Biden candidacy.
But as CNN news anchor Don Lemon recently warned his fellow leftists, now the polls are changing. Lemon apparently fears that the public is sick of seeing the urban unrest. Suddenly, many members of the media want Biden to condemn the rioting and violence.
But if Biden did, he might alienate his now-critical left-wing Bernie base. Yet Biden’s continued reluctance to unequivocally fault the rioters and arsonists may be alienating moderate suburban swing voters.
The same paradox surrounds the debates. Should Biden, as promised, debate Trump?
Yes. But would he thereby blow up his candidacy in a moment of incoherence?
No. But would he end up ridiculed in absentia, like Clint Eastwood’s empty chair at the 2012 Republican convention?
Trump never sits still. So should Biden match the president’s frenzied pace and hold town halls, impromptu interviews, tarmac rallies, photo-ops on the campaign trail and daily unscripted press conferences? But to do so could well confirm to voters that he is frail and confused.
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We saw some evidence of that danger in his Aug. 31 address in Pittsburgh after Biden finally emerged from his basement. He seemed confused about the COVID-19 death tally and could not quite follow his own TelePrompter:
“Look, the lives, when you think about it, more lives this year than any other year for the past 100 years,” Biden said.
Few knew what he meant. And when Biden also claimed that he never opposed fracking, his opponents came out almost immediately with past clips of him being critical of fracking and favoring the phasing out of fossil fuels.
How did Biden become a prisoner of his own paradoxes?
Perhaps he knew that he was not physically or cognitively up to running a real campaign. But he ran all the same.
Perhaps he knew that the violence of antifa and other agitators could eventually hurt more than help him, but for months he kept silent about the violence all the same, given the perceived political damage to Trump.
Perhaps he knew that he had always opposed the wacky agenda of Sanders, but Biden wrongly felt he could pose as a moderate in 2020 yet if elected keep a promise to the socialists of the more radical wing of his party to govern as a leftist.
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Perhaps he knows that his new progressive allies would be happy for him to win them a presidency but even happier for him to then disappear as soon as possible.
Paradoxes happen when what seems real is not — and is known not to be real by those who act as if it is.
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]]>A UC Davis cancer researcher, suspected of being a clandestine member of the Chinese military, has taken refuge in the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, according to U.S. prosecutors.
The researcher, Juan Tang, is charged with visa fraud, accused of concealing her membership in China’s military and Communist Party in seeking permission to work in a radiation oncology lab at UC Davis. She fled to the consulate after being interviewed by FBI agents in late June, prosecutors said.
Tang is “a fugitive from justice currently being harbored at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco,” a Justice Department spokeswoman said Thursday.
The charges against Tang come as the U.S. government escalates a simmering dispute with Beijing over what it says are attempts by the Chinese government to steal secrets from the United States’ eminent research institutions. Officials at the consulate could not be reached for comment.
The State Department on Wednesday ordered the Chinese consulate in Houston to close. “We are setting out clear expectations for how the Chinese Communist Party is going to behave,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters in Copenhagen, “and when they don’t, we’re going to take actions that protect the American people, protect our security, our national security and also protect our economy and jobs.”
It was unclear from court records whether Tang had retained an attorney. A phone number listed for the consulate was disconnected.
Her case does not mark the first time U.S. authorities have eyed the San Francisco consulate for aiding researchers suspected of hiding their affiliations with the Chinese government. In June, a researcher at UC San Francisco acknowledged he was secretly a Chinese military official and said he had “a designated point of contact” at the consulate, an FBI agent wrote in an affidavit.
The researcher, Xin Wang, has been charged with visa fraud. Chen Song, a neurology researcher at Stanford, and Kaikai Zhao, who studied machine learning and artificial intelligence as a graduate student at Indiana University, face the same charge; both are accused of having undisclosed ties to the Chinese military.
John Brown, who leads the FBI’s National Security Branch, said Thursday that agents had identified visa holders in more than 25 American cities with hidden affiliations with the Chinese military.
U.S. authorities have evidence the Chinese government is “instructing these individuals to destroy evidence and [is] coordinating efforts” to spirit them out of the United States, Benjamin Kingsley, an assistant U.S. attorney, wrote in court papers.
FBI agents interviewed Tang, the UC Davis researcher, at her apartment in June and served a search warrant, seizing her Chinese passport and various “electronic media,” Steven G. Dilland, an FBI agent in Sacramento, wrote in an affidavit.
The agents recovered pictures of Tang wearing a uniform of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force, Dilland said. They also found an application for government benefits in which Tang identified herself as a member of the Chinese Communist Party, he said.
At some point after being interviewed, Tang fled to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, a prosecutor wrote in court papers.
Andy Fell, a spokesman for UC Davis, said Tang was a visiting researcher in UC Davis School of Medicine’s radiation oncology department. Her research was funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council, “a study-based exchange program affiliated with the China’s Ministry of Education and Xijing Hospital in China,” Fell said.
Tang left UC Davis at the end of June, and the school “is providing all information requested by the authorities,” he said.
In asking a judge to unseal documents in her case, a second prosecutor, Heiko P. Coppola, said in court papers filed July 13 that representatives of the Chinese government had approached U.S. officials “about the law enforcement activity surrounding Tang.”
