Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, Mark will be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~My conscience is clear. For the entirety of his alleged presidency, I've been calling Joe Biden "the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet" - not because that's a uniquely penetrating insight but because, as I remarked along the way, it's perfectly obvious to any creature more sentient than a tapeworm. October 2022:
March 2022:
Mark Steyn: Joe Biden is the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet.
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April 2021 - even on Fox News, although unbeknownst to me before airtime apparently some Senior Executive Vice-President vetoed "dead husk" from the prompter at the last minute:
So, Joe Biden or whoever has got his hand waggling that moth-eaten sock-puppet is consciously enriching these cartels and ensuring that they can expand their operations including more fentanyl to kill Americans...
But what do I know? I don't have a degree from Columbia Journalism School. And all the guys who do are suddenly Claude Rains:
'I'm shocked, shocked to find dementia going on in this White House!'
'Your revised list of approved questions for tomorrow's Biden interview, Captain Renault.'
'Oh, thank you very much...'
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough just a few weeks back:
I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he's better than he's ever been intellectually, analytically... Start your tape right now, because I'm about to tell you the truth. And f-you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.
Watergate colossus Bob Woodward is now calling for "very aggressive" "reporting" to get to the bottom of what went wrong here. How did paragons of integrity such as Joe Scarborough wind up spouting in public what less rarefied media cultures call "bollocks on stilts"? Could it possibly be those "real killers" OJ was looking for?
All Bob's chums' previous aggressive reporting shows that Biden was still "far beyond cogent" as recently as last month's G7, when civil servants from multiple EU countries disclosed that Joe doesn't attend any of the meetings except one, where he leaves it to his entourage to do all the talking. But, as they could only source such comments to six of the G7 members, the American media were unable to confirm it to their famously rigorous standards and so dismissed it as "disinformation".
Now, though, Slate's Jill Filipovic is doing the aggressively aggressive reporting Bob Woodward has demanded:
One theory goes that the Biden team and perhaps even the broader Democratic Party have long known that the president is in no condition to run and have taken great pains to conceal that fact. A second theory is that Biden's family is at fault and that a scheming wife is Lady Macbeth–ing his refusal to drop out. Another is that Biden's difficulties are largely an invention of a cynical media who are determined to take down a good president because Donald Trump is better for clicks and ratings. And yet another is that reporters knew or should have known about Biden's decline this whole time and have been refusing to report it out of liberal bias or perhaps professional incompetence.
Well, we can certainly dismiss that last one, can't we? But Jill reckons we may be over-thinking the whole business:
Something far more mundane might actually be the case: Most people—staff, family, the media—were doing what they thought was correct and professionally responsible...
Uh-huh. Like myocarditis in twenty-two-year-olds or Sudden Adult Death Syndrome in fifteen-year-olds, dementia can strike out of the blue at any moment. Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic:
When I write or tweet that he should leave the race, I get a pretty fair number of angry tweets about how I'm a bedwetter and how all this worry is just helping Trump. I kind of understand where people are coming from. But I am not part of the media that's been helping Trump. As I noted last week, we just put him on our cover as Hitler. I'm part of the media that thinks the Democrat absolutely has to win this election.
I've met Michael Tomasky just the once - almost three decades back, at the start of the Clinton impeachment trial, in a tearoom near the Capitol with my National Post colleague David Frum. David was interested to hear from a Dem insider re the embattled President, and I was struck by the fact that the only Washington lefties willing to turn on Slick Willie were two old Fleet Street hands, Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens. But, fascinating as these points were, Mr Tomasky quickly wearied of them, and summed up his position as:
He's our guy and we're sticking with him.
Even if his trousers are round his ankles. Likewise, he's our guy