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.”
President Joe Biden has a new problem: a competitive race in deep blue New York.
Elected officials, union leaders and political consultants are panicking over polls showing a steady erosion of Biden’s support in a state he won by 23 points four years ago. They’re so worried they’ve been trying to convince the Biden team to pour resources into New York to shore up his campaign and boost Democrats running in a half-dozen swing districts that could determine control of the House.
Biden aides have not focused on New York, committing no significant resources to a state where they expect the president to easily win all 28 electoral college votes in November.
But the warning signs are impossible to ignore and have been building over the past year. Two private polls conducted in a swing New York House district and reviewed by POLITICO — one in September and another in March — found former President Donald Trump leading Biden there by 1 point, a virtual tie. And public polls over the last four months found Biden’s lead had winnowed to just 8 points across New York — an unusually narrow gap in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.
“We’re still acting like this is a one-party state, which for pretty much 20, 25 years it has been,” Democratic Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said. “I truly believe we’re a battleground state now.”
I’d honestly be shocked if Biden goes on to actually lose New York, but as former Democratic New York Gov. David Paterson tells the Politico, “The money that needs to be spent here will be subtracted from other areas he’s going to lose.”
George Stephanopoulos apologized Tuesday evening after being caught on camera quipping to a passerby that he didn’t think President Joe Biden “can serve four more years.:”
The exchange was captured on video by TMZ, and the person lobbing a query about Biden’s fortitude appeared to be working for the outlet. The person approached Stephanopoulos as he was walking, in workout clothes, on the streets of New York City.
“Earlier today I responded to a question from a passerby. I shouldn’t have,” Stephanopoulos said in a statement that was shared previously with both Puck News and TMZ. “George expressed his own point of view and not the position of ABC News,” the Disney news unit said in a separate statement.
The media have moved in such lockstep during the 2008 election cycle to turn a junior senator from Illinois into The One, followed by their unending attacks on Trump, and then until recently, their efforts to prop up John Gill. To see them currently in disarray as Biden, Hunter, Jill, and the many other rival factions in Democratic Party decide the (p)resident’s future is loads of fun to watch. Enjoy it for now, because they will immediately return to uniformly printing The Approved Narrative again once they receive their orders from DNC HQ.
[Dr. Tom Pitts, who works with Parkinson’s patients in a clinical setting in Dayton, Ohio] conceded, “We’re finding [word] retrieval doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t know what you want to say. What I cannot comment on is his ability to make good decisions. His motor symptoms are degenerating. He has Parkinsosisms. That is a fact. You know, he has the generation of the brain.”
“Show me the MRI,” he challenged Biden’s doctors. “Show me he doesn’t” have Parkinson’s. “You know, put you put your money where your mouth is. He definitely has it.”
He thinks both Biden and Donald Trump should complete the standard four-hour neuropsychological testing—the hallmark test for cognitive performance (as opposed to the shorter Montreal Cognitive Assessment Trump claims to have passed).
“So, for example, they may have you say, like, say as many words you can in a minute that start with ‘F.'” Patients also do block-building, and a trail-drawing test and complete retrieval exercises. “I may, I may say ‘cup’ and have you recall it three minutes later.”
These are done with a professional PhD in neuropsychology,” he said. “It’s a full day. We tell people, ‘Bring a snack.'”
NBC host Lester Holt asked, “You’re a Democrat, you’re a doctor. You sound like you’re frustrated with what the White House is saying.”
“Well, because, you know, I’m an American before everything. And I look at it and say, when I used to see Russia, the Soviet Union, North Korea, when they just make up outrageous things, you know, like when North Korea can’t keep the lights on, and they say, ‘Oh, you know, it was some faulty power thing.’ I kind of hate that kind of stuff.”
Then he landed a death blow on the Democrat Party: “They had four years. My own party had four years to find—you know, this was a wreck in slow motion. And they had four years to find—out of 350 million Americans—one person that could take [Biden’s] place. And here we are, the day before school, trying to do the homework and replace a guy who’s got a neurodegenerative disease.”
At the beginning of the first Obama term in early 2009, the Washington Post through its then sister-publication Newsweek insisted, “We Are All Socialists Now.” Nearing the end of the third Obama term, is it anyone surprised that our socialist Capitol Hill resembles the Soviet Union of the early 1980s?
The New York Times has now written twoeditorials 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.
It’s easy to get lost in bleak humor (or score-settling) and lose sight of the sheer magnitude of what it is we are living through: The president of the United States is an empty shell of himself mentally. His praetorian guard has been keeping his near-complete mental collapse a secret for possibly years now, and the media engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” (Nuzzi’s words, not mine) to conceal it from voters, out of reflexive (in the truest sense of the word) partisan and professional self-interest. Very Smart People tell me that my sense of complete betrayal and abiding disgust is a feeling peculiar only to Republicans and political anoraks — chumps who care too much, in other words. Perhaps so.
But the question Charlie Cooke posed last week should be the same one you hang on to as well: If the media claims it has been lied to about the state of Biden’s health for all these long years, then maybe they should investigate that? How that happened? How much did Kamala Harris — Biden’s almost certain replacement, should he step down — know? When did she know it? A real media would start from the premise that she is just as disqualified by helping to conceal Biden’s collapse as Biden and his people themselves are, and force her to prove otherwise. A real media wouldn’t play a balancing game in its head, saying, “Let’s not push her too hard, we don’t want to help the Other Guy.” This is not a real media, however, so I will invoke Betteridge’s Law by answering the question Charlie merely posed in his headline: Will the media seriously investigate how they were “misled” about Biden’s health? No. That would mean investigating themselves.
BUNKERTIME: Biden rebels in Congress see their revolt crumbling. “One House Democrat who was in both meetings said: ‘Most of our caucus is still with him … meaning he’ll stay in. Which sucks for our country.’…Another described the mood as ‘pretty much unanimous’ that Biden has ‘got to step down,’ adding, ‘There were actual tears from people, and not for Biden.’”
There is perhaps a silver lining to yesterday’s election. Although Le Pen did not prevail absolutely, her party has been making steady progress. As Glenn Reynolds reports, citing a friend, “When Mr. Le Pen made it into the second round of the presidential election in 2002, he got 18 percent of the vote. When his daughter made the second round in 2017, she got 34 percent. When she did it again in 2022, she got 41 percent. They are persuading, just very slowly.”
The question is whether the cultural confidence that is necessary for civilizational survival will progress quickly enough to stave off disaster. No one’s crystal ball, I suspect, is far seeing enough to say. But the fact that everyone in the flaccid, low-testosterone corner of the punditocracy dismisses Rassemblement National with the epistemically empty epithet “far right” suggests that the battle, or at least the war, is not yet over.
Archimedes is purported to have said: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
I’m glad I’m not a Democrat right now. They’re engaged in looking for a lever long enough to dislodge Joe Biden’s stubborn grip on the 2024 nomination, and so far it eludes them. Will they find it in time?
Of course, they may not need it if they can commit enough fraud to win the election even with Biden at the helm. There is zero pretense that they care about the effect his continuing to occupy the office has had, and will have, on the fate of the country and the world. It’s about one thing only: winning. That’s why Joe was chosen in the first place in 2020 – not because he’d be a good president, but because he could be presented to the public in such a way that he would be the victor. And whether this occurred through rigging, fraud, or fair and square, it hardly matters to them, as long as it could be accomplished.
Why is Joe Biden clinging onto his presidency like grim death? It’s a point of pride, ego, and a burning desire to prove his critics wrong again. The president sees the internal voices of opposition as those who advised him not to run in 2016. They did so again in 2020, but he ran and won, thanks to the party elites he now loathes. A top Democratic Party donor and operative, Dmitri Mehlhorn, expounded on Biden’s deep intransigence over his 2024 nomination (via Drop Site News):
The key thing to understand about Biden’s resistance to dropping out, Mehlhorn said, is that Biden believes he should have run in 2016, but let himself be talked out of it—and won’t make that mistake again. “I want to just go a little bit deeper into the decision-making process of Joe Biden,” Mehlhorn told me. “Joe Biden is haunted by the fact that in 2016, he listened to these arguments. And he’s right. We were all wrong. If he’d run in 2016, we would not be here. A lot of people—not us as much this time—but a lot of people made those same arguments to him in 2020 and he stubbornly, stubbornly resisted all of them. And he saved us.”
