20 Dec Lying Liars and the Reason They Got Caught
Huh. So, it turns out Joe Biden was not quite as “sharp” and “with it” as we all were told he was:
While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble….
[A] sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.
They issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused….
Interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said….
Over four years, Biden held nine full cabinet meetings—three in 2021, two in 2022, three in 2023 and just one this year. In their first terms, Obama held 19 and Trump held 25….
Now, this isn’t exactly a breaking story. You know and I know that Biden has been completely unfit for the job for a long, long time. The details here are new and discomfiting, but this is “news” like the discovery that water is wet.
That said, this is still an important story, if not a surprising one, for a couple of reasons. First, it reinforces our low regard for everyone involved in this farce of a presidency and confirms everything I wrote this past summer, when Biden dropped out of the race:
While there is some small truth in the charge that the people closest to Biden were unusually protective of him and hid his cognitive decline, the larger truth is that the mainstream press served as their witting accomplices. Some journalists would introduce and discuss Biden’s age-related issues, but they would discuss them in precisely those terms: “age-related issues.” They would then conclude that judging someone based on age was prejudicial and wrong and that to do so made one a bigot of some sort. Meanwhile, the rest of the media ran blanket cover for the Democrats and their nominee, gaslighting voters and political commentators, insisting that criticism of Biden amounted to Trump-inspired conspiracy-mongering. All the while, the words “senility” or “dementia” never crossed their lips (or their keyboards, as it were) except to mock those who would dare to bring them up.
As a result, for the last three-and-a-half years, the United States has been ostensibly “governed” by a chief executive who is, to put it bluntly, unfit for the job. Worse still, they’ve all been aware of this—everyone in the media and everyone in high-level Democratic politics.
They knew. They all knew. And they lied and lied and lied. There is no legitimate reason to trust any of them again.
On Twitter/X, CNN’s Chris Cillizza posted a video in which he “apologized” for not “pushing harder” on questions about President Biden’s mental well-being. I churlishly replied, “Get bent!” I did so, of course, because that is exactly what Cillizza and the rest of the mainstream media should do. If I were Dick Cheney, I would probably tell Cillizza and his pals to do something anatomically impossible, but this is a family publication. So “get bent” is the best/worst I can do. As is usually the case with people like this, they’re not sorry for what they did (or didn’t do). They’re sorry they got caught.
The problem here isn’t that the media didn’t “push” hard enough. It’s not that they didn’t follow up or take the signs seriously. The problem is that they lied. Flat out, inarguably, and unforgivably. Worse still, they attacked anyone who questioned the official narrative as conspiracy theorists or, as in Cillizza’s case, big, mean jerks who were playing “base” politics at its basest. In short, they lied AND they gaslighted us about it. They did whatever it took to ensure that the official narrative was never “credibly” challenged.
That brings us to the second reason why this story matters, despite not being especially newsworthy: we still knew what was going on. We still understood that the country was, essentially, leaderless. We still knew what we knew and knew that the media was lying (or something like that). Whatever the case, we were able to bypass the mainstream media, and we were able to do so largely because of one man, Elon Musk.
To be blunt, I’ve never been a huge fanboy of Musk’s. I don’t think electric cars are particularly great, and I don’t like it when businessmen get rich from products that require massive government subsidies. I don’t like child slavery at lithium mines in the Congo, and I don’t like having to pretend that the CCP isn’t a grotesque, homicidal regime.
Nevertheless, it is largely inarguable that Elon’s purchase of Twitter/X has been the most important development in the protection/preservation of free speech in decades, if not longer. When the government and the mainstream media insist that something is a conspiracy theory or, more frequently of late, that it is “misinformation,” they are hoping to shut down discussion of the issue thoroughly and permanently. Before Musk bought the company, Twitter was often complicit in these efforts. Twitter worked hand-in-hand with the government and with misinformation “experts” to censor unpopular beliefs. Everything is different now. While many conspiracy theories and much misinformation trafficked on X are just that, conspiracy theories and misinformation, some of them are not. Some of them are just ideas that the ruling class finds inconvenient – including the early reports about Joe Biden’s dementia.
Many in the Democratic-media-complex are unhappy this week because of the failure of the bloated omnibus budget bill. They blame Musk for its collapse and insist that he is directing government policy. They refer to him as “President Musk.” What they really don’t like is that he provides a forum in which public discussion of matters like this can now take place as never before in history. The budget “cram-nibus” was killed by overwhelming negative public sentiment, much of fomented and expressed on Twitter/X.
What they forget, as they whine about President Musk, is that Joe Biden is still, technically, the president for another four weeks – which is to say that, in addition to exposing themselves as authoritarians, they are also confirming what they Journal reported and what they once called “reckless speculation” – namely that Joe Biden is president in name only. If there is a power vacuum that Musk is filling, that’s not because Trump is allowing it but because Biden is unable to stop it.
I have to admit that it’s hard not to loathe the ruling class. Still, it’s Christmas, and so, I’d much rather be grateful for what we have than wallow in my detestation of these small, small people – especially since they will only get smaller and smaller going forward.
