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It's obvious that the timing on Biden's Health was coordinated with the Mainstream media finally turning on the Democrat Party. The gaslighted the American Public in an attempt to tell you to not believe what was obvious everytime Biden was in the Public Spotlight. Only, it's even worse than it seems.
It's something to behold and it's long past due. But it seems in the midst of collapsing ratings and massive distrust by the American public of the mainstream media... They're trying salvage what little dignity they have left and to throw themselves on the mercy of the American Public.
Basically...
"We're sorry we lied to you. We're sorry we were buried in the ass of the DNC. We're going to do our best to rebuild what little reputation we have left"
The headline is almost spot on... But it should have said "The Democrats and the Mainstream Media Are the Problem"
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” is already the big political book of the moment, even before its formal May 20 publication. (For a summary, see the subtitle: “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”) The authors depict a Democratic Party, a White House staff and a Biden campaign that, though aware to varying degrees of the weakness, forgetfulness, confusion and incoherence afflicting Biden, remained largely silent about it, opting instead to accommodate and rationalize. And they describe a president and inner circle so enamored with the Biden mythology — defiant against tough odds, resilient against adversity, solely capable of vanquishing Donald Trump — that any skepticism was forbidden.
Instances of Biden’s decline make up big chunks of “Original Sin.” In 2019, during a bus tour in Iowa, Biden struggled to remember the name of Mike Donilon, a campaign strategist and White House adviser who had worked with him for nearly four decades. In March 2020, Biden forgot the words of the Declaration of Independence. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created by the, you know, you know the thing.”) One day in the White House in 2022, he could not summon the names of his national security adviser (Jake Sullivan, whom he called Steve) and his communications director (Kate Bedingfield, whom he called Press), both of whom were standing near him. And at a Hollywood fund-raiser in 2024, Biden did not recognize George Clooney — among the more recognizable faces on the planet — and had to be reminded who he was.
These are just a few of the copious examples Tapper and Thompson report, all in advance of Biden’s halting and confused performance in his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024. “What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly,” Tapper and Thompson write. “It was not a cold; it was not someone who was underprepared or overprepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired.”
The authors call out a close circle of top Biden aides — Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, among others — for insisting either that the president was fine or that his health was not a major problem. When Biden was running in 2019 and 2020, senior aides treated his age “as simply a political vulnerability, not a serious limitation on his abilities,” Tapper and Thompson write. Four years later, they told themselves that even a reduced Biden would be better than a Trump redux. “Biden, his family and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times
Anyone questioning or even inquiring about Biden’s physical or mental competence faced intense pushback from the White House. When a reporter from a national news outlet began asking about the president’s forgetfulness and confusion, Ricchetti, who served as a counselor to Biden, called her and said the story was false, and that he knew because he was in constant meetings with the president. The reporter, whom the authors do not identify, inferred that if she pursued the story she’d be branded a liar. (“The tacit threat worked,” Tapper and Thompson write.) And when David Axelrod, a former strategist for Barack Obama, publicly raised Biden’s age as a liability, he got an irate phone call from Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff. “Who’s going to beat Trump? President Biden is the only one who has done it. You better have a lot of certainty about a different candidate before you say the president should step aside. The future of the country depends on it!”
Biden began relying more on teleprompters and note cards even for simple gatherings. Members of his cabinet recall meetings that were “terrible” and “uncomfortable” and “so scripted,” even early in his term. “It was like talking to your grandpa,” said a former leader of a European country who saw Biden in 2021. And during a trip with the president in 2022, one Biden cabinet member dismissed the possibility of re-election while chatting with another member: “There’s just no way. He’s too old.”
In the eyes of some Democrats, hiding the truth about a diminished Biden became a self-fulfilling political necessity. After the Trump-Biden debate, some Biden allies began to wonder not only whether he should continue in the race but also whether he was even fit to carry on as president. “But if Democratic officials spoke of the latter publicly, if they told voters the sitting president was in no shape to run the country, they would surely forfeit any chance at winning in November, whether it was Biden or another Democrat at the top of the ticket,” Allen and Parnes write.
It’s more tortured logic — if we admit that we can’t run the country, they won’t let us run the country! — and shows how the imperatives of partisanship can put a nation at risk. (In a sign of how entrenched the mistrust of the Democrats has become on this issue, even Biden’s Stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis, announced on Sunday, has elicited questions about when the president first learned of his disease.)
In “Original Sin” Donilon emerges as a principal villain; in “Fight” it is Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who served as chair of the Biden campaign (and later the Harris campaign) and who “enraged” Democratic donors following Biden’s fateful debate, Allen and Parnes write, dodging questions about the president’s mental competence and about possible alternatives should he depart.
After the debate, the Biden family offered conflicting excuses, arguing that advisers had left the president “unprepared” for the event, but also that “overpreparation” was Biden’s problem, that “his team had filled his head with so many facts, figures and scripted lines that he couldn’t process everything in real time,” Allen and Parnes write. (Tapper and Thompson offer a simpler explanation: Biden took lots of naps during the days he’d blocked out for debate prep.)
Late in the campaign, as the president pondered whether to stay in the race, Donilon continued to tell him that the polling remained tight, that Biden was still competitive, even when the campaign’s pollsters disagreed. Tapper and Thompson report that multiple Democrats, including Obama, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Senator Chuck Schumer, worried that Biden was not getting good information from his campaign regarding the public’s concerns over his performance. Pollsters complained that they delivered their data to Donilon, who would put his own positive spin on it when sharing it with Biden. When Schumer told Biden in mid-July that the president’s own pollsters believed he only had a 5 percent chance of winning,
Biden had a one-word response. “Really?”
It's something to behold and it's long past due. But it seems in the midst of collapsing ratings and massive distrust by the American public of the mainstream media... They're trying salvage what little dignity they have left and to throw themselves on the mercy of the American Public.
Basically...
"We're sorry we lied to you. We're sorry we were buried in the ass of the DNC. We're going to do our best to rebuild what little reputation we have left"
The headline is almost spot on... But it should have said "The Democrats and the Mainstream Media Are the Problem"
Biden Is a Scapegoat. The Democrats Are the Problem.
Loading…
www.nytimes.com
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” is already the big political book of the moment, even before its formal May 20 publication. (For a summary, see the subtitle: “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”) The authors depict a Democratic Party, a White House staff and a Biden campaign that, though aware to varying degrees of the weakness, forgetfulness, confusion and incoherence afflicting Biden, remained largely silent about it, opting instead to accommodate and rationalize. And they describe a president and inner circle so enamored with the Biden mythology — defiant against tough odds, resilient against adversity, solely capable of vanquishing Donald Trump — that any skepticism was forbidden.
Instances of Biden’s decline make up big chunks of “Original Sin.” In 2019, during a bus tour in Iowa, Biden struggled to remember the name of Mike Donilon, a campaign strategist and White House adviser who had worked with him for nearly four decades. In March 2020, Biden forgot the words of the Declaration of Independence. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created by the, you know, you know the thing.”) One day in the White House in 2022, he could not summon the names of his national security adviser (Jake Sullivan, whom he called Steve) and his communications director (Kate Bedingfield, whom he called Press), both of whom were standing near him. And at a Hollywood fund-raiser in 2024, Biden did not recognize George Clooney — among the more recognizable faces on the planet — and had to be reminded who he was.
These are just a few of the copious examples Tapper and Thompson report, all in advance of Biden’s halting and confused performance in his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024. “What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly,” Tapper and Thompson write. “It was not a cold; it was not someone who was underprepared or overprepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired.”
The authors call out a close circle of top Biden aides — Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, among others — for insisting either that the president was fine or that his health was not a major problem. When Biden was running in 2019 and 2020, senior aides treated his age “as simply a political vulnerability, not a serious limitation on his abilities,” Tapper and Thompson write. Four years later, they told themselves that even a reduced Biden would be better than a Trump redux. “Biden, his family and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times
Anyone questioning or even inquiring about Biden’s physical or mental competence faced intense pushback from the White House. When a reporter from a national news outlet began asking about the president’s forgetfulness and confusion, Ricchetti, who served as a counselor to Biden, called her and said the story was false, and that he knew because he was in constant meetings with the president. The reporter, whom the authors do not identify, inferred that if she pursued the story she’d be branded a liar. (“The tacit threat worked,” Tapper and Thompson write.) And when David Axelrod, a former strategist for Barack Obama, publicly raised Biden’s age as a liability, he got an irate phone call from Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff. “Who’s going to beat Trump? President Biden is the only one who has done it. You better have a lot of certainty about a different candidate before you say the president should step aside. The future of the country depends on it!”
Biden began relying more on teleprompters and note cards even for simple gatherings. Members of his cabinet recall meetings that were “terrible” and “uncomfortable” and “so scripted,” even early in his term. “It was like talking to your grandpa,” said a former leader of a European country who saw Biden in 2021. And during a trip with the president in 2022, one Biden cabinet member dismissed the possibility of re-election while chatting with another member: “There’s just no way. He’s too old.”
In the eyes of some Democrats, hiding the truth about a diminished Biden became a self-fulfilling political necessity. After the Trump-Biden debate, some Biden allies began to wonder not only whether he should continue in the race but also whether he was even fit to carry on as president. “But if Democratic officials spoke of the latter publicly, if they told voters the sitting president was in no shape to run the country, they would surely forfeit any chance at winning in November, whether it was Biden or another Democrat at the top of the ticket,” Allen and Parnes write.
It’s more tortured logic — if we admit that we can’t run the country, they won’t let us run the country! — and shows how the imperatives of partisanship can put a nation at risk. (In a sign of how entrenched the mistrust of the Democrats has become on this issue, even Biden’s Stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis, announced on Sunday, has elicited questions about when the president first learned of his disease.)
In “Original Sin” Donilon emerges as a principal villain; in “Fight” it is Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who served as chair of the Biden campaign (and later the Harris campaign) and who “enraged” Democratic donors following Biden’s fateful debate, Allen and Parnes write, dodging questions about the president’s mental competence and about possible alternatives should he depart.
After the debate, the Biden family offered conflicting excuses, arguing that advisers had left the president “unprepared” for the event, but also that “overpreparation” was Biden’s problem, that “his team had filled his head with so many facts, figures and scripted lines that he couldn’t process everything in real time,” Allen and Parnes write. (Tapper and Thompson offer a simpler explanation: Biden took lots of naps during the days he’d blocked out for debate prep.)
Late in the campaign, as the president pondered whether to stay in the race, Donilon continued to tell him that the polling remained tight, that Biden was still competitive, even when the campaign’s pollsters disagreed. Tapper and Thompson report that multiple Democrats, including Obama, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Senator Chuck Schumer, worried that Biden was not getting good information from his campaign regarding the public’s concerns over his performance. Pollsters complained that they delivered their data to Donilon, who would put his own positive spin on it when sharing it with Biden. When Schumer told Biden in mid-July that the president’s own pollsters believed he only had a 5 percent chance of winning,
Biden had a one-word response. “Really?”