Mehlhorn said the reverse was true in 2020. “So all of these arguments came at him in ’16. He listened, the world suffered grievously. All of these arguments came at him in 2020. He refused to listen, the world benefited tremendously,” Mehlhorn said. “America now has the strongest economy of the world, we are powering the world economy, we are leading the free world against Russian aggression because he refused to listen to these arguments. So right now, who is he going to listen to? I believe that fundamentally, he is going to listen to voters.”
If you honestly believe Biden “saved us” economically, and successfully “leading the free world against Russian aggression,” that’s some seriously potent hallucinogenic substances you have access to, perhaps along the lines of whatever John Gill is ingesting these days:
Why, if that is the case – are we sending billions to Ukraine? Putin is shut down – like talk of Joe being replaced has been "shut down". https://t.co/QSS7Yz9AV3
In any case, Joe believing he knew better in 2016 than those who insisted he not run is classic Joe believing he’s smarter than anyone else in the room:
Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’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.
The White House has limited Biden’s daily itinerary and shielded him from impromptu exchanges. Advisers have restricted news conferences and media appearances, twice declining Super Bowl halftime interviews — an easy way to reach millions of voters — and sought to make sure meetings with donors stuck to scripted pleasantries.
Senior aides dismissed travel suggestions over worries the president didn’t have the stamina for them, including an idea for Biden to make weekly cross-country trips in 2022 to tout the benefits of his infrastructure law.
All of this unfolded as Biden’s slips became increasingly obvious, and his top advisers were assuring everyone the president was fine.
When the 81-year-old president took the stage at last month’s debate, his abysmal performance in the 90-minute event stunned members of his party, including some White House staffers who rarely spend one-on-one time with Biden.
Now, many donors and lawmakers say they feel misled by what they say is an effort to tamp down concerns, raised well before the debate, about whether Biden is fit for a second term. Some high-ranking Democrats said they worry that few in the party have the courage to tell Biden face-to-face that he needs to step aside.
But when you begin to lose the palace guard late night hosts, the writing is on the wall: Colbert: Biden a ‘Great President’ Without a Brain. Far-left host shreds ‘ancient’ leader, shoves him toward the exit. “‘Biden debated as well as Abe Lincoln … if you dug him up right now,’ he said before shredding the White House spin on Biden’s terrible, awful debate performance as being due to a cold. He had the kind of cold “where your voice gets hoarse and your brain explodes.’ ‘I guess you could say he’s … Sleepy Joe,’ he added, referencing Trump’s nickname for Biden with a comical wince.”
Inhofe, a Republican, was the state’s longest serving senator from 1994 to 2023 and passed away peacefully this morning surrounded by his wife Kay, his children and other family members, a former senior aide tells Fox News.
Flashback: When Al Gore emerged from his energy-guzzling mansion to address the Senate in 2007 only to refuse to take his own energy reduction pledge from An Inconvenient Truth when presented to him by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Ann Coulter quipped, “I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson appeared to suggest President Richard Nixon was to blame for the city’s pervasive gun violence problem.
More than 100 people were injured in shootings in Chicago, at least 19 of them fatally, over the Fourth of July weekend, when there is often a spike in gun violence.
“We are standing here today talking about a violent weekend because of generations of disinvestment and deep disenfranchisement in the exact communities where so much of the violence has taken place,” Johnson, a Democrat who took office last year, said during a press conference on Monday.
* * * * * * * *
“Black death has been unfortunately been accepted in this country for a very long time. We had a chance 60 years ago to get at the root causes. And people mocked President Johnson, and we ended up with Richard Nixon. I’m going to work hard every day to transform this city. That’s what it takes to build a better, stronger, safer Chicago.”
Johnson did not elaborate further on his remarks about Nixon. His office has been contacted for comment via email.
The Richard Nixon Foundation responded to Johnson’s remarks on social media.
“Mayor Johnson’s reference to President Nixon is gratuitous and the facts are not on his side in his characterization of Richard Nixon and the Nixon administration’s civil rights record,” the foundation wrote in a thread on X, formerly Twitter, along with a list of the administration’s accomplishments.
Mayor Johnson’s reference to President Nixon is gratuitous and the facts are not on his side in his characterization of Richard Nixon and the Nixon administration’s civil rights record.
Every now and then, some elected official gets caught in a serious scandal and then attempts to just wait out the storm. Sometimes they hang on because enough time passes between the revelation and their next election; sometimes they hang on because their state or district strongly prefers one party over the other; and often they survive because they’re incumbents who have been around forever, know where all the bodies are buried, and bring home the bacon. Think of Ted Kennedy, John Murtha, Barney Frank, David Vitter, or Charlie Rangel. Idaho GOP senator Larry Craig rescinded his resignation and finished out his term.
And in my home state, we had the egregious embarrassment of former governor Ralph Northam. As I wrote at the end of Northam’s term:
It’s no big mystery how Northam remained in office. If Northam had resigned or the state legislature removed him from office, the lieutenant governor would take over – and the lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was facing two serious accusations of sexual assault. (The Virginia House Democratic Caucus argued that “the allegations against Lieutenant Governor Fairfax are extremely serious,” and also that the state legislature should not investigate the allegations.) If Northam and Fairfax resigned, then state attorney general Mark Herring would be governor — and Herring admitted he had worn blackface to a college party in 1980.
If Northam, Fairfax, and Herring had all resigned simultaneously, then the speaker of the House of Delegates at that time — Republican Kirk Cox — would become governor. And Virginia Democrats believed that a Republican governor was much worse than blackface, wearing a Klan hood, or allegations of past sexual assault.
We are witnessing the Biden inner-circle attempt the Ralph Northam maneuver. Sure, the president had an abysmal debate, didn’t do a sit-down on-camera interview until a week later, and his staff is telling radio interviewers what questions to ask. But Biden has all the delegates he needs to stay the party’s nominee in 2024, and it’s exceptionally difficult to remove a president who doesn’t want to leave office. Eric Felten contended in the Wall Street Journal last week that the current circumstances are proving that the 25th Amendment “is practically useless when a president is incapacitated and won’t admit it. . . . Cabinet secretaries are chosen by the president and serve at his pleasure. What politician is going to kick to the curb the man who gave him his high office?”
Ralph Northam was a Democrat governor, whose party, as Geraghty wrote above, decided was the least worst choice of all their options. So it was relatively easy for his state’s media to simply go to ground shortly after the scandal around him broke. The implications of a single state’s media being in the tank for him weren’t as noticeable to the general public as the blob of journalists who cover Capitol Hill. Or as Victor Davis Hanson writes:
Biden’s dementia has become so overt and so impossible to hide that the entire “crooked deal” has blown up. As a result, in the eleventh hour, there are very few pathways to salvation—as there never are when everything is birthed on a lie and its media-assisted cover-up.
Bidengate is far worse than Watergate. The media this time around was not exposing the wrongdoing of a conservative president but instead serving as a force multiplier in deceiving the very American people it was supposed to inform. “Democracy Dies in Deceit” is now the Washington Post’s de facto motto.
Remember, the left is worried only that Biden is so challenged that he cannot win an election. But they are not bothered that he has no business continuing in his dementia as commander-in-chief and putting the country in real danger each day he occupies the oval office—a bitter paradox that is beginning to infuriate the American people.
So, can Joe Biden just press ahead, sleep more, and fulfill his Faustian obligations? Or is he not in a doom loop? The more he rests, sleeps, and avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate, one-quarter president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, interviews, press conferences, debates and town halls, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent to the public. So, his handlers haggle over the choice between an ensconced virtual president versus an all-too-real, obviously senile one.
President Joe Biden’s fundraising operation started showing cracks in its once formidable armor, almost 10 days after his disastrous presidential debate performance.
Some of Biden’s campaign bundlers have stopped making calls to potential donors since the June 27 debate, according to people familiar with the matter.
“No one is picking up the phone,” said a well-connected Democratic fundraiser, who raises money for Biden and the Democratic Party. This person and others were granted anonymity in order to speak openly about private conversations on a sensitive topic.
A few of his bundlers are limiting their outreach to people in their personal fundraising networks, after they either received no response at all to asks, or else they received furious replies from people who questioned why they should give money to Biden after his substandard debate performance, according to people familiar with the matter.
Crosshairs is a political phrase that emerged from Palin’s political action committee SarahPac that targeted congressional districts for the Tea Party campaign in the last election, including the district of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Although Palin later denied she meant the graphic over the districts to look like a gun sight, it is part of the hunting lexicon that critics say she prefers.
Comedian Frank Conniff tweeted: “Hey, Sarah Palin, hows that hatey, killy, reloady, crosshairsy thing working out for ya?”
Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg said many people on the social networking site are asking whether Sarah Palin is to blame.
According to Zuckerberg that is the #1 question on the social network behemoth following the Tucson shooting.
Like so much with Palin, the roots are on Facebook. On her Facebook page last year when she posted the a map of 20 congressional districts targeted by SarahPac, the headline of the map: “It’s time to take a stand.”
At the time Giffords reacted to the map in an interview on a cable news program.
“When people do that, they’ve got to realize there are consequences to that action,” Giffords said.
I eagerly await ABC News’ similar attack on Biden for using similar rhetoric.
In retrospect, what’s striking is how quickly Biden’s credibility on Covid eroded. When he took office, his favorable rating on Covid policy stood at a robust +27 points, according to YouGov’s historical polling data; just a year later, in January 2022, that figure stood at –12 points. By then, many Americans had grown weary of lockdowns and enraged by continued school closures as evidence mounted that they were unnecessary and harmful. Migration data showed a huge upswing in Americans moving from locked-down Democratic states to reopened-and-thriving Republican states. The press increasingly referred to a “post-pandemic” America even as Biden kept wearing his mask. Covid rapidly receded as an electoral issue.
Perhaps more significantly, as Covid faded into the background, voters’ perception of Biden on other matters soured. By September 2022, polls rated the president’s performance on a dozen issues—including the economy, education, foreign policy, government spending, immigration, and crime—even lower than his work on Covid. This may tell us something about why his campaign wants to talk about the virus again.
Biden’s latest gambit seems an exercise in wistfulness by his campaign, which managed to pull off an election victory that seemed unlikely early in 2020 thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime crisis. The Biden campaign is counting on Trump to ignore its attacks because what the former president once touted as his biggest Covid success—the fast-track campaign to develop and approve vaccines—is now regarded with much more public skepticism, something he doesn’t want voters to remember as they cast their ballots this fall. Even so, stressing how bad pandemic life was under Trump may serve only to remind voters of how much they’ve despised Biden’s Covid sequel.
The president’s chief of staff is arguably the most demanding job inside any White House. President Joe Biden’s top staffer, Ron Klain, isn’t making things easier for himself lately with the absurd things he’s posting on Twitter.
Klain is what we can only call a Very Online person. He is constantly tweeting and sharing other people’s posts to his half-million followers in an incessant effort to cheerlead for his boss and the Democratic Party more broadly. While this is the role of any outward-facing political staffer, Klain is taking his shilling so far that he’s now just making embarrassing public statements on the regular.
For example, Klain recently tweeted that “America is back at work” alongside this graph, which shows the opposite.
The Biden staffer boosted the graph hoping to show that the labor force participation rate, the percentage of people working or seeking work, is back to normal after the pandemic. Yet it actually shows that it’s still significantly below pre-pandemic levels, even a year and nine months later. Anyone with eyes can clearly see this.
In actuality, we are 8.2 million jobs below the pre-pandemic trend, according to economist Aaron Sojourner. So much for America being “back at work.”
But hey, Barry sent Joe to Detroit to fix things during the pandemic. Problem solved!
