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Good Friday Morning! Except to the United Kingdom. This week I learned about the abomination that is the “toast sandwich.” The Wikipedia description of this is, and I am not kidding: “A toast sandwich is a sandwich in which the filling between two slices of bread is itself a thin slice of toasted bread, which may be buttered. An 1861 recipe says to add salt and pepper to taste.”
Add salt and pepper to taste. There’s a picture of it on Wikipedia. My friends, Thomas Jefferson should come back to life and add a line to the Declaration of Independence over this. I appreciated this line: “The A.V. Club’s Mike Vago described it as an ‘extravagance of blandness.'” This is not some whimsical dish, however. It came up against in recent history:
In November 2011, the toast sandwich was recreated by the Royal Society of Chemistry in a tasting 150 years after the release of Beeton’s Book of Household Management. The society sought to revive the forgotten dish in wake of the Great Recession after calculating the cost as low as £.075 per sandwich. They named it “the country’s most economical lunch,” offering £200 to whoever could create a cheaper edible meal. Due to an overabundance of submissions, the offer was closed seven days later and the £200 given to a randomly selected entrant.
Folks, people eating dry Ramen noodles consume more edible and seasoned food than the United Kingdom. I get that it’s one dish, but when we make similar jokes in the South, it’s because we fry everything. At least that’s tasty!
This week, I will go into a Q&A piece I linked last week, a Q&A between a historian and a journalist on Barack Obama. They discuss many things, including whether or not Obama is partially running the Biden administration — links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- The national press made a big deal of Sen. Joe Manchin’s comments on local West Virginia radio. Big headlines came out all across media outlets. The Washington Post headlined it, “Joe Manchin says he’s thinking ‘seriously’ about becoming an independent.” Internationally, the Guardian had an immediacy to it: “Democratic Senator Joe Manchin ‘thinking seriously’ about leaving party.” The problem with the coverage is one of tense. Manchin said he’s “seriously thought” about becoming an independent — it’s not “seriously thinking.” Past versus active tense, which is a purposeful word choice by Manchin. Obviously, everyone has Kirstyn Sinema on their mind, who flipped to an independent. Manchin has made similar comments in the past, so this statement was nothing new. Republicans have a strong candidate in Gov. Jim Justice running for Senate, and Manchin is eyeing that. If he flipped parties, he’d have a brutal primary. If he switches to independent, he alienates Democratic voters. If he remains a Democrat, he will carry that stench into 2024. There’s a reason he’s choosing to dance around the question and not answer it. The possibility of what he could be is better than the reality of his choice.
- Headline inflation slightly ticked up to 3.2%. While the rate ticked up, it didn’t increase as much as estimates predicted. Most analysts I’ve read expect CPI to go up again next month, which will put the Fed on notice again for a rate increase. There are plenty of stories about the Fed being done with rate increases. I could see the Fed skipping a month on raising rates, but I believe they have one more rate increase in them. After that, it’ll depend on the data.
- We’re headed into the meat of the Atlantic Hurricane season. The National Hurricane Center is still predicting a busy Atlantic season, despite the overall quiet we’ve had so far. “NOAA said Thursday that it now expects 14 to 21 named storms this year, of which six to 11 will become hurricanes, which have winds of 74 miles an hour or higher. Two to five storms are expected to be major hurricanes, meaning winds above 111 mph.” But the key factor this season is whether or not El Nino puts a dent in these numbers. El Nino is theorized to create wind shear in the Atlantic, which reduces hurricane development. However, this year, the Atlantic is much warmer than average. It’s El Nino vs. a warm Atlantic. At the moment, dry air has prevented any tropical development. But from now through September is the most active part of the season. Whatever the end number, we will learn a lot about hurricane development this season.
Where you can find me this week
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Biden, Democrats Want Higher HVAC Costs? Time to Lead by Example – Conservative Institute
Corporate DEI Racism Faces Supreme Court Challenges – Conservative Institute
Disney’s Sinking Woke Ship – Conservative Institute
The Shadow Presidency.
Last week, I highlighted a piece in Tablet Magazine in the Quick Hits section. I heard back from some of you who read it that you enjoyed it — as did I. The piece is “The Obama Factor: A Q&A with Historian David Garrow.” Garrow has written one of the only critical biographies of Obama. And by critical, I mean he interviews people, verifies facts, and tests the mythology that Obama has created around himself.
