By Taylor Lewis
Between you and me, perceptive reader, I don’t think this Joe Biden fella has the mettle to be president. Sure, he has the CV for the job. Plenty of White House time, a long Senate record, party stalwart, Obama-adjacency, vague labor union appreciation, and donor schmoozer. But consider the camera factor: his age. His stilted mannerisms, awkward phrasings, obvious memory gaps bleeding into cringeworthy gaffes—what voter will go for a pudding-cup president? And a chief executive in his 80s? With the ascendant authoritarianism of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Ayatolla Khamenei, and whatever tinpot baddie the Wall Street Journaleditorial board feels like tossing in its Axis-of-Evil pottage? Sure, Ronald Reagan disarmed the Soviet Empire well past his Medicare-eligible date. That was qualitatively different: the Gipper packed those secret American weapons of a sun-shiny demeanor, a Hollywood smile, Kodachromes wearing a Stetson and spurs, and a generous credit line.
What I’m saying is that I don’t think a silver-sprouted dodderer like Joe Biden is up for the stresses of the presidency. He’s hardly a spring chicken. Nor is he a summer pullet, an autumnal cockerel, or even a winter bantam. His withered features, ungainly stride, and vacuous pupils more resemble a crisped bird yanked from Colonel Sanders’s fryer. Should he run, and somehow win, his shaking, skeletal hand grasping loosely onto a solid victory, the White House will become a Shady Acres, and his aides will be less policy gurus than Visiting Angels. It would be the gerontocracy’s ultimate triumph—a far greater feat than refusing to leave price-inflated multi-bedroom homes in good neighborhoods while cashing Social Security checks paid for by millennials living in bedsits too cramped for a queen-size mattress.
The above description has multiple timestamps, and could just as easily apply to 2024 as five years earlier, when the former vice president unexpectedly reached for his baseball cap, convinced he was wearing one, only to toss some dust motes and peeled skin flakes into the ring. His startled look at his own empty hand mirrored the horrified expression of pundocrats. “Really?” the commentariat wondered when Biden tripped over his tongue, all but announcing his intention to campaign for the White House in March of 2019. The solecism-prone, enfeebled Veep is going to take on Trump?
The resulting campaign, then administration, was one gigantic visual dissemblance. Joe Biden’s obvious—“obvious” as an adjective doesn’t do justice to how clear of a scatty cooter Joe Biden really wass—impairment was sheened as much as possible by staffers who themselves were fooled into thinking they’d been yanking the government’s levers only to find out their roles were reduced to that of a glorified stage crew. Biden wasn’t a president as much as he was a daily reality show in an age of digital voyeurism.
The production is now finally addressed by its main players in the form of a mega-selling book: Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, authored by Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN anchor-scold Jake Tapper. The work is being marketed as a scandalous tell-all about how a close-knit West Wing troupe played at the appearance of a functional presidency. But because our politics is all meta-gotcha-ism and catchpenny public relations, the tract serves a dual purpose: that of a let-off-the-hook apologia issued by the very people who perpetuated a half-decade hoax.
You see, to take Tapper’s and Thompson’s contention at its face, you have to evenly swallow the preposterous notion that the Washington press corps was undisturbed by Biden’s long list of dementia-doings, including incoherent mumbling, calling on dead colleagues, wandering aimlessly at public events, frequent onset catatonia, failing to recognize George Clooney’s dashing mug, being arm-leashed by the Easter Bunny, and divulging his cancer diagnosis due to oil slicks on windshields.
(The latter is a particularly grim admission, with news “breaking” that Biden indeed suffers from advanced prostate cancer—a diagnosis only the most credulous, Politico-reading, Le Dip-frequenting, condo-renting, Sunday-show watching Beltway creature has a hard time believing was just chanced upon.)
Of course, nobody beyond the I-495 loop is ingenuous enough to buy the line that our intrepid media minders, so perspicacious in unshoveling decades-old perjorative-laden Facebook posts from Republican grandpas, missed the eerily translucent President meeting every camera and spectator with the same vacant stare behind a sagging, celluloid masque. They knew. And lent their various mastheads and chyrons to the narrative of whippersnapper Joe burning the midnight oil long after his blue-plate special.
But say our nature vaulted the animal urge to ridicule. And let’s go further than the saints, and extend magnanimity to the same cable-news hosts so eager to browbeat skeptics who didn’t accept Joe Biden was any less sharp than Ben Shapiro’s voice playing at 1.5x speed. Must we, for the sake of remediating our pestiferous press, swear off any indictment, offering amnesty to those who deliberately cast wool over our eyes?
“If you punish people for admitting they were mistaken, they will not admit they were mistaken. These dunks are counterproductive,” tweeted Washington Postcolumnist Megan McArdle. What may sound like a kindhearted plea for kid-glove treatment is actually an appeal to what Christopher Lasch called “therapeutic morality.” To McArdle, the journalists who indulged in covering the President’s clear infirmity shouldn’t be regarded too harshly, otherwise they’ll dig further into the practice of treating progressive canon as a neutral perspective from which to gauge events.
To wit, I say, with all the learned articulation of an Oxford dean, screw ‘em. St. Aquinas defended the bitter feeling of being hacked off on the basis that anger serves as a motivator to exacting “reasonable retribution.” Far be it from me to argue with such a pious heavyweight!
We were lied to. Millions of voters were defrauded as to the President’s well-being. And while Joe Biden did the country a great service by showing that America requires no prepotent president, his handlers proved how easily those with power propagandize to keep their clutch on the wheel, all with the abetting of lickspittles cosplaying as Walter Cronkite.
The verbal beatings must continue until the media elite improves. Or newspapers are shuttered and reporters laid off en masse. Whichever comes first.
Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.
