THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Anyway. . . “So this was the week Joe Biden and the Democratic machine, looking for a squirrel, any squirrel, discovered Project 2025, which—horror of horrors!—proposes conservative ideas for America. Ideas like sound fiscal policy, strong national defense, family values, lower taxes, less regulation, back to basics education, etc. In other words, for the left, a climate of hate. As Joe Biden might say, anyway. . . Now back to President Chauncey Gardner, Vice President Trump, and Ukrainian President Putin.”
PJM WEEKEND UPDATE: A Big Week for a ‘Big Boy.’ “Make no mistake about it, Biden may have survived his ‘big boy’ press conference Thursday night, but the defining moment of the event was when he said, ‘I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be Vice President if she wasn’t qualified to be president.’”
Here's Secretaries Blinken, Austin and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan when President Biden said, "Vice President Trump." pic.twitter.com/chvT7eRqvY
From those crazy right wing MAGA nuts at, err, CNN:
Weird one… CNN reports that a prominent Democrat has claimed Biden’s advisors have threatened White House staffers, saying they will “beat the shit out” of anyone who says anything about Biden’s health that runs contrary to their narrative. Full report: https://t.co/bKUXT4Vct4pic.twitter.com/mlyvpNev2c
Leonid Brezhnev led the former Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1982. But like most Russian apparatchiks who excessively smoked, drank, and gained weight, he aged prematurely. Also like them, his disabilities never led to his abdication.
By Brezhnev’s late 60s and early 70s, he was too ill to travel abroad or make public appearances. Indeed, his debility left the Soviet Union without a real leader for the final six or seven years of his tenure.
Brezhnev got away with it because the Soviet state-controlled media doctored photos and videos to attest to his supposedly vigorous health and constant hands-on involvement.
“Journalists” sent out false communiques. They spun narratives that Brezhnev was robust, hale, and working long hours on behalf of the Russian people. Any dissenting journalists who sought to report the true, sad state of affairs were in danger of losing their jobs, freedom — or even their lives.
Instead, the “reporters” of Pravda (“Truth”), the official print megaphone of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, wrote lies about Brezhnev’s busy workdays. Pravda’s handlers spun fables about the respect (and fear) the rest of the world held for such a dynamic leader — even as Brezhnev became an ill virtual recluse.
The cynical Russian people shrugged because they had long been accustomed to their lying media and the falsehoods they peddled. And besides, Brezhnev was a doctrinaire Stalinist communist. So his job was not to rock the boat or upset the Russian communist hierarchy.
Instead, he reigned over the penultimate Soviet “era of stagnation,” while an ossified communism increasingly destroyed all incentives and hope, leaving the Russian people poor, cynical, and helpless.
Owens’s latest bid for publicity involves her embrace of Holocaust denial in which she uses her popular videos and X posts to speak as if the horrors of Auschwitz, including the bestial medical experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele, is mere “propaganda.” On top of that, she has the chutzpah to speak of the Germans as if they were the true victims of World War II and that the Allies who defeated Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime were the true axis of evil.
We can hope that this latest entry in an increasingly long list of antisemitic rants is the one that finally leads to a situation where she will, like some other hatemongers before her, sink into well-deserved obscurity where her mad utterances will draw no further notice from the general public.
Still, I think it’s important to note her journey from populist conservative talker to conspiracy theorist to full-blown lunatic Jew-hater. This story deserves to be understood not just because what she says is terrible—though it certainly is—but because Owens is a cautionary tale of how articulate, yet also utterly ignorant and completely unprincipled people can be platformed by serious outlets without them having a full understanding of the sort of person they’re employing. It’s also a commentary on how once you start buying into conspiracy theories, the rabbit hole of antisemitism can become an irresistible temptation.
“Hollywood hates nothing more than weakness. Unless there’s a montage of getting strong and winning. They know there’s no montage of Biden getting strong and winning, so time for a quick offscreen death and a recast,” he said. Even if he manages to turn in an impressive campaign stop or press conference here and there, everyone’s simply waiting for Biden to stumble again. And he will. He’s not getting any younger.