The State Department issued a bulletin this month, warning U.S. citizens in China of “arbitrary enforcement of local laws for purposes other than maintaining law and order.” U.S. officials believe that activity “has some relation” to Tang’s case, Coppola wrote.
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]]>Author and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told “The Story” Wednesday that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden‘s first press conference in 89 days did not quell concerns about his fitness to lead America.
“Almost the first thing he said to a reporter was … ‘you’re a dog-faced liar.’ And that was something that he should have avoided because before, remember, he said, ‘You’re a dog-faced pony soldier …'” Hanson told host Martha MacCallum. “He was reading the names of the people he was supposed to call and he had these pauses, and this was after almost 90 days.
“I’m just reflecting what 20 percent of the Democratic Party stalwarts believe,” Hanson added. “That he’s not cognitively able.”
At Tuesday’s event in his hometown of Wilmington, Del., Biden condemned President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak as well as the administration’s response to intelligence indicating Russia had paid bounties to Taliban-linked militants for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Biden also defended his cognitive ability and said he “can hardly wait” to compare it to President Trump’s as the general election campaign heats up.
“I’ve been tested, I’m constantly tested,” Biden said in response to a question from Fox News’ Doug McKelway. “Look, all you’ve got to do is watch me and I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against.”
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“Where has he been tested the last 90 days?” Hanson asked. “He could have at least have four or five Skype or Zoom interviews, but he didn’t. And you know why he didn’t? Because he’s not able to … [in] an impromptu, ad hoc, extempore fashion, to reply to questions in a coherent manner.”
“When people have those challenges,” Hanson added, “staying in the basement doesn’t make them more sharp. He needs the stimuli, and he got it in his first press conference, and I think most, you know, felt underwhelmed by it. They were disturbed. They were worried about it.”
Fox News’ Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
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]]>About 80 miles away, protesters in Portsmouth beheaded and then pulled down four statues that were part of a Confederate monument on Wednesday, according to media outlets. Efforts to tear one of the statues down began around 8:20 p.m., but the rope they were using snapped, The Virginian-Pilot reported.
The crowd was frustrated by the Portsmouth City Council’s decision to put off moving the monument. They switched to throwing bricks from the post that held the plaque they had pulled down as they initially worked to bring down the statue.
The actions come amid national protests over the death of George Floyd who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck.
A statue of Christopher Columbus in Richmond was torn down by protesters, set on fire and then submerged into a lake on Tuesday. News outlets reported the Columbus statue was toppled less than two hours after protesters gathered in the city’s Byrd Park chanting for the statue to be taken down.
The death of Floyd, who was black, has prompted similar Confederate monument removals around the nation. Some people say the tributes inappropriately glorify people who led a rebellion that sought to uphold slavery. Others say their removal amounts to erasing history.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam last week ordered the removal of an iconic statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which is four blocks away from where the Davis statue stood. A judge on Monday issued an injunction preventing officials from removing the monuments for the next 10 days.
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Historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson told “The Daily Briefing” Wednesday that Obama national security adviser Susan Rice was likely tired of being a “scapegoat” for the administration and was hoping to cover her tracks by writing the newly declassified email she sent to herself on Inauguration Day, 2017.
“During the Benghazi mess, she went out on the directive of Obama on five occasions and lied about the origins, genesis, and the cause of the disaster,” Hanson told host Dana Perino. “She was not going to be a scapegoat again.”
RESURFACED SUSAN RICE COMMENTS DENYING KNOWLEDGE OF TRUMP TEAM SURVEILLANCE RAISE NEW QUESTIONS
Hanson said Rice “played that role again and again … whenever there was a lie in the administration, it was traced back to her.
“And I think that she was kind of apprehensive,” he added, suggesting Rice’s thought process was “‘I’m not going to do this anymore. And I need a document that shows that I was just following Obama’s orders, but he was only following what other people told him.'”
Rice’s email documented a Jan. 5 Oval Office meeting with Obama and others, during which he provided guidance on how law enforcement should address Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race. Parts of the email had been previously released, but a section stating that then-FBI Director James Comey had suggested that the National Security Council (NSC) might not want to pass “sensitive information related to Russia” to Rice’s designated sucessor, Michael Flynn, had been classified as “TOP SECRET” until Tuesday.
KT MCFARLAND: ‘NOTHING MAKES SENSE’ ABOUT SUSAN RICE EMAIL
Rice wrote that Obama wanted to be sure that his outgoing administration was “mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that [they could not] share information fully as it relates to Russia.”
Comey reportedly reassured Obama and promised he was proceeding “by the book,” — a term Rice emphasized three times throughout the email — and said that he had “no indication thus far that Flynn [had] passed classified information to [Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak].”
Hanson questioned Rice’s emphasis on operating “by the book,” which he said might indicate that Obama “ordered her or suggested that people might not want to be candid” in sharing information with Flynn pertaining to Russia.
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Rice “was very worried that James Comey or Barack Obama or the mixture of the two might suggest that it happened in the past…,” Hansen explained, “and that she would be culpable.”
“So,” he went further, “if she ever got in trouble and lied about all of this to Flynn and others, she could say, ‘I went to a meeting and the president of the United States on the advice of James Comey said that there were some problems … and we might not be able to be candid about what we knew about Russia and this new administration.'”
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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