As Joe Biden marks a somber anniversary, his son's fate weighs on him https://t.co/QT06Tdjc68
— Mike Memoli (@mikememoli) December 18, 2023
Mike Memoli, NBC News — “As Joe Biden marks a somber anniversary, his son’s fate weighs on him”:
During the eulogy for his brother in 2015, Hunter Biden recalled his first memory of Beau: hearing him repeat, “I love you,” as they lay together in a hospital bed. The toddlers — Beau was just 3, Hunter 2 — were the only survivors of a car crash that 51 years ago killed their mother and baby sister.
The accident was the first of the personal tragedies that have shaped President Joe Biden’s political career, coming just weeks after he won the U.S. Senate seat. The death of Beau Biden after a battle with brain cancer kept Joe Biden out of the 2016 presidential race, but his dying admonition to his father to stay engaged became a foundation for his 2020 candidacy.
Now, Biden is preparing to wage his final campaign while his remaining son faces two separate criminal indictments.
Biden will remain in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday on the somber anniversary, which has remained a sacred and protected day on his calendar as president, as it was when he was vice president and a senator. It comes just days after his son made his most public response yet to allegations from House Republican investigators that are the basis of the impeachment inquiry against the president they formally approved on Wednesday.
Speaking not far from the Senate chamber where his father served for 36 years, the younger Biden said his parents “literally saved my life” amid his battle with addiction, and blasted Republicans who he said “have taken the light of my dad’s love for me and presented it as darkness.” …
In private conversations, the president has blamed himself for the fact that his son remains such a political target, telling associates it would not be happening if he were not in office and running for another term. Hunter Biden “comes up all the time,” one source who has spoken with the president said, sometimes out of concern but also with pride at how he has endured the harsh spotlight recently…
Republicans have made “where’s Hunter” a calling card of the 2024 race, with merchandise bearing the slogan. Biden advisers have noted, though, that Hunter Biden was also a target in the 2020 race and said the president’s critics often miss that the president’s standing by his son, especially supporting him in his recovery, has often made those attacks backfire…
The president has often discussed how the 1972 accident nearly led him to quit the Senate before he’d even taken office, saying after he took the oath of office in his sons’ hospital room that if there was ever a conflict between him being a good father and a good senator, he’d choose the former.
A career full of personal trials has also led Biden to say, as he often did ahead of announcing his plan to seek a second term, that he is a “great respecter of fate. It also helped him not only build personal relationships across the aisle but was the root of what Biden aides have long called his “superpower,” his empathy…
======
An update on the car that slammed into one of Biden’s security vehicles: Wilmington Police say they’ve charged a 46-year-old local man with Driving a Vehicle Under the Influence of Alcohol and Inattentive Driving. https://t.co/fcflI1Z7A2
— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) December 18, 2023
Baud
That presidential motorcade came out of nowhere, officer.
FelonyGovt
Biden is a good, decent man. It pisses me off mightily how they are trying to tear him down and cynically twist his loyalty and affection for his son.
Alison Rose
It’s absolutely ghoulish and callous the way the right uses Hunter as a political football against his father, especially considering everything their family has been through. It would be gross nonetheless, but it takes on a seriously twisted feeling when you realize that for the wingnuts, forcing even more emotional trauma on them is their entertainment.
Baud
I shouldn’t have evolved.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
It’s consistent with their treatment of women and immigrants.
Ruckus
@Baud:
My understanding was that you hadn’t….
cckids
@Alison Rose: It’s even more infuriating when you contrast it with the way they treat the disfunctional Trump clan.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I blame the R voters, the electeds are fulfilling the demand of the deplorables.
Mike in NC
We should never forget the time Hunter Biden tried to help his father steal an election that he lost. Oh, wait…
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, the R voters are horrible. But the electeds have agency too. They can choose to value doing what is right over trying to stay in office. They have made the opposite choice of their own free will.
Alison Rose
I think the Earth is breaking.
Alison Rose
@cckids: INDEED.
mrmoshpotato
@FelonyGovt:
@Alison Rose:
@cckids:
Come sit by me.
lowtechcyclist
@Alison Rose:
This is how these supposedly Christian folks honor Jesus’ commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
The GQP is increasingly reminding me of Lord of the Flies.