Even in an age of aging heroes—one in which the biggest box office draws are Tom Cruise (62) and Denzel Washington (69) and Will Smith (55) and Keanu Reeves (59)—what’s being sold is not that they’re old but that they’re effective, that they’ve got verve, that they can outperform men and women half their age. It’s why Biden embraced the Onion’s vision of him as the aging bro washing his Trans Am, it’s why he goes everywhere he can in Top Gun-style aviators. It’s why the Dark Brandon meme took off in certain quarters of the Democratic party: He’s not nearing death, he’s old and wily and still vibrant enough to crush his enemies.
Call it shallow, call it whatever you want: politics is the art of persuasion and perception, and people are less likely to be persuaded by someone they perceive to be incapable of doing the job. People are also less likely to be persuaded by folks who lie to their face and tell them everything is just fine with Biden, that he’s clearly together enough to get the job done. For what it’s worth, I am incredibly ambivalent about the effort to replace Biden: the unknown unknowns that come with either a mini-primary at the convention or simply replacing Biden with Harris atop the ticket are vast and, potentially, destabilizing. And maybe Biden rights the ship with a series of command performances in front of the press and population alike. Maybe it was a one-off thing and his standing will improve in the polls.
But pretending there isn’t a conversation to be had at all is foolish and self-defeating. The voters have seen what they have seen. Again: politics is perception. And right now, the perception is bad.
Clooney on Wednesday added himself to the growing list of prominent Democrats who said he had concerns over Biden’s at-times frail condition, well before it spilled into public view at the debate.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F—ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” he wrote.
Campaign officials sought to intervene to prevent the piece from publishing, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
YOUR DOG WANTS STEAK: What’s In A Dog Bark? Scientists Look To Use Artificial Intelligence To Help Figure It Out. “Using Artificial Intelligence and algorithms, researchers say that they could potentially not only learn more about what a dog is saying, but why they are saying it as well. Ultimately, they believe this could help humans understand and communicate with their dogs better. We’re not quite like the dog from Pixar’s ‘Up’ film yet – but it appears that’s where we may be heading!”
CBS News reports that potentially ‘dozens’ of Democratic lawmakers will issue statements calling on Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential election.
The outlet states it may transpire within the next 48 hours.
UNITED STATES: CBS News reports that four Democratic sources say they 'expect dozens of Democratic lawmakers over the next 48 hours to issue statements calling for President Biden to step out of the race'
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) July 12, 2024
If the money’s disappearing, then Biden will have to get by on just small-donor contributions and the current $240 million cash-on-hand his campaign has. That would be enough to compete, but not enough to win even for a candidate with full compos mentis. This may be the biggest signal yet to Biden that he simply can’t stay on the ticket, but … will it matter to the Bidens at this point? Stay tuned.
In the meantime, Biden-Trump, err, -Harris are still plugging away, looking for individual contributions:
Later he tried to explain what happened, which was even more baffling:
I’ll do my best to transcribe this gibberish:
“And the moo, the Putin piece, I was talking about Putin, and I said, ‘And now,’ at the very end, I said, ‘Here,’ I mean ‘Putin,’ I said, ‘Uh, no, I’m sorry, Zelenskyy.’ [DISCONCERTINGLY LONG PAUSE] And then I added five other names. Look, guys. The idea, anybody suggests that, that… we haven’t had an incredibly successful conference. How many times did you hear in that conference, I don’t, it sounds too self-serving, but other leaders, heads of state, in thanking me, saying, ‘The reason we’re together is because of Biden. Because Biden did the following.’ Look, folks. This is, uh… Well. Anyway.”
