This is an opinion piece.
You knew it was really bad when CNN’s panel of liberal commentators immediately erupted into a full-blown panic within seconds of the first presidential debate ending, blustering and hand-wringing. One panelist even asked people to pray for President Joe Biden.
Yes, it was that bad. You could feel the panic rising fast. They couldn’t hide it.
The media and Democrats are in complete freak-out mode after Biden’s epic debate disaster Thursday night; talk is raging about how to get him off the ticket. In case you missed it, Biden rambled incoherently, lost his train of thought repeatedly, lied (see Snopes’ belated fact check on Charlottesville), and slung childish names (“whiner” and “sucker.”)
Trump just released a brutal 95 second ad of Joe Biden's debate lowlights: pic.twitter.com/enusIKHhwN
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 28, 2024
He was arguably even worse when he wasn’t speaking, which was a remarkable feat; his blank and, frankly, lost facial expressions were more sad than funny. Scratch that. They were downright scary because this man has the nuclear codes. And our enemies are watching. Meanwhile, Democratic prosecutors are trying to jail the only candidate who was coherent last night. Jill Biden had to usher a shuffling Biden down the stairs after the debate. Brutal.
🚨Zoomed in video of Jill Biden leading Joe off the debate stage.
This is insane. pic.twitter.com/QJhkfetdWz
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 28, 2024
Years ago, when my then-95-year-old grandfather with end-stage dementia was in a nursing home, he somehow managed to wander down the street. They found him sitting at a bus stop, unharmed, insisting he was going to visit his long-dead brother Clyde. Biden reminded me of this – an elderly gentleman who wandered down the road to the bus stop. We are witnessing a president’s shocking decline in real-time. He would be 86 at the end of a second term. 86!
My 19-year-old apolitical daughter has already seen, and mentioned, clips of Biden’s “land of the lost” performance on TikTok, and she missed the debate because she was at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. These clips will be played endlessly; younger voters will see them 1,000 times until November. It’s a social media age. From a purely political standpoint, Democrats have a right to freak out; they just should have freaked out well before Biden secured so many delegates. They should have freaked out long ago because he’s supposed to be running the country.
In contrast, CNN’s “rules” ended up helping President Donald Trump, who was restrained, in control, and downright presidential. Yes, he’s old too, but he doesn’t show it. Yes, he also said things that didn’t always match the facts, which isn’t great. But his opponent was repeatedly INCOHERENT.
Why did it take the media and Democrats so long to admit the obvious? The answer is obvious. The increasingly activist beltway media (The Hill even declared that the “format,” not Trump, won last night’s debate) and Democrats (funny how that goes hand-in-hand) soft-pedaled Biden’s cognitive issues for months because they hate Donald Trump more. You can almost see the thought bubbles: “If we can just limp him over the finish line…” To hell with the country in the interim, apparently.
I am struck this morning by the duplicity of the political reporters at the New York Times — all of them close confidants of Biden. Yesterday, they knew he was unfit and tried to hide it. Today, after the entire world saw that the emperor has no clothes, they all are calling for…
— David M Friedman (@DavidM_Friedman) June 28, 2024
They’ve still got one card up their sleeves, of course: Throwing Trump in prison. And/or somehow engineering a way to get Biden off the ticket.
I know the conventional wisdom on the right is that Democrats set Biden up with an unprecedented early debate because they, and the media, decided this was the only way to get him out. They want to replace him with Govs. Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, or Gavin Newsom. But Joe won’t go – at least for now.
The problem with this theory is that getting Biden off the ballot won’t be that easy, so they waited a bit too long for the scheme. He has earned the delegates, and people expect their votes to count. Biden could make it easy and relinquish power, graciously stepping aside. But his campaign said after the disastrous debate that he isn’t planning to do so and is even planning a second debate! Remember the decision is being made by a man who, at times, seems completely out of it. Catch 22.
“I think we did well,” a clueless Biden told reporters.
The Heritage Foundation released a memo indicating that it might be legally impossible for Democrats to remove Biden from the ballot in Wisconsin, Georgia and Nevada, at this late stage.
There’s also the Kamala problem. Will liberal factions obsessed with identity politics be okay with leap-frogging over the first black, Indian, female vice president for a white guy from California or a white lady from Michigan? What a mess. If this WAS the plan, it’s not a great one, and Trump was already gaining in the polls. I tend to think Biden’s Democratic handlers hoped they could shore him up just enough with a week-long prep session and Trump’s possible imprisonment (by a Biden-donating judge) looming. But unlike the State of the Union, Biden didn’t get to use a teleprompter this time. And it showed.
BREAKING
Biden campaign says Joe will not drop out of 2024 race.
He is committed to losing the second debate to Trump in September.pic.twitter.com/NZOghkxT4K
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 28, 2024
Maybe Barack Obama can talk Biden into exiting stage left, but, if he doesn’t, that leaves the DNC with the unpalatable decision of whether to evoke a rule accusing their presumptive nominee of being “disabled,” to attempt to remove him from the ballot in the face of certain legal challenge. And Obama was already tweeting that “bad debate nights happen.”
At a local GOP debate party in Wisconsin, folks had the opposite impression of the freak-out media after the debate. Biden was about as they expected. Only the media and the left seem to be acting surprised as if Biden’s wobbly incoherence is something new. Well, some are still delusional, but we know what we saw.
The winner of tonight’s debate 😎pic.twitter.com/3FZgZSQc3F
— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) June 28, 2024
When Special Prosecutor Robert Hur announced he wasn’t criminally charging Joe Biden partly because he was an “elderly man with a poor memory,” that should have been the end of his candidacy, if not his administration.
Instead, after a brief spurt of coverage and consternation, the media moved on (with some notable exceptions, such as the Wall Street Journal’s recent deep dive into his cognitive challenges.) Attorney General Merrick Garland was declared in contempt of Congress for withholding audio of Biden’s Hur interview.
“Liberal pundits loudly complained about media coverage of the episode, and it quickly became a truism among professional Democrats that Hur was a political hack who never should have been trusted with the probe and who was plainly out to hurt Biden in an election year,” Politico wrote.
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC laughably claimed this spring, “He’s (Biden’s) far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been. This is a battle for the future of American Democracy.”
Why everyone knows @JoeNBC is a 💩head:#JoeScarborough, 3 months ago: #Biden is better than ever he’s ever been.
Joe Scarborough, today: We must replace #JoeBiden in the name of #Democracy. pic.twitter.com/aNGTqcuWcX
— Sn00pdad (@sn00pdad) June 28, 2024
When Biden proved he’s still capable of reading a prepared script from a teleprompter, albeit in bizarrely angry tone, the media pretty much declared there was nothing to see here; The AP dubbed it a “scrappy” and “feisty” performance designed to quell concerns about his age.
NBC News wrote that Biden was “shaking off lackluster approval ratings and his own party’s anxiety about his political and physical health,” and said, “the 81-year-old delivered on Thursday one of the feistiest and most political presidential addresses to Congress in recent memory.”
The White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre trashed Republicans when videos emerged raising obvious questions about Biden’s conditions, snapping, “We’re seeing these deepfakes, these manipulated videos.”
The problem for Democrats is that the debate exposed their lies and reinforced what we already thought we knew. It can no longer be denied.
It’s not that the media have not covered questions about Biden’s cognition. They have, of course. It’s that they did not do so with the urgency and persistence that they are showing now, and there is no excuse for that. Instead, they tended to cover the claims as Republican accusations contested by Democrats.
This isn’t a political question, not really. It’s about the security and state of our country. And it’s, frankly, about the possible mistreatment of an elderly man for political purposes. Biden deserves to spend his final years on a beach in Delaware with his grandkids. Shame on Jill Biden, seriously.
For those reasons, Biden’s cognitive condition is arguably one of the biggest media and Democratic cover-ups in U.S. history. We haven’t seen such a thing since Edith Wilson covered up her husband’s post-stroke incompetence. “After the President suffered a severe stroke, she pre-screened all matters of state, functionally running the Executive branch of government for the remainder of Wilson’s second term,” the White House reveals.
But that was before live TV and an expectation that presidents appear on it.
In Biden’s case, we don’t even know who is really running the country.
