Having long kept all its eyes wide shut to “our” president’s spectacular debility - despite his triple-pratfalls, stunned expression, physical and verbal wanderings, frequent “inappropriate touching” and (pardon me for writing this) loud public farts - “our free press” is now suddenly fixated on the fact that he’s too old to stand for re-election, as if (a) this hasn’t long been obvious to anyone not crazed by Trump Derangement Syndrome, and as if (b) “Biden” was elected in the first place.
Of course, the reason for this sudden, total shift from deference to contempt was that (literally) unspeakable “debate” two weeks ago (with “Biden” barely capable of speech, while Trump was barely capable of shutting up) and the swift grim verdict by the audience. That face-off between rank senility and aging juvenility was, to put it mildly, no barrel of laughs, in part because there was no audience in the room, no doubt so that no MAGA-heads would be there to pump Trump up even more, reminding everybody of his greater popularity.
That eerie absence of the usual two rival mobs—an unnatural quiet reminiscent of Biden/Harris’s locked-down inauguration—deprived us of the evening’s only possible guffaws, as it (maybe) would have been a hoot to listen to the anxious hush of all those Democrats, hand-picked for their partisan intensity (as if some able bio-engineer had cloned Joe Scarborough for the occasion), faced with the impossibility of mustering anything but gloom at the macabre sight of “Joe Biden” struggling to come off as “presidential,” or alive.
In this dismal moment there was actually some cause for hope, and not just for Trump and his true believers; but before we get to that, and in preparation for it, let’s hark back to the forgotten struggles of his less-disabled, yet far more popular predecessor, Ronald Reagan—who, though capable of often rallying grandly, tough old trouper that he was, showed signs of his Alzheimer’s from the start. (Mark Lloyd, employed by CNN in 1980, told me at the time that he was shocked not just by Reagan’s addled state at the Gipper’s first encounter with the press, but, no less, by his colleagues’ blithe indifference to it.) In August of 1984, some three months prior to Election Day, Reagan, grinning vacantly, with Nancy at his side, went blank before a scrum of journalists when asked a question about arms control.
“We’re doing everything we can,” his helpmate quietly prompted him, enabling him to say, not too convincingly, “We’re doing everything we can.”
Having turned a blind eye to his illness at the start of his long run, the press now underplayed it:
“Nancy Reagan says she did not prompt President Reagan's recent response to a question on arms control but was simply talking softly to herself,” UPI reported a day later (the New York Times running only that terse item), and that was the end of it for the moment.
The issue then blew up big-time after Reagan’s first debate with Walter Mondale, when the usually-hale-seeming Chief Executive, though still looking agedly boyish at 73 (eight years younger than “Joe Biden” is today), rambled, stumbled, looking lost, thereby giving rise to the “age issue,” as the ever-helpful media delicately termed it. Great actor that he was, he finally put that roadblock behind him at the next debate, when he turned the tables on his uppity young rival (a mere lad of 56) by stoutly quipping that he “would not make an issue of his opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
Whoever crafted that bon mot, it brought down the house, ensuring Reagan/Bush’s landslide re-election victory in November.
From Politico:
Thus Reagan jigged away from his unnerving likeness to such ancient, highly perishable Soviet heads of state as Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko, and that was that, his Alzheimer’s staying largely out of sight until Nancy managed his sad post-presidency. Unluckily for “Joe Biden” and his true believers, Ronald Reagan’s was the last major presidential ailment that “our free press” was eager not to magnify, after having totally blacked out FDR’s polio and JFK’s Addison’s disease (along with his astounding sex life, as people never tire of pointing out). Especially now that he performed so poorly opposite the snidely jabbering Trump, and on top of all the falls upstairs and weird remarks (“God save the queen, man!”) and—here I go again—loud farts that have defined “his” presidency (along with his flagrant non-election), “our free press” has been piling on with a zest unprecedented in the history of the US president-and-media.
Whereas, before what we might call his Waterloo (although that reference gives him too much credit, since, unlike Napoleon, “Biden” really had no prior smashing victories to speak of), this president’s “senior moments” were played up mainly by Fox News and other outfits on the right, that fatal contest has now freed many on the “left,” if not most of it, to cry up every sign of his infirmity, both past and present, as fiercely as any tribune of “conservatism.”
“I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president—first black woman—to serve with a black president,” “Biden” mumbled on the Fourth—a comic slip providing CNN’s Jake Tapper with a pithy intro to the network’s blistering montage of such moments post-debate.
(That inadvertent statement of trans/cross-racial pride apparently caused people not to notice what “Biden” said right after that: “[I’m] proud to have been involved with the first black woman on the Supreme Court.”)
Such has been the tone throughout the Anglo-American media machine. “The other weird thing about Biden, which nobody seems to be talking about,” nattered BBC veteran Emily Maitlis (famed for skewering Prince Andrew on Newsnight, and played by Gillian Anderson in the Netflix movie Scoop), “is that he has been, from what I can see, Botoxed up to the eyeballs,” making his face “very, very rigid. It is not a good look.” (Over here, that catty shot was headlined in the ultra-“liberal” Daily Beast.) “I’ve seen Joe Biden up close,” confessed the Guardian’s Joanna Coles. “Nobody can deny his decline” [emphasis added].
Further glaring evidence of “his decline” is everywhere you look. “Biden didn’t show up for an early evening meeting with the German chancellor because he had to go to bed,” giggles Business Insider. “Staff provides Biden with instructions ‘on how to enter and exit a room’ with large print and pics ahead of events,” reveals the New York Post. “He can’t say ‘Afghanistan’ anymore,” claims his former stenographer. Thus “our free press” continues to ignore the myriad big scandals simmering beneath the surface of the “Biden” White House—the mind-boggling corruption (putting even Richard Nixon in the shade), the open brinksmanship, the ongoing treason at the border, the relentless push for censorship, the enablement of genocide—in favor of the trivia of “his decline.”
And just as “our free press” is all about the second childhood of “Joe Biden,” so, suddenly, has most of “Hollywood” been hammering that gong since the “debate,” a celebrity “revolt” (as the Washington Post terms it) led, seemingly, by George Clooney, and joined by such “liberal” stalwarts as Stephen King, Rob Reiner, Michael Moore, Damon Lindelof (“Lost”) and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, along with the leading lights from the CIA’s Comedy Desk. “Stephen Colbert, other late-night hosts turn on Biden as they mock train-wreck debate,” exults the New York Post. “Excuses for Biden’s ‘shocking display of cognitive difficulty’ are ‘bulls—-,’” according to Jon Stewart (as headlined in The Hill). “Seth Meyers Lays Into Democrats Over Their Indecision on Joe Biden's 2024 Candidacy,” headlines the Hollywood Reporter—and on and on and on.
Clearly, such loud complaints disprove Joanna Coles’ overstatement that “nobody can deny his decline,” since “Joe Biden” also has a fretful chorus of defenders on the “left,” who either don’t believe that he’s a total wreck, or think it really doesn’t matter all that much, since “Biden” isn’t Trump. Those holdouts include Gretchen Whitmer (who concedes that cognitive testing “wouldn’t hurt”), Jen Psaki, Mika Brzezinski (who sees Obama’s cunning hand behind George Clooney’s leadership of that celebrity “revolt”) and her jut-jawed consort Joe Scarborough, the patently insane Keith Olbermann (who blames the president’s undeniable debility on CNN, barking, with his usual subtlety, “Burn it down!”), the yapping heads on MSNBC and—not least—the brain trust on “The View,” all desperately denying the undeniable, as we have seen them do for some four years.
And therein lies the only sign of hope in this preposterous episode—not that it means Trump can win, or that Kamala Harris, or Gavin Newsom, or any other leading Democrat can save the party’s bacon. Let’s note here that both sides in this acrid “liberal” conflict actually agree, since every single one of them is, as ever, terrified of Trump, with most believing that “Joe Biden” can’t win “re-election” (although, with our disastrous voting system, “Biden” can “beat” Trump, just as he seemed to do before), while the minority believes he (really) can, farts and all. (Again, forgive me.) What’s hopeful here bears no relation to the outcome of the next election (if any), since there’s no hope in the victory of either party, the two being one, with We the People losing out in any case.
If so many "liberals" can now (painfully) admit that he's a wreck, what other taboo truths will people finally see, because of all that EVIDENCE?