Well anyway indeed. Actually, that would be a great campaign slogan:
BIDEN 2024: WELL ANYWAY
Now, if you’re an older person or you know one, this behavior may be familiar. Sometimes a person’s mental filing system gets mixed up as he ages. All the information is still up there in the ol’ noggin, but things get misfiled. Jumbled. Mostly nouns. People, places, things. He knows what he wants to say, but he picks up the wrong name and attaches it to the wrong thing. It happens.
This can be understandable and even endearing in a loved one. It’s not very reassuring to a world that’s waiting to see how many marbles the president of the United States has left.
How well did this week go for Biden? It was a cornucopia of soundbites* for the opposition, from both Biden’s gaffes, and what his own party is now saying about him:
Truly amazing to realize there’s going to be a GOP ad this fall that does nothing but quote Dem Congressmen, Senators and George Clooney on the unfitness of their presidential candidate.
Here's Secretaries Blinken, Austin and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan when President Biden said, "Vice President Trump." pic.twitter.com/chvT7eRqvY
On Thursday evening, Joe Biden held what was widely dubbed his “big boy” press conference. Originally scheduled for 5:30 pm ET, it was delayed an hour, before again being pushed to 7:00 pm and then 7:15 pm.
It was a rough start, for sure. Biden sounded hoarse at times, coughed quite a bit, and sounded like he had cotton in his mouth and nostrils. But, it was a campaign speech through and through. He repeated the same old stump speech lines that we’ve heard over and over and that haven’t resonated with the public.
Of course, the speech was irrelevant. The questions and answers are what matter, and it didn’t go very well.
For starters, his “big boy” press conference was made up of pre-approved reporters.
The press conference, which closed out the NATO summit in Washington, was the latest make-or-break moment for his presidential campaign. Frankly, the entire thing was a losing proposition for Biden, as even White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby were calling it the “big boy” conference.
Asked whether it would harm his legacy if he were to lose to Trump in November, he challenged the premise of the question, saying “I’m not in this for my legacy.” He subsequently explained why he abandoned his “bridge” candidate pledge instead of anointing a successor.
“What changed was the gravity of the situation I inherited,” Biden said, citing the economic turbulence and geopolitical crisis of his first term. “My long time in the Senate equipped me to have the wisdom on how to deal with the Congress to get things done.”
Biden did acknowledge his need to slow down and his staffers’s desire to add events to his schedule, a tendency he said angered First Lady Jill Biden.
“I love my staff, but they add things. They add things all the time. I’m catching hell from my wife,” Biden stated.
At times, Biden gave long-winded, rambling answers on foreign policy, going into detail about working with world leaders and cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. During these stream of conscious answers, Biden repeatedly lost his trains of thought and stumbled over his words, repeating “anyway” and “the idea” as verbal crutches.
Asked about how he would fare at the end of a second term, Biden maintained that he’d be ready to deal with the leaders of hostile countries.
“I’m ready to deal with them now and three years from now,” Biden said of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin, America’s two most powerful adversaries.
As usual, Biden’s ego and reality are inhabiting two extremely different planes of existence:
Reporter to Biden: Is Your Noticeable Decline Hurting America's Standing In The World?
One of the single most incredible things about Biden is that he really does view himself on foreign policy as a combination of Metternich, Bismark, and Cardinal Richelieu, not as a guy who screws up everything he touches
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.
* * * * * * * *
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 LiveTV 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!
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.
A true Washington psychodrama will unfold today a mile from the White House, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
A red-hot press corps — which feels ignored, used and deceived — will get its first true unfiltered crack at grilling President Biden, the most media-sheltered president of modern times. “The dogs are loose,” a Biden adviser told us.
Biden, bitter over media coverage of his age and acuity, gets his shot at redemption — a chance to show the press and public he can think fast, handle the heat, and spar and speak improvisationally without glitching.
Why it matters: The stakes are even higher than during the first presidential debate. If Biden looks weak and wobbly, his Democratic critics will pounce and crank up resignation calls. If he looks strong and steady, the anti-Biden campaign could stall.
Biden’s every word and move will be dissected, every mangled sentence scrutinized, every stiff move or mind freeze discussed.
The big picture: Senior Democrats are increasingly bearish about the chances Biden stays at the top of the ticket. “I think this weekend is critical,” said a former top government official. “I expect key conversations to happen at the end of the week after NATO. But the reality is setting in. The numbers are bad. The money is frozen. The path isn’t there.”
Yes, for the next couple of decades, every time the regime media says anything to us, our response needs to be, “What about Russiagate, Laptopgate, and Dementiagate?” To the limited extent that any Republican ever again goes on any of those regime channels or talks to any of the regime reporters, the first thing out of his mouth needs to be, “You’ve already shown yourself to be liars by pretending Joe Biden wasn’t senile until he senile all over himself on the debate stage, so I don’t expect to be treated fairly here. I expect you to continue to lie to your viewers and to me, and I’m going to point it out. Now, what are your loaded questions?”
The regime media could never endure for long pretending to be objective to get the benefits and respect an objective outlet is entitled to while simultaneously shrimping the toes of the Democrat Party. This collapse was inevitable. This humiliation was deserved. And this farce will never be forgotten.
Don’t laugh. The media once knew how to do this. The best example is the Richard Jewell story. In 1996, after Jewell, a security guard, discovered a bomb at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park and helped clear the crowd, he was declared a hero by the press.
Days later, reporter Kathy Scruggs was told by a law enforcement source that Jewell was the FBI’s foremost suspect. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran the story that made Jewell the villain. CNN reported the AJC article, and for the next 88 days, Jewell was hunted by reporters. He was one of the first victims of what would become known as “trial by media.” When his name was finally cleared, Jewell, who died in 2007, sued the New York Post, NBC News, and CNN and settled with all three.
In what today would be considered an astonishing move, CNN producer Henry Schuster actually wrote an apology to Jewell: “I made Richard Jewell famous — and ruined his life.”
Imagine a journalist in 2024 having this kind of integrity and self-reflection. Russiagate, the Covington Catholic students, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservatives who sounded the alarm about President Joe Biden’s health years ago and were mocked, the child who dressed up in face paint for the Kansas City Chiefs and was accused of using blackface — the list of those wronged by the press is long. Yet reporters now seem sociopathic, incapable of remorse or human feeling. They won’t ever simply apologize.
— Free the World 🇺🇲🌏🦅 (@PatriotVerity) July 7, 2024
UPDATE:
Biden’s campaign got a radio station to edit out the president saying: “I have more Blacks in my administration than any other president, all other presidents combined, and in major positions, cabinet positions” https://t.co/WRJYnIDuvv
News division president Debra O’Connell called a panicked meeting with advisers and executives on Tuesday night, including public relations consultants, it was reported.
‘This was a fully fledged crisis and it exploded with far-reaching reverberations,’ an insider claimed to Radar Online.
She is then said to have hauled Stephanopoulos into a private meeting where she gave him an ultimatum: apologize or be yanked off air.
Stephanopoulos both hosts Good Morning America and is a moderator on current affairs panel show This Week.
ABC bosses were reportedly concerned the veteran broadcaster had expressed a private opinion that would fatally undermine his appearance of objectivity.
‘[O’Connell told him] in no uncertain terms that he is a newsman who is expected to be objective,’ the insider told Radar.
‘She was furious that someone of George’s experience and status would compromise the news division’s impartiality, and subject it to unnecessary and embarrassing headlines.
‘George backed Debra into a corner. If he did not apologize, how could he continue with his duties at ABC News without the network facing an avalanche of criticism.’
The insider, however, claimed that even though Stephanopoulos backed away from his comment and ‘minimized it as a quip’, ABC bosses knew the damage was done.
‘You can expect the Trump campaign and GOP to seize on this. You can also expect the White House to avoid ABC News moving forward. Biden will never sit down with Stephanopoulos ever again,’ they said.
According to Variety, Disney named O’Connell president of ABC News in February, after decades of toiling at various divisions within Disney and ABC. And I know it can be difficult for a new executive to get up to speed with the culture of the division he or she has been tasked to lead. But does O’Connell know that she works for a TV news division, which during the 2004 presidential race, back when the players were George W. Bush and John Kerry, issued a statement that it would not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable?”
An internal memo written by ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin admonishes ABC staff: During coverage of Democrat Kerry and Republican Bush not to “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable.”
But Halperin claims that Bush is hoping to “win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”
“The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin writes.
Halperin’s claim that ABCNEWS will not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable” set off sparks in St. Louis where media players gathered to cover the second presidential debate.
Halperin states the responsibilities of the ABCNEWS staff have “become quite grave.”
In August, Halperin declared online: “This is now John Kerry’s contest to lose.”
It took TMZ to get the truth out of a lifelong liar like Stephanopoulos. Just like it took the National Enquirer to get to the truth about John Edwards and the secret daughter he had with his nutty campaign aide back in 2008. Sometimes you gotta dig around in the gutter to find a gem.
Now the libs are furious at this tiny little man for expressing his genuine opinion. How can the Democrats stop the Big Orange Liar, if one of their soldiers can ruin the whole thing in a regrettable moment of unintentional honesty?
And as Treacher paraphrases today:
"You're a newsman and must be objective. Don't you know this will only help Trump?"
The agony here is all on one side. And it’s not my side. It’s being experienced by people who have spent the past eight years bathing luxuriantly in their own self-infatuated sense of their political virtue as demonstrated by their fixated hatred on all things Trump. That fixation either prevented them from seeing or kept them from admitting or gave them the permission structure for lying about the severity of Joe Biden’s condition. Now they are finding themselves in the choppiest political-emotional waters anyone has experienced in politics since the Republican New Hampshire primary in 2016 began to make it clear to non-revolutionary conservatives that our ideas had been supplanted and our understanding of the political rules was outdated. The people who are suffering today actually thought themselves immune from the self-doubts and sense of despair that gripped people like…me.
I was speaking to a friend, a very serious Catholic, who confessed (sorry) that he was enjoying the spectacle so much he felt guilty for his schadenfreude. I asked him whether this was because he thought his emotion did not befit a Christian. He said yes. I said, well, I don’t have that particular problem. I haven’t had this good a time in years. I hope there are another couple of polls to give Biden hope. That will keep all this going, and keep me entertained. Not much good can come out of any of this, so, just as the doctor told the young Alvy Singer when Alvy said he was depressed because the universe was expanding, “we might enjoy ourselves while we can, hah?”
When Democrats stare into the abyss-inside-the-abyss that is Kamala Harris, it is suddenly understandable that many conclude they’d be better off sticking with Biden after all. Smarter Democrats know they need to pass over Harris if they are to have any hope of winning, but are terrified at the prospect of angering their identity politics factions they have negligently empowered over the last three decades.
I’m reminded at this point of a commencement address Woody Allen once wrote (but never delivered as far as I know), which I paraphrase thus:
More than any other time in history, Democrats face a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
[Paraphrased from Side Effects, p. 57.]
Still though, as the line from a film that came out the same year as Annie Hall reminds us, “don’t get cocky.”
Joe Biden Is the Kindest, Bravest, Warmest, Most Wonderful Human Being I’ve Ever Known in My Life.
He is also “sharp as a tack.”
Not anymore, for either of those things. As Joe Biden has been threatening Mutual Assured Destruction (damn, Ed beat me to writing that post, but I am stealing it!), threatening Democrats with the complete implosion of his political party if they try to push him out–the Narrative about Biden in the mainstream media is going to change and likely change quickly.
The media wants Biden out, and if Chuck Todd’s podcast is any indication, they are less afraid to go nuclear on Biden than his Democrat colleagues in Congress.
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd says Biden’s refusal to step aside has made him “rethink a lot of the Biden biography. I still can’t believe he ran for president in the first place, given that his family was in crisis in 2018…You look at what has happened, I can’t believe he has put his… pic.twitter.com/gi7dgiF6Be
Todd isn’t holding back–at least not that much. No doubt he can take it up a notch or three, but this shot didn’t go across the bow–it hit the bow of Biden’s boat.*
“Here’s the reality,” Cramer began. “If Hunter Biden’s name was Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump you guys would be treating the war in Ukraine like—
“Don’t what-about … Enough of this,” Todd interjected, waving his hand. “”That is the laziest attack. It is not about the media. It doesn’t matter about the media.”
“It’s also honest,” Cramer said as the two continued to speak over each other.
[Sen. Ron Johnson]: Well, Chuck, you need to look at your mirror because you carried the Democrats’ water on the whole Russian collusion with the Trump campaign hoax —
TODD: Sen. Johnson, I’ve got to go. I appreciate you coming on. I’ve let you, I’ve let you say plenty of —
JOHNSON: That is what you did in the media. You carried that water for years. You destroyed the credibility of the press, not me.
Todd seems to lose it whenever he he has Johnson on, curiously enough: This 2019 Real Clear Politics article by Mark Hemingway, “Chuck Todd and the Demise of True Journalism,” is built around Todd’s interview with Johnson and subsequent insults.
On June 4, the Wall Street Journal published a story headlined, “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping”…[The] Journal described a January White House meeting with congressional leaders on Ukraine policy in which Biden “spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.” The next month, meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), the Wall Street Journal said, “Johnson worried that the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.”
White House and Democratic pushback was furious. Biden is as sharp as ever, Democrats said. The article was a hit piece based on Republicans who were playing partisan politics. Among those pushing back was Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who had talked with the Wall Street Journal for the story but was not quoted in the published piece.
“Surprise, surprise,” Murray posted on X after the story came out. “Everyone attacking POTUS is a Republican with an agenda. I made clear to the Wall Street Journal regarding the January meeting on Ukraine that the president was absolutely engaged and ran that meeting in a way that brought everyone together. I’m not quoted — I wonder why.”
Murray’s answer to her own question was obvious — she was accusing the Wall Street Journal of publishing a partisan hit piece suggesting Biden is not up to the job when she, Murray, had told reporters Biden is as good as ever. Later, the Wall Street Journal would describe it this way: “Murray told the Journal in April that she hadn’t seen a change in Biden’s acuity during her years of working with him. ‘He engages in a very personal way, asking questions,’ Murray said. ‘He is listening and absorbing.’”
That was Murray then. Now, after the disastrous June 27 debate exposed Biden’s infirmities for the world to see, Murray is singing a different tune.
As is the DNC-MSM. In a Twitter thread, Drew Holden rounds up over a dozen examples of the media performing Orwell-worthy pivots.
New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi’s deep dive into the worst-kept secret in American politics may be the most damning entry in this genre. Biden is reported to have “stared blankly” at a “Democratic megadonor and family friend” until he was reminded to say “hello.” “Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names,” Nuzzi wrote. One guest at a White House event came away from it appalled by the president’s inability to make it to the end of the reception. “The guest wasn’t sure they could vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda,” the report continued. “The president may not really be the acting president after all.”
This is hard-hitting investigative reporting, and it takes time to develop the sources required to flesh stories like these out. Perhaps it was the debate alone that shook those in Biden’s orbit out of their complacency and made these dispatches possible. But that doesn’t alone suffice to explain the sudden enthusiasm reporters have shown in their effort to chase those sources and their stories down. Nor does it explain the degree to which journalists have declined to paper over the president’s manifest impairment.
In a segment on his CNN program on Tuesday, host Jake Tapper exposed the degree to which even Biden’s efforts to reassure Democrats of his acuity have fallen short by simply reading verbatim transcripts of the president’s extemporaneous remarks. It was an effective tactic, but also one that could have been employed at any point in the president’s term — throughout which, Biden has mused over the “cumalidefasredsulc” benefits of student-debt forgiveness, touted his efforts to repair the country’s “bldhyindclapding,” and summed up his affection for America in a single word: “Asufutimaehaehfutbw.”
Allen and VandeHei’s observation about the press corps’ motives here is undeniably true, but it’s not something of which the press should be proud. The robust display of retrospective journalism to which Americans have been privy these last twelve days is a function of reporters’ professional embarrassment, yes, but also their anger over their own exploitation. An unspoken compact has been broken, and that infidelity must be punished. After all, you cannot be scorned if you never loved in the first place.
And as Ace of Spades notes, keeping the readers in love with the current Democrat president (or at least not letting them know about his cognitive decline in recent years) was part of their business model, until Biden’s pathetic debate performance and equally bad follow-up interviews with George Stephanopoulos and the since-fired AM radio host Andrea Lawful-Sanders have made it impossible to hide the decline:
[Matt Taibbi] points out that the media has changed its “commercial business model.” Previously, he says (a bit naively) that the corporate media attempted to inform a broad audience.
Under Trump, the media became more overtly biased, of course. He says that’s because Trump was a huge draw commercially, even for — especially for — leftwing news outlets. They knew that when they ran segments about Trump, their ratings went up. When they posted about Trump, their clicks went up.
So under no circumstances would they stop making their channels and papers Trump News 24/7. This would benefit Trump, of course — if they reported on him neutrally.
So the new business model they chose would be to continue filling their airwaves and newspapers with almost nothing but Trump, but they would appease their audiences, and their own consciences, by making it unrelentingly negative and biased coverage.
To measure the terror now gripping the mainstream media in the wake of the Biden–Trump debate, consider this: the New York Times is now fact-checking Joe Biden in favor of Donald Trump.
Monday’s print edition of the Times contains an article titled “In ABC Interview, Exaggerations about Polling and Trump.” The article applies a level of scrutiny to Biden’s Friday interview with ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos that is nearly unprecedented toward a Democratic candidate.
The Times now quotes Biden verbatim, with the clear intention of putting his verbal shuffles on full display:
Biden: “After that debate, . . . I did events in—in—in Georgia, did events like this today, large crowds, overwhelming response, no—no—no slipping.”
So remorseless is the Times toward Biden’s speech stumbles that it even records a missing syllable:
“The New York Times had me behind before anything having to do with this race—had me hind—behind 10 points.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper was also pointing out Biden’s fractured speech patterns in his interview with Stephanopoulos in the video we posted earlier today, gaffes that the media ignored for over four years.
So what happens if Biden manages to ride out the ever-growing calls to leave the race? Mac Donald writes:
On Monday, Biden sent what the Times characterizes as a “defiant” letter to Congress, daring his Democratic critics to challenge him at the convention. He also delivered what the Times calls “fiery remarks” on MSNBC denouncing the skeptical “elites.” Until Biden bows before the inevitable, we can expect to live in an inverted reality in which the mainstream media applies the same journalistic standards to the Democratic frontrunner as it does to the Republican frontrunner. As soon as Biden withdraws, we will return to the status quo ante.
Or as Kyle Smith wrote in March of 2019, “When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious. For the next few months, though, we’re in an amusing interstitial period when the media actually has a reason to attack their fellow Democrats: any hacks out there who think their party can do better than Biden (or Sanders, or Warren, or Harris, or etc.) can rip into their disfavored candidates in order to give an assist to their preferred picks. All of this goes away as soon as the Democratic pick for 2020 becomes evident, but until then we’ll be seeing some actual vigorous reporting.”
The trailer for Ridley Scott’s new epic, Gladiator II, is undeniably impressive, but then it rather had to be. Rumors that its already massive budget had ballooned to as much as $310 million — which would mean it would have to be one of 2024’s highest-grossing movies just to break even, never mind making a profit — may have suggested that the film was in trouble, but an early screening of the preview at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas reassured exhibitors and studios alike, with the few journalists who had seen the footage rushing to extol its scale and grandeur. Now it’s been released online, and viewers have a chance to judge for themselves. (Its cinematic debut will come with Deadpool vs Wolverine.) Does it look like a worthy follow-up to Gladiator?
There will be an awful lot riding on this picture’s success. The beleaguered Paramount Pictures desperately needs a hit, and for the film to make serious money, it needs to bank Oppenheimer-level amounts. And there is something of a question mark over the now-eighty-six-year-old Scott, too, who appears in recent years to have gone for broke in emphasizing the comic aspects of everything from Napoleon’s conquest of Europe to the murder of Maurizio Gucci by his wife Patrizia.
I’m looking forward to reading reviews when the film is ready for distribution. But at least for me, Scott’s botched attempt at Napoleon last year casts a bit of a pall on the above trailer, which shares a fair amount of that same plastic-CGI look for its epic battle scenes with the previous Scott film, and the strange reaction shots and dialog readings from Denzel Washington don’t help matters.
Nancy Pelosi ignored Joe Biden’s claims that he was staying in the race to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2024 and said time was “running short” for him to make that decision.
The former Speaker of the House has not endorsed the US President as the party’s best option for beyond his current term. Ms Pelosi told Mr Biden’s favourite morning news show, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, that “it’s up to the President to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”
Regardless of the reason, everything seems to hinge on the president’s “big boy” press conference on Thursday. As RedState reported, Democrats have set Friday as the deadline to have Biden out of the race. If he flubs that presser despite how low the bar is already set, the rush to get him out of the race will be overwhelming. Pelosi seems to be hedging her bets, waiting to see how he performs.
The fact that a major Democrat leader (who has been given the fake title “Speaker Emerita”) won’t just commit to Biden being the nominee at this stage is pretty incredible. The longer this festers, the lower the president’s chances of winning re-election become. That Pelosi and others know the stakes and are still not willing to speak with confidence about Biden’s future is telling. Something is up.
Put on your “big boy” trousers and stay tuned.
UPDATE: “Am I speaking English to you?”, Pelosi hisses at ABC’s Rachel Scott, in a rare attempt from the MSM of a hallway interview with a fellow Democrat. This clip would be played on a loop on CNN and MSNBC and would kick off nightly network news shows if a Republican said this to a black DNC-MSM journalist:
Pelosi may not appreciate the question, but to allude that a black female journalist for a major news organization is somehow unable to comprehend English is pretty beyond the pale. https://t.co/LWvcSEPXGC
Ed Morrissey adds, “The time for Clooney to speak up was in 2023, or 2022, when public evidence made Biden’s decline obvious to everyone. For that matter, why didn’t Clooney himself speak up after the fundraiser, or immediately after the debate? He’s part of the gaslighting brigade; he’s only speaking out now because it’s clear that the con has stopped working.”
The Democrats’ ridin’ with Biden seems to me an optimal scenario for President Trump. Can Biden maintain the Democrats’ unhappy status quo? “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future,” but I doubt it.
They also serve who only stand and wait. The press stands and waits to jump into bed with Kamala, metaphorically speaking. That is one message I take from the — ah, somewhat late — awakening of CNN’s Jake Tapper in the brutal clip below. Along with the rest of the mainstream media, he’s trying to maintain his self-respect.
Or as Oliver Wiseman writes at the Free Press: How ‘Misinformation’ Becomes Common Knowledge: “Every White House reporter, every fancy magazine profiler, they knew exactly what was going on with Joe Biden. They just didn’t think you, the reader, were ready to know. Also, did we mention the risk of getting yelled at by an intern? That’s hard. The Biden era has to be one of the least covered White Houses in modern history. Read the mainstream press, and you’d think Trump had been president these last four years.”
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