Alison Rose
@lowtechcyclist:
I’ll go along with that, since it’s on my list of “worst books I’ve ever read”.
topclimber
I am sure Biden’s faith has helped him deal with emotional blows, whether fate- or fuckwit-engendered.
Which reminds me that the two Presidents in my lifetime who most made their faith part of their public service are Democrats (Biden the Catholic and Carter the Baptist). Shall we see how the most recent Republic-cant Presidents stack up? GW Bush at least didn’t embarrass his Church too often. Trump does all the time, which is amazing since he doesn’t really have one.
OzarkHillbilly
I’m not gonna speak for everything Joe did for his son’s. I can’t know. I only know what I did for my sons and what I sacrificed for them. And I know a lot of men of the ’80s would have said, “Fuck it.”
I thought about it. I remember sitting on the tailgate of my p/u truck in my sister’s back yard and thinking, “WTF??? I can just leave, I still have friends in WY, they’ll help me get set up. I don’t have to put up with this shit.”
But I could not abandon my sons. And I didn’t. And because I didn’t I went thru things I had no idea were waiting for me.
Guess what? That is what being a parent entails.
I didn’t do anything all that special, I just took care of my sons.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Plus, the alternative was Wyoming.
frosty
@Alison Rose: @lowtechcyclist: And not only is it fiction, it’s made-up from whole cloth fiction. The story is not how people act in these situations.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Wyoming is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I once dreamed of living there.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
I kid. I’ve never visited. It does seem beautiful.
ETA: And you vote counts like five times as much.
Alison Rose
@frosty: I don’t know. Part of the reason I hated it when we read it freshman year of high school was that, as a chubby unattractive 14-year-old girl, I didn’t need a damn book to tell me that boys can quite easily turn into monstrous little shitweaseals at the slightest opportunity. Real life had already made me well aware of that. Granted, as far as I know, none of my male schoolmates beat any of their acquaintances to death, but TBH there were a few I wouldn’t have put it past.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: You really know how to puncture a touching story, don’t you?
zhena gogolia
@Alison Rose: At least you read the whole thing. I couldn’t. Hated, hated, hated it from the first page.
Gretchen
Hunter implied, and I agree, that the attacks on him are aimed at making him relapse into drug addiction or die by suicide because that would destroy his father, and they could gain political advantage from that destruction. That’s the cynical, ghoulish, cruel aim of all of this and I hope everyone who is pursuing this will come to their just ends.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: I have hiked thru the mountains and the plains there. Worked a ranch there. Buried family there.
The politics suck, but if I could pick where my body would be laid when I died, there is a place in WY that would make me happy for all eternity, and another in San Luis Potosi.
Gretchen
@OzarkHillbilly: and I’m sure your sons know that and honor you for that decision.
Steeplejack
@Baud:
It was a funny joke.
lowtechcyclist
@frosty:
And yet the GQP, in a much more hospitable environment…
OzarkHillbilly
@Gretchen: They know it, and forgive me all my many sins. (I hope)
bbleh
@lowtechcyclist: yes — same thought has occurred. The Republican Party has degenerated into a gang of 10-year-old boys.
lowtechcyclist
@Alison Rose:
I’ll confess I haven’t read it in ~55 years, so I have no basis for taking one side or the other.
Alison Rose
@zhena gogolia: I was too good a student not to, although I did argue with my teacher about the value of doing so.
Yarrow
@frosty: I thought Lord of the Flies was supposed to be about how awful English public (private) school boys are. All one has to do is look at the current Tories in power in the UK to see it’s not that far off.
WendyBinFL
@OzarkHillbilly: Bless you. And now you are able to enjoy your grandchildren! Glad your commitment to those boys has brought well-deserved rewards!
Ben Cisco
The GQPs attacks on Joe – particularly and especially those targeting Hunter, come from a place of absolute moral bankruptcy and cowardice. They are, individually and collectively, unfit for office.
Gin & Tonic
The Weight.
jimmiraybob
To sum up: A father loves his son. The son has major addiction problems. The father sticks it out and helps his son through troubled waters. The Republicans, “Jesus loving Party of family values”, flings endless bushels of shit at father and son in attempt to destroy the father. 24/7/365. The end.
