The Great Democratic Freakout over President Biden’s debate performance is in full swing. The real question is why. What did party leaders expect? The obvious decline in Mr Biden’s cognitive abilities has been transparently evident for well over a year.
What is the explanation for why party leaders, as opposed to the rank-and-file, have insisted that Mr. Biden was just fine, and any suggestion to the contrary was just propaganda emanating from the “far right”. As far as I can tell there are two possible explanations for the behavior of those party leaders.
The first possibility is that Democratic party leaders actually believed that Mr. Biden was up to the job for another 4 years. While this explanation is theoretically possible, it lacks plausibility to put it mildly. Consider the evidence.
Mr Biden has for some time studiously avoided any spontaneous public exposure. He has had almost no press conferences; one-on-one interviews have been few and far between and they have only been with friendly interlocutors. Similarly there have been plenty of videos where Mr. Biden has seemed to drift off into space not knowing where he was. Most recently that included the G7 meeting where on video (see below) he was assisted by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Biden was similarly assisted by former President Obama at a fundraiser in California. And the Wall Street Journal just recently ran a front page story that presented evidence of Biden’s mental deterioration in closed door meetings.
Is it really plausible to believe that the people who worked closely with Biden day-to-day didn’t notice any of this? If so, they are guilty of willful blindness, which also suggests that Biden is surrounded by delusional fanatics who are willing to believe anything provided it advances “the Cause”. Given the current state of geopolitics that fanaticism is cause for alarm.
There is, however, an alternative explanation that is far more plausible. It is that Democratic Party leaders saw Biden’s deterioration and lied about it because (a) they still thought that Biden was their best shot against a Trump restoration and (b) they wished to remain in power, no matter the cost.
Let us consider some of the evidence for this hypothesis. For example, slightly before the first debate of the 2020 race, 51 intelligence officials (some of whom were CIA contractors) released their infamous letter stating that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore all the earmarks of Russian disinformation. We now know conclusively that that assertion was a lie. Further we know that it was arranged by Anthony Blinken, now US Secretary of State.
Now let’s consider U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal comply with a House Judiciary subpoena to turn over the audio tape of Robert Hur’s interview of Biden. That interview concerned Biden’s decision to illicitly retain (and share) possession of national security documents.
Garland’s stated rationale for refusing to turn over the tapes was a claim of executive privilege. This even though he had already turned over the transcripts of the interview, which would seem to obliterate the executive privilege claims.
As justification for his non-compliance Garland insisted that the Republicans would use the tapes to make commercials for the upcoming campaign. In this, Garland is probably correct. But it has no bearing on the question of executive privilege.
Remember that, at the time, Hur declined to prosecute Biden. While he maintained that Biden did in fact willfully share classified information with his ghost writer, he concluded that as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, that he would not charge Biden. In his report he wrote “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur’s conclusion was subject to a storm of criticism by party Grandees. After Biden’s catastrophic debate performance, we now know why. Hur’s description of Biden was undoubtedly accurate and threatened the blow the lid off the cover-up of Biden’s rapidly diminishing mental capacity. Which means the inner circle was well aware of the problem and chose to support and encourage his candidacy anyway.
We can go beyond the various investigations which, while not above the suspicion of partisanship, certainly invite a trench warfare mentality. So let’s consider a statement made by White House Communications director Karine Jean-Pierre. Ms Jean-Pierre came up with this doozy at a White House press briefing:
“Oh, my gosh, he’s the President of the United States, you know, he – I can’t even keep up with him,” Jean-Pierre told CNN’s Don Lemon. “We just got back from New Mexico, we just got back from California … just look at the work that he does, and look what he’s, how he’s delivering for the American public.”
Question: who is naive enough to believe that the (at the time) 47 year old Karine Jean-Pierre had trouble “keeping up with” the then 79 year old Biden.
Answer: Nobody.
This was simply a bald-faced lie, which most of the mainstream press happily consumed and regurgitated.
And so here we have numerous examples of Mr. Biden’s rapid and conspicuous cognitive descent and the accompanying lies of officialdom designed both to obscure the fact and deny the obvious. All of which was helped along by the mainstream press.
Add to this the one-sided coverage of the Israeli-Hamas war; the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots; the dismissive coverage of the Wuhan lab leak theory for the COVID-19 virus; the evidence-free assertions of mask-wearing efficacy; the widespread school shutdowns; the false claims of gender transition reversibility, and a whole host of other deliberate falsehoods. Simply put, there is a pronounced pattern of deliberate deception. Which is to say the whole progressive agenda is shot full of lies.
And necessarily so. Because the progressive agenda is at war with human nature. Anybody who doubts this should just pause for a moment and watch the shenanigans of the transgender movement.
People are not idiots. In the end the truth will be exposed and people will revolt. In this respect the Biden debate episode simply demonstrates the utter futility of the progressive project; it depends on a perpetual cover-up of its results. How are those inner city public schools doing these days? How is modern monetary theory working out? And what is the state of the mythical Social Security Trust Fund?
Never forget that progressivism depends on scores of disinterested “experts” to guide (read coerce) society by transferring power away from individuals and toward the massive bureaucracy of the Administrative state. It necessarily robs individuals of their agency. By treating people as nothing more than cogs in a machine, it inevitably leads to identitarian politics. Not to mention its reliance on the ludicrous presumption that government bureaucrats are disinterested parties who seek merely to “do the right thing”.
In the end, the progressive project depends on a body politic that believes human nature is infinitely malleable; that history is on a predetermined trajectory and a public that buys into the polite (and not so polite) lies of officialdom. And the whole time, officialdom will seek more and more power over the lives of citizens, depriving individuals of their agency.
Ultimately, they will fail as they have done throughout history. They will simply encourage a revolt, which is precisely what is going on right now.
JFB
