What a difference a week makes. Last week, White House spinners and Democratic pundits were insisting that clips of US president Joe Biden appearing to freeze up, slur his words and generally show his age at various public events were selectively edited ‘cheap fakes’ – tawdry, low-tech misinformation put about by the scurrilous right-wing media. Now, after Biden froze up, slurred his words and generally showed his age during last night’s first televised presidential debate of 2024, in front of tens of millions of Americans and in the full glare of the international media, they’ve suddenly changed their tune.
Democratic pundits and politicians have finally had to concede that the president is clearly very frail, as the American public concluded months ago
White House spokespeople are currently trying to keep a straight face while saying the doddering, 81-year-old Biden did rather well in his CNN face-off against relative whippersnapper Donald Trump, 78. But many more Democratic pundits and politicians have finally had to concede that the president is clearly very frail, as the American public concluded months ago. ‘Unintelligible’, ‘past his prime’ and ‘disaster’ were among the more polite, anonymously briefed takes to the media from Democrat lawmakers. The TV talking heads, meanwhile, were forced to feign surprise at Biden behaving and talking on the TV-debate stage as he has been behaving and talking at every public engagement for a while now. ‘There is a sense of shock at how he came out at the beginning of this debate’, said David Axelrod, long-time adviser to former president Barack Obama. ‘How his voice sounded. He seemed a little disoriented… There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue.’
Shock? That Joe Biden might not be all there has been clear since before the last election. Among his gaffes ahead of 2020 were forgetting Obama’s name and calling a hostile student a ‘lying dog-faced pony soldier’ – a baffling insult that America’s top linguists are still trying to figure out. His apparent decline has been sharp – and alarming – since then. Not least because the stakes are now so much higher. Losing his train of thought, dozing off, or confusing Emmanuel Macron for the long-dead François Mitterrand is one thing, accidentally saying Putin ‘cannot remain in power’ and telling American troops that they will be in Ukraine soon – as he did on a 2022 trip to Poland – is quite another. His aides now periodically have to ‘walk back’ comments suggesting he’s about to start world war three.
Leading Democrats aren’t shocked. They’ve just become prisoners of the lies they’ve been telling about Biden’s obviously deteriorating health. The gaslighting has been off the scale – and it has become more shrill the more Biden has visibly slid. In February, special counsel Robert Hur was blasted by the Democratic establishment for concluding that Biden should not be charged with mishandling classified materials, in part because of his mental frailty. It would be ‘difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him… of a serious felony that requires a mental state of wilfulness’, Hur said. Rather than breathe a sigh of relief that Biden would be spared prosecution, the pundits pretended to be outraged at Hur’s characterisation of the president’s mental state. His devastating and obviously fair assessment was roasted on CNN by legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin as ‘an outrage’ and ‘a disgrace’.
Well, the tone was very different on CNN last night. Former Obama adviser Van Jones essentially said Biden should jack it in. ‘I love that guy. He’s a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can’, said Jones in CNN’s post-debate post-mortem. ‘But he had a test to meet tonight to restore the confidence of the country and of the base. And he failed to do that… We’re still far from our convention and there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward.’ The shamelessness of it all is staggering. Democrats have spent months pretending everything is fine, insisting that any voter who had concerns was a misinformation-addled rube. Now, they’re rushing to abandon Joe Biden’s Potemkin presidency altogether. I’d call them lying dog-faced pony soldiers, if I could be sure what it meant.
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