OPINION:
From CNN to The New York Times, the left-wing establishment media is in full-blown meltdown mode.
They are panicking because their darling in the White House — the purported savior of democracy — is manifestly unfit to lead the country. And, after last week’s disastrous presidential debate, everyone knows it.
“This was a game-changing debate,” reacted CNN anchor John King, “in the sense that, right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the debate, and it continues right now. It involves party strategists, elected officials, and fundraisers. And they are having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people in the party down the ticket. They are having conversations about what they should do about it.”
New York Times columnist (and party hack) Thomas Friedman, who claimed he wept during the debate, agreed. “I cannot,” he mourned, “remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.”
This “revelation” is striking — not because it was unexpected to witness a stumbling Biden deliver a disjointed and rambling performance (which many anticipated) — but because overnight, the mainstream media complex uniformly acknowledged the once-dismissed “right-wing conspiracy theory,” namely, that Biden is unfit to lead the country. Even more shocking, they deemed it disqualifying: Biden, the man who, days earlier, they told us was quick, sharp, and shrewd, now finds himself on their chopping block due to his ineptitude.
In other words, they’ve been lying to us.
For four years, the president’s allies in the media have insisted that Biden is fully capable of handling the responsibilities of the presidency. They told us to deny our eyes, to deny our ears. Whenever the president looked frail or sounded weak, whenever he wandered off stage, slurred through a sentence, made up words (“kleptocracy,” “truindenashendubbabapresser,” etc.), or mused about corn pop, hairy legs, and ocean-crossing trains, they reminded us that, behind closed doors, the president was supposed to be chipper and sharp, with a keen intellect and amazing recall. As recently as one week before the debate, any video clip appearing to “reinforce” narratives about Biden’s cognitive decline was swiftly dismissed as a “cheap fake.”
But the debate changed all of that. At the drop of a hat, the scales seemed to fall from their eyes, and they abruptly admitted what we’ve all known for years — that Biden is not competent or fit for the job. Of course, they’ve known all along, but they are part of the Democrat apparatus, so they couldn’t admit it. Biden blew his own cover by debating Trump.
In 2021, my colleague Chris McIntire and I partnered with the Trafalgar Group to develop a national poll, asking voters a straightforward question: “Do you believe that President Biden is fully executing the duties of his office?” At the time, a 57% majority of Americans answered no; other people were running the show. Amazingly, nearly one-third of Democrats agreed.
That was three years ago — the evidence against Biden has continued to mount since then. The country has known all too well this entire time that our president is not fully in charge and yet did nothing to address it. The suggestion by the media that this is a surprise to anyone is patently false. No matter how his aides or the nation’s so-called “reporters” tried to hide it, we could all see the decline. And try as they may to fein alarm at his debate performance, they have seen it, too.
The Biden vs. Trump debate was the nail in the coffin for anyone — Republican or Democrat — still clinging to the outdated belief that America’s corporate media is actually, well, news media. The manufactured “shock” by a press corps that has known full well about Biden’s cognitive challenges proves that these people are “storymakers,” not fact reporters. It’s pure theater—all run by political operatives posing as journalists. It’s Hollywood masquerading as news.
We’ve all been lied to, and we know it. Now they know we know it. The media’s current state of hysteria isn’t solely due to Biden’s underperformance; rather, it’s because their dishonesty is now laid bare for the world to see.
• Mark Meckler is the President and Co-Founder of Convention of States Action, and a regular political commentator on many outlets. www.ConventionofStates.com On X @markmeckler
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