By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
Two new books exposing the cover-up of former U.S. President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline have created fresh political waves in the United States, all the more so since his cancer diagnosis.
“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” co-authored by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, an account of Biden’s disastrous political conclusion, came out May 20.
“Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” by Jonathan Allen, a reporter at NBC News, and Amie Parnes, a senior political correspondent at The Hill, detailing Biden’s decline, was published last month.
All four authors described their shock at watching the ill-fated June 2024 debate between Biden and Donald Trump. But even before the 2020 election, it was obvious that Biden was struggling cognitively on the campaign trail. This became clearer by the day while he was president, even as White House staffers limited and strictly choreographed his media appearances.
Biden knew of the concerns, but it only ignited his defiance. His pride drove him to seek re-election. In April 2023, he announced he was running again – though he had stated in 2020 that he’d only serve one term. And since his senior aides were convinced that only Biden could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations.
And, as these books point out, it’s remarkable how they kept him so closed off, since as one writer put it, “he had become a shell of himself.” It finally all came crashing down in the debate with Trump. And even then, he held on for another month before finally stepping aside, giving the party no time to hold primaries, so allowing for Vice-president Kamala Harris’ own hapless run, and Trump’s victory. It was a fitting end to a presidency that will likely be primarily remembered for Biden’s mental deterioration.
These days, Democrats who supported him are even more hostile to Biden than Republicans are. That’s because they blame Trump’s victory on Biden’s stubborn refusal to give up his bid for a second term, despite his obvious growing mental incapacity.
But they are themselves complicit. Many had vouched for Biden literally up to the very day the president ended his campaign. Representative Ro Khanna of California, for instance, lauded a speech Biden made in Detroit a mere five days before he finally dropped out.
There are lessons to be learned from all this, larger than the Biden debacle itself. First of all, the so-called “legacy” media are now far less trusted than before. America’s premier newspapers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, were in effect collaborating with the concealment. Their reporters clearly knew what was going on yet hid and denied it -- something worthy of propaganda sheets in dictatorships.
Read this: “Doing his best to push back against doubts about his stamina and health,” an “energized” President Biden “delivered a fiery and forceful speech at a rally in Michigan.” This is from a July 12, 2024 New York Times article by Maggie Haberman, a seasoned White House reporter, just days before Biden stepped aside.
On the other hand -- and yes, I brag! -- I published an oped in the Charlottetown Guardian on May 5, 2021, “Is Joe Biden Up for the Job?” in which I wrote: “The Democrats perpetrated a fraud on the American people and sold them a bill of goods.” And I haven’t set foot in the White House since a conference held there in February 1986, when I worked as a journalist in Washington.
Biden was a put-up job from the word go, little more than a front man, like Stalin’s “president” of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalinin. He became the candidate, in an arrangement brokered by Representative Jim Clyburn, the powerful South Carolina dealmaker, on behalf of those Democrats worried Bernie Sanders might win the nomination. This would work in 2020, given the exigent circumstances of the pandemic, but not four years later.
Is it a wonder more and more people turn to blogs and websites – in effect, “samizdats” – for news? The shock was palpable, and it turbocharged Trump’s campaign. To turn the Washington Post’s motto in on itself, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Another very important lesson: yes, Virginia, you can have “conspiracies” with many multiples of people involved, despite those who say that makes it impossible. It was clearly the case in this instance.
There’s a third disturbing aspect to the deception: much of it was based on Biden being considered “indispensable,” due to the “existential” threat posed by Trump. Of course, this kind of attitude most typically happens in authoritarian regimes.
The ruler’s age or health is never discussed because without him, claim his collaborators, the state’s very existence is in peril. He’s “healthy” until the minute he dies, even if he’s in his nineties. We have seen this in various countries, often with African despots, but also in formerly Communist or fascist states.
Democracies should never reach a point where a challenger who has been legitimately nominated by a major party needs to be defeated at any cost, including the use of lies or “lawfare.” If the political system is already under such strain, it’s a clear indication of a country in political and constitutional peril.
