Jake Tapper: We've Been Too Polite In Dealing With Trump. Trump Isn't Being "Transparent With His Health Records" and It's Time We Pressed Him On That.

You've got to be kidding me. Four years of insisting that Biden's inability to speak and attempts to Conjure Spirits were just the residue of a "childhood stutter," but by golly, we're gonna correct that error by getting even nastier with Trump!

Alex Thompson, Fake Jake's coauthor, made some news Wednesday night. He said that a Biden aide had pushed back against him, saying the media deserves every bit of the blame Biden staffers do. This unnamed staffer said that they were frequently surprised at how easily they could get the left-wing media to repeat their obvious, ludicrous lies about Biden's mental fitness.

So he wants to know -- as do we all -- who is really to blame here? You expect a political campaign staff to lie.

But the media claims to be Truth Incarnate, and routinely pressures the government and social media monopolies to censor people for speaking what the media claims is "misinformation."

But of course, they're the worst peddlers of lies of all.

Earlier in the week, I mentioned Biden cabinet officials complaining that all of their "cabinet meetings" were fake, with each of them given a scripted "question" for Biden which he would answer with an equally-scripted "answer."

I didn't cite my source there because I couldn't find it. But here it is.

Tapper and Thompson also reported Biden increasingly relied on teleprompters and note cards even for private discussions like Cabinet meetings.

"Before these meetings, White House staff called the various departments and agencies to figure out what they were going to ask the president so that answers could be prepared. The conversations were largely scripted, even after the press had left the room," the authors reported.

"Some Cabinet secretaries felt that, in fact, Biden relied on the cards more heavily when reporters were absent," the book states.

Tapper and Thompson spoke to four Cabinet secretaries anonymously to allow them to be candid without fear of retribution.

"The Cabinet meetings were terrible and at times uncomfortable -- and they were from the beginning," one secretary told them. "I don't recall a great Cabinet meeting in terms of his presence. They were so scripted."

Another secretary said they hated "the scripts."

But the authors said that some aides argued that Cabinet meetings were always stiff and time-consuming and that Biden was more inquisitive in smaller meetings. And they weren't too worried about his frequent use of note cards or a poor speech from time to time.

The authors report that the campaign held a staged town hall last April in a high school gym to film a commercial. It was made to appear that Biden was taking questions off the cuff, but the event was closed to reporters and the campaign was given questions in advance.

When a group would ask Biden to record a five-minute address for keynoting an event, the White House usually responded that the video would be one to two minutes, Tapper and Thompson report. But Biden still struggled with that.

"To compensate for that, aides filmed Biden with two cameras instead of one. If Biden messed up, the edit was less obvious with a jump cut," they reported. "Other politicians use jump-cuts, but Biden aides noted to themselves how much more often they had to use them for the president."

From Jamie Kirchick's review of all three
"Now It Can be Told" books:

In December 2019, while Biden was vying for his party's presidential nomination and four months before he vaguely promised to be a "bridge" to a new "generation of leaders," four Biden advisers told POLITICO that it was virtually inconceivable he would run for reelection in 2024. Biden's decline was apparent to his inner circle before the 2020 Democratic Convention, in which, given the pandemic, his participation would consist mostly of pre-taped videos. Even this undemanding medium proved onerous for the then 77-year-old, whose performance speaking virtually with real Americans was, according to two aides, "horrible" as Biden "couldn't follow the conversation at all." Despite being edited by some of the best people in the business, little of the material was usable.

The morbid observation by some Biden aides that the pandemic, while terrible for the world, was an enormous boon for their campaign, was entirely accurate. With Biden granted a plausible excuse to avoid active campaigning, the American people were shielded from the physical and mental regression that would become increasingly apparent as the country opened up. And once he entered the White House, it was visible to anyone who saw him up close. "The cabinet meetings were terrible and at times uncomfortable -- and they were from the beginning," a cabinet secretary told Tapper and Thompson, one of four to speak anonymously with the authors. In October 2021, when Biden addressed the Democratic House caucus in an effort to win their support for an infrastructure package, one member described his 30-minute speech as "incomprehensible." According to Allen and Parnes, Vice President Kamala Harris' communications director eventually drew up a spreadsheet listing judges across the country who could administer her the oath of office in the event Biden died.

According to all three accounts, 2023 was the year Biden's deterioration became undeniable. It was also the year he formally announced his decision to seek reelection, which brought his worrisome condition increasingly into the open. A television ad in which Biden would answer pre-screened questions from a handpicked audience had to be scrapped because none of the footage was usable. At small, intimate events with donors, Biden would avail himself of teleprompters, stop randomly in the middle of his speech and shake hands, and just as randomly start speaking again. That June, following an interview on MSNBC, Biden got up from the desk and wandered off the set as the cameras rolled. The following month at a White House picnic, Biden didn't recognize Congressman Eric Swalwell, one of his opponents for the nomination. (To be fair to Biden, not recognizing Eric Swalwell is a point in his favor.)

The "Politburo" began sending White House household staff early so they couldn't see Biden -- and so they couldn't then report to the outside world that he was essentially a vegetable.

Befitting an inner circle dubbed the "Politburo," the Biden ascendancy in many ways resembled the Soviet Union in the early 1980s when three successive geriatric leaders died within as many years. The pathetic sight of Barack Obama fetching a spaced out Biden from the edge of the stage at a Hollywood fundraiser and leading him off into the wings recalls the videotaped spectacle of an enfeebled Konstantin Chernenko "voting" in a hospital room shoddily refashioned as a polling place. In one of the more disturbing revelations from Original Sin, White House residence aides were told that they no longer needed to staff the elevator and could leave work early because the proletarian Bidens didn't like being waited on. The real motive, the authors suggest, was to expand a privacy buffer around the president and limit his exposure to household staff -- the kind of move one can imagine in the palace of an aging dictator.

He names names in the article. Read it for the details. I'm not super-interested in that because I doubt those people have much of a future in politics. (Well, except for Adam Schiff and Chuck Schumer and Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders...)

What I am interested in is the unindicted co-conspirators in the media:

Revealingly, none of these books are interested in the essential role that the media played in the cover-up. Given how much the press valorizes itself for defending democracy, its dereliction of duty regarding Biden's infirmities is a massive failure. To be sure, the Biden White House didn't make things easy for reporters; it's no coincidence that the two journalists granted the most access to Biden -- Evan Osnos of the New Yorker and Franklin Foer of the Atlantic -- overlooked the biggest story of his presidency. But lack of access is no excuse. When POLITICO's Ben Schreckinger produced a deeply reported, unvarnished book about the Biden family's half-century rise to power in 2021, the mainstream media ignored it. With the exception of Thompson, one of the handful of journalists who consistently reported on Biden's fitness and who bears the scars of vicious White House attacks on his character to prove it, most of the media declined to investigate Biden's disposition because it interfered with a higher priority: saving the country from Donald Trump.

I saw someone write that Schreckinger's book was almost entirely embargoed by Politico, the very "news" outlet he worked for.

Some crimes are too great for the Democracy Dies in Darkness media to cover.

posted by Ace at 12:02 PM

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