Der er panik i den overlejrede presse og deres Demokratiske bagland. “The problem is not a scandal, it’s not a gaffe, it’s the candidate himself.” siger Peter Hamby til CNN, som han forklarer at de interne meningsmålinger hos Demokraterne tegner et billede af en jordskredssejr til Donald Trump. “If Biden ends up running, potentially the Democrats could lose the Senate, the House, and the White House, and it’s going to be a bloodbath. The blue states that we have held for many decades might potentially turn red.” sagde en delegeret til CNN. Nancy Pelosi ville ikke strække sig længere end “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short.” Og George Clooney – “who never came close to making a great movie” – indrømmer nu, at Biden var “the same man we all witnessed at the debate”, ved den store Fundraiser, hvor Obama førte ham væk fra scenen (man kan se det bedre her).
Politico skrev i forrige uge
But inside the White House, Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate, with the senior team’s management of the president growing more strictly controlled as his term has gone on. During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”
The official said, “He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it.”
The debate, however, was so dismal for Biden that nobody could ignore it. For as furiously as Biden’s advisers have pushed back on concerns about his age, the now 81-year-old president’s halting, soft-spoken and scattered responses to former President Donald Trump, 78, shattered the party’s magical thinking on the subject. That the president’s difficulties came as such a shock was largely the result of how effectively his top aides and the White House on the whole has, for three and a half years, kept him in a cocoon — far away from cameras, questions and more intense public scrutiny.
Medierne er enten dumme eller onde. Onde som i løgnagtige, og de står nu i et valg mellem at skulle indrømme det ene eller det andet. De vil indrømme at de er ondsindede løgnere, forudser Scott Adams, for i så fald er de ikke inkompetente og har demonstreret loyalitet for deres arbejdsgivere. Som den tidligere vært for MSNBCs “Meet the press” Chuck Todd fortalte Politico
I had a cabinet secretary two years ago — two years ago — out of the blue asked me, ‘Do you really think he’s gonna? He can’t run again like this.’ And I said, ‘Well, you have more interaction with him than I do.’ And they said, ‘I don’t have a lot of interaction with him.’ This is a pretty senior cabinet secretary. This was two years ago
Drew Holden har samlet en række mediers reaktioner i en underholdende tråd, der er en hård dom over medieklassen. Som New York Times, der 21/6 skrev “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden As He Battles Age Doubts” hvori det hed, at han udover Trump også var oppe imod “the distorted, online version of himself, often a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities”. Og Washington Post der 15/6 skrev “‘Cheapfake’ videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead” om episoden, hvor Biden fremstår kataton, mens alle danser omkring ham til Juneteenth fejringen i Det Hvide Hus, at Biden “has often said he didn’t dance” og giver videosekvensen fire Pinocchioer. Og Associated Press, der blot afviste at “seeing is believing”.
Miranda Devine skriver at Carl Bernstein…
…[t]he former fabled Watergate reporter-turned-Trump-derange-ment merchant told CNN this week that he knew of 15 or 20 occasions in the past 18 months when Joe Biden’s brain has malfunctioned as it did during last week’s debate.
Several people “who are very close to President Biden . . . are adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off . . . In the last six months particularly there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline.”
Da anklager Robert Hur konkluderede at det ikke ville give mening at retsforfølge præsident Joe Biden, for ulovligt at have hjemtaget hemmelige dokumenter i løbet af sine lange korrupte karriere, fordi en jury ville se en affældig stodder, eller hvordan det nu var formuleret, forlangte Republikanerne straks at lydoptagelserne fra afhøringerne blev offentliggjort. Det modsatte justitsminister Merrick Garland sig fordi, aktindsigt ikke gælder, hvis han mener at det ikke gælder. Høringer må der til, og Garland, adspurgt af Jerry Nadler, hvilket vil sige at det er damage control vidneudsagn, afviste at der var foretaget ændringer i transskriberingen af Joe Bidens vidneudsagn – dog med enkelte forbehold
The senior, um, uh, career official in the department, um, in a declaration he filed under oath, stated that he had compared the audio, uh, to, um, the transcript and that it and that it is an accurate, uh, transcript is transcript is accurate with the exceptions of ‘uhs’ and ‘ahs’ and repetitions of words like ‘I’ and ‘and’.
Trump påpegede, at Biden ikke har fyret nogen, mens han har været præsident, hvilket leder lige dele til, at han er inkompetent ikke ikke den egentlige leder. Således sagde sikkerhedsrådgiver John Kirby, at Biden snart ville holde en rigtig pressekonference, uden de forhåndsaftalte spørgsmål. Eller, som Kirby formulerede det “a big boy press conference”. Han kunne have tilføjet af Biden er “mental acutie” – men så langt rakte hans humor dog ikke.
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