Democrats Can’t Pretend to Be Shocked by Joe Biden’s Decline

What a difference just one week can make. Last week, White House officials and Democratic pundits insisted that clips of US President Joe Biden appearing to freeze, slur his speech and generally show his age at various public events were “cheap fakes » selectively edited – vulgar, low-tech disinformation. by the slanderous right-wing media. Now, after Biden froze, slurred his words and generally showed his age during the first televised presidential debate of 2024 last night, in front of tens of millions of Americans and under fire from the international media, they suddenly changed his tone. .

White House spokespeople are currently trying to keep a straight face while insisting that Biden, 81, did pretty well in his CNN face-off with the relatively lively Donald Trump, 78. But many Democratic pundits and politicians have finally had to admit that the president is clearly very fragile, as the American public concluded months ago. “Unintelligible,” “past his prime” and “disaster” were among the more polite and anonymous statements Democratic lawmakers made to the media. TV anchors, meanwhile, were forced to feign surprise at Biden’s behavior and remarks on the televised debate stage, as they have done for some time in every public engagement. “There’s a sense of shock at the way he spoke at the beginning of this debate,” said David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to former President Barack Obama. “The sound of his voice.” He seemed a little disoriented… There will be discussions about whether he should continue.”

Shock? It was clear that Joe Biden might not have been all there before the last election. His gaffes before 2020 included forgetting Obama’s name and calling a hostile student a “lying dog-faced pony soldier”—a baffling insult that America’s best linguists are still trying to understand. Since then, his apparent decline has been steep—and alarming. Not least because the stakes are now much higher. Losing one’s train of thought, dozing off, or confusing Emmanuel Macron with the long-dead François Mitterrand is one thing; accidentally saying that Putin “can’t stay in power” and telling American troops that they’ll soon be in Ukraine—as he did during a 2022 trip to Poland—is quite another. His aides now have to periodically “walk back” comments suggesting he’s about to start World War III.

Democratic leaders are not shocked. They simply became prisoners of the lies they told about Biden’s obvious deterioration in health. The gaslighting has been off the scale – and it has become more garish as Biden has visibly slipped. In February, special prosecutor Robert Hur was lambasted by the Democratic establishment for concluding that Biden should not be charged with mishandling classified documents, in part because of his mental fragility. It would be “difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him … of a serious crime that requires a voluntary mental state of mind,” Hur said. Rather than breathe a sigh of relief that Biden would be spared prosecution, pundits pretended to be outraged by Hur’s characterization of the president’s mental state. His devastating and demonstrably fair assessment was criticized on CNN by legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin as “a scandal” and “a disgrace.”

Well, the tone was very different on CNN last night. Former Obama adviser Van Jones basically said Biden should give up. “I love the guy. He’s a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best he can,” Jones said in CNN’s post-debate report. “But he had a test to pass tonight to restore the trust of the country and the base. And he failed to do it… We’re still a long way from our convention and this party has time to figure out a different path forward.” The brazenness of it all is astounding. Democrats have spent months pretending that everything is fine, insisting that any voter who had concerns was a fool consumed by misinformation. Now they’re rushing to completely abandon Joe Biden’s Potemkin presidency. I’d call them lying dog-faced soldiers, if I could be sure what that meant.

Watch more on Spectator TV: