Now They Tell Us Joe Biden’s Not Up For This Job

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Better late than never, I guess, but it doesn’t make regime media any less infuriating. 

Thursday morning’s Wall Street Journal features a lengthy story by Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes documenting the lengths Joe Biden’s staff at the White House went to in order to cover up the President’s rapid mental and physical decline not just from the public, but from his own cabinet and advisors. In a normal world, it’s easily the biggest scandal of the century thus far. Sadly, we’re not living in normalcy, and we have not been since COVID.

As recent as June, there was only one narrative coming out of the Democratic-abetting Manhattan-Beltway media complex – Joe Biden is fine. He’s better than fine. He’s never been better. All this nonsense being peddling on right-wing sites and talk radio is disinformation. The videos we all saw were not real. They were cheap fakes. 

The New York Times on June 21st ran a headline that read, “How Misleading Videos Trail Biden As He Battles Age Doubts.” It parroted the White House line that videos showing Joe Biden addled and disconnected on trips abroad were “cheap fakes.” 

The Washington Post ran similar stories. On June 11, this piece.

In edited videos, Republican officials and allies of former president Donald Trump repeatedly tried to turn Biden’s Normandy visit into a highlight reel of senior moments and missteps, aimed at showing the president as infirm, addled or out of his depth. Trump, who turns 78 on Friday, has also repeatedly attacked Biden over his age and fitness, and regularly shares videos of the president looking frail. 

But an examination of video feeds from the events in Normandy, France, makes clear that the selected clips had been edited to present a particularly damaging — and often misleading — picture. 

Such deceptively edited videos — known as “cheap fakes” because they misrepresent events simply by manipulating video or audio, or by leaving out context — have become staples of Republican attacks against Biden. They are easier to make and disseminate than content generated by artificial intelligence and can quickly go viral, allowing Biden’s opponents to take innocuous moments and turn them into attacks on his mental acuity or physical fitness.

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact-checker, which is itself ironic in this piece covering disinformation, gives four Pinocchios to right-wing media for misleading videos and cheap fakes. Here’s a bit of his analysis along with co-fact-checker Adriana Usero. Perhaps each fact-checker donated two Pinocchios each. 

“Unfortunately, some of President Biden’s right-wing critics don’t respect their readers or themselves and resort to misinformation and cheap fakes because his performance in office — fueling the strongest economic growth in the world, bringing violent crime to historic lows, and advancing our national security in the world — is so threatening to them that they feel a need to make things up,” deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement. “It’s also telling that President Biden’s critics believe that giving a thumbs up to a skydiver or taking the time to thank veterans in Normandy is somehow negative.” 

The Pinocchio Test 

The use of these clips is an especially pernicious couple of examples of manipulated video — what we label “isolation” under our guide to manipulated video — because it’s intended to create a false narrative that doesn’t reflect the event as it occurred. The RNC and its avid followers in the conservative media earn Four Pinocchios.

Joe Scarborough on MSNBC famously went on a screed against anyone who dares to believe Biden has slipped. The President had never been sharper. 

Here’s the problem. It was all a lie. Every single member of regime media lied to you. And not just this year, but all four years of the Biden presidency. They all knew Biden was losing it. 

In the Journal story this morning, the reportage is just stunning. Not surprising, but stunning that they finally covered in detail what we’ve known for years. 

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan. 

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president. 

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

Right from the outset, The Biden protection squad were deployed to keep visitors and cabinet members alike from getting too close, asking too many questions, or putting all the clues together that Chance the Gardener wasn’t just a character in Being There, he’d actually been inaugurated. 

This week, Biden has made a couple appearances, and hasn’t reassured anyone on his way out the door about anything. From the White House lawn to a gaggle wanting to know what was flying over New Jersey, here’s what the President said. 

Well, I’m sure that will calm everybody down. Joe seems fully briefed on the situation. 

Biden, for some reason, showed up on the More Perfect Union podcast with Faiz Shakir. Donald Trump spent 3 hours with Joe Rogan. Biden coughed up 13 minutes to Shakir. Here’s the highlights.

You’ll be glad to know that Joe Biden finally realizes grocery prices are still pretty high. Maybe it’s just me, but this realization seems to come a tad bit late. 

This next one made my eyes bug out. 

