By the time we saw Joe Biden’s debate debacle, the media had spent four years covering up his mental and physical decline to help Democrats. After Biden’s fragile mental state was exposed, the media instantaneously began pushing Biden out of the presidential race to help Democrats.
The goal remains the same.
The Wall Street Journal reports this week that Biden’s senior advisers “aggressively stage-managed” the president’s “schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.” Basically, everyone in the White House — as well as big-money donors — conspired to hide that the president of the United States was unable to perform even the most rudimentary tasks associated with the most powerful job in the world. By 2022, the president’s advisors didn’t even believe he was up to taking weekly cross-country trips.
And now we’re supposed to accept the claim that not a single reporter embedded in the White House (outside perhaps some who work at Fox News) hadn’t figured it out? As Ace Rothstein put it to the “yokel” floor manager in “Casino,” “If you didn’t know you’re being scammed, you’re too f—n’ dumb to keep this job. If you did know, you were in on it.”
Most reporters, one strongly suspects, fall in the latter camp. No one is that bad at his job. The same outlets that deploy teams of investigative reporters to uncover which flags Supreme Court justices are flying at their vacation homes surely have the capacity to investigate the mystery of our doddering president. More than a year ago I wrote a piece headlined “Joe Biden Is Not OK,” laying out a string of incidents that were in the public record (I was hardly alone.)
So when Axios tells me that “Hell has no fury like a press corps deceived,” I am highly skeptical. “Reporters,” Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write, “feel duped — and some probably embarrassed —and are scrambling to unearth new evidence of decline.”
As with Pulitzer Prize-winning bogus scoops of the Russia collusion hoax or the concerted censorship meant to mitigate the fallout from the Hunter laptop story, there has never been reckoning from the press over its malpractice. No one has yet explained how a barely functioning president escaped the notice of dozens of highly paid journalism school graduates. They simply move to the next project.
So, for instance, this week CNN’s Jake Tapper assailed Biden’s incoherent MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” interview, noting incredulously that it was “supposed to be reassuring to those Democratic supporters who have gone wobbly.”
Well, no more reassuring than the rambling gun-control speech Biden gave last year that ended with the words “God save the queen, man,” or the time Biden informed the League of Conservation Voters he was building a railroad “from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean,” or the time our president forgot Winston Churchill’s name while meeting with the British prime minister, or the time he tripped on stage after a commencement speech at the Air Force Academy, or the time he wandered off during a G-7 meeting, or was helped off the stage at a fundraiser by Barack Obama (which Tapper’s network told us was misinformation.)
When Special Counsel Robert Hur let Biden — an “elderly man with a poor memory” — slide on his decades-long habit of hoarding classified documents, the political media didn’t pore over White House logs and schedules to figure out if the president was being insulated from the world. They attacked the messenger.
We’re not only talking about comically dishonest partisans like Joe Scarborough and politicians like Pat Murray — both of whom have shamelessly gone from praising the president’s supernatural mental sharpness to essentially asking him to abandon the race — we’re talking about virtually the entire press.
The New York Times has now written two editorials asking Biden to drop out of the race. And if the members of the board had only been reading their own coverage, they might not have known that Biden was struggling. Days before the debate the paper ran a piece titled “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts,” which laid out the case that conservatives had been unfairly attacking the president. An earlier piece, “Release of Hur Report Underlines Perils of the Special Counsel’s Job,” did not investigate Hur’s contention, it merely amplified attacks on him, noting that report was “seized upon by Trump supporters.”
The Times editorial page helpfully ran essays like “I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way,” wherein credulous readers learn that the president’s failure to recall the year his son died is probably not a very big deal. The same thing went on at NBC News, where one story’s subhead helpfully notes: “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”
Are there bigger dupes in this country than media-approved “experts?”
Even now, virtually every discussion on the left regarding the president’s fragile mental acuity revolves around his ability or inability to beat Donald Trump — rather than the dangerous position the administration and a pliant press have put the nation in. One suspects that if Biden withstands the pressure and stays in the race, they’ll all go back to covering for him again.
Because, if there’s anything this incident reaffirms, it’s that far too often the first loyalty of the political media is to the Democratic Party.
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