President Biden takes a tumble, the media claims he “appeared” to trip and acted like he sprung up faster than a prime Jean-Claude Van Damme, while The New York Times informs us his age is “complicated.”
Conservatives had a good laugh last week when President Joe Biden took a tumble at the Air Force Academy Commencement Ceremony and the media swooped in to save him. Somehow, actual news reports claimed the President merely “appeared” to trip when he fell flat on his face and that he bounced right back like a prime Jean-Claude Van Damme even though it took three people to help him up. To this observer at least, it was unclear whether he would have made it back to his feet himself. Of course, comparisons to former President Donald Trump walking gingerly down a ramp at West Point in 2020 were legion. Back then, we were told repeatedly that a slow walk in leather soled shoes on a metal ramp was a legitimate cause for concern, something that had to be talked about and taken seriously because it might be the first signs of some underlying health condition. Apparently, many of the same outlets no longer have those concerns given President Biden has managed to fall walking up the stairs to Air Force One, wipe out on his bike while standing still, and now trip flat out in the middle of a graduation, earning snickers from some of the graduates themselves, and we see no such worry that the man might be unwell or day I say unfit. Nor are they particularly worried about the President’s inability to form coherent sentences, his habit of appearing to forget where he is, or know who is around him. How many times are they going to watch him attempt to shake the hand of a person that simply isn’t there before they start to wonder whether the President himself is all there? Last month, President Biden appeared in Asia at an important summit and was unable to form a coherent sentence for more than 40 seconds. Instead, he painfully stumbled and bumbled something about balancing the budget (false) and increasing taxes on corporations (partially true) with no coherent point, or even a real attempt at one. This too passed without any media notice outside of conservative sites, as if the inability of the President to clearly articulate his ideas in public isn’t an issue to perform the job and doesn’t constitute grounds to voice concerns about this fitness for office.
The New York Times, meanwhile, recently informed us that the President’s age is “complicated,” as in devoting thousands of mostly useless words to describe the “complicated reality of being America’s oldest President.” In their view, Biden’s age is the equivalent of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde scenario, only he transforms between an elder statesman and a doddering old fool depending on the day of the week. They contrast his (non public) response to the news last year that a missile landed in Poland, making a huge deal of the fact that he was awakened in the middle of the night and made some phone calls, as if that was the measure of the office. What are your qualifications for the Presidency? Well, I can hold the receiver while someone else dials the number. Vote for me! This is not far from their reporting. “Within hours in the middle of the night, Mr. Biden consulted his top advisers, called the president of Poland and the NATO secretary general, and gathered fellow world leaders to deal with the crisis.” Of course, the Times only knows this because someone on the President’s team told them and there wasn’t an actual crisis because the Associated Press mis-reported the story, but that is somewhat beside the point when they continue to note that he was recently unable to name his own grandchildren or even get the count right. “So, let me see. I got one in New York, two in Philadelphia — or is it three? No, three, because I got one granddaughter who is — I don’t know. You’re confusing me,” the President said recently at a Take Your Child to Work Day. The reporters continued to note that “He also drew a blank when asked the last country he had visited and the name of a favorite movie.” Does anyone really believe a man who can’t count his grandkids is literally kicking ass on foreign policy calls as they claim? Somehow, however, they still manage to conclude “The two Joe Bidens coexist in the same octogenarian president: Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world. Yet a little slower, a little softer, a little harder of hearing, a little more tentative in his walk, a little more prone to occasional lapses of memory in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has reached their ninth decade or has a parent who has.”
Of course, no mainstream media article can resist the urge to take shots at President Trump while pumping up the President. Thus, in an article about President Biden’s fitness or lack thereof, we’re treated to a lengthy, completely unnecessary aside mentioning that the former President is also not young. Who knew? “The question of Mr. Biden’s age does not come in isolation, of course. Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican challenger, is just four years younger and was the oldest president in history until Mr. Biden succeeded him. If Mr. Trump were to win next year, he would be 82 at the end of his term, older than Mr. Biden will be at the end of this one.” Even richer still, they reference the concerns the mainstream media itself raised when he was in office, meaning they will apply the fitness standard to Trump but not to Biden even in the same article, giving media bias, double-standards, and hypocrisy a new name. “While in office, Mr. Trump generated concerns about his mental acuity and physical condition. He did not exercise, his diet leaned heavily on cheeseburgers and steak and he officially tipped the scales at 244 pounds, a weight formally deemed obese for his height.” They even manage to loop in supposed “experts,” claiming “He was erratic and tended to ramble; experts found that he had grown less articulate and that his vocabulary had shrunk since his younger days,” making one wonder where these same panels have been over the past 2.5 years. If the media was employing experts to psychoanalyze the President then and the President’s age is a concern now, where are these same experts?
It’s not as if many conservatives have not raised these concerns themselves including on this very blog. What do they have nothing to say about what is happening as we speak, but plenty to say about what happened three years ago? The Times doesn’t say, but it takes them quite a few words to get to the obvious point: President Trump is what he is, and hasn’t changed. Watch any given rally, of which he holds several per month even in these early days of the campaign, and you can see for yourself. “But perhaps because his bombastic volume conveys energy, Mr. Trump’s issues are not associated with age in the public mind as much as Mr. Biden’s are. In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 73 percent said Mr. Biden is too old to be in office, compared with 51 percent who said the same of Mr. Trump.” This is a roundabout, convoluted way of saying that age is merely a number. The problem with President Biden is not simply that number. It’s that he’s obviously declined to anyone who has followed him over the past ten years. Gone are the days when he can give rousing speeches as he did at the Democrat National Convention in 2012. Today, he mumbles, whispers, yells, rants, and is lucky if he doesn’t fall down. This is the story the media should be covering, but ask them to be fair is the same as screaming in space.
All of this prompts an obvious question, aside from precisely how stupid the media believes the average American truly is: Is there any incident that would prompt the mainstream media to consider that President Biden should not be in office at all, much less running for another term? In other words, is there a conceivable scenario where they give him the Trump treatment and start talking about the 25th Amendment? By their own admission, he has slowed considerably in recent years and despite the spin, even The New York Times essentially admits what President you get – the wise sage or the aging dullard – is a roll of the dice each and every time. What if the odds continue to get worse as they surely will? No one has ever gotten younger. If the President is in decline now, it does not get better from here. What then? It’s not inconceivable that President Biden suffers a major health incident between now and election day 2024, but so far the media continues to circle around the issue without taking it head on, pretending the most powerful person in the known universe is not on the edge of a precipice from which no one ever returns and presenting his ability to make a phone call as proof he is fit for office. Democrat politicians are also loath to discuss the topic, resulting in only two primary challengers, neither of which appears to have much of a shot at the nomination, though the President barely tops 60% in most polls. There is still time for this to change, and should he suffer a more serious setback in the next few months, it certainly will, but once we get into the actual primary season and people start casting their votes, it will be too late. They will either be saddled with Biden, Weekend at Bernie’s style, or if the unthinkable happens and he resigns, stuck with Vice President Kamala Harris. The Republicans should be so lucky, but alas the country as a whole would not be and we would have the media to thank for spinning Biden’s big fall, making mockery of us all.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 