Listen, I’d support a zombie for president if they promised to nominate originalists for the Supreme Court and deregulate the economy. Do whatever you have to do. But stop telling me that Joe Biden isn’t a mentally and physically fragile man.
We can all watch the video of our octogenarian president awkwardly freezing up and staring out at a crowd before former president Barack Obama takes his arm and leads him off the stage.
Now, I can tell you from experience, it isn’t normal for a grown man to grab another man’s arm in this manner — unless one of them needs help. If Biden was really in the robust physical and mental state that the White House maintains, Obama would have merely said something to Biden or given him a friendly tap on the shoulder. But like Dr. First Lady Jill Biden and White House handlers and world leaders, Obama was compelled to act as caretaker to a confused Joe Biden.
And, considering his age, that isn’t abnormal. There is, however, something decidedly abnormal about the coverup. I’m not sure we have ever seen anything quite like this kind of gaslighting.
In the past, the media would wrap inconvenient news in some quasi-journalistic effort to give it credence. Reporters might go out and find proxy “experts” that dispel the obvious or they would bury news in layers of “context.” When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, virtually the entire establishment media proactively tainted the revelations by waving around a letter from partisan former Obama officials warning about Russian ”disinformation.”
Successfully suppressing the misadventures of President Magoo, however, means convincing millions of Americans to reject the events they see happening every day–things that anyone who has ever dealt with an aging relative recognizes.
I’m not contending that every video clip spread by the RNC of Biden is offered in full, pristine context. Democrats who are still accusing Donald Trump of calling Tiki-torch Nazis “very fine people” or claiming he wanted people to “inject bleach” aren’t really in a position to complain. I’m merely saying there are numerous videos of these events, and there are endless examples of Biden’s decline.
There is cropped video of the Obama incident. There is uncropped video. There is a full video provided by The Hollywood Reporter. We even have a video provided by the White House that only confirms Biden froze up and was led off by Obama.
Seemingly every time the left provides a clip to debunk or contextualize one of Biden’s mishaps, they reinforce the original.
Like a prepubescent kid caught in the act, the White House just says “This did not happen.” Karine Jean-Pierre told the press that the Hollywood video, and other recent clips of the baffled president, were “cheap fakes.” As far as I can tell, not a single reporter asked her to elaborate on which parts of these clips were manipulated. Instead, most rushed to the White House’s aid.
The truth is, they’re not even trying very hard anymore. CNN’s Oliver Darcy wrote that the video was a fabrication without offering any explanation or evidence to back up the claim. On MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace didn’t merely contend the tape was part of a “growing and insidious trend in right-wing media” to spread “highly misleading and selectively edited videos,” she played an edited clip of the incident that cuts out the worst part.
“Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral,” says NBC News, in what can only be described as a piece of propaganda. “The fact-checks have trouble keeping up.”
Indeed, the “fact-checks” were particularly astonishing. The Associated Press’s “FACT FOCUS” not only relied on “Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer,” “White House spokesperson Andrew Bates,” “White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre,” but also “Lewis Kay, a spokesperson for Jimmy Kimmel,” to allegedly debunk the Obama video.
The Washington Post’s factcheckers argue that a video of a perplexed Biden at the G7 summit in Apulia, Italy, was achieved by “deceptive framing.” The headline of the piece read, “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply misleads.”
Deeply? The Post offers an alternative video of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni gathering Biden before the president could wander away that is probably more misleading than the original. It was edited to exclude the fact that Biden is completely out of sync with every other world leader, all of whom are paying attention to the parachuter who landed right in front of them. Despite the Four Pinocchios, both clips show him “meandering.”
It is true that the video of Biden fruitlessly trying to find his chair during a D-Day commemoration was misleading. There was a chair. The video now shows us an old man struggling to accomplish the simple physical act of sitting down. Because he’s old. It is transparently ridiculous to keep denying this truth.
Biden’s mental acuity, never particularly sharp to begin with, has considerably deteriorated over the past couple of years. It’s not the lifelong fabulism or habitual lying or his lashing out at anyone who asks him a marginally tough question. Whether he’s saying, “God save the queen, man,” for no discernible reason or shaking hands with ghosts or struggling to walk up normal-sized stairs, the president acts like a man who is struggling to do his job.
Yes, Biden also has his moments. As we all know, elderly people in decline have good days and bad ones. Maybe putting a lid on the day at 11 a.m. most weeks is paying off. But the fact that Biden can still read a speech off a teleprompter or give an interview to an obsequious journalist doesn’t prove he’s not struggling in general. We can all see the truth. No fake factcheck is going to hide it.