As I am writing this well after midnight on Sunday, it looks like Biden is going to be forced out of the race. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
The Biden family and their closest hangers-on have circled the wagons, but the howling mob of feckless media and Liz Warrens are firing more and more arrows their way. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
And on the inside they’ve got… non-Dr. Jill (“The patient is fine, everything’s fine. He answered all the questions!”) Oh, and also Hunter. Which isn’t great, because when you’re surrounded by aggressive opponents you need crack shots, not crack heads.
Meanwhile, the hypocritical chutzpah of the MSM knows no bounds. Two small-time radio hosts are in trouble because they admitted that within the last week, Biden’s team sent them pre-arranged questions to ask Biden during radio interviews. One of the hosts was fired, and the media is in a huff, shocked – Shocked, I tells ya! – that “journalists” would collude with a Democrat candidate!
(Remember that time when CNN hack Donna Brazile admitted to giving Hillary the debate questions beforehand? And you can watch her right now on ABC News!)
Another good example is this Breitbart headline from Saturday: “Hollywood Donors Rage at Katzenberg for Convincing Them Biden Wasn’t Too Old to Run.”
CONVINCING them!
The sub-head is even better: “People Are Pissed, They Feel Betrayed”
Yes! Katzenberg pulled the wool over their eyes and convinced them, and now they feel betrayed.
I can see it now. They’re all sitting around a long table in a conference room, yelling in righteous anger:
“You told us that Biden was the best Biden ever, and that he was in great shape and at the top of his game. We held debate-viewing parties expected him to show up with a towering intellect and rapier wit, as well as the youthful virility and animal magnetism of a Martin Simpson-esque figure! And out totters the Crypt Keeper? You betrayed us!”
They’re a bunch of image-obsessed people in an image-conscious business, yet they want us to believe that they never noticed Biden’s physical decrepitude and mental infirmity over the last four years? The evidence was all around them, piled as high as human excrement in the streets of San Francisco, but they somehow managed to overlook it.
Even when it came in the form of Robert Hur’s sobering report, and the transcripts that backed it up. Hur testified about the evidence that Biden was guilty of retaining and disclosing classified materials, and that he was only refraining from charging Biden because he thought that a jury might resist convicting because Biden lacked “mens rea,” Latin for “guilty mind.”
This legal concept involves the diminished capacity of a defendant, and is sometimes paraphrased in our system along the lines of, “Did/does the defendant understand that he was doing something wrong when he committed the crime?”
But everyone with functioning eyes – including those Hollywood liars – could see that Biden lacks “mens rea.” Along with “mens vivi” (a living mind) and “mens muneris” (a functioning mind).
Even more troubling, during his meeting with the Pope, he also lacked a “mens room.” (HA!)
It’s gotten so bad that even Rob Reiner is out. After still defending Biden last week, Reiner put out a tweet yesterday calling for Biden to step down. My favorite part of the tweet is the first sentence: “It’s time to stop f***ing around.”
NOW, Rob? You’ve been “F-ing” around on this planet for 77 years, and NOW it’s time to stop? (I can hear Archie saying it now, “Stifle yourself, Meathead!”
When you’ve lost Meathead, it’s really Joe-ver.
The Biden team’s only argument about the debacle that has gotten any traction – by which I mean the MSM has taken it up and repeated it shamelessly – is that Trump lied so, SO much during the debate. Which is infuriating, in the context in which every understandable word out of Biden’s mouth was dishonest.
Sure, Trump tells lies. Like all politicians, and like all of us. But from the first days of his administration, I’ve been aggravated by the mismatch between the way the MSM talks about Trump’s “lies” vs. Democrat lies.
Most of Trump’s lies are exaggerations (his inauguration had the biggest crowd in the history of earth, he had the safest border in the history of the country), or half-truths (nobody thought Roe was a good decision), and many of them are about petty/trivial issues (Does anybody believe that his WH accurately reported his weight, or that he just won a non-senior club golf championship?)
A lot of his “lies” are bombastic generalizations of an accurate statement. (Saying “we had the best environmental numbers ever,” isn’t checkable; saying “everybody in the world respected us” cannot be literally true, etc.)
And many of Trump’s lies are actually Democrat lies about what he said. He didn’t tell people to inject bleach to fight covid, he didn’t call Nazis “very fine people,” etc.
Compare those to the lies told by Dems that the MSM never seems to notice.
Obama rammed through a partisan health care plan impacting 1/6th of the economy on two monumental lies: if you like your doctor and your health plan, you can keep both under Obamacare.
The repeated Democrat lies about the Russian hoax hampered Trump’s administration for years. The Hunter laptop Russian disinformation lie may have changed the outcome of the close election in 2020. Constant lies about race – cops kill tens of thousands of unarmed, innocent blacks every year; the 1619 project; there is institutional racism everywhere – have poisoned race relations.
And the MSM lie that is unraveling right now – that Joe Biden is a mentally and physically healthy man capable of being a competent president – has to be the most consequential lie of the last decade, at least.
This double standard has always been aggravating, but a comment I heard on a podcast over the weekend really crystallized the issue for me.
Regular readers know that I am a language nerd. Connotations of different words can be crucial, and I really value searching until you find just the right word. As a fan of the late, great Norm MacDonald and other great comedians, I see this in comedy as much as in politics.
I’m thinking of an old Chris Rock bit in which he heard someone say that Biggie Smalls and Tupac were “assassinated.” Rock said – and if you know his stuff, you can hear him spitting out each word — “JFK was assassinated. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Them [N words] got SHOT!”
I thought about that bit yesterday when I heard a disillusioned liberal on Joe Rogan’s show going off on what hypocrites Dems are for calling Trump a liar while they excuse all of Biden’s lies. He said that Biden is a total liar, while Trump is just a “bullshi**er.”
That clicked. It’s the right word.
I think Trump is much more than that; he can actually be a very strong communicator. (During and after the 2016 election, Scott Adams wrote some very insightful analysis about this strength of Trump’s, and how the arrogant left had missed it.)
But he definitely mixes in a lot of a salesman’s puffery. And his loose and undisciplined way of speaking often gives his enemies ammunition, as when he uses schoolyard insults, or threatened to put Hillary in jail if he won.
On the other hand, which is worse: sarcastically threatening to be a “dictator for a day” and joking about locking up his opponents, while not doing it? Or actually behaving like a quasi-dictator?
(As Obama did when, after admitting dozens of times that he cannot lawfully change immigration laws on his own, did just that. Or as Biden did when he tried to force millions of Americans to take an untested vaccine, stuck the public with billions of unconstitutionally “forgiven” student loans, and unilaterally opened our borders.)
I can hear Chris Rock saying it in my head:
“Trump might be a bullshi**er. But those guys are LIARS!”
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 