The Media Want the Flaming Wreckage of the Biden Campaign to Explode — to Cover Their Tracks

By Jeffrey Blehar

Sunday, July 07, 2024

 

It is July 7, 2024 — well before the conventions, well before what used to be known in my childhood as “the real campaign,” the one that theoretically begins after Labor Day — and every single Republican (or, to be honest, objective political oddsmaker) finds himself playing an idle holiday-weekend parlor game: “How can Trump or the GOP somehow screw this one up?” (Answer: It’s Trump and the GOP, so just like the bullet with your name on it, you’ll probably never see it coming.)

 

Understand that conservative commentators are profoundly unused to seeing Republicans in a commanding presidential lead unless they were around for the Reagan/Bush years, and we certainly never expected to associate it with Donald Trump of all people. But it’s sinking in. Because right now, every single moderately intelligent person not explicitly paid to claim otherwise believes — even if only in that darkest part of their hearts they examine when ruinously drunk or falling fitfully asleep — that Joe Biden is a dead man walking, in multiple senses of that term. (Ah, the rich metaphorical opportunities our present political moment offers.)

 

The debate car-crash from ten days ago has not been salvaged in any way. Biden is in fact still trapped in its media cycle, struggling to escape the bent wreckage, and the interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC was exactly the sort of sub-adequate response precisely calculated to strike despair into the hearts of Democratic partisans: not as “bad” as the debate but still appalling in any objective respect, and worse so after that kind of public priming. No, the Biden campaign is still a destroyed hulk ablaze by the side of the road; the only question is whether the fire reaches the gas tank (kaboom!) before it’s extinguished. Now here come the media, rushing to the scene of the disaster — but this time as pyromaniacs, not firemen.

 

This long holiday weekend has thus seen a gushing torrent of breaking stories reporting past incidents of Biden’s mental malfunctions, heretofore concealed from the public — as if a hundred spindly journalists had gathered for a collective Herculean effort, weedily laboring to reroute an entire river’s worth of “We Were Lied To” news coverage toward the Biden White House in order to clear out years of accumulated disgrace. They betray too much with their sudden overeagerness; this is a river of gasoline heading toward the flaming wreckage of the Biden campaign, not water.

 

For the media do not want to put out this fire, they want the car to explode — and ideally soon, while there’s still time to wheel Kamala out there on the road and see how bald her tires are. Which story caught your attention? Was it the one about Biden’s lapses at various foreign and G-7 meetings, known to world leaders and the traveling press at the time but kept quiet until now? Or was it the one about how the Biden administration has been doing pay-for-play “access” fundraising at the White House? Maybe it was the revelation that black radio broadcasters “interviewing” Biden during campaign season have instead been forced to choose from a small list of pre-written questions, the answers to which had been scripted in advance.

 

The honest answer for me was none of them. I have watched the mainstream media’s most connected and prolific journalists file one blazing-hot “scoop” after another about various scandalous and shocking Biden mental failures with a mixture of contempt and disgust. The stories may be new; their underlying thrust should have been addressed four years ago — and was indeed tentatively raised by media back then — before he won South Carolina and secured a nomination most journalists were hoping would go to Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders. At that point the media’s class duties — promote the Democratic party line as long as it hews to progressive priorities — kicked in, and we were no longer allowed to discuss this matter. So forgive me if I am not as titillated as the rest of you to read yet another “breaking news” revelation about how Biden once drooled on Jake Sullivan’s French cuffs during a State Department briefing, or whatever. Instead I ask myself: Why now, friends? Whence have you found your steely new sense of journalistic purpose? Why this sudden attack of reportorial conscience?

 

The reason, of course, is that the mainstream media were caught not merely with their pants down but in flagrante delicto, making sweaty, grunting, undignified love to their true occupation: stewarding the Official Democratic Line that Joe Biden is so healthy he expects to compete in the next Ironman Triathlon. (“Don’t worry, kid — there’s a promotion around the corner for ya if you survive the next round of layoffs.”) Now they’re infuriated, not at being lied to, but rather at their loss of face with an American public they keep attempting to swindle. Almost everyone in the Washington press corps knew — or had heard through the grapevine — that Biden was asleep at the wheel of his own administration, but knew full well the consequences of pursuing that in their reporting: To do so was to be cast by the administration, social media, and your peers alike into the professional Phantom Zone. Instead, write a story about how “crazy right-wingers are lying about Biden” and move on. (“We already covered this in our paper!”)

 

Don’t take my word for it, take Jill Abramson’s. Take Olivia Nuzzi’s, who just wrote an intolerable piece for New York magazine titled “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden” where she unwittingly revealed that she’d been sitting on this story for over half a year. Hence the media rage: They did their job — why, look at how enthusiastically they coordinated with the White House on the “cheap fakes” story a mere two weeks ago! — but Biden failed to keep up his end of the deal, and now he’s going to pay. Not for being a senile vegetable posing as commander in chief while directed by a coterie of Jill Biden’s secretaries, mind you, but for dropping the curtain and revealing how deep an inside game the press has always played with the Democrats. “We simply had no idea!” is not going to wash with an American public that itself has been deeply concerned with Biden’s decline for years, only to be told how ignorant we were for falling for “cheap fakes” and Fox News propaganda.

 

Never again. With each additional piece — each “Now It Can Be Told!” preface, each additional scandalous detail about Biden being non compos mentis — my blood begins to curdle. Oh, the sudden enthusiasm with which the media is now reporting on this! And why now? Because it can no longer be hidden! If Biden had succeeded somehow in hiding it — or had he declined to debate altogether, as most observers expected him to before he (surprisingly) agreed to an early debate — then it is undeniably true that none of these pieces would be written now. Did we experience an orgy of self-recriminative “make up” reporting about the implosion of the Russiagate hoax? Or about Hunter Biden’s laptop being authentic? How about Covid likely being a Chinese lab leak? Of course not — no apology was necessary in the media’s mind because those were no longer “live” issues, and their suppression of the truth had served its necessary purpose. This time the ruse was exposed before the con had been completed. Now the only job: Get a new shyster in to run at the top of the ticket and complete the mission.

 

It’s easy to get lost in bleak humor (or score-settling) and lose sight of the sheer magnitude of what it is we are living through: The president of the United States is an empty shell of himself mentally. His praetorian guard has been keeping his near-complete mental collapse a secret for possibly years now, and the media engaged in a “conspiracy of silence” (Nuzzi’s words, not mine) to conceal it from voters, out of reflexive (in the truest sense of the word) partisan and professional self-interest. Very Smart People tell me that my sense of complete betrayal and abiding disgust is a feeling peculiar only to Republicans and political anoraks — chumps who care too much, in other words. Perhaps so.

 

But the question Charlie Cooke posed last week should be the same one you hang on to as well: If the media claims it has been lied to about the state of Biden’s health for all these long years, then maybe they should investigate that? How that happened? How much did Kamala Harris — Biden’s almost certain replacement, should he step down — know? When did she know it? A real media would start from the premise that she is just as disqualified by helping to conceal Biden’s collapse as Biden and his people themselves are, and force her to prove otherwise. A real media wouldn’t play a balancing game in its head, saying, “Let’s not push her too hard, we don’t want to help the Other Guy.” This is not a real media, however, so I will invoke Betteridge’s Law by answering the question Charlie merely posed in his headline: Will the media seriously investigate how they were “misled” about Biden’s health? No. That would mean investigating themselves.