May 15, 2025

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:

Posted at 5:56 pm by Stephen Green

THE FALL OF JOE BIDEN — AND HOW HIS TEAM COVERED UP HIS DECLINE:

At the start of an election year that would be gruelling for a candidate half his age, the US president’s stiffened gait was already a clear sign of age-related decline.

But Biden and his inner circle were forced to discuss a worse prognosis.

“Advisers talked about how he may need a wheelchair in a second term,” says Alex Thompson, co-author with Jake Tapper of Original Sin, a book telling the inside story of the ill-fated 2024 Democratic Party presidential campaign.

“He had significant spinal arthritis and his spine was degenerating to the point that, if he either had another bad fall or maybe just because of time, he would have needed to be in a wheelchair.”

In the grand tradition of American presidential medical reports, this was barely hinted at in the description of Biden’s “moderate to severe” arthritis and “mildly decreased range of motion” that was relayed to the public in February 2024.

The revelation of the “wheelchair debate” is just one of many telling glimpses behind the scenes by Tapper and Thompson into the “insane” attempt to convince America that Biden, then 81, was fit to serve in the White House until he was 86.

Even more outrageous than his true physical state was the failure to carry out any kind of cognitive assessment, given that Biden’s frequent gaffes, memory lapses and odd behaviour were increasingly sounding alarm bells with voters who saw signs of a president well past his prime.

“He passes a cognitive test every day,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, when asked why no formal evaluation was carried out.

This came at a point when Biden was not yet confirmed as the Democratic candidate but was not being opposed by party heavyweights out of deference to his judgment. They had little idea how bad his condition was getting because access to Biden became tightly controlled by a cabal of family members and senior advisers known by senior Democrats as the Politburo, the book claims.

Of course, the Politburo needs a Pravda, and Tapper and the rest of the Washington press corps were happy to play their part:

Despite the sense of inevitability about Biden’s implosion conveyed in the book, compiled from 200 or so post-election interviews, the authors are bracing for significant blowback on at least two fronts once it is published next week. On the one hand there are critics already decrying the idea of journalists who did little to expose Biden’s fragility throughout his presidency now claiming to tell the inside story, and on the other hand there is the Politburo who still believe Biden would have beaten Trump. “I would have loved to know any of this and break it last year,” Tapper says. “I mean, we learnt all this after the election. We weren’t wise to this. We saw it the way everybody else saw it, which was, yeah, he looked bad, but everybody behind the scenes was saying he was fine. And then came the debate.”

Shades of Dan Rather’s infamous statement, as quoted by Howard Kurtz in September of 2004, after being caught cooking the books:

CBS anchor Dan Rather acknowledged for the first time yesterday that there are serious questions about the authenticity of the documents he used to question President Bush’s National Guard record last week on “60 Minutes.”

“If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story,” Rather said in an interview last night. “Any time I’m wrong, I want to be right out front and say, ‘Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.’ “

As a result, Ace of Spades writes, “Jake Tapper Reportedly Hires a Crisis Communications Firm to Stop Criticism.”

Mark Halperin, among others, has a different view. “One thing that’s not true is that the cover-up was so good that no one could see this, that we couldn’t possibly have gotten to the bottom of this during the election,” he said. “It is not true that it’s only after the election that Jake Tapper could’ve gotten to the bottom of this, and the rest of the Washington press corps could’ve gotten to the bottom of this.” The media were not simply “stymied from getting to the truth” by lying White House aides, Halperin argued. “No, they were part of the conspiracy and the cover-up. They allowed themselves to believe the ridiculous spin on TV and in public, and privately they allowed themselves to be browbeat,” he said. “They were told, you will lose access … Reporters who covered any story the Biden people didn’t like were denied access.”

Media reporter Dylan Byers noted Tapper’s insane levels of “self-promotion and sanctimony” are even bothering to annoy his fellow leftwing hacktivists.

And now we know who made that deceptively-edited video that both Tapper and Thompson linked, which purported to show, through cheapfake manipulation, Tapper showing any interest in the story.

Ace has a compilation of media headlines defending Biden, including this classic from AP: “Biden at 81: Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful”…”And from the Federalist: nine times Tapper showed what a valuable soldier he is for the Democrat Party by insisting Biden was ‘mentally sharp.'”

Tapper and Thompson’s book is an attempt to put a Band-Aid on an enormous scandal involving both the White House and the media whom it gave marching orders to. And while its details are fun and dishy to read, I want to go much deeper. Take this clip from a year ago today:

Who thought it would be a good idea for Biden to challenge the world’s biggest media persona to a debate? Who allowed this clip of an angry Biden with at least five jump cuts in it to go out? I don’t necessarily need to know the name of the intern who loaded up Premiere Pro and did the donkey work, but who signed off on the clip? Did he think nobody would notice all the edits? Did he not put two and two together and say, “Wow, if the president can’t shoot 14 seconds of continuous usable video, how can he handle a ninety minute live debate?” Was he trying to sabotage Biden’s reelection bid in order to replace him with Kamala? Just get ahead of another news cycle? That’s the book I want to read.

As Duane Patterson writes (accompanied by an AI-created image of Tapper wearing Ray Charles’ sunglasses and carrying his cane: Media Still Missing the Big Story — Who Ran The Country For Four Years?

Where are the tell-all books that get to the bottom of the true scandal of the last quarter century – who was running the country now that it’s been established that the cognitive and physical decline of Joe Biden was much more severe than previously reported? You’ve got a media enterprise in the nation’s capital whose sole job is to challenge the premise of the White House, whomever is in it, and get to the real truth. But we get crickets about who was making consequential decisions for at least the last year of the Biden administration? Why? Logic would conclude that one of the reasons why there’s no journalistic curiosity is because if that truth and scandal were reported as it deserved to be, Kamala’s chances would have diminished further. Her role in the coverup, being one of the people lying to media about Biden’s condition, and she would have been disqualified for office. The Trump margin of victory almost certainly would have been wider, and the House and Senate might have seen larger Republican majorities as a result.

* * * * * * * *

My humble, but sincere advice for my friends in media, and I do have dozens of them that are friends, is it’s hard to take them seriously when they won’t admit their failings in coverage of the Biden regency. If you want to regain trust, go where the story goes, not where you want the story to go. And I’m telling you, the story is who was running the country the last four years, and why there was no accountability in government. Why did the 25th Amendment fail as a failsafe apparatus against an obviously incapacitated president?

Find me a reporter that gets to the bottom of that, regardless of whether they lean left or right on the ideological spectrum, they’re going to be the first ones that lead the media herd back out of the wilderness.

After every presidential election, a leftist media grandee takes one for the team and apologizes, just a little, for all of his industry’s biased reporting during the election cycle. But the last four years of being deeply in the tank for a president who took office resembling John Gill, and left it at risk of becoming Capt. Pike in the wheelchair deserves much more inside detail than Tapper and Thompson’s meager efforts.

UPDATE: In The Wake Of Biden Book ‘Bombshells,’ One Pressing Question Still Remains.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE:

Posted at 5:26 pm by Stephen Green

IN ANDOR, TONY GILROY SHOWED US THE EMOTIONAL POWER OF STAR WARS:

None of the previous Star Wars entries have worked in this fashion. There are no Jedi. There is no Skywalker family drama. The Force is only present on the edges, as a ludicrous old fable of a lost religion, not an abiding faith. This is a story about rebels becoming soldiers becoming a revolution, not a plucky fantasy where all the Stormtroopers miss and no one ever gets just straight-up murdered. The casting, particularly of Imperials Denise Gough and Kyle Soller, injects a resonance into the series for understanding the true nature of evil and how it overtakes its human cogs and collapses their misgivings. And Gilroy’s choice to use as many physical settings as possible – casting aside the Unreal Engine Volume for Britain as the cold emotionless Coruscant and Spain as the gorgeous but decaying Republic – makes the whole series feel more grounded, a human drama where otherworldly things exist, but are not the focus of the plot.

There’s always an inclination to assign current politics to Star Wars, whether in the context of the George W. Bush years or the current anti-Trump moment. But what Gilroy manages in this series is to show this clash instead as one between elites. This is no Occupy Wall Street rebellion. Instead, it is an authoritarian empire which creates nothing that must lie, steal and disrupt peaceful people in order to grasp the wealth and political freedom of a capitalist class of traders and merchants. It is a militarist state that takes from those who grow, build and create by force of arms, because that is all they have. Yes, they are stronger – but their hubris leaves the villains vulnerable to the machinations of those who actually know how to build, how to create, and how to hide the key to the Empire’s destruction in plain sight.

Whatever comes next for this saga, if the cost of three increasingly ridiculous sequel movies was getting the Gilroy vision of Star Wars, it was absolutely worth it.

I watched the last two episodes of Andor last night, and they were pretty good. They were a combination of Cold War thriller and an episode of SWAT blended with a smattering of Star Wars technology. The same complaints I made after seeing Rogue One on the big screen apply: Diego Luna isn’t the most charismatic actor, and the machinations of the baddies are far more interesting than those of the Rebellion. But just imagine how astonishing Andor would have been if it had been the live-action series that ran on network TV in the late 1970s in-between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Or if it had immediately followed The Mandalorian on the Disney+ streaming platform. Instead, it really feels like the last gasp of an utterly bankrupt franchise:

Posted at 5:19 pm by Ed Driscoll

#METOO:

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: What’s a Journalism?

“I’m a journalism!” hapless Simpsons character Ralph Wiggum says in one of my favorite memes — a favorite because sometimes it takes a meek moron’s malapropism to express what we were all thinking.

Poor Ralph. He never quite understands what’s going on around him, but he always wants to help. Then there are Washington’s actual journalists — I’ve called them many other names over the years, none of them nice — who surely understand much but seem only to push partisan narratives.

That’s how Ralph’s “I’m helping!” while standing uselessly around became “I’m a journalism!” Some versions of the meme show Ralph with a finger jammed up his nose, as if for emphasis.

The everyday reporter brings biases — and increasingly, a near-total ignorance of anything that might add essential context. My concern today isn’t with them because they’re just following the lead of media-types much higher up the food chain.

So today, let’s take a look at three examples: the publisher, the talking head, and the fact-checker.

Much more at the link.

Posted at 4:22 pm by Stephen Green

SKYNET FROWNS: Executives Are Pouring Money Into AI. So Why Are They Saying It’s Not Paying Off?

The general fear of being left behind by missing the boat on AI is still rampant.

“At this point, leaders who aren’t leveraging AI and their own data to move forward are making a conscious business decision not to compete,” IBM vice chairman Gary Cohn wrote in the report. “As AI adoption accelerates, creating greater efficiency, and productivity gains, the ultimate pay-off will only come to CEOs with the courage to embrace risk as opportunity.”

But how to leverage AI meaningfully — and convey that vision to workers — is proving extremely difficult.

According to a 2024 Gallup poll, only 15 percent of US employees felt that “their organization has communicated a clear AI strategy.” Only 11 percent said they feel “very prepared” to work with AI, a drop of six percent from Gallup’s 2023 survey.

Despite pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI investments and supporting infrastructure expansions, companies are still many years out from turning a profit. When, or if, they’ll ever get to the point where AI pays for itself remains to be seen.

“Are we using GenAI to solve real problems, or just optimizing slide decks?” Curioser.AI CEO Stephen Klein told Forbes.

In a study commissioned by Microsoft last year, researchers claimed that for every $1 invested in generative AI, companies would realize an average of $3.70 in return, claims that were never externally validated.

Even ChatGPT loses money, despite having all that money thrown their way.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

WIKIPEDIA IS FREE AND WORTH LESS THAN YOU PAY FOR IT:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

OUR GRID WASN’T IN GREAT SHAPE EVEN BEFORE LEFTIES STARTED MUCKING WITH IT:

Posted at 2:58 pm by Stephen Green

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Kimmel, Clooney Have Some Serious Explaining to Do.

The 46th president lacks the mental acuity to serve a second term, Clooney wrote in The New York Times. He had seen Biden up close during a June 2024 fundraising event, and it wasn’t pretty.

The media has been protecting Clooney ever since. Journalists refused to ask the Oscar winner why he waited so long before publicly sharing the president’s mental decline.

And it’s not for lack of media access.

My theory is that Clooney turned against Biden, not because he was senile, but because he was so senile that he didn’t recognize George Clooney.

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

GLEICHSCHALTUNG:

Posted at 1:57 pm by Stephen Green

SKYNET IS A LEFTY: Worldcon Uses AI To Hunt Wrongthink. “The World Science Fiction Convention, the same people who thought it was a dandy idea to have a Worldcon in communist China, have stepped in it again. This time, the scandal is using ChatGPT to hunt wrongthink.”

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Trump Team Ain’t Playin’ Around: More Hanky Panky Busted at the CFTC.

Remember back to last week when I told y’all about the work-from-home fraud that Caroline Pham, acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), had released a statement on?

The post was fun in itself because I got to use the Trading Places clip where Aykroyd and Murphy ruin the Dukes to explain what some of it is that the CFTC helps regulate.

When I first started writing that, there hadn’t been much information available about why ‘staff members’ had been put on leave, which naturally led to speculation about trading irregularities and that sort of thing. Later information revealed the worker phoning it in from a foreign country and the union leaders who’d facilitated it.

Which was pretty bad and apparently cost the government a fortune in wrongfully claimed salary, etc., not to mention the fraud itself.

Good on her, I said.

Little did I know Ms Pham is a tiger and, thanks to brother Bingley alerting me to another email he got this morning, she’s on the horn about another far more egregious case of actual wrongful government prosecution, CFTC false statements, and just malicious incompetence.

Much more at the link.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green

MEDIA SHOCKED THAT MEDIA COVERED UP BIDEN’S COGNITIVE DECLINE:

It’s a headline that reads more like satire than reality. But the corporate media is once again pretending to be shocked at new details about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline – despite having themselves perpetrated the cover-up of the former president’s failing health for years.

Since Biden left office, details have slowly emerged about the lengths to which top White House staff, Democrat insiders, and liberal media pundits went to cover up the president’s physical deterioration. But that trickle has become a torrent this week as details from “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” a new book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, have entered the headlines.

The book is reportedly based on interviews with more than 200 people and includes explosive revelations like the fact that Biden’s health was apparently so bad as early as 2023 that advisors privately discussed the potential need to use a wheelchair if he won re-election. Biden’s physician, Kevin O’Connor, also pleaded with aides to give the president more time to rest, and White House staffers were instructed to plan events so that Biden had to walk as few steps as possible.

In another instance, Biden allegedly did not recognize movie star George Clooney at an event, despite the fact that the two men had known each other for nearly two decades. Clooney would later pen an op-ed urging Biden to drop out of the race – but only following his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.

For Americans who watched the media’s fawning coverage of Biden for four years, the feigned shock and outrage of the commentariat class over these new details is as laughable as it is insulting. Do Tapper, Thompson, and their legacy media brethren really expect us to forget that they themselves paved the way for the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline until that lie became impossible to maintain?

Well, yeah. There’s a lot they’re hoping you’ll forget:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll