Jennifer Rubin is the former ‘neoconservative’ columnist and warmonger for The Washington Post, always agitating for more money and weapons to keep the Russo-Ukrainian War going, and completely infected by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. On May 19th, she wrote:
President Biden took the media and political world by surprise in challenging Donald Trump to two debates — and then swiftly accepting offers from CNN and ABC. Trump accepted the debates, on June 27 and Sept. 10, but whether he will show up is another matter.
Yup, Mr Trump showed up! Oops!
Trump has done Biden a favor over the past few months by painting the president as an infirm, doddering old man. If Biden appears even remotely sane, alert and engaged at the debates, he will have defied expectations. Moreover, Biden already accomplished an important component of a successful debate. In getting out in front to reach quick agreements with CNN and ABC, the president might have snagged, for the CNN-hosted June 27 debate in Atlanta, two of the most competent moderators available.
Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have been blunt in calling out Trump’s lies and grilling Republicans about Trump’s 2022 sit-down with a racist Holocaust denier, Trump’s bigoted language and his derogatory comments about Jews. They are more than capable of pinning Trump down. (Unfortunately, for moderating the Sept. 10 debate, ABC News did not select George Stephanopoulos, who has distinguished himself for blunt talk about Trump’s abnormal behavior. The designated moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, without general election debate experience, will need to be on their toes.)
As it happens, the left have expended a significant bit of bandwidth criticizing Mr Tapper and Miss Bash, because they didn’t try to attack Donald Trump’s performance. Perhaps they were too busy picking their jaws off the floor at Joe Biden’s dementia-addled performance?
As Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok documented, Miss Rubin, 14 days after the debate, tweeted:
The notion Biden is out of it or doesn’t govern effectively is dead wrong. On top of his material. The question is whether he can convince people he can win
Now, seven days later, well:
It is very sad it came to this. Those closest to Biden should have never allowed him to be in this situation. Almost the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy.
The Washington Post? Remember its tagline, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”? Conservatives have been pushing the fact that President Biden has been slowly losing his marbles descending into dementia for a couple of years now. The editors of the Post were certainly aware that Mr Biden’s physical and mental health have at least been issues, shouldn’t they, in keeping with their tagline, at least have been investigating the subject?
Well, perhaps they did, but if the newspaper investigated it, the editors chose not to publish it. It was as though their real mission was, as my blog tagline mocks, to tell the people to reject the evidence of thei9r eyes and ears, and follow the party line.
But now? The newspaper reports that:
- President Biden is “absolutely” staying in the presidential race, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday, calling him the “best person to take on Donald Trump.” Her assessment comes amid growing calls from Democrats for Biden to step aside.
- The political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus endorsed President Biden amid reports that some top Democrats are privately telling the president that his presidential bid may hurt Democrats’ chances to win the House and the Senate in November.
- Another House Democrat is calling on President Biden to step aside from the presidential race, even as Biden’s campaign doubled down Friday morning on its insistence that he would remain at the top of the ticket. In an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune Friday, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) said there was “tremendous fear about this moment” in conversations he has had with his constituents.
- This could be a key weekend for Democrats as pressure continues to ramp up on President Biden to step out of the race ahead of the Democratic National Convention next month.
We previously noted this coverage from The Wall Street Journal:
The World Saw Biden Deteriorating. Democrats Ignored the Warnings.
European officials expressed worries about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate
By Annie Linskey, Laurence Norman, and Drew Hinshaw | Friday, June 28, 2024 | 6:30 PM EDT
The loudest public alarm about Joe Biden’s mental acuity came in February with the release of special counsel Robert Hur’s report, a document he produced after spending five hours interviewing the president that revealed Biden displayed significant memory problems.
Democrats worried. Then most of them followed the president’s lead and dismissed it as partisan hackery. Biden’s closest advisers defiantly beat back suggestions that the 81-year-old president showed signs of decline.
The “loudest public alarm” came in February, but that’s when Mr Hur’s report was released. The actual interviews, five hours over two days, came in October of 2023, when, if the Democrats were going to do anything about a President sinking into senility, they actually had time to do it. Yes, Mr Biden was already running for re-election by then, but the first caucuses and primaries were still in the future, and the time for a replacement candidate to organize and run for the nomination existed.
The President of the United States meets with people every day, and they can’t have failed to notice that Mr Biden was having mental issues. As we previously noted, Axios has reported that his staff noted he was “dependably engaged” between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM, but, “outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued.”
Minutes into Thursday night’s presidential debate, the concerns began gushing into the open.
Yet they had already become increasingly apparent in Washington’s corridors of power and across the world for months. In interviews, top officials abroad and Democrats said they have witnessed other moments when Biden’s behavior concerned them. Some were quickly relieved when Biden appeared to regain his footing. Others were left shaken by the experiences.
European officials had already been expressing worries in private about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate, with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer. There were real doubts about how Biden could successfully manage a second term, but one senior European diplomat said U.S. administration officials in private discussions denied there was any problem.
“(T)hey had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer”? That was a year ago! But The Washington Post and its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” ethos? Nobody at the newspaper even noticed? How about The New York Times, which reports “All the News That’s Fit to Print”? Did no one there notice what had happened to the President? Did no one there think it “Fit to Print” that the President of the United States, the man trying to get us ever-more-involved in a shooting war with nuclear-armed Russia, and the man who has the authority to decide how to use our own nuclear arsenal, might have “a noticeable deterioration in (his) faculties”?
My good friend Robert Stacy McCain, formerly a credentialed media reporter himself, has called many of the reporters “Democrats with bylines,” and there’s a tremendous amount of evidence that he’s right on target with that description. Why, it has to be asked, did none of the legacy media report on the President’s decent into dementia? Why was no one, other than us evil, reich-wing Republicans, able to see and tell the truth about Mr Biden’s condition?
Remember how Dan Rather and CBS News tried to shift the 2004 election against the younger President Bush and toward Senator John Kerry, through the use of forged documents, so obviously forged that two bloggers, Powerline and Little Green Footballs, were able to spot the flaws not with the documents physically in hand, but from images copied from their television screens?
We have reached the point at which the credentials of the credentialed media have to be questioned. President Biden wanted to create his Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, to try to ‘regulate’ and censor what the Administration considered to be falsehoods on the internet. Yet it has been through the internet, that great invention by God himself which broke the ‘gatekeeping’ function of the credentialed media over publication and dissemination of information, that we’ve been made aware of the things the legacy media didn’t want people to know.
We’ve seen it happen before our very eyes: the professional media have been exposed as purveyors of falsehoods, while some of the sources on the internet, despite lacking those professional credentials have been exposing the truth. But, then again, as George Orwell said, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
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