Adrastos, Campaign Notes, JOEY B SHARK, Political Crack, So Called Liberal Media

Joe Biden Deserves Better Than This

Gulliver Tied Down By Lilliputians by Bettmann.

Joe Biden is a good man. He was a good senator. He was a good vice president. He is a good president. But in the wake of a poor performance in a “debate,” none of that matters to a pundit class that’s out to torpedo his candidacy.

I’m not sure which wildlife show image to use to describe what’s going on: Is it a shark feeding frenzy or turkey buzzards circling carrion? The folks at the NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Axios, and Politico are certainly turkeys. They believe that “debate” performance is more important than job performance. That’s as unhinged as Joe Biden’s opponent’s fear and loathing of windmills.

Instead of wildlife imagery, I’m going literary on your asses. Jonathan Swift was an early practitioner of the fine art of satire. Gulliver’s Travels is about a man who is perceived as a giant upon reaching the land of Lilliput. The locals freak out over his size and tie him down. That’s what’s happening to Joe Biden right now.

I realize many people don’t think of Joe Biden as a giant, but he’s accomplished remarkable things in his time on the public stage. He’s spent a lifetime struggling with a stutter, which seems to have worsened in recent years, but instead of celebrating Biden’s struggle, the media have started mocking him for it. They’re all insult comedians now. I wonder where they got that from.

A rare pundit who hasn’t caught “Biden must go” disease is The Guardian’s Rebecca Solnit:

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

 

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.

 

According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.”

That’s a longer quote that I typically use but Solnit is so on point that I had to resist the temptation to quote the whole damn column.

Joe Biden wasn’t the only one who had a bad “debate.” His opponent spouted bizarre and untrue shit throughout the joint press appearance. The punditocracy asserts that everyone knows that Donald Trump is a lunatic who lies incessantly therefore they need not deign to comment on his mendacity. I beg to differ: He’s a convicted felon who staged a coup to remain in office illegally. Flooding the zone with shit is his jam. That’s why I call him the Kaiser of Chaos. He’s a clear and present danger to all that Americans should hold dear.

The evil dweebs at Axios headlined a recent newsletter, Biden’s Credibility Crisis. I searched their archives, and a similar headline has never appeared about the Convicted Insult Comedian. Axios should wear this headline as a badge of shame, instead they’re spiking the ball. All Team Biden has done is spin facts about his health but if they lied about it, they’re in good company: Charlie Pierce has reminded us that lying about presidential health is as American as apple pie.

Another reminder: If a presidential candidate has shown signs of dementia, it’s Donald Trump, not Joe Biden. Trump’s family has a history of dementia and Alzheimer’s, which is an indicator that his unhinged rants about sharks, bleach, and Hannibal Lecter are signs that he’s many light bulbs short of a chandelier.

Repeat after me: Vote against the crook, it’s important.

I thought President Biden did reasonably well in his ABC interview with my diminutive countryman. The New York Times, who refuse to fact check the MAGA Yippie, decided to do some fact checking of the interview. You have to click on the tweet to read the important bits:

It’s called hyperbole. It’s what normal politicians do during a campaign. It is indeed petty bullshit.

Josh Marshall pointed out another serious issue with the NYT piece:

The legacy media are all gerontologists as well as insult comedians now.

Joe Biden is being attacked by wealthy donors such as Abby Disney for thinking he can win this election. Why does he believe that? He beat Trump in 2020 while facing similar questions about his age and health. While I’m glad that Ms. Disney doesn’t share her Uncle Walt’s odious right-wing politics being wealthy doesn’t qualify you as an expert on President Biden’s health. Disney is just as unqualified on that score as the NYT, WSJ, and Axios. These know-it-all Lilliputians can go fuck themselves.

Back to Rebecca Solnit:

Some speech pathologists have suggested he may (not does, just may) have a disorder that sometimes accompanies stuttering, called cluttering, which is not an intellectual deficiency but a sometimes hectic and disorderly translation of thoughts into words. In recent months, actual gerontologists have said in print that Biden appears to have normal signs of aging, not signs of dementia. Nevertheless, the amateur armchair diagnosticians have been out in packs, and their confidence in their ability to diagnose from watching TV is itself an alarming delusion. I am not giving Biden a clean bill of health; I’m saying that I don’t have a basis to render a verdict (and neither do the august editors of large publications).”

Joe Biden is a good and decent man who will, in the end, do what is right for the country be it staying in the race or endorsing his Veep as his successor. The attacks on him are excessive and just as damaging to the media outlets who are purveying them as to their intended target. Legacy media is trying to prove that they still matter by taking down a president. They should take down 45 instead of 46. Lilliputian motherfuckers.

The only ones who benefit from the Biden siege are Trump and the MAGA Republicans. Joe Biden deserves better than this; so does America.

The last word goes to Louis Jordan:

2 thoughts on “Joe Biden Deserves Better Than This”

  1. President Biden seems to be trusting in his own abilities and listening to Democratic voters who support him by better than nine-to-one. How dare he not be stampeded into a reckless decision! As the High Priest so notably observed, “What further need have we of witnesses?”

    I note also that as the pushback has gotten more organized against the “Dean Scream” pundits, some of the more strident voices have begun to moderate their tone. Is it possible to resist the irresistible call of the attention-seeking pundits?

  2. At Angry Bear Blog, we agree with this. Joe has his issues but it is not dementia. Here we are again when Dem candidate doubters may throw the election by voting for others or not voting. That is how the nation suffered trump in the first place.

    Wake up silly people. He delivered 4 years of prosperity in spite of a pandemic.

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