The Emperor has no clothes... And his aides sent him onto the CNN debate stage without changing his soiled adult diapers
Biden’s disorderly debate performance unfortunately has major global implications
Listen to this Disorder Emergency Cast here.
And boy, is this an emergency. It has really just been one of those days. One that I will never forget for my whole life:
After months of the grandees in the Democratic party telling the public that Biden’s age was nothing to worry about and that the Emperor was in fact well dressed and of sound mind and fit body: the Global Orderer-in Chief has been shown to have no clothes, a feeble mind, raspy vocal chords, a bit of a cough, and his adult diapers were not changed by his campaign staff prior to his being rolled out before an audience of tens of millions.
As Mega-Orderers know, I love Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. I truly consider him like a surrogate uncle. I trust Joe. I think he is a compassionate, decent human and a great leader. But his time has come and is now long gone. Jill and Obama need to do their intervention and go out there with a cane and pull him off stage left.
I know I am prone to melodrama, but in this instance the Sky Really Is Falling! June 27, 2024 may go down there as one of those dates like Dec 7, 1941 and June 23, 2016: Dates that will live on in infamy. Or as this meme has it:
Biden’s debate performance truly has massive implications for global order: it will embolden Pyongyang, Beijing, Tehran, and Moscow; it creates a dangerous global vacuum with an absence of orderers for many months until the dust settles from the US election; and it leaves the democratic party with an urgent choice how to choreography the process of substituting Biden out for a younger candidate.
To counterbalance my doom and gloom, I was joined on this Disorder emergency cast by the ever up beat Glaswegian Jane Kinninmont who presents the view on Biden from the European capitals.
As for what needs to happen now, here are what centrist Democrats commentators are saying:
Firstly friend of the Pod and Mega Orderer, Jamie Metzl: https://jamiemetzl.com/jamie-metzl-statement-following-the-6-27-24-presidential-debate/
Tom Friedman: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/opinion/joe-biden-tom-friedman.html
Frank Bruni: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/opinion/presidential-debate-trump-biden-2024.html
Scores of cogent podcasts have emerged dissecting the optics of the debate and what the Dems have to do now. Here are a couple that we have found particularly useful:
Ezra Klein: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-presidential-debate.html
The Rest is Politics US:
And Alex’s Byline Times articles here: https://bylinetimes.com/author/alexandrahallhall/
And now for some light relief:
For those who are interested in another disordering historic tragedy that happened on this day 110 years ago today…. We’ve done another Disorder episode on the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.
So on this day of cataclysms maybe you want to get your mind off it by listening here: Did WWI start our era of Disorder?
Exactly 110 years ago, a malnourished teenager with a pistol disordered the world. On Sunday the 28th of June 1914, Gavrilo Princip fired two bullets. They hit their targets -- killing both the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian imperial crown, and his wife, Sophie.
That event ended the age of the traditional European empires, unleashed the mud and blood of the Great War, catalysed the fall of the Tsar and theoretical Marxism’s transformation into a totalitarian reality, and uncorked the nationalist genie that would lead to Hitler, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and later the Cold War. But did it also start our era of Enduring Disorder?
As you Mega-Orders know, I have certain contentions about the relative degree of order and disorder in the past -- notably that the years 1815-2011, in general, and 1946-2003, in specific, were periods characterized by global order and coherent hegemonic leadership -- but what if he is wrong? What if our global disorder didn’t start in 2003 but rather in 1914?
In this special anniversary episode of Disorder, Tim Butcher tells me about that fateful day exactly 110 years ago, what its disordering implications have been, how they have rippled down the years, and how modern history can be thought to have begun on that street corner in Sarajevo.
Princip has been variously described as the `bloodiest assassin in history’ and ‘the most important person in the entire 20th century’… but in this episode, we are going to investigate if he is -- possibly more so than even Trump, Putin or the Ayatollahs -- our world’s true disorder-in-chief… As Tim explains, there is every reason to feel that the world of the Fin de Siècle was in fact more order than what came after it and that Princip is the author of the Disorder that we now inhabit.
Deep Background on Princip, the causes of WWI, and how it has led to our era of Disorder:
Buy ‘The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War’ by Tim Butcher - https://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Hunting-Assassin-Brought-World/dp/0802123899/
For more on Gavrilo Princip’s biography: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gavrilo-Princip
For more on Tim Butcher’s amazing career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Butcher
And for his great episode on our sister Pod, Battleground: