ED MORRISSEY: Dems, Media Begin Captain Louis Renault Award Contest Over Declinin’ Biden.
Get the Visine ready, because the eye rolls you’ll do in reading this suddenly lengthy list of Joe Biden red flags will require medical attention before you get to the end.
CNN did a deep dive earlier today on Democrats’ effort to win a Captain Louis Renault award for being the Most Shocked, Shocked by Biden’s cognitive decline. Why, they had no idea how poorly Biden performed of late until the debate! Clearly, Biden’s White House snookered them and the media all along!
Come on, man …
On September 29th of 2020, William Voegeli of the Claremont Institute published his column headlined “The Weak Leading the Woke,” in which he wrote:
After so many years of saying so many weird things, Biden has come to receive a benefit denied other politicians: being graded on a curve, a phenomenon journalist James Lileks has termed the “soft bigotry of Joe expectations.” Even so, [the New Yorker’s Eric Lach] predicted last year that Biden’s nomination would mean Democrats “will be in for months of apologizing and explaining things away.”
However, in the Q&A style of his column, Voegeli eventually asked what we were all thinking that year: “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.
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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.”
For years, my recurring headline for Joe’s innumerable gaffes was “Super Gaffe-O-Matic ’76,” a takeoff on Dan Akroyd’s classic Saturday Night Live TV commercial parody. But it was obvious by the 2020 election cycle that the pilot light was beginning to dim on Biden, which is why I retired that headline and started going with “Trunalimunumaprzure!”, with my first reference to the word on October 31st, 2020, in reference to this infamous moment, in which brain, mouth and teleprompter reading skills all failed miserably for Biden.
Assuming Kamala replaces Sundown Joe, the media will coalesce lockstep around her, just as they did during Obama’s rapid rise to power during the 2008 election cycle. As Jim Treacher wrote last week:
I don’t normally do predictions, but here’s one you might not like: Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee, and she’ll defeat Donald Trump in November.
I said what I said.
Think about it: What Democrat in good standing is gonna sit at home on Election Day, when they’ve got a chance to stop Trump and make history by electing the first woman president? A multiracial POC, to boot!
Plus, she’s not bad-looking for a woman her age. For most Americans, that’s all they’ll see. They don’t know anything about any of the issues. They’ll just see an attractive, youthful person of color against a grouchy old white man they really hate.
It’ll be 2008 all over again.
No, she doesn’t have Obama’s skills. She doesn’t have anybody’s skills. But she’s a warm body who can keep Trump from getting back into the White House.
That’s all Biden was. And hey, at least she can still walk down a flight of stairs.
All the journos panicking today about Kamala taking over the ticket will flip in an instant when it happens. If they were willing to lie to you about Biden’s brain melting out of his ears, do you really think they’ll tell you the truth about her?
Look how quickly they’ve turned on Biden. They can start boosting her just as fast. They can pretend they never wanted another old white man to get reelected. That was yesterday. Never happened.
Nobody wants to be the reporter who put Trump back in the White House.
I’m not stating a preference here, dear reader. I’m just thinking it through. A lot of MAGA-heads are going to wish Biden had held out long enough to lose in November.
But look on the bright side: Every political prediction I’ve ever made has been wrong!
Yes, Steve Hayward postulates that the Dems are “Facing the Abyss Inside the Abyss:”
In the immediate moment, she’d be inheriting Biden’s White House staff when she becomes president. They know better than anyone how terrible she is. Would she try to bring in her own White House staff in short order? Maybe, but that is a recipe for chaos, and Kamala already has a reputation as someone who leaves chaos in her wake the way PigPen trailed a cloud of dust in Peanuts.
She’d be inheriting Biden’s campaign apparatus. What happens the first time she doesn’t like a speech or campaign message the staff produces? More chaos, leaks, backbiting, resignations, firings—and a landslide loss at the polls in November.
But she’ll have a newly galvanized DNC-MSM ready to break out Will Smith’s memory erasing tool from the Men in Black movies en masse about their coverage of Biden, and ready to declare everything Trump and whoever his veep is to be “raaaaaaacism!!!!” when they attack her. Will that get her across the finish line? We may know soon enough.