Joe Biden says he was Vice President during covid and President Obama sent him to Detroit to fix it. His brain is mush. I don’t even know what he could be trying to say here: pic.twitter.com/xHE9Ln4ypn
Keir Starmer is the new far-left prime minister, and oddly enough, his plan to release tens of thousands of criminals didn’t make it into the platform he ran on. Couple that with continued mass migration of Islamists, and you can guess how things are going to turn out long term. As bad as things have been in the United Kingdom over the last decade, the decline will accelerate.
Then there’s the French. After a surprise first round elevated the right-wing National Rally Party, the country’s far-left, from Emmanual Macron to the literal communists, colluded to win the second round. That included pushing hundreds of candidates to strategically drop out of their races to ensure the left wing held enough seats to form a coalition. French voters happily played along.
As in the UK, the results were predictable. Win or lose, there were going to be riots because that’s what European leftists do, with Palestinian flags marking the pro-migration messaging.
I wish I could say there’s hope for Western Europe, but the sad reality is that Europeans don’t want to be saved. These elections weren’t rigged. Voters chose this path, and now they are going to get the consequences good and hard.
It is the same conundrum for Mme Le Pen and Geert Wilders: as unwinnable as French and Dutch cities are now, they will be even more unwinnable half-a-decade hence – when there will be even more “university students” like Mlle Bennani, and the establishment will still be urging us to unite even more unitedly against the scourge of hijab-grabbing.
So the “far right” will continue to make “historic gains” that are never quite historic enough. Because as I wrote on Friday our rulers have decided that no changes to anything that matters can be permitted.
Many years ago, the late Martin Amis put my demographic thesis to the then British prime minister:
When I interviewed Tony Blair earlier this year I asked him if continental demographics had yet become ‘a European conversation’. He said: ‘It’s a subterranean conversation.’ And we know what that means. The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.
And, like that BBC reporter on the streets of Saint-Denis, that’s how they intend to keep it.
Biden’s word salad and sudden drops in volume to pianissimo are relevant for reporters to cover because they’re a microcosm of the questions at the heart of the 2024 Democratic campaign: Is the president’s mental state strong enough to beat Donald Trump and can he serve for four more years? The desperate Biden team is ready to go to war over every syllable.
In my Saturday column, I quoted Biden’s line to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, about how he would feel if Trump were sworn in as president because he refused to step aside: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Now, “goodest” isn’t a word. But my researcher, Andrew Trunsky, and I listened to the video, our ears up against the computer, 10 times, and that’s what it sounded like. We also checked the ABC News transcript and that’s the word they used. Times news reporters and reporters for other news outlets took their cue from the ABC transcript.
The confusion was so universal that on Axios Saturday, there were two different versions: Mike Allen’s newsletter used “goodest” and another story used “I did as good a job as I know I can do.”
After my column posted Saturday morning, T.J. Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman, emailed me to “flag” that ABC News had updated its transcript to read: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Ducklo asked if I could “tweak” the column and change the word “goodest” to make my piece “consistent with the corrected transcript,” even though the revised version was also gobbledygook.
When I said we would tell our editor what he thought, Ducklo wrote back: “Yeah again, it’s not what I think. It’s what ABC News, who conducted the interview, thinks. I think it would be quite unusual if the Times asserted the president said something that the news organization who conducted the interview says he didn’t say …”
Andrew and I both emailed Ducklo, asking whether ABC had changed the transcript on its own or if the Biden team had asked them to change it.
“ABC News, like any news organization, makes their own independent editorial decisions,” Ducklo replied to us. “surely you are not suggesting otherwise.” He emailed again to add: “Had another convo on this. ABC News received the tape and confirmed the error to us. Then made the correction.”
I was more confused than ever. What tape? From whom?? Why the runaround??? Given the White House’s egregious coverup about Biden’s sag from aging, the spokesman’s coyness seemed de trop. By Saturday night, Shear and Michael Grynbaum had a Times story clearing up things. Indeed, the White House had asked ABC News to check whether the president said “goodest” or “good as,” after the White House stenographers, who had recorded the president on ABC News, noticed the discrepancy between their recording and the network’s transcript.
The Times attached notes on my column and all the news stories that had used “goodest,” explaining the befuddlement.
