That great philosopher of the 1930’s, Chico Marx, in the classic Marx Brothers film Duck Soup said, Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?
In the aftermath of his disastrous debate performance and in an effort to salvage his re-election bid, President Joe Biden and his closest advisers are trying to make us buy into what Chico said.
Are you going to believe them, that the president’s mental state is strong enough now and will stay strong enough for four more years?
Or, are you going to believe your own eyes. The eyes that saw Joe Biden on that Atlanta stage have scary moments of mental lapses, incoherence and blank stares?
Here’s my response. Pay close attention to the lyrics from the Eagles hit from 1975. Guys, there ain’t no way to hide your lyin’ eyes.
And here’s what I would tell the mainstream news media, that by and large pooh-poohed any reporting of Biden’s mental decline over the past four years; you all tried to pull the wool over our eyes.
Was it because you covered up for Biden to try to stave off another Trump presidency? Or was it because you feared losing your place in line for the crumbs of media access that were offered up to you by the White House Press Office? Or was it because you thought you knew better than what the American voters were seeing with their own eyes, that the president was in a frightening mental decline?
The evidence wasn’t hidden. It was there for everyone to see, if you really wanted to see it.
In the very few open media availabilities Biden has held btw, the fewest of any president since Ronald Reagan, everyone saw how incapable he was of performing without a script and cue cards.
He couldn’t remember names of some members of his cabinet. He called on people in the audience who were dead. He weirdly whispered answers to some questions.
Heck, he didn’t even sit down for the traditional Super Bowl pregame interview.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal ran a bombshell story entitled, Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping. The Journal interviewed more than 45 people, Democrats and Republicans.
The article said, Some who have worked with [Biden], including Democrats and some who have known him back to his time as vice-president, described a president who appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.
The White House was quick to claim the article was motivated by partisan politics.
Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s popular morning show supposedly watched by Joe Biden, furiously called the WSJ article a Trump hit piece.
Well, this past Friday, the morning after the debate, Scarborough said of his friend, if he were a CEO and he turned in a performance like that, would any Fortune 500 corporation in America keep him on?
Whose eyes should we believe now?
The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, so close to the president he openly sniffs his foggy bottom as his shadow secretary of state said, I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime, precisely because of what it revealed. Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.
So, you die-hards who’ve now lost faith in Biden’s ability to govern for four more years, let me get this straight.
You’ve been seeing the polls for months, like this one from the AP last August. Three-quarters of American adults said Biden was too old to be re-elected. Here’s another AP poll from February of this year. Sixty percent of US adults were not very or not at all confident that Biden had the mental capacity to be president.
The American people were seeing the problem but you, the so-called experts weren’t?
No, I don’t buy it.
If they thought Biden’s debate performance was a one off, wouldn’t they now say, yes he had a bad night but don’t worry, we’ve seen him up close and he’s really very sharp.
By immediately leaping like pumas after the debate and calling for him to pull out of the race, it tells me they have been seeing what the American people have been seeing for a long time, because you don’t abandon your bestie after one bad night. You cut him some slack. You give him the benefit of the doubt.
Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, told the website Semafor this past week, that Biden’s incapacity was indeed a super hard story to report but it could have been done. And by not doing it, the media did a tremendous disservice to the nation.
Abramson said, It is simply astounding for the entire country, including the most seasoned reporters, to be as shocked as everyone was by the ugly and painful reality of Biden’s debate performance.
Astounding indeed. Astounding because of the massive dereliction of journalistic duty perpetrated by many in the media.
Yeah, it’s hard to report that type of story if you are afraid of losing access, of being outside of the club, of being accused by your colleagues of helping get Trump re-elected.
It’s not hard if you are fearless in speaking truth to power, as you should be, and your pals’ political preferences be damned. So you won’t be invited to any state dinners at the White House. Big deal.
Now, with Biden within an implanted hair’s breadth of bowing out, reporters have discovered that he really isn’t mentally equipped to do the job for another four years. That Carl Bernstein, who helped uncover Watergate, has conveniently revealed that his sources have told him for a while that Biden has these inexplicable moments that we [people close to Biden] are very concerned about.
The mainstream media and the beltway bros, living in their bubble of God forbid another four years of Trump, kept pissing on our heads, and kept telling us it was raining.
Now, the real storm is coming.
I give the Biden candidacy another week or two at the most. The pressure to withdraw will become too much for him and his posse to push away. Then the Democrat presidential wannabes will battle each other in a steel cage death match for the nomination.
And you know who’s laughing about all this malfeasance? Donald Trump and the Republicans. They’ll stand united behind their sordid, dissembling, and divisive candidate come hell or court order. They have their own share of shame in this travesty of an American presidential election.
More on that in a future edition of Friend Without Benefits.
What a fine mess they’ve gotten us into because the media maitre d’s, the White House mouthpieces and the Democrat party grand poobahs did a full Chico Marx and told us to believe them and to disbelieve what we were seeing.
After the debate, they can’t hide their lyin’ eyes any more.