FelonyGovt
@Alison Rose: It was definitely a “boy” book. It really annoyed me that we were assigned stuff like that to read and not books that would have been of more interest to girls. And I went to an all-girls school (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth)
kindness
Hunter Biden is a choir boy compared to Jared & Ivanka. How many billions did the Saudis and the UAE give them? Hunter got peanuts comparatively.
Brachiator
@Baud:
RE: Apes recognize friends they haven’t seen for decades, new research finds
Apes also don’t wear pants. Maybe you didn’t evolve.
satby
@Gin & Tonic: Every version of that is a great version. Here’s mine, by the Playing for Change folks
Parfigliano
Biden stands by his son. Reagan didnt know which kid was his at said kids graduation. The GOP loves Reagan and hate hate hates Biden. Tells you all you need to know about them.
Another Scott
@Yarrow: +1
Look at BoJo, also too.
Cheers,
Scott.
wjca
Perhaps it might be worth considering that they really are honoring the commandment.**
Admittedly, it does say something sad about their deep down feelings about themselves. Still, it doesn’t run counter to the evidence elsewhere.
** Jesus had a blind spot. It does not appear to have crossed his mind that there are people out there who loath themselves. (Sometimes with good reason.)
Betty Cracker
@Alison Rose: Absolutely NOT rooting for volcanos here, but major eruptions do cool the earth. The Mount Pinatubo eruption cooled the earth 0.5 C. Just saying.
Alison Rose
@FelonyGovt: Yeah, there were a lot of boy books, and the few that weren’t so much were loathed by the boys. I’m pretty certain, also, that in my whole four years of high school, of all the assigned reading, it was almost entirely white men. There was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, so one white lady. But I can’t recall any other assigned books that were by women, and I’m almost certain there were none by POC authors.
Suzanne
@FelonyGovt:
Lord of the Flies is one of those books that I’m told has “universal themes”, because it’s about boys. But FSM forbid they read Pride and Prejudice in school; that’s not “universal”.
See also: The Red Badge of Courage. Or don’t. It’s boring as fuck.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
The GOP is certainly the party of grubby vindictiveness, pettiness and revenge.
CarolPW
@satby: I love the song, and that version made me cry the first time I watched it, and it made me cry again tonight. A good cry, so thanks. Music moves me to tears often, and those tears are always restorative.
LiminalOwl
@FelonyGovt:
@Alison Rose: Well, as an atypical (and chubby/unattractive/etc) girl, I … can’t quite say I enjoyed the book, but I was fascinated by it. Agree about already knowing that boys (and girls, IME!) could be like that. Read it in one sitting, or rather lying-down, on an insomniac night in seventh grade, and definitely could not go to sleep afterwards.
Has anyone else read Beauty Queens, by Libba Bray?
Alison Rose
@Suzanne: Hated that one too. Also Hatchet. Bleh.
NotMax
@Alison Rose
Icelandic cams.
Suzanne
@Alison Rose: The other one that I hated was Two Years Before the Mast. Like, I hated it so much. Get fucked, boat.
Betty Cracker
I’ll admit I found Lord of the Flies relatable and instructive as an 8th-grade girl growing up in the feral state of Florida. I still think about its themes from time to time decades later.
IMO, one of the most egregiously sexist classics ever is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Every woman in that book was either an emasculation specialist or a brainless floozy.
As depicted in that book, women are orders of magnitude less human than the men depicted so movingly struggling for their humanity and dignity. Yet it’s an extremely worthwhile book, IMO. Literature is complicated. Like people are.
geg6
@Suzanne:
Seriously. And don’t get me started on the worst book I was ever forced to read, The Catcher in the Rye. I found Lord of the Flies highly entertaining in comparison.
satby
@CarolPW: I’ve watched it so many times, and get pretty misty over it myself. It’s just glorious to see how people all over the world can unite in music. It’s the hope for a better world welling up.
different-church-lady
Which is, what, at least two fewer than Biden’s opponent does?
different-church-lady
@frosty:
That’s because Lord of the Flies is not about boys. It’s about adults.
