Welcome to the cover-up for the cover-up

Are Joe Biden and his handlers telling the truth about his prostate cancer diagnosis? The way they've tried to hide his cognitive decline gives us reason to ask hard questions.

Too bad Robert Hur didn't do a prostate exam during his interview with Joe Biden too.

Yesterday, former president Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. said he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. The overall five-year survival rate for such cancers is under 40 percent, according to the American Cancer Society.

In normal times, the only decent response would be sympathy for Biden and his family.

These are not normal times.

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(Whatever the circumstances, the truth matters. For under 20 cents a day.)

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Both the timing of Biden’s cancer announcement and the news itself raise more questions than they answer. Biden, his family, and his handlers cannot dodge them.

For Biden is not an ordinary 82-year-old man whose comfort after a devastating diagnosis is paramount. Less than a year ago, he was the president of the United States - and seeking another term. Had he won, the reins of the American nuclear arsenal would be in the hands of a sick and likely dying man.

The timing first. Yesterday’s statement came as Biden and the people around him face the sharpest scrutiny yet over their efforts to hide his mental decline as president.

On Friday, tapes leaked from Biden’s October 2023 interview with Robert Hur, the prosecutor who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents, revealing Biden was nearly incoherent. Tomorrow, a new book about the coverup comes out. The excepts that have already been published show it is a massive exercise in score-settling from Democrats who stayed quiet before Biden’s disastrous debate performance last June exposed his incapacity to the world.

Biden and his wife recently tried to deflect the criticism with interviews claiming he remains mentally fit. Those did not go well. New Yorker editor David Remnick — the capo di tutti capi of the liberal media elite — said that Biden’s stumbling appearance on The View on May 8 had only reinforced the belief that “it would’ve been a bad idea for Joe Biden to risk being President into his mid-eighties.”

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(Joe and the Juicers!¹)

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So yesterday’s announcement can fairly be seen as a desperate effort to change the subject, to not-so-subtly argue that the truth about Biden’s decline no longer matters. Let the aged king take one final bow and shuffle offstage as the curtain comes down.

Except Biden didn’t act alone.

And whatever happens to him, the people who aided — if not outright drove — the cover-up of his mental incapacity cannot be allowed to use his illness to avoid the fullest examination of the efforts to hide the truth from the American people.

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Then there is the news itself.

Prostate cancer is easy to diagnose, thanks to a simple blood test that measures levels of a hormone called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. Any man² with unusually high levels of PSA can then be examined for malignancies.

Prostate cancer is also usually very slow-growing. In fact, it is so easy to diagnose and slow-growing that doctors now counsel most men against getting a PSA. The Centers for Disease Control now recommends men over 70 not routinely get the test.

The reason is that the diagnosis can lead to a “medical cascade” of tests and treatments, some with serious side effects, for prostate cancers that men would otherwise never know they had. Only in the rare instances when prostate cancer metastasizes does its lethality explode.

But Joe Biden was not most men over 70. He had the world’s most important job, president of the United States. And he had a family history of aggressive cancers. Did his doctor really not give him PSAs before or during his presidency? If not, why not? If so, what did the tests show?

As Dr. Greg Murphy, a urologist and Republican member of Congress, wrote on X yesterday:

Prostate cancer is diagnosed by a blood test called prostate specific antigen, or PSA as well as rectal examination. Makes me wonder why someone running for President of the United States, especially someone who is elderly, did not have these examinations. Screening is critical.

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(Help me screen for the truth. For less than 20 cents a day.)

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Of course, Joe Biden might be telling the truth.

It is possible he happens to have a very rare and aggressive form of prostate cancer that developed quickly. It is also possible that for whatever reason his doctor decided not to give him either PSA tests or rectal examinations and a slow-growing and treatable cancer turned into a likely lethal malignancy.

The first would be terrible luck. The second would be medical malpractice. But though either is possible, neither seems at all likely.

What is likely is that the legacy media — which circled the wagons around Biden even after Robert Hur tried to tell the world the truth — will accuse anyone who asks questions about what really happened of being cruel to a sick old man.

As with Covid, the propaganda is not so much Orwellian in its ferocity and effort to intimidae as late-Soviet in its contempt for the intelligence of its audience. We have gone from kids will be fine without in-person schooling and mRNA is a miracle cure to a man with unlimited access to the world’s best medical care wound up with cancer in his bones before anyone noticed.

The good news is that if the rebellion on X is any guide, this effort at narrative control is already failing. People learned during Covid that if they let the media and public health establishment cow them into silence, they and their children would suffer.

They aren’t going to let the lies metastasize this time.

1. A reference to “Joe and the Juice,” an overpriced coffee-and-fruit-drinks chain headquartered in Copenhagen and coming soon to a hipster neighborhood near you.

2. Or transgender woman, since transgender women have prostates too!