The political/media establishment that lied to you about President Joe Biden will lie to you about the new Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
When Special Counsel Robert Hur in February declined to prosecute Biden over his technically illegal mishandling of classified documents, in part because a prospective jury would be disinclined to convict an "elderly man with a poor memory" who has "diminished faculties in advancing age," the reaction from the White House was swift and terrible.
"They don't know what they're talking about," the president snapped to reporters that evening. "My memory is fine." (Alas, not fine enough to prevent Biden at that same brief press conference from mixing up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico and falsely accusing Hur of bringing up during questioning the subject of his son Beau's death.)
Hur's assessment of the president's memory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre charged the next day, was "gratuitous," "unacceptable," and "does not live in reality."
But the most over-the-top administration attack on the Department of Justice messenger, and on a message that would be so undeniable by July that Biden felt impelled to drop out of the presidential race, came from Harris.
"The way that the president's demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and [is] clearly politically motivated," Harris claimed at a community forum the day after Hur's report. "We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw."
We Americans have, through soul-deadening experience, come to expect a piddling level of integrity from our elected officials, particularly as they push ever higher up the greasy pole of political power. What makes Harris' February brazenness all the more difficult to digest this fall is the knowledge that an entire swath of allegedly truth-seeking individuals and institutions will be enthusiastically abetting the Democratic nominee's attacks on veracity, much as they disgraced themselves by doing the same with her boss.
Let us not forget before being subsumed by subsequent events (including the July assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump) that Hur's report did not exactly arrive in a cognitive vacuum. In just a handful of days prior, Biden confused French President Emmanuel Macron with the long-dead François Mitterrand (while initially saying Mitterrand was from Germany), attributed a comment by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the also-deceased Helmut Kohl, and blanked on the contemporarily relevant name of "Hamas."
Watchdog groups had already by this time documented Biden's historic aversion to public questioning—just 32 press briefings (most of them joint appearances with foreign leaders) in his first three years, according to the University of California, Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project, compared to 52 for Trump, 66 for Barack Obama, 65 for George W. Bush, and 111 for Bill Clinton. Biden granted just 74 interviews over that span, many with celebrities and late-night comics, compared to Trump's 273. He discontinued the White House tradition of year-end press conferences, became in 2023 the first president of this century not to make an appearance at an attack site on the anniversary of 9/11, and this year even turned down the traditional softball interview at the Super Bowl.
What few unscripted exchanges that Biden's handlers allowed were fraught with peril. In a solo January 2022 press conference, the president seemed to minimize the possibility of a robust Western response should Russia perpetrate a "minor incursion" into Ukraine. After that event, Jill Biden reportedly chewed out White House staff and helped institute a series of safeguards: a phalanx of human bodies to encircle the president on his short walks to and from Marine One, minders (including, at the 2022 White House Easter Egg Roll, a staffer dressed as the Easter Bunny) ready to whisk POTUS away from unplanned conversations at a moment's notice, as well as the ever-present first lady, ready with a steadying hand on her husband's arm or a hand signal from the audience telling him to cut an answer short.
A November 2023 report in The New York Times on the Biden team's elaborate prophylactic efforts unearthed a memorable and damning name that campaign staffers gave to the operation: "Bubble Wrap."
All of this was widely documented as of February 2024. That's what makes so remarkable what came after, in the 20 weeks between the Hur report and Biden's disastrous brain freeze of a debate performance against Trump. Biden's apologists, impervious to the fact that a majority of his own supporters thought him too old for the presidency, spent months post-Hur berating anyone who believed their own eyes over the establishment's lies.
"Talk of his alleged mental decline," tweeted Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter John Harwood in March, is "utter bullshit." City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis in March excoriated The New York Times for even polling about Biden's age-related fitness. "That they even asked this question is evidence of the bias—the agenda—in their poll," Jarvis wrote on Threads. "Who made age an 'issue'? The credulous Times falling into the right-wing's projection. This is not journalism. Shameful."
When The Wall Street Journal in early June published a 45-source, 3,000-word article under the headline "Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping," Biden's favorite news show, MSNBC's Morning Joe, kicked into overdrive, with host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, calling it "shocking," a "false, biased story," and a "Trump hit piece." (In March, Scarborough had testified that, from his own recent personal experience, Biden was "better than he's ever been intellectually.")
White House pushback on Biden age critiques in the run-up to the June 27 presidential debate proved so successful that a handful of respected outlets—The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, the Poynter Institute—all basically echoed Jean-Pierre's accusations that widely shared recent video clips of the president shuffling around and looking confused at public events all amounted to deceptively edited "cheap fakes" rather than documentary evidence of anything important.
The debate, and the ensuing three weeks of presidential stumblecore until Biden's merciful withdrawal from the 2024 race, put an abrupt stop to this yearslong campaign of shameless gaslighting. But it will not so much as slow down the machinery of propaganda.
None of the liars and hacks mentioned above are likely to suffer a moment's career discomfort after having played the American public for fools. Their operating animus toward and/or campaign marketing about Trump as an existential threat to the continued existence of our constitutional republic will continue to bind all wounds and erase all short-term memory. Meanwhile, Trump's own considerable lying, most consequentially about the integrity of the 2020 election, will also befoul the political atmosphere, driving the headline presidential race further downward into a spiral of hyperbolic bilge.
It took the political class almost no time to apply its old bad habits to the new 2024 reality. Journalists who in 2021 had described Harris as being Biden's dedicated "border czar" issued fact checks denouncing Republicans for now doing the same. The New York Times classified as "disinformation" negative interpretations of Harris' record, such as that she was a "diversity hire." Biden, a legendary fabulist, said in his race withdrawal address that, "When you elected me to this office, I promised to always level with you, to tell you the truth."
But most condescendingly of all may have been the controlling first lady. "To those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed," Jill Biden tweeted after Joe's speech, "my heart is full of gratitude."
Translation: Thanks, suckers, and see you next scam.
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