Alison Rose
@Suzanne: Never read it, but I wish “Get fucked, boat.” could be a rotating tag.
Alison Rose
@geg6: I tried to read Catcher in my early 20s and all I wanted to do was kick that dude in the dick. I think I made it maybe a quarter of the way in before deciding I had better ways to spend my time. Like doing literally nothing.
catclub
I disagree. Without being able to love oneself (including the parts you see as unloveable), you cannot love others. Because parts of yourself that you hate, you will hate even more in others.
Miss Bianca
@Alison Rose: Given the choice – as in, “these are literally the only two books you get to choose between” says my torturer in the Tower – I would probably choose Catcher in the Rye over Lord of the Flies. Mostly because I remember finding it at age 10 and being delightedly scandalized at all the profanity.
I did have to read both in school.
Chris T.
@Suzanne:
I was forced to read some of these in school myself.
That’s one of them too. Our teacher talked about how Jim Conklin (the wounded guy who eventually dies, and has the “red badge”) was a Christ Figure, which was supposedly obvious because his initials were J. C. and he had a wound in his side. I forget exactly how it got brought up but someone asked whether the author (Crane) did this on purpose and our teacher said something about “oh no it’s all subconscious”, at which point one of the students called BS, saying “my mom’s a writer and she’s always grumbling about having to insert Symbolic Stuff into her work”.
That was the highlight of the whole class for me: exposing how authors have to shovel stupid Themes into their works to get The Critics to Approve. 😀
wjca
I think the way I would put it is that the parts of themself that they hate, they project onto others. Because they seem so eager to denounce others for failings that they appear to invent out of whole cloth — and they have to be getting the idea for those failings from somewhere.
Chris T.
@wjca:
That’s classic psychological projection, yes.
The difficult part here is that sometimes people project qualities that their targets actually possess. Then you have to wonder if they’re projecting, or just accurately perceiving….
Alison Rose
@Miss Bianca: It is true that, as established last night, I am always in favor of profanity.
Suzanne
@Chris T.: I literally don’t remember any of that. I got As in English that year, so I know I read it. But I must have blocked this all out.
I blocked out a lot. I used to run into former classmates who would recognize me, and mention that we had classes together, and I usually have no memory of them.
I remember taking a British Literature class my senior year and reading a lot of WWI poetry and I loved it.
StringOnAStick
@Betty Cracker: It needs to be a big explosive eruption, something the barely explosive Icelandic ones aren’t; wrong rock type. Something of reasonable size on the Pacific ring of fire might do the trick. Jet travel would end for a year or two but that would help as well.
Chris T.
@StringOnAStick:
Oh no, you’ve just set in motion the Great Mt Rainier Eruption of 2024… 🤪
Trivia Man
@FelonyGovt: I am absolutely astounded that “Christians” support the orange cheater and DESPISE with the heat of a thousand suns Obama and Biden (and Carter). I am an atheist but I can respect religious people if they are respectable. No politician I can think of is more Christian than Biden, Obama, and Carter. Both in attending services and living as Christ taught in the New Testament.
When I speak to my mother, hard core Mormon, I never let it pass when she shit talks Biden. I thought you were a Christian? How can you support Trump? Either change the subject or denial. It’s exhausting. She voted for him twice and will again. But pretends she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
Madeleine
In seventh grade my male English teacher led us through Pride and Prejudice. A memorable experience with lifelong effect.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Republicans are experts at taking something positive about someone and using their lies to turn it into an attack on that person and/or their loved ones. It doesn’t matter if the person is innocent, Republicans have no qualms about lying to destroy the lives of innocents to further their destruction and overthrowing of our democracy.
You would think that Christians wouldn’t be into lying so much but their Ooga Booga Sky Guy is just fine with it.
NotMax
@Chris T.
When people cite books which were a chore to wade through in high school Silas Marner is usually high on the list. Surprising no one has mentioned it.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
Me. Me.
My exasperated high school English teacher threw me out of his class because I mocked this novel and refused to keep reading it.
Part of the problem is that you have to bring a lot of historical background before you grapple with the novel, and nobody has time for that in high school.
I appreciate the novel, don’t love it, but do love George Eliot.
I also appreciate, but don’t love the Steve Martin film, A Simple Twist of Fate, a loose adaptation of Silas Marner.
Brachiator
@Chris T.:
Good authors don’t write for critics. And too many of my Literature teachers were dull middle-brow drones who looked at a book or poem as a nut that you had to crack open in order to get to the “meaning” and symbols, instead of a performance with levels of beauty and nuance.
wjca
Reminds me of my Comparative Literature 1 class in college. The instructor didn’t take in well when, after reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I gave the opinion that “The problem with Joyce is that he doesn’t know how to handle the English language. ” (The fact that I was a Mechanical Engineering major would have made it worse. But fortunately he wasn’t aware.)
His response was less rude than you got: he sent me off to read Ulysses. Which I labeled “unreadable”. But I’d slogged thru 150 pages, so he conceded that I had given it a fair trial. Perhaps he went easy on me because I was aceing the course.
Josie
Early in my teaching career, I taught a group of students many of whom had English as a second language. Because of the rigid requirements for sophomore English, we had to struggle through both Silas Marner and Julius Caesar. When I asked which they preferred at one point, I was surprised to hear that it was the Shakespeare play. Their reasoning was that, in Silas Marner, good was rewarded and evil was punished, which was not the case in Julius Caesar. They said Shakespeare’s work was more like real life. I found their reasoning pretty sound. It has colored my view of writing ever since.
ETA: Forgive my inability to deal with italics. I’m sure you get the gist of my comment anyway. ;-)
geg6
@Miss Bianca:
IMHO there is no more obnoxious, stupid and deplorable character in so-called great fiction than Holden Caulfield. He’s an incel and a narcissist. Ugh, always whining and boohooing. Such a fake. There’s a lot of “literature” that is supposed to be “great”. It’s actually only great if you’re a white man complaining about how you’re so oppressed. This is the epitome of that to me.
frosty
@Chris T.: The worst one they made us read in high school was Great Expectations. Dickens wrote some good stuff but this definitely was not one of them. And Wuthering Heights. Why they thought this was Important Literature for Twentieth Century Teens totally escapes me.
Lyrebird
Wow, even compared to characters by Hemingway? James Joyce?
I liked Holden Caulfield and thought he was kind. What incel type would genuinely try to protect children? Franny & Zooey can be a bit much, but I am glad I read that, too.
gwangung
@Brachiator:
Yeah. Far too many defenders of the classics are cultural embalmers than appreciators of the works. They exult over every word and allusions without ever realizing that the readers of the day would know the allusions off hand without trying, because it’s part of their everyday life, or that grammar and language use has CHANGED over the centuries, and current audiences can;’t enjoy it the same way the original audiences did.
Love Chaucer and Shakespeare, but they can be a chore for modern day audiences AND IT AIN’T THEIR FAULT.
Alison Rose
@frosty: I liked GE at the time, though I’ve never reread it and I imagine I’d like it less now. But I am also a weirdo because my favorite Dickens novel is Bleak House which usually makes people back away from me.
Wuthering Heights was one of those I read because I felt like I ought to in order to be Well Read™ but God almighty, it wasn’t a fun time.
Brachiator
@wjca:
I just would have laughed in your face for such a deeply dumbass opinion. But worth a challenge.
Reading it out loud sometimes helps. Also, it helps to know that Joyce was an Irishman with a chip on his shoulder who challenged the English language branch of the Western Literary tradition to a wrestling match. And won.
@Josie:
English as a second language students. I love that they felt something about both works. Very perceptive observations.
Chris T.
@Brachiator:
I never said her mother was a good author. (I have no idea; don’t remember the other students’ names in general, don’t even remember the teacher’s name from high school.)
wjca
Well, it wasn’t just an opinion. It was backed up with reasons, references to various quotes from the book, etc. (After half a century, I don’t have the details at my findertips, alas.) As I say, he didn’t take it well. But he did consider that I’d made a respectable case for my view. In fact, IIRC, I got an A for the paper.
Brachiator
@wjca:
Coming back late to the thread
RE: I just would have laughed in your face for such a deeply dumbass opinion.
God, I would never expect you to recapitulate your paper again. But it would be interesting to see and to learn more about your views back then.
I vaguely recall in my student days saying that some of Shakespeare’s sonnets were too mired in rhetoric and were inferior to those that were more little pieces of drama. This also ruffled feathers.
JAFD
@Suzanne:
Anyway, Stephen Crane was born a few blocks from my dwelling, the site (it was a slum then) is now a parking lot for Post Office vehicles, wunovdezedaze we’ll get a historical marker put up. (If we’re going to take down some Civil War monuments, mayhaps replace them with better…)
Ramona
@frosty: oh my God! I love Wuthering Heights!
Betty Cracker
@Ramona: I love it too. In college, I wrote a paper about how the interactions between the dogs that live at the two houses foreshadow the encounters between the humans. (Any author who can so skillfully weave canine intrigue into clashes between humans is okay in my book!) There are layers upon layers in that novel. It’s a masterpiece.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: I thought Lord of the Flies rang 100% true as a description of a junior-high-school PE class. In hindsight, it’s not a depiction of what kids would do returned to the state of nature, it’s a depiction of what they do in prison-like environments designed to encourage brutality, like a circa-1980 junior-high PE class.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: Yes! That’s exactly what it’s about, IMO — the cages humans build for each other and the madness that ensues.
Matt McIrvin
@frosty: I think the people who set high-school literature curricula imagine that teenagers of any era will relate to stories of troubled young people being super-emotional. But this behavior is culturally conditioned in ways that make it actually not universal.
Matt McIrvin
@Trivia Man: I grew up on the edge of the South around a lot of Southern white evangelicals. I have zero surprise that they would support Trump. What their religion stresses over and over is that everyone is a contemptible being who deserves Hell, that attempts to make a fairer or more peaceful world are characteristics of the Antichrist, and that being saved has nothing to do with Christlike behavior but is about executing the correct Weird Trick in your mind to game the system. And that this situation is somehow good and proper.
I’m an atheist but sometimes I get angry on Jesus’s behalf. It seems like that whole mindset is doing him dirty.
Miss Bianca
@Alison Rose: Bleak House is the best. Nothing weird about that conclusion.
Hamlet of Melnibone
Yeah, the choice to teach Silas Marner in high school baffled me when I was in school. I was a reader as a child, and I just couldn’t imagine sifting thru all of literature and deciding to use that.
We read so little at our school. I grew up in Lacrosse Wisconsin in the 1980s, and most of my classmates ( outside of the college prep type classes ) were not. Why you would pick something so dreadfully dull out of all the literature in history as one of the like 6 things you were going to teach these people was beyond me.
My mother the English teacher did say that it was better than Bartleby the Scrivener :)
wjca
My recollection, at least for Ulysses, was that I faulted it for prolixity and the lack of a coherent plot arc. It might be that, like you and some Shakespeare, I was simply unable to grasp the plot that was hiding there. On the other hand, is a work great literature if it is inaccessible?
Brachiator
@wjca:
This is often said about Finnegans Wake, but rarely about Ulysses. The plot arc of Ulysses is so well established, talked about, documented in skeleton keys and other schema that it is literary conventional wisdom.
wjca
@Brachiator:
Yet somehow my instructor didn’t point me at those. Perhaps because it was, after all, not part of the actual course content.
Brachiator
@wjca:
I don’t see the point of reading Ulysses or many other novels without some background or context.
I think in high school, maybe even junior high school, some reading was presented as “this is great literature. Don’t question it or ask questions. This is the approved curriculum so it must be good.”
This only invited rebellion. And guaranteed a lot of boredom and confusion.
Mel
@Suzanne: I had my juniors (at an all boys Catholic school) read Pride and Prejudice. Much whining and dread ensued initially (from kids and, surprisingly, from mothers much more than from fathers) when they first saw the title on the syllabus.
The boys loved it. 😺
Mel
@Suzanne: Red Badge of Courage should be reclassified as a torture device, as should that onerous clunker Moby Dick.
RaflW
If the same thing had happened to the former guy. Fox would be blaring about how “POTUS narrowly escapes horrific suicidal car-crash attack”.
Manyakitty
@Miss Bianca: Bleak House contains the first reference to spontaneous human combustion I remember in English literature.