Wednesday, July 24, 2024

The Graceless Exit

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

 

Spare me all the praise for Joe Biden as a selfless hero who has put aside his ego and ambition to do what is right for the country. Joe Biden did not give up the presidency. His candidacy for reelection was euthanized by his own party, while they thought nothing of him and everything about the inheritance he could squander if they allowed the candidacy to live any longer. This was like watching a Canadian Medical Assistance in Dying scandal, with the president physically and verbally resisting the “dignity” his party offered him.

 

“Who put NATO back together, Jack?”

 

“Take your Paxlovid and shut it, Gramps!”

 

For weeks, the media hive mind and elected Democrats have been threatening to trash the reputation of Joe Biden and his family, a reputation they have routinely humiliated themselves defending in recent years. Think of the lengths they went to to describe the Hunter Biden story as foreign propaganda, even when they knew that Hunter was (in the words of Daniel Foster) something akin to a character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Think of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski going on and on about how Joe Biden’s mental acuity was only just now reaching its peak, having recently been liberated from his previous “Irish” temper and extremism.

 

The man was stabbed in the face by people he loyally served, such as former president Barack Obama, who was reportedly orchestrating the various statements and leaks that undermined confidence in Joe Biden. He almost didn’t have to bother; the media was suddenly in full froth. The whole thing had the quality of a Warner Bros. cartoon, with anvils falling out of the sky onto Joe Biden’s head, timed to do maximum damage.

 

Press: Oh, by the way, President Biden hasn’t had an unscripted full cabinet meeting in years. BANG! Exclusive: Hollywood Donors Are Abandoning Him. BANG! Oh, the Biden family has a scheduled meeting for a photo shoot; let’s present it as a meeting at which they are discussing potential resignation. BANG! Exclusive: Did you know Biden has just been skipping his meetings with foreign leaders, even ones who deliberately set them early in the afternoon so he could sleep? BANG! Latest: Biden is being minded almost exclusively by Hunter Biden, who you might remember is the legally imperiled monster who addicted his deceased brother’s wife to crack. BANG!

 

There are some who similarly want to praise the Democratic Party and its elites for soberly organizing, for reinstituting the smoke-filled room and saving their party from the extremism of the voters.

 

This too is a special form of insanity. The Democratic Party and the enormous media hive mind that protects it had been deliberately ignoring and covering up Joe Biden’s deterioration for years. They would have continued to go along with this outrageous abuse of the executive branch — deliberately running an incompetent — for as long as they could. They only stopped because the debate performance so badly exposed them that they could no longer collectively will themselves to deny a fact that the vast majority of the public and the vast majority of Democratic voters had accepted long ago: that Joe Biden was too old and infirm to be president of the United States.

 

The last functional emotional register left in Biden’s quiver is solemnity. And yet he didn’t get even the simulation of a dignified exit. The announcement that he was exiting from the presidential race was delivered via an unmemorable bit of awkward prose, filed directly onto a social-media platform that most elite progressives claim to hate and that is owned by a confirmed donor to his opponent.

 

Now the same Democrats who insisted until just a few weeks ago that any question about the president’s competence is just the product of right-wing misinformation and “cheap fakes” are assuring you that they can make “fetch happen.” Kamala 2024. She’s part of something called “brat girl summer.” I’m sure that will help her run up the margins in Scranton that Biden did.

No comments: