Biden's announcement that he's seriously ill with cancer came at a very auspicious time for the former president and the Democratic Party. The book "Original Sin" by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which goes into excruciating detail about the lengths Democrats went to cover up Joe Biden's mental and physical decline, hits bookshelves today.
It's also interesting that the cancer announcement comes in the immediate aftermath of the release of recordings of special prosecutor Robert Hur's interviews with Biden, which are even worse than Hur let on as far as demonstrating Biden's complete unfitness for office.
Biden's cancer announcement is being used by some Democrats as an excuse to drop the whole investigation into who knew and when that Biden was incapable of fulfilling his duties.
David Axelrod, former Obama advisor and a CNN analyst, said on Sunday that looking into Biden's mental decline "should be more muted and set aside for now as he's struggling through this."
That would be a bad idea generally, but specifically, two tracks to the investigation need to continue as Biden fights cancer. The first is the media's culpability in hiding Biden's condition from the American people. The second is what elected and non-elected officials knew about the most serious presidential crisis of this century and why they didn't insist on Biden's resignation.
The responsibility of the American media to report the news honestly and without bias is a cruel joke. The fact that they cared more about preventing Donald Trump from being elected than they cared about the truth is a scandal that at least some in the media are trying to cover up.
“It was just the painful realization that the White House had been lying to everyone, including likely, in many ways, to themselves,” Jake Tapper told the Los Angeles Times. “As bad as it was on TV, it was worse in person.”
Tapper was speaking of Biden's June 27 debate with Trump, during which a CNN anchor slipped a note to Tapper after a rambling, incoherent answer to a question by Biden: “He just lost the election,” she wrote.
Many of us said the same thing at the time. Biden often had a dazed look when leaving the stage after speaking, or even being led offstage by an aide or his wife, Jill.
Franklin Roosevelt showed similar signs of physical decline in 1945. The press hid that from the public, and refused to photograph FDR in a wheelchair or walking with braces. The incestuous relationship between the number-one newsmaker and the people who write the news has always been fraught. The problem is that in the nuclear age, it's a vital issue of national security.
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The American people should have been told of Biden's physical and mental deterioration. However, more than the failure of the media to perform their duty of keeping the public informed, elected Democrats who spent much of the last year defending Biden's mental competency to perform his duties as president and presidential aides who failed to bring Biden's obvious infirmities to anyone's attention need to be held accountable.
It would be a stretch to charge anyone with a crime. That's a deficiency Republicans may want to remedy. But calling Democrats to public account for covering up Joe Biden's health problems is a necessary function of oversight, and Republicans need to hold these Democrats' feet to the fire.
People can pretend that Biden’s team deceived them if that's the history that makes them feel better about things, but that is not what happened. Ignoring Biden’s decline required a significant amount of personal complicity.
There were countless instances of Biden’s decline manifesting very publicly, ranging from minor linguistic gaffes to appearing completely lost in public. Republicans covered it relentlessly, and Democrats insisted it was a hoax.
To have believed the lies of the Democrats about Biden’s competence required partisans to jump through hoops to ignore what they were seeing in favor of the preferred Democrat narrative.
Members of the media who were somehow blindsided by Biden’s mental state during his disastrous presidential debate against Trump, especially, need to look in the mirror. Ordinary Democrat-leaning voters have an excuse due to a lack of information reaching them, but those in the media who ignored what they were watching unfold in favor of talking points from the administration’s allies have no explanation beyond willful ignorance.
Pretending there's nothing wrong is not a valid reason to withhold information vital to the safety and security of the republic. This is the primary reason why Senators Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, and other elected Democrats who accused Republicans of spreading lies about Joe Biden need to be publicly brought to account before Congress. Let them tell us under oath how unaware they were of Biden's infirmities.
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