“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926
We thought the "suddenly" was the debate, but it wasn't. There were still questions about Biden's fitness. There were still holdouts, Biden himself among them.
This week, among the tell-all books, the audiotapes of the interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, and yesterday, with the cancer announcement, Biden is now fully bankrupt.
Bankruptcy is a chance to start over. It cleans the slate. It frees Democrats to tell the truth, at long last.
I witnessed the "gradually" up close. My first face-to-face meeting with Biden was in Iowa in the late summer, 2019. The first photos I took were these:
I was shocked. This was a stump speech, the most basic, first step in politics, a practiced speech from the heart. But here was Biden using a teleprompter. I wrote about it on August 28, 2019, trying to get clear just what was Biden's state of physical and mental health.
Attending a Biden Town Hall outside Des Moines, I witnessed and experienced the crush of people following his speech. I noticed that he seemed slender, possibly a bit frail, but that he stood very erect. He did not appear befuddled. His voice was strong.
On November 10, 2019, I made a sadder report. I said I agreed with attendees at an event who said "It was a yawn," and "He seems really older than I thought he would be," and "He rambled on and on." I wrote that "his responses to questions were free-association rambles going on for five to eight minutes. The unspoken message is weakness and lack of focus."
So how did he win the Democratic nomination? He was the viable alternative to Bernie Sanders, who Democrats thought was an unelectable person who proudly advocated "Democratic Socialism." Americans weren't going to elect a Socialist. Biden won the general election because he had periods of kindly lucidity and competence, which the public saw from his curated basement-room campaign during Covid shutdowns. And he was the alternative to Trump who came across as crazy. Eighty-one million Americans rejected Trump.
But then Biden's presidency was a long, gradual decline, largely hidden from the public. The person who told the truth about Biden's decline was, alas, Donald Trump. But "gradually" is uneven. Biden had good moments -- good-enough moments. I saw him in 2023. He was OK, but rambled. But the campaign forbade people to make recordings. They were afraid of a screw-up. That was the value proposition for Biden: Biden was good enough and he wasn't Trump.
Now it is all falling apart. Original Sin, a book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, describes the coverup. The audiotapes of Biden talking with the special counsel are out and we can listen to a confused, vague old man. Hur was right. A jury would not find Biden competent to have knowingly stolen documents.
Now the cancer diagnosis. Joe Biden had no business whatever running for re-election. Men in their 70s get prostate exams. We get PSA tests. We get a finger probe. Prostate cancer with a Gleason score of 9 does not sneak up on a guy, certainly not a guy with a White House doctor on site.
There it is, the simple truth can be spoken. The emperor has no clothes. Biden lied to us. His wife lied to us. Biden's circle of advisors lied to us.
The public saw two people unfit for office and chose the strong one. Kamala Harris positioned herself as the stand-in for Biden, not his replacement.
But Democrats aren't stuck the way that Harris was stuck. Bankruptcy frees a debtor to move forward, with debts restructured or eliminated. The reputational bankruptcy of Biden gives Democrats room to say aloud the truth that has been laid bare. Biden running for re-election was wrong. Morally wrong, not just politically risky. No need to sugarcoat it, which simply continues the gaslighting, as if maybe there is some doubt. There is no longer any doubt in the minds of people paying attention. Biden should not have run for reelection. Shame on Joe. Shame on Jill. And shame on anyone who participated in the coverup.
Who will be free to tell this truth? Probably a governor or someone far away from Biden. Probably not Pete Buttigieg, a Cabinet member. Probably not a senator. I cannot think of a single Democratic senator who spoke up to warn us about Biden and publicly urged him not to run.
The best candidate will be someone with clean hands.
I have written repeatedly here warning of Biden's decline, and was condemned by Democrats who thought I was a traitor. I did a short video in September, 2023, when there should have been a vigorous Democratic primary.
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10 comments:
Whatever.
I encourage Democrats to vote in tomorrow's special election. Turnout is low. MAGA extremism is on our doorstep. If you think "it can't happen here", you are sadly mistaken. VOTE!
That first debate was such a downer for me. I saw the emperor’s nudity and figured we were doomed. I thought Harris would save us, but it was too late. Biden went from hero to I don’t know what by running for a second term. If only he would have not run a year out from the election.
"Now" it's all falling apart? Those with eyes to see and ears to hear knew Biden was well past his sell-by date virtually from the onset of his presidency. Legacy media devotees, not so much. Biden's post-Hur presser--and coverage thereof--was a farce.
Far from a courageous truth-teller, Jake Tapper was in on the fraud all along. He cast alarms about Biden as slurs about a "stutter" (mixing up Iraq and Afghanistan, or saying his executive order student loan reprieve "passed by a vote or two"?).
GOP pols were rightly pilloried for repeating "Let's look forward, not backwards" in reply to questions about January 6. Now Chuck Schumer and his ilk offer the same pap about Biden. Democrats (including media) wonder why they are so distrusted.
As Dave suggests, Democrats could have defeated Trump in 2024 had they approached the race honestly and wisely.
"Whatever"?!
It's intellectually dishonest to equate an attempt to overthrow a legal election with admittedly political malpractice. Do better.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) admitted that the Democrat Party is a “threat to democracy,” as some argue they have not had a fair primary election since 2008, conceding this point during an appearance on Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh.
Schulz, a podcaster, actor, and comedian who identified himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” explained how disappointed he was with Sanders’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. He also pointed to the greater picture of Democrat voters feeling as though they truly have not gotten a say in who their nominee would be over the last several election cycles, as many wanted Sanders, who was viewed as an agent of radical change. However, the Democrat Party seemed to step in and quash his changes.
“We felt that over the last four elections, Democrats, we felt that we didn’t have a say on who could be president,” Schulz said. “We talk a lot about the Republicans being autocrats and oligarchs and taking over democracy, but from the Democrat perspective, and as I’m a lifelong Democrat, I felt like the Democratic Party completely removed the democratic process from its constituents.”
In 2020 we were given a choice between two geezers who were both too old, but one was honorable and the other a criminal so it was a no-brainer. The honorable geezer won, but the inevitable effects of aging became increasingly obvious. Unfortunately, he took too long bowing out of the race.
Now the criminal geezer is back and we see the same thing happening to him. He's always been malevolent and self-obsessed, but if you haven’t noticed how deranged and demented he’s becoming, you aren’t paying attention. The world is.
In the two years before the presidential election, I am certain that many in the liberal mainstream media saw evidence of this, but acted like those three monkeys who could not hear, see, or speak the truth.
But now all of a sudden here they are, proclaiming the truth to the world, now that it’s too late, in a desperate attempt to rescue their own reputations.
Party apparatchiks pull the levers and then pull the wool over the eyes of the voters through a complicit media, the age equivalent of a smoke filled room and now you’re surprised? Fool me once but continue to fool me and I won’t play your games.
Wow, look at that photo. The pot calling the kettle black. You look OLD...OMG!!! Joe Biden is much better looking.
Thank you Joe Biden for your service to our country. There are Americans who appreciate what you accomplished and have not turned on you like a pack of vicious wolves. The haters are enjoying every minute of this very unfortunate development. They are sad, little people.
Some folks really enjoy their ageism and ableism. Something is wrong with them.
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