If the last 36 hours are any indication, doddering Joe Biden is apparently committed to ushering in a second Donald Trump term.

He’s no longer a sensible and decent man with practical inclinations. Barring an electoral miracle, he’s becoming the circumstantial, cliff’s-edge architect of our democracy’s demise. He’s the decrepit gatekeeper who could, if so inclined, at least try to orchestrate a scenario that might marshall our best resources and with God’s help hold back the yokel barbarian hordes…but he won’t do it.

He knows he’s too old and doesn’t give a shit. Post-debate Joe knows the chances of defeating Trump are almost nil, and he doesn’t want to hear it. He’s determined to charge forward atop his Old Paint and somehow muddle through.

His primary offense is (switching from horse-riding to sea-faring or Cincinnati Kid metaphors!) not so much that he’s doggedly determined to hold the course and perhaps go down with the ship. It’s that he’s determined to gamble on a hand that almost everyone (excepting he and Lady Macbeth and a handful of reality-denying, inner-circle loyalists) knows is weak and Jimmy Carter-ish and almost certainly doomed.

It’s that his Irish, mule-headed tenacity has bullied the shrewd or at least seasoned card player aspect of his nature into submission.

God help us but the post-debate, “what, me worry?”, damn-the-torpedoes Joe Biden has, by all apparent appearances, become a kind of delusional banshee. This wretched bastard has determined that tens of millions who believe in sanity and decency — the blue or blue-purple flock, the fair-minded, non-MAGA faithful — may have to suffer for his hubris, and so be it. Four years of hell (1.20.25 to 1.20.29) and perhaps longer than that.

Joe is showing his true colors, and they are not the colors of a patriot. He’s no longer the proverbial good guy.

If the worst happens on 11.5.24 and The Beast takes back the reins, it will be small comfort knowing that Joe’s ignominious and reprehensible place in the annals of American history will be locked in and branded deep like the Red River D. Damn this obstinate great grandpa…damn his old-coot, drooling sponge brain all to hell.

Perfect. Eloquent. Spot on.

…there’s always someone eyeballing the shooter (i.e., me) with an expression that says, “Uhm, are you stealing a little piece of my soul?”

Here we are in hipster wokester Brooklyn, and the philosophy of Anthony Quinn’s Auda Abu Tayi still has a foothold.

The restaurant is Fan Fried Rice Bar, 740 Driggs Ave., Brooklyn, 11211.

It took the N.Y. Times editorial board a full working day to post this urgent plea — President Joe Biden needs to man up, smell the coffee and pack it in.

If he refuses to do this and if Donald Trump wins on November 5th, Biden will surely be reviled by historians as the blindest, most egotistical and reprehensibly selfish U.S. President in U.S. history.

In Pablo Larrain’s Maria, Angelina Jolie will play a twitchy, headstrong, tempestuous performer…no day at the beach!

Lonely, unhappy and temperamental, Maria Callas spent her last years living largely in isolation in Paris. She died of a heart attack at age 53 on 9.16.77.

Who dies at 53 from a heart attack? A non-obese person, I mean.

A funeral was held at St. Stephen’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral on rue Georges-Bizet, Paris on 9.20.77. Callas was later cremated at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Her ashes were ultimately scattered over the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece, in the spring of ‘79.

During a 1978 interview, Callas’s friend John Ardoin said the following:

“There are times, you know, when there are certain people who are blessed and cursed, with an extraordinary gift, in which the gift is almost greater than the human being. And Callas was one of these people.

“It was almost as if her wishes, her life, her own happiness were all subservient to this incredible, incredible gift that she was given, this gift that reached out and taught us all – taught us things about music we knew very well, but showed us new things, things we never thought about, new possibilities.

“I think that’s why singers admire her so; I think that’s why conductors admire her so; I know that’s why I admire her so. And she paid a tremendously difficult and expensive price for this career.

“I don’t think she always understood what she did or why. She knew she had a tremendous effect on audiences and on people. But it was not something that she could always live with gracefully or happily.

“I once said to her, ‘It must be very enviable to be Maria Callas.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s a very terrible thing to be Maria Callas, because it’s a question of trying to understand something you can never really understand.”

Jordan Ruimy has polled over 100 reputable film critics about the best of ’24, and the winner is Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune: Part Two.

That’s a respectable preference. I paid no attention to the story but I loved the cinematic penetration aspects — the look and the flavor and the rhythm of it.

The Ruimy critics chose George Miller‘s Furiosa as their #2…not so much on this end. And Luca Guadagnino‘s Challengers is in third place.

I really, really don’t get why Richard Linklater‘s Hit Man came in fourth. I didn’t love hut certainly respected the fifth-placed Love Lies Bleeding.

Among the second five (#6 through #10) only Alex Garland‘s Civil War and Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera really rang my bell.

Here are HE’s Top 12 2024 films, posted on 6.6.24:

Barack Obama, Jill Biden, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi need to explain to Joe Biden that it’s over…that the bell has tolled…that the cock has crowed three times.

Friendo: “There’s a silver lining in the Biden debate catastrophe.

“If the debate had happened after the Democratic Convention, we’d be toast. But now, 18 weeks before the 11.5.24 election, the debate about whether Biden can be replaced can actually happen.”

HE to Friendo: “Yes, and good for that.  But Biden should have bailed last March, Lyndon Johnson–style.  (LBJ quit on 3.31.68.) Then there would have been a solid historical precedent.”

HE-posted on 11.5.23:

This is as serious as a heart attack. It’s the doddering, slurry-voiced, squinty-eyed, 80something thing.

Joe is Jimmy Carter in ‘79, and he’s really gotta step down. The Beast is at the door. Lyndon Johnson read the writing on the wall in March of ‘68 and acted accordingly. Trump will not defeat Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer.

Barring an electoral miracle, Joe Biden has almost certainly doomed us to four years of howling totalitarian saliva-spray madness…a descent into punitive, assaultive, grunt-level and relentlessly malicious chaos.

Grim up and get ready for a 48-month chapter that will almost certainly maim if not poison the fabric of our already weakened democracy.

Joe has done this to us…it’s absolutely his fault…and I feel nothing but sputtering rage about what’s likely to happen tonight…again, barring a miracle…and more crucially on Election Day a bit less than five months hence.

If the worst happens, subjecting this nation to four more years of Donald Trump will be Joe Biden’s terrible legacy. If he loses the general election, God forbid and God help us, may he suffer grievously for not wisely and prudently stepping aside and allowing a younger normie substitute (Whitmer, Newsom) to run in his place.

No matter what happens tonight and over the next few months, Biden has already risked way too much…he’s responsible for a foolish, arrogant and catastrophic error of judgment. Of this I am certain. I’m almost convulsing with anger right now.

I’ll be live-blogging reactions starting at 9 pm. The challenge will be to react as fairly and even-toned as possible.

The whole world is watching this…a certifiable sociopath and ego monster vs. a decent, withered career politician who’s done a reasonably good job over the last three and a half years, and the former seems poised to win. It’s a nightmare.