For instance, one of the key differences in the book is over Obama’s white girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In his book, “Dreams of my Father,” Obama presented the breakup between the two one way and Garrow another. Here’s the breakdown:
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
No doubt, Obama’s evolving race-based self-consciousness did distance him from Jager; in the end, the couple broke up. Yet it is revealing to read Obama’s account of the breakup in Dreams against the very different account that Jager offers. In Obama’s account, he was the particularist, embracing a personal meaning for the Black experience that Jager, the universalist, refused to grant. In Jager’s account, the poles of the argument are nearly, but not quite, reversed: It is Obama who appears to minimize Jewish anxiety about blood libels coming from the Black community. His particularism mattered; hers didn’t. While Obama defined himself as a realist or pragmatist, the episode reads like a textbook evasion of moral responsibility.
As Samuels and Garrow note, knowing who was right is impossible. Divorces, breakups, and other things all have one thing in common: neither side typically tells the whole truth.
But the episode sets the tone for the Q&A in the piece and goes through how the historian pops the mythology of Obama. A mythology that was allowed to persist because — as both Samuesl and Garrow both found ridiculous — not one journalist attempted to interview Jager in the 2008 or 2012 elections, primary or general. With no journalists pushing against anything, it allowed Obama to write his own bio, which went critically unchallenged.
Ironically, this also helped boost the “birtherism” movement. Also, another historical tidbit: Hilary Clinton is responsible for the beginning of birtherism in the 2007-08 primaries and the Steele dossier that formed the early crux of Russia-Trump accusations that plagued him starting in 2016. Many reporters will say that “Clinton supporters” started these things, not the Clintons themselves, which doesn’t even pass the smell test of the Clinton ways (the Marc Rich pardon payoff is one of many exhibits).
I digress.
Where the Tablet Magazine piece shifts is when the Q&A goes into current affairs and asks a simple question: Is Barack Obama running a shadow third term through the incapable Biden administration? The belief is: yes.
Samuels points out that the Obamas clearly decided to stay in DC long after their daughters graduated high school. That meant there were no personal reasons to leave DC and rejoin private life — like George W. Bush, as an example. He writes:
By then, it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms.
Then we pivot to the Biden administration:
The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. The whispers about Biden’s cognitive decline, which began during his bizarre COVID-sheltered basement campaign, were mostly dismissed as partisan attacks on a politician who had always been gaffe-ridden. Yet as President Biden continued to fall off bicycles, misremember basic names and facts, and mix long and increasingly weird passages of Dada-edque nonsense with autobiographical whoppers during his public appearances, it became hard not to wonder how poor the president’s capacities really were and who was actually making decisions in a White House staffed top to bottom with core Obama loyalists. When Obama turned up at the White House, staffers and the press crowded around him, leaving President Biden talking to the drapes—which is not a metaphor but a real thing that happened.
How does this arrangement work? Samuels writes:
That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.
Instead, every few months a sanitized report appears on some aspect of the ex-president’s outside public advocacy, presented within limits that are clearly being set by Obama’s political operatives—which conveniently elide the problems that are inherent in having a person with no constitutional role or congressional oversight take an active role in executive decision-making. Near the end of June, for example, Politico ran a lengthy article noting Biden’s cognitive decline, with the coy headline “Is Obama Ready to Reassert Himself?”—as if the ex-president hadn’t been living in the middle of Washington and playing politics since the day he left office. Indeed, in previous weeks Obama had continued his role as a central advocate for government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership, claiming it is historically linked to racism. Surely, the spectacle of an ex-president simultaneously leading campaigns against both the First and Second Amendments might have led even a spectacularly incurious old-school DC reporter to file a story on the nuts and bolts of Obama’s political operation and on who was going in and out of his mansion. But the DC press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful.
One of the things pointed to as evidence for Obama running things, at least partially, is the Biden administration’s focus on cutting a deal with Iran. It’s worth considering that point, as we learned on Thursday that the Biden White House cut a deal with Iran. The United States is trading four American prisoners getting released to house arrest for the unfreezing of $6-10 billion in South Korea for Iran.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Barack Obama sent “pallets of cash” to Iran for the release of prisoners in 2016. It was initially reported that $400 million in cash got sent Iran’s way, with later reports saying it was closer to $1.3 billion. The cash was used as leverage to loosen up the Iranians.
We also got more viral video clips this week of White House staffers steering Biden away from reporters to prevent questions. The same staffers are trying to shift Biden’s stories on how his son Beau died. Biden is trying to retell stories of how many grandchildren he has (with the media stealth editing stories).
In short, it’s not much of a leap to see Obama having a serious say in how specific issues are handled in this White House. Obama has long seen himself in that Brent Snowcraft/Kissinger role as someone who can change how foreign policy works. The irony is that while Obama believed he was creating a more balanced Middle East by empowering Iran, that gave enough of a threat to Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. So now, the state Obama and Biden don’t like in Israel is more powerful than ever in the region.
Iran siding with Russia in the Ukraine invasion makes navigating this even trickier. But that hasn’t dented the optimism of the Obama crowd on Iran and the Middle East, no matter how many times they get proven wrong.
But in terms of presenting an alternative theory on how DC works right now, I’ve found myself nodding along in agreement with Samuels. There are few “Biden people” in Washington DC policy circles, but plenty of “Obama people.” With the Clintons vanquished from politics, Biden too old to matter, and no one else in the party powerful enough to command a unified audience, that leaves the Obamas.
During the 2019 Democratic primaries, I pointed out an unusual 2019 Politico piece that demanded Democrats not criticize Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders had the intellectual core to criticize Obama and the rest of the party. But the rest of the field was scared to do so, which made navigating attacks on Biden difficult.
Garrow says on that point:
[Obama] has no interest in building the Democratic Party as an institution. I think that’s obvious. And I don’t think he had any truly deep, meaningful policy commitments other than the need to feel and to be perceived as victorious, as triumphant. I’ve sometimes said to people that I think Barack is actually just as insecure as Trump, but in ways that are not readily perceived by the vast majority of people. I think that’s probably my most basic takeaway.
And just like Trump has refused to go away, there’s no evidence that Obama has gone away either. But whereas Trump is brash and open with his meddling, Obama is stealthy.
In many respects, George W. Bush is the exception to the rule that Presidents remain in the public eye after their term ends. Hoover wrote books for years criticizing his successors and defending his legacy. Nixon did the same. Jimmy Carter has been a bane to other Presidents for decades with his meddling in the Middle East. The Clintons have meddled and enriched themselves, while Trump is Trump.
Do we expect less from Obama? He’s not painting pictures and biking like George W. Bush. That’s why this theory rings true to me, and has shifted how I view the Biden administration. Maybe it will for you, too.
Links of the week
Anthony Fauci’s Deceptions: A trove of emails, Slack messages, and other documents reveal Fauci’s behind-the-scenes involvement. ‘Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.’ – David Zweig, The FP
Jack Smith Wants Trump Convicted by Super Tuesday – The Daily Beast
China’s Plan to Rule the World’s Smart Devices, FCC Urged to Act – Newsweek
China Relies on U.S., Allies for Hundreds of Products: New research argues countries could use those exports to counter economic pressure from China – Timothy W. Martin, WSJ
A Disney Sale to Apple? Don’t Count It Out This Time: Facing the staggering problems afflicting all legacy studios, is Bob Iger contemplating a once-unthinkable option? The signals he sent in Sun Valley suggest that it could happen. – The Hollywood Reporter
Disney+ Subscriptions Collapse As Company Takes Another Hit – Outkick
Disney “Very Comfortable With Current Liquidity Position” As Deadline Nears To Buy Rest Of Hulu – Deadline
Tiffany Gomas begs people not to ‘judge’ her for ‘not real’ airplane meltdown – NYPost
US Suicides Hit an All-Time High Last Year: ‘My son should not have died,’ said Christina Wilbur, whose son died by suicide last year – The Messenger
DeSantis replaces campaign manager as he scrambles to catch Trump – CNBC
VIDEO: Australian student fighting back after China tries to silence him – 60 Minutes Australia
VIDEO: The $1.5 Trillion auto loan crisis: How Americans Are Struggling With Car Loans – CNBC
Here’s What Mustard Skittles Taste Like – The Takeout
Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Select Committee on the CCP accuses China of using its tech to sabotage US devices.
Satire of the week
Softer Bob Iger Now Says He Hopes Striking Creatives Die Painlessly – Onion
Sheet Placed Over Dianne Feinstein Between Votes – Onion
Senator Feinstein Briefly Hospitalized After Altercation With Van Helsing – The Hard Times
Blinking Red Dianne Feinstein Insists She Has Never Felt Better – The Hard Drive
Wayne Brady Comes Out As Needing Attention – Babylon Bee
Study Finds Love Is Dead and Existence Is Pain–Oh the Scientist’s Crush Just Texted – Reductress
Coalition Government Lasting Way Longer Than Anyone Thought, In Fairness – Waterford Whispers
Thanks for reading!