Joe Biden’s Age is “Hillary’s emails” 2.0
God help our republic. The media's malfeasance is nothing short of embarrassing. Are we ready for a repeat of 2016?
The past week since the debate between President Joe Biden and the twice-impeached felon, the media has been tripping over itself with its obsession over how poorly Biden did.
Yes, he did.
His performance was abysmal.
Know who else’s was abysmal?
CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash’s, and Donald Trump’s.
Everyone on that stage failed.
But here is where the media is continuing to fail us.
Joe Biden is the most successful incumbent president in a generation. His accomplishments are nothing short of astonishing.
Standing to his right on the stage in Atlanta was a failed businessman who can longer do business in the state of New York and ran a scam online “university” that stole from veterans for which he was ordered to pay a $25 million education fraud settlement (as a sitting president).
One of Donald’s jobs when his father, Fred Trump, ran the family business was to mark housing applications from applicants of color with a “C” so they could be denied housing, for which the Nixon Justice Dept. sued for racial discrimination. (Yes, he was even too racist for Richard Nixon.)
He flaunted his mistress, who became his second wife, around New York in the 1990s while still married to his first wife.
He is an adjudicated rapist.
To “win” the 2016 election, he solicited help from Russia. He then lost the popular vote.
His only legislative “accomplishment” while in office was signing the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” a $1.5 trillion-dollar permanent tax cut to corporations and the wealthy.
Congress impeached him twice — once for attempting to extort the Ukrainian president into finding dirt on Joe Biden, and again for inciting the January 6, 2021 attempted coup to keep himself in power.
While in office, he told 30,573 lies (not “falsehoods,” as the media prefers to call them).
Upon leaving office (reluctantly), he made sure to go back to his Florida golf resort with classified documents, some of which contained nuclear intelligence information, left them lying around in various insecure locations, showed them off to various people, and may have even sold some to foreign governments. (In exchange for what did Saudi Arabia give his son in law, Jared Kushner, $2 billion dollars?)
Two months ago, he promised oil industry executives that, if re-elected, he would destroy the fossil fuel regulations making Biden the most environmentally progressive president in history.
Shortly thereafter, he was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying records to commit election fraud in his effort to conceal from the public sex with an adult film actress before the 2016 election.
Yet, the interminable media narrative has not been about the aforementioned facts but about Joe Biden’s age and alleged “cognitive decline”.
Not the fact his opponent did not answer a single question Tapper and Bash asked him.
Not the fact he lied (surprise!) every time he opened his mouth.
Not the fact he proudly pronounced he would be a “dictator on day one”.
Not the fact that he is only three years younger than Biden and is obviously suffering from his own mental deterioration.
No.
Biden stumbled. He stuttered. He erroneously stated, “We beat Medicare.” He failed to tout his myriad accomplishments to a public likely not paying attention over the past three and half years.
Yes, he blew it.
But he is still a remarkably successful president. That apparently doesn’t seem to matter, though.
Dana Bash and Jake Tapper failed in their duties as journalists moderating a highly anticipated debate.
When Trump claimed “everybody” wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, they did not correct him with the fact that 62% of the American people disagree with the Supreme Court decision that robbed women of bodily autonomy.
When Trump claimed “some states” allow abortions “after birth,” neither spoke up to insist there is not a shred of truth to it.
When Trump claimed that pre-pandemic the country had “the greatest economy in the history of our country. Everything was locked in good,” neither chimed in with a correction that real GDP in Trump’s entire term grew annually by 2.5% in 2017, 3% in 2018, and 2.5% in 2019, and that the pandemic pushed it down to 2.2%. It grew 3.5% under Biden.
When Trump claimed undocumented (he said “illegal”) immigrants are destroying Social Security because of the benefits they receive, not a single correction about them actually not receiving benefits despite contributing $10 billion a year to Social Security.
The lies just kept coming with nary a correction.
That’s journalistic malfeasance writ large.
This was brought to us in part by the same Jake Tapper who, in September, tried his best to get Biden’s reelection campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond to pile on the president when he asked, “Do you not acknowledge that the perception of his frailty — perceived frailty — is hurting his campaign? Is hurting his reelection chances?”
But we shouldn't be surprised, because the for-profit corporate media wants its Trump-sized ratings back. Trump may still call the press the “enemy of the people” (like Josef Stalin); he may have assailed them with accusations of being “fake news”; he may have some journalists personally loathing him.
But, as former CBS head Les Moonves proclaimed back in 2016 before Donald Trump took over the republican party:
I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going. It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.
And it’s damn good for CNN, the network that former chairman Chris Licht, in a pathetic attempt to court the right-wing hate media audience, instructed staff to stop referring to Donald Trump’s discredited claim the 2020 election was stolen from him as “the big lie” because it sounds too much like a “Democratic Party talking point.”
The corporate media structure is predicated on ratings, which equal money.
Since most of the wealthiest people have a personal stake in staying as rich as possible while paying next to nothing (and in some cases, actually nothing) in taxes, they naturally gravitate toward the party whose raison d’être lies solely in massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — the republican party.
But there aren’t enough morbidly rich in the country to win all the elections republicans need to hold onto power, so they traditionally resort to fear, outrage, grievance, desire for horse race, racism, and a little salacious conspiracy theory to crank up average voters.
This is where the corporate media is happy to oblige.
The corporations that own the big American media conglomerates thrive on horse race because it’s how they generate ratings. Since those corporations are owned and run by people interested in staying rich (corporations themselves are not people, after all, despite what the almighty US Supreme Court argued), their personal fortunes depend on this.
This is why we rarely hear on television and radio anything about organized labor, or from people with serious criticisms of the rigged tax code or the republican tax cuts from which the economic royalists maintain their hegemony.
Put simply, the media is as “liberal” as the corporations that own it.
What policy does any member of the republican party, presidential candidate or not, have whose primary beneficiary is average working Americans?
The answer is none.
We instead get from them fear, faux outrage, grievance, conspiracy theories, hurtful legislation, hate, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, jingoism, and elitist proto-fascism.
But they can’t come right out and admit that (although they’re close to doing it), so they get us fighting among ourselves. Because when we’re fighting each other, we aren’t demanding billionaires pay their fair share of taxes; we aren’t strengthening collective bargaining power; we aren’t raising the minimum wage; we aren’t demanding an expansion to Social Security; we aren’t fighting to preserve Medicare; we aren’t fighting for better schools, healthcare, or a cleaner environment.
CNN et al. is spending a lot of money and air time obliging as it deflects from the real issues affecting Americans.
“Biden’s age” and “fitness for office” is 2024’s “Hillary’s emails” 2.0.
The media is apparently not interested in fulfilling its responsibility as “the fourth estate”. What are media personalities going to do the day the convicted felon accomplishes getting libel laws rewritten and starts locking them up should he occupy the Oval Office again? Think their attempts at appeasement are going to be considered, or are they just going to look like a sorry, sad bunch of sycophants afraid of mean things being said about them?
It won’t matter to the network heads since they’ll have sailed off on their yachts or private jets for off-shore tax havens, their bank accounts stuffed like Thanksgiving turkeys.