Joe Biden, the 46th President of the United States, is dying.
With him, the last embers of legacy media’s credibility.
On Friday night, Hunter Biden told the BBC Joe Biden’s prostate cancer has “metastasized into his bones and further.” Hunter added, “As long as he [Joe] is alive, he will continue to fight.”
As long as he is alive?
How else to read those words but as a son’s eulogy for a father who can still (barely) hear it? And metastasized further is the cruelest diagnosis. I suspect even Biden’s near-term survival is in doubt. The odds he will live through January 2029, when his second term would have ended had he been reelected, are long indeed.
Let us all take a moment for Joseph Robinette Biden. (Last year, I wrote a piece called “Why we need to humiliate Joe Biden.” We’re past that now.)
He wasn’t a good President, but he wasn’t a bad man. I believe he meant to do well by the country. (No doubt you will have your own thoughts in the comments; please be kind.) In any case, Republican complaints about the personal corruption of the Bidens ring hollow with Donald Trump enriching himself unfathomably, building foreign-funded luxury hotels atop the swamp he promised to drain.
This isn’t really about Joe Biden. The rider on the pale horse comes for him, and us all.
This is about the Fourth Estate.
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(Taxes are no longer inevitable, especially when you control the Internal Revenue Service. Alas, there is no Internal Death Service to cut deals with.)
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Throughout Biden’s presidency, nearly the entire legacy media tried to hide the truth about his health from the world, and especially American voters.
The efforts grew more intense after Robert K. Hur, a federal prosecutor, released a report in February 2024 calling Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur had interviewed Biden in October 2023 for his investigation into classified documents found at Biden’s Delaware house. His report recounted Biden’s memory lapses in devastating detail.
The media insisted otherwise.
In June 2023, the New York Times wrote how Biden
was awakened at 3 a.m. while on a trip to Asia and told that a missile had struck Poland, touching off a panic that Russia might have expanded the war in Ukraine to a NATO ally. Within hours in the middle of the night, Mr. Biden consulted his top advisers, called the president of Poland and the NATO secretary general, and gathered fellow world leaders to deal with the crisis.
If this anecdote reads like bad fiction, that’s because it is. Does anyone believe Biden was awake at 3 p.m. in 2023, much less 3 a.m.?
The same story referred to Biden as
Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world.
I feel like I have to say this a lot when I quote legacy media outlets, but nope, I am not making those words up. I couldn’t make them up.
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In 2024, as Biden’s lapses mounted, as he froze during speeches and referred to long-dead foreign leaders, as he wandered off stages and across lawns despite the best efforts of his aides, the media treated us to lectures on video “deepfakes” and “cheapfakes.”
The latter referred to accurate and real videos that made Biden look bad and were thus unpalatable to left-leaning legacy reporters. They were the filmed counterpart to “misinformation” about Covid — studies that might undercut support for lockdowns or vaccines and thus had to be shouted down. Biden was running for reelection. He could not be replaced as the Democrats’ candidate. The media had to stand with him.
Of course, all the defenses and omissions and outright lies from Biden’s defenders came to naught on June 27, 2024, when Biden had to stand alone on stage to debate Donald Trump, a fight that would have been stopped in the first round had a referee been able to step in.
A month of further humiliation followed (including my scoop that a doctor specializing Parkinson’s disease had repeatedly visited the White House), before Biden finally bowed to the inevitable and quit his reelection campaign.
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Now, barely two years later, Biden is nearing the end of the road.
Had he somehow been reelected, he would have about 60 percent of his term remaining, and the United States would be facing the prospect of an unelected President Kamala Harris to serve through 2029.
Of course, vice-presidents have taken over before, and the republic has survived. But this case would have been different, because Harris’s ascension would have come after intentional media deception, not an assassin’s bullet. Worse, we know now that given the chance to choose her, voters rejected her.
The Fourth Estate dereliction here is unforgivable.
Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, we are better off to have him in office, facing a legacy media that openly dislikes and opposes him, than the reverse, a President who can depend on the unflagging support of the chattering classes.
In a democracy, the will of the people constrains the President more than any constitutional or procedural safeguard — as Trump has seen, and as his own actions show (to wit, his decision to back down from aggressive street-level immigration enforcement after the shootings in Minnesota). Even now, the media, in all its forms, represents the most powerful force in both shaping and reflecting that will.
When a President fights reporters, the contest is ugly but fair, and the truth will ultimately emerge. When a President and the media work together to hide reality, the truth faces long odds.
The June 27 debate was an extraordinary and unlikely moment. Had it not happened, had Biden’s advisors told him to play turtle until Election Day 2024 and let the media carry him across the line, he would be dying in the Oval Office instead of at home.
And that would be a tragedy for him — and more importantly for all of us.
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(Robert Hur tells the truth)
I'm sorry, but I disagree. Biden IS a bad man. A very bad man. He was corrupt to the core, selling influence for decades to enribh his family. And no, you can't compare that to a development company continuing to to what development companies do.
Biden also tried to paint half the country as evil fascists for disagreeing with him. He demanded that we take experimental medicines to keep our jobs or go to school. He oversaw a justice department that was seeking to punish people for being Catholic (they're terrorists!) or white (worse!).
So I don't feel very charitiable to BIden or his family. Yes, others were just as corrupt, but the Clinton Foundation was erected with the veneer of a respected, sophisticated organization. Not so the Biden Crime Family. They are as trashy as it gets.
Let's face it. Biden was the nation's first Trailer Trash president.
He cheated with Jill on her husband, had a bizarre(euphemistically kind) relationship with his daughter, was inappropriately attracted to female children, despicably treated Clarence Thomas, was involved in Ukraine corruption with son Hunter, was a terrible and demented president who was not in control of his faculties. He was NOT a good or decent or kind man!