Whatever the president meant, his answer to that question went over like a lead balloon. No one cares if he feels good about himself in a losing cause.
It might seem like much ado about goodest. But it’s a harbinger of tense times between a White House in bunker mode and a press corps in ferret mode.
ABC’s transcript currently reads, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” which still isn’t a form of English you and I speak — and it sure doesn’t sound like what Biden actually said:
BIDEN on how he'd feel after losing the election: "I'll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that's what this is about." pic.twitter.com/PCQhQCSkga
In any case, it speaks volumes that the post-debate, the DNC-MSM is finally dropping the pretense of protecting the old man, in-part because, as Jorge Bonilla wrote at NewsBusters on Friday night, “ABC Didn’t Get Their Campaign-Ending Moment.”
In the immediate aftermath of the speech, Robert Ruark, a syndicated columnist, wrote that Nixon had effectively “stripped himself naked for all the world to see, and he brought the missus and the kids and the dog … into the act.” Nixon had aligned himself with mainstream Americans in what Wicker described as a “political masterstroke.”
Nixon closed by inviting viewers and listeners to help decide his political fate by sending letters and telegrams not to Eisenhower but to members of the Republican National Committee. Tell them, Nixon said, “whether you think I should stay on or whether I should get off. And whatever their decision is, I will abide by it.”
Americans responded by the tens of thousands, expressing support for Nixon. Members of the Republican National Committee voted without objection to keep him on the ticket.
The outcome was perhaps encouraged by less-sensational disclosures at the time that Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee, had supported supplementary income funds for appointees to state positions in Illinois and that his running mate, Sen. John Sparkman, had kept his wife on his congressional payroll for 10 years.
The day after the speech, Eisenhower met Nixon in West Virginia and declared his running mate vindicated. “Why, you’re my boy!” the Herald Tribune quoted the general as saying.
A political disaster had been averted. Nixon served two terms as vice president in Eisenhower’s administrations and twice won the presidency before resigning in August 1974 over the Watergate scandal.
Nixon’s rescuing himself in the 1952 election was notable and perhaps instructive, suggesting that a creative, high-profile and timely response can prevent sensational allegations from overwhelming a beleaguered candidacy, much as they nearly did to Nixon.
And given Brandon’s recent foray into spray tans, there’s a weird sense of déjà vu going on here:
Calling into his favorite show to say all the polls he sees have him winning, brag about his crowd sizes, rail against "the elites," and dares anyone to challenge him at the convention. What year is this? Who is the president?
It resembles an enormous, malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway’s new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind.
Starting this month, the large machine with enormous arms, a crude, disproportionately small Wall-E-like head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck – which can drive on rails – will be put to use for maintenance work on the company’s network.
Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, “seeing” through the robot’s eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely.
With a vertical reach of 12 metres (40ft), the machine can use various attachments for its arms to carry objects as heavy as 40kg (88lb), hold a brush to paint or use a chainsaw.
Before 2008, the legacy media — while always leaning to the political left — had maintained a patina of objectivity. When Bill Clinton lied to the American people about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, they belatedly pounced. When John Kerry’s campaign began to crater, they reluctantly covered it. They were, to be sure, oriented against Republican candidates and policies. But they recognized that their credibility innately relied on the public’s perception that they could put their own biases aside long enough to report accurately even on those with whom they agreed.
Public trust in the media had been in a steady state of decline since the late 1990s — according to Gallup, 53 percent of Americans said they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media in 1997; in 2007, that number was 47 percent.
Then came Barack Obama. In 2008, the media, in its insistence that Barack Obama was a philosopher-king, decided to adhere to his version of the facts at every available instance. They ignored or downplayed stories that hurt Obama. They insisted that his biggest scandal was the wearing of a beige suit. Obama was simply too godlike a figure for them to resist. They became, for all intents and purposes, extensions of the Democratic White House. And public trust began to crater. In 2008, those who trusted the media dropped to 43 percent. In 2016, with the media’s abominable coverage of the Trump-Hillary race, the number dropped to 32 percent. It recovered slightly over the next five, but then began cratering again: to just 36 percent in 2021, 34 percent in 2022, 32 percent in 2023.
A consistent pattern of partisan coverage ate away at the media’s credibility, slowly and steadily.
Then came Joe Biden’s debate collapse last week. And now, all media credibility is gone.
Ernest Hemingway once described the process of going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” The same is true of legacy media legitimacy. Legacy media lost the trust of the American people with its coverage of Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, Covid, transgenderism and the Hunter Biden laptop story. But they maintained some semblance of credibility by appealing to “new studies,” the “fog of war,” the difficulty of reporting an ever-evolving set of facts. When their lies were debunked and they were exposed they could simply claim they were just reporting based on the information they had at the time. They were just doing the hard work of Journalisming™ — just trusting the experts, who always slanted their political direction — and could continue congratulating each other for their brave and important work. Then came the Biden presidency.
Either Biden is senile or he is not. And it does not take an expert in Russian relations, systemic racism or Covid biology to tell the answer to that question. Any child could do it.
There’s no doubt that the DNC-MSM creation of Obama was a watershed moment, as this John McCain ad from 2008 highlights:
As the Anchoress perceptively noted, 2004 was in many ways the MSM’s template for “reporting” on the 2008 election — only this time around they had a much charismatic candidate to build their campaign around. When Obama had his own Winter Soldier moment — the moment that the Rev. Wright videos hit YouTube — the self-described “non-official campaign” staffers working in the media and coordinating via the JournoList were prepared to both bottle up the conservation, and to smear conservatives as racists — “[T]ake one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country?” as Spencer Ackerman infamously banged into his keyboard — and use Obama’s race to deflect criticism. (As with Kerry’s Winter Soldier phase, Obama would have his own radical chic connection, thanks to his friendship with Bill Ayers. And note how badly even a stalwart Ruling Class Democrat like George Stephanopoulos was briefly demonized by the far left for even broaching the issue.)
With each additional piece — each “Now It Can Be Told!” preface, each additional scandalous detail about Biden being non compos mentis — my blood begins to curdle. Oh, the sudden enthusiasm with which the media is now reporting on this! And why now? Because it can no longer be hidden! If Biden had succeeded somehow in hiding it — or had he declined to debate altogether, as most observers expected him to before he (surprisingly) agreed to an early debate — then it is undeniably true that none of these pieces would be written now. Did we experience an orgy of self-recriminative “make up” reporting about the implosion of the Russiagate hoax? Or about Hunter Biden’s laptop being authentic? How about Covid likely being a Chinese lab leak? Of course not — no apology was necessary in the media’s mind because those were no longer “live” issues, and their suppression of the truth had served its necessary purpose. This time the ruse was exposed before the con had been completed. Now the only job: Get a new shyster in to run at the top of the ticket and complete the mission.
It’s easy to get lost in bleak humor (or score-settling) and lose sight of the sheer magnitude of what it is we are living through: The president of the United States is an empty shell of himself mentally. His praetorian guard has been keeping his near-complete mental collapse a secret for possibly years now, and the media engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” (Nuzzi’s words, not mine) to conceal it from voters, out of reflexive (in the truest sense of the word) partisan and professional self-interest. Very Smart People tell me that my sense of complete betrayal and abiding disgust is a feeling peculiar only to Republicans and political anoraks — chumps who care too much, in other words. Perhaps so.
But the question Charlie Cooke posed last week should be the same one you hang on to as well: If the media claims it has been lied to about the state of Biden’s health for all these long years, then maybe they should investigate that? How that happened? How much did Kamala Harris — Biden’s almost certain replacement, should he step down — know? When did she know it? A real media would start from the premise that she is just as disqualified by helping to conceal Biden’s collapse as Biden and his people themselves are, and force her to prove otherwise. A real media wouldn’t play a balancing game in its head, saying, “Let’s not push her too hard, we don’t want to help the Other Guy.” This is not a real media, however, so I will invoke Betteridge’s Law by answering the question Charlie merely posed in his headline: Will the media seriously investigate how they were “misled” about Biden’s health? No. That would mean investigating themselves.
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