Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if they are liars or frauds. The end result is the same. The defenders of Democracy are anything but, simply power mad fools who will do anything to get what they want, and almost 50 million people saw for themselves exactly what that looked like last Thursday night.
Following President Joe Biden’s absolutely disastrous debate performance last week, the panic on CNN was something to behold, an unprecedented combination of shock, fear, and sadness. Rather than the expected spin that the President had self evidently met or even exceeded expectations, there were close to tears from more than one member of the expert panel as John King reported leading Democrats were in full freak out mode, displaying a “very aggressive panic” about President Biden’s entire candidacy – long before the debate was over. Van Jones was one of those practically in tears, saying “That was painful” and urging the President to consider stepping aside. Yashir Ali, a writer for The New Yorker and The Huffington Post, took to X to describe the reaction in the party, “I am in multiple large group texts with Democratic operatives, elected officials, staffers, and donors. Not one of them feels good about Biden’s performance tonight in terms of style, his voice etc. And these are people who aggressively defend him. And I know this is anecdotal….still noteworthy.” Chris Cillizza echoed these points in a similar post, “Look. This debate was a total and complete disaster for Biden. He looked old. His answers trailed off repeatedly. He was hard to understand. He would stop in mid sentence and move on to something else. I NEVER thought he would be this bad. Stunning. Truly.” MSNBC’s Alex Wagner said much the same, “There has been a uniformly negative reaction to Biden’s performance tonight,” referring to him as “enfeebled person,” saying “He is very old and was lost frequently.” Former Campaign Manager for President Barack Obama, David Plouffe described it as a “Def Con 1 moment.” Former Democrat Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang was even more blunt on X, “Guys, the Dems should nominate someone else – before it’s too late.” Ultimately, it was CNN’s Senior Political Analyst, Chuck Todd, who perhaps said it best, encapsulating the entire dynamic after the reports of initial shock and panic. “Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting and there were no clips tonight, you saw it before your eyes.” He too said he’d been talking to high ranking Democrats. “There’s a full on panic about this performance. Not like, oh, this is recoverable. It is more of an OK, he’s gotta step aside…This is about as bad of a performance that Biden could have delivered.”
The real question, at least in my mind, is why is anyone surprised in the first place? President Biden has been showing signs of mental decline at least since 2019, when he rambled incoherently about putting on a record to help improve cognition in infants, apparently. After winning the primary, he ran the most low profile presidential campaign in modern history, spending most of his time communicating on carefully scripted Zoom calls from his basement. There was little reason to believe he was up to the job then, especially considering his former boss President Barack Obama claimed we should never underestimate his ability to fuck things up, and every reason to believe he’d get much, much worse over time, between the natural aging process and the crushing weight of his office. In a more rational world, the reality would have been made plain in February when a Special Counsel, Robert Hur, appointed by President Biden’s own Justice Department deemed he was unfit to stand trial because of his manifest cognitive issues. At the time, the report noted, “He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).” His “memory [also] appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.” Personally, “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” and generally speaking, he displayed “diminished faculties and [a] faulty memory.” Over the course of the past month alone, the President froze in public for a full minute during a Juneteenth celebration at the White House, wandered off into a field at an event in France and had to be walked back by the Italian Prime Minister, bizarrely butted heads with the Pope, was escorted off stage by President Obama at a fundraiser, had trouble getting into and out of his motorcade, etc. This is why it didn’t take a genius, the proverbial rocket scientist, Wile E. Coyote super genius, or whatever term you prefer for me to conclude before the debate, “President Biden needs to do what is essentially impossible based on his recent public appearances, where he has variously mangled his words, wandered off, froze in place, etc. while defending his record and keeping his own cool. He hasn’t achieved anything close since at least 2020, if not earlier.”
Somehow, however, all of these supposedly intelligent political prognosticators were completely and totally shocked at this obvious outcome. There are only two plausible explanations for such a dramatic reaction, either they are liars or just plain stupid. These explanations are mutually exclusive when applied to an individual and yet given the number of people involved, likely present in some combination across President Biden’s supporters and enablers, be they in the political class, media, or academia. I understand that some might consider calling people “stupid” insulting, and it is, intentionally so, make of it what you will except blindness like this needs a strong word. Still others will feel it far too generous given the President’s obvious decline, but in my opinion at least, one should never underestimate the power of wishful thinking, self-rationalization, and denial. All of us, even your humble author, have an all too human tendency to see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe, especially when the alternative in our eyes is too awful to contemplate. In this case, it’s no secret that former President Trump is loathed by the great majority of President Biden’s supporters, considered an aspiring Adolph Hitler who’s literally a threat to the future of the entire planet with, to quote perhaps the President’s best line of the night, the “morals of an alley cat.” Whether or not this is true, is irrelevant because the President’s supporters clearly believe it regardless. Therefore, is it any surprise that they were completely unable to come to grips with the obvious decline of the person charged with taking on the scourge of the world? As the old saying goes, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you want. This is doubly true when they were provided with a ready made excuse: President Biden couldn’t possibly have declined that much because Republicans were saying it. Mr. Todd alluded to that above, but the refrain was frequently repeated. As The Nation opined in the aftermath of the Special Counsel report, “There’s certainly no secret about Biden’s status as a quite elder statesman, nor about persistent and growing anxiety about the president’s capacities among the electorate. But in the great tradition of the rolling Hunter Biden inquisition and the comically failed impeachment vote against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the plan is a brazenly cynical effort to (in the argot of another grandiosely empowered standing House committee) ‘weaponize’ Biden’s greatest political liability into a headline-driving campaign offensive. Plans are afoot to get Hur to hand over transcripts of his Biden interview, and to give his own direct testimony about the president’s grasp of things during the depositions. But really, such machinations are little more than window dressing, intended to keep the Biden’s-too-old narrative pulsating through the discourse.” The New York Times similarly claimed that concerns about the President’s age were a “manufactured panic” as early as last year. In other words, President Biden might well be old, but the only reason to make an issue out of it is purely political, and in that case, not relevant when objectively considering a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
We might extend the benefit of the doubt to at least some of those who were too blind to see what should have been obvious, knowing that we too might suffer a similar failing at some point and, assuming they acknowledge how they were deluded (which is not likely to happen, unfortunately), but the liars and frauds are another matter. These were the ones close enough to the President to have witnessed his decline first hand and chose to lie about it, spinning tales about how he was actually a dynamo in private and no one over forty years old could even keep up with him. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, for example, recently claimed that unedited videos of President Biden wandering off during a photo-op of world leaders were a “cheap fake” and “so much disinformation” coming from conservatives. “It’s also very insulting to the folks, the viewers who are watching it. And so we believe we have to call that out. We’ve been calling it ‘cheap fakes.’ That is something that came directly from the media outlets in calling it that, the fact-checkers and calling it that. And so we’re certainly going to be really, really clear about that as well. And calling it out from where we are, from where we stand,” she told NBC’s Nicolle Wallace in June, when President Biden appeared to have to be led off the stage by President Obama as I mentioned earlier. “I think there is so much misinformation, disinformation as we’ve been talking about. You talked about the video of the president wandering. And it’s not true. Right? The president wasn’t wandering. He was talking to a parachuter that was right in front of him. And what you saw is the Republican Party really manipulating what was being said and what was being seen by the American people,” she continued. Earlier that same day, Ms. Jean-Pierre insisted. “And instead of talking about the president’s performance in office, and what I mean by that is his legislative wins, what he’s been able to do for the American people across the country, we’re seeing these deepfakes, these manipulated videos. And it is, again, done in bad faith.” The only bad faith on display here is on her part, of course, and those who have behaved similarly, putting their own power and prestige ahead of both the President’s and the country’s best interest. First Lady Jill Biden, for instance, was praising her husband’s performance immediately after the debate. “Didn’t the president do a great job? Yes!” She said to supporters at an afterparty in Atlanta. “Joe you did such a great job,” she went on. “You answered every question, you knew all the facts,” she concluded in an absolutely stunning lie.
Sadly, President Obama himself – who probably predicted our current state of affairs best with his famous, aforementioned quote about Joe fucking things up – is now decidedly in this camp. He has transformed from an elder statesman into a political hack and fraud, dismissing concerns about the President’s performance as simply a bad night in an attempt to thwart those who believe he should step aside. “Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself,” he wrote on social media. “Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November,” he continued. This, of course, is impossible to believe in part or in its entirety. After all, we’re talking about a man who recently said his uncle was eaten by cannibals, who claims no American soldiers died on his watch, who has lied about his son and his business dealings, and more – when he isn’t babbling incoherently. Speaking of babbling incoherently, even those like The New York Times who now believe President Biden should step aside are completely incoherent in their reasoning. “The greatest public service President Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not run for re-election” they said while failing to consider how he can possibly be President for the next six months. If he’s unfit to be on the ballot, how can he be in office? Even more ironically, they continued to insist that they would unequivocally endorse President Biden anyway , meaning they do not give the slightest shit about anything except partisan power, pardon my language, but it fits. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if they are liars or frauds. The end result is the same. The defenders of Democracy are anything but. They are simply power mad fools who will do anything and say anything to get what they want, and almost 50 million people saw for themselves exactly what that looked like last Thursday night.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 