Come on, man. You would be hard-pressed to find a politician of either party in the last 100 years that has grifted off of his place in power, whether it be as a United States Senator, Vice-President, or the President more than Joe Biden. Peter Schweizer has written extensively on Biden, Inc. in Red Handed and documented the numerous cases of peddling influence domestically and internationally. For Biden to now feign outrage at pols who use their positions of power to game the system and enrich themselves, that actually breaks the hypocrisy meter. Why again did Hunter Biden get a blanket pardon for a time period spanning 11 years? It wasn’t just for a gun and drug charge. 

This may be the most truthful thing Biden has ever said in his entire career. Yes, I do believe we will be able to make a sharp contrast four years from now after Donald Trump’s term compared to the flaming wreckage turned in by this guy. 

Back to the Wall Street Journal piece, it makes one question this entire interview with Shakir. How many different edits and pick-up were necessary to get 13 usable minutes out of this? Who scripted the questions for him? Where were the Biden staffers to wave off the interview if Shakir deviated from the pre-approved script? 

If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying. 

While it isn’t uncommon for politicians to want more time with the president than they get, some Democrats felt Biden was unusually hard to reach.

James Hohmann, editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post, excerpted long passages from this Journal article on his X feed. 

The president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him moments earlier. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to any average person.

— James Hohmann (@jameshohmann) December 19, 2024

If only James had access to a news organization with resources to cover the White House and report the results of their journalistic curiosity to the American people. Alas.

Why now? Joe Biden’s debate performance against Donald Trump peeled the veneer off the facade that Biden was competent to be president, now or in the future. It was Joe Biden himself that forced the Democratic elite to kick him to the curb. It was the naked display of Biden’s slippage that caused regime media to briefly do stories like this one today in the Journal back in July. But once Kamala Harris was subbed in, the Biden aging angle disappeared once more from regime media. 

Again, why now? Does media harbor the fantasy that their past sins of commission and omission will be forgiven and forgotten, and their credibility will be restored in the new year now that the election is lost? Of course, not. So why now? 

Well, in short, It’s Christmas, and regime media is not feeling very merry. Chanukah happens to fall on Christmas day this year, and Jewish members of the press are not feeling very happy. They’re angry. They’re bitter. They feel used. Chuck Todd on a podcast with CNN’s Chris Cillizza pretty much summed it up with the pardoning of Hunter Biden. 

Regime media is ticked off that Joe and Jill Biden put them in this nightmare. They’re ticked because the Biden’s immediately backed Kamala Harris and they were forced to make a souffle out of that excrement sandwich. And not to be overlooked is the relationship Joe Biden and the White House has with their purported allies in media. 

Up to this point, all Democrats, media and elected politicians, including their staffs, were basically all in the same boat rowing oars in the same direction, because they’re all left-wing and they had a common enemy – Donald Trump. Now that they’ve lost, they’re not at all happy to have been treated like dirt for the last four years. Biden rarely, if ever granted interviews. When interviews were given, questions were scripted out, and if reporters deviated, staff would end the interview early. The White House Press Corps were herded in for photo ops, and promptly herded out before being able to ask questions. Press conferences were ridiculously stagecrafted and managed, if the White House held them at all. 

The Biden’s hold regime media in the same regard conservatives do, when push comes to shove, and as a long-time GOP hand tells me, it’s like a master beating his dog one too many times. The dog will take those beatings for only so long, and then eventually that dog will turn on him and fight back, and it’ll get ugly. I think that’s what you’re beginning to see, largely, and will continued throughout the remainder of Biden’s term. 

Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC appeared on So Many Issues with Lukas Thimm a few days ago, and revealed the frustration she dealt with trying to carry water for the Biden-Harris administration, compared to working with Donald Trump. Trump was at least responsive. He gave her a three-word colorful refusal when she ask to interview him, but he was accessible and took her call. It would be easier to rifle through Fort Knox than get Joe Biden on the phone unless you were Hunter with a ChiCom business opportunity. 

MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle says Trump told her to go f**k herself when asking for interview. https://t.co/Ke5nvPiFvK

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) December 17, 2024

If the President would have committed resources to the Southern Border with the same intensity as he did beefing up his White House inner circle, fentanyl deaths would have plummeted. Apartment buildings in Aurora would be safe. Jocelyn Nungaray and Rachel Morin would be alive.

Joe Biden’s legacy is not going to be a good one, and it’s not just because he was rotten on domestic policy, worse on foreign affairs, and decaying faster than the Halloween Jack-O-Lantern in November. All that is true. But the reason Biden will not age will in the history books is because deep down, he’s a nasty, bitter, vindictive, corrupt old man who has treated everyone around him akin to how Capone treated Chicago. 32 Days to go, and they can’t fall off the calendar fast enough.