INSERT KINGSLEY AMIS AND ROBERT CONQUEST REFERENCE HERE: The Weak Leading the Woke.
Is Biden still, you know, all there?
It is especially hard to gauge the cognitive decline of a public figure whose cognitive peak was neither recent nor lofty. In his memoir, former FBI director James Comey recalled White House meetings where President Obama would point a discussion in Direction A, then wait patiently to resume that journey until a five- or ten-minute digression from Vice President Biden in Direction Z had run its course. Discursiveness has always been Biden’s modus operandi. In 1993, the New Republic devoted an entire page to a verbatim reproduction of a single question Biden posed during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. It contained nearly five times as many words as the Gettysburg Address.
That said, and despite campaign efforts to limit and script his public appearances, it certainly appears that Biden merits the assessment made of many people in their late seventies: he has good days and bad days. The detours that Comey noted are increasingly frequent, often occurring within a single sentence—or, rather, freeway pileup of sentence fragments. Worse, rather than heading in a new, unexpected direction, they don’t really go anywhere at all. In September Biden answered, after a fashion, a question about the coronavirus: “COVID has taken this year, just since the outbreak…has taken more than 100 years. Look. Here’s. The lives. I mean, just…you think about it. More lives this year than any other year for the past hundred years.”
In a CNN interview earlier this year, Biden repeatedly looked down from the camera to his desk while saying, “You know, there’s a…during World War Two, when Roosevelt came up with a thing, that was, you know, totally different, than a…than the…it’s called, he called it, you know, he had the war, the War Production Board.” The moment was excruciating in ways transcription doesn’t capture. Journalist Glenn Greenwald subsequently tweeted, “I’ve literally never seen one person—until Joe Biden—who had to read from notes to answer questions from a cable TV host. And even with that, he often gets lost.”
— William Voegeli, the Claremont Review of Books, September 29, 2020.
Yes, 2020, which dovetails perfectly with Ian Miller of Outkick the Coverage, who wrote on Wednesday: Media Didn’t Report On Biden’s Senility Because Republicans Noticed It.
CNN’s Hadas Gold asked White House reporters whether they didn’t do more work on Biden’s “mental fitness” because they wanted to “prop up the campaign.” Shockingly, they said no.
“The media has faced accusations that it has not covered Biden’s mental fitness more aggressively because it wants to prop up the campaign in some way – an accusation the White House reporters CNN spoke to denied,” Gold writes.
Then in the very next paragraph, those same sources admits that they didn’t actually do their jobs because it would have made Democrats mad.
“Several White House reporters told CNN that the coverage of Biden’s age and his mental stamina should have pushed harder,” Gold says. “They cited several difficulties in doing so before the debate – from the obvious political motivations of sources who either want to protect Biden’s image or project a certain image, to the blowback from pursuing such reports, especially from the White House and Democrats.”
So they didn’t report on Biden’s age because, in part, they were lied to by their friends in the Democratic Party, and because their allies in the party would have been upset if they told the truth. But Gold unwittingly reveals an even more important reason why liberal media reporters had no interest in reporting: because it would have proved Republicans right.
“Biden’s age was also a right-wing talking point for years, something the White House was quick to point out to reporters, which may have inadvertently turned off any serious investigation,” Gold writes.
And there it is.
Liberal ‘Journalists’ Won’t Accept The Truth If It Comes From The Right
Jonathan Turley confirms this thesis: Reporters Blame “Right-Wing Media” for Their Failure to Disclose Biden’s Infirmity.
Their willfully turning a blind eye to years of Biden’s condition worsening is the ultimate example of Jim Treacher’s observation:
(Classical allusion in headline.)