On one hand, this writer has to commend the Democratic Party and the White House staffers: they really circled the wagons on Joe Biden's cognitive decline. There were no leaks, and anyone who suggested Biden wasn't able to do the job -- based on video evidence Karine Jean-Pierre called 'cheap fakes' -- was attacked as a partisan liar.
But last week, the other shoe dropped. Biden's on the way out of the White House, Kamala Harris lost the election, and now the media are trying to salvage the scraps of their reputation. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday how, from 2021 onward, White House staff had to work around Biden's obvious mental decline.
This includes being unable to participate in phone calls leading up to the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal that saw thirteen Marines killed at Abby Gate and making the families of the fallen wait hours for the dignified transfer while he napped on Air Force One.
If you'll recall, both of those incidents happened in the summer of 2021, just months after Biden was inaugurated. So -- and I cannot emphasize this enough -- for nearly his entire presidency, Joe Biden was mentally and physically incapable of performing the duties of his office.
I already told you where the media was: dismissing the concerns and attacking those who expressed worry over Biden's cognitive ability. Not until the debate in June, when Biden's issues became even more glaringly obvious to the rest of the nation, did the media kind of acknowledge that maybe something was going on.
But they took the word of staffers and politicians like AOC that Joe Biden was still -- behind closed doors -- sharp as a tack.
They have no place to hide now that The Wall Street Journal has opened Pandora's Box. But they'll try to clean up after themselves, desperately trying to reclaim shreds of their credibility.
Sorry, Chris, but that's not accepted.
This is -- without a doubt -- the biggest presidential scandal of my lifetime, and I lived through Clinton lying under oath about boinking interns and lying about it and Obama running guns to Mexican cartels.
We haven't had a president. For nearly his entire term. And no one cared.
But if Chris wants to show he's sorry, he can start by pestering Kamala Harris for some answers.
Here's a six-minute supercut of the sitting Vice President denying there was anything wrong with Joe Biden:
In light of the BOMBSHELL report in the Wall Street Journal that said national security meetings in spring 2021 were rescheduled due to Joe Biden’s “good days” & “bad days,” here’s over 6 minutes of Kamala Harris covering up Biden’s cognitive impairment: pic.twitter.com/lXY4XCBKhm
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) December 20, 2024
She was with him -- by her own admission -- in the Situation Room, among other places, and said he was fine. He was capable. He was fit to serve another four years.
She lied.
And she failed in her Constitutional duty to us.
Kamala Harris has an obligation to remove Joe Biden from office if and when he becomes incapable of doing the job under the 25th Amendment.
Article 4 of that Amendment allows the Vice President and a majority of presidential cabinet secretaries to declare the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office. To date, it has never been invoked.
But it's very clear it should have been. The White House, desperate to hide Biden's decline, tapped Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg to provide voice coaching for Joe's 'fading warble.' Here's more of what The Wall Street Journal detailed about Biden's cognitive struggles:
To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.
Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.
There are plenty of villains in this sordid tale: Jill Biden, who let her demented husband run for office to feed her own desire for power and fame; Hunter Biden, who let his father diminish in the public eye to curry political favors; the media, who ignored what was going on when everyone who didn't have a j-school degree saw it.
But the one person who is being overlooked, as of right now, is Kamala Harris.
The party that screamed that only they were the defenders of democracy and that Donald Trump was the existential threat to our safety, governance, and norms have run a puppet administration for the last four years.
THAT is the actual threat to democracy. The Democratic Party has damaged democracy.
And Kamala Harris is central to that threat and to that damage.
Why aren't reporters pounding on her door?
Why aren't they hounding her every move asking her what she knew, when she knew it, and why she didn't do anything about it?
This is the woman the media wanted to be president. Kamala Harris, they told us, was the only way to keep our freedoms and our democracy.
Yet she will get precisely zero questions about this. She will face zero political repercussions if (when?) she decides to run for another office (they're already floating her for governor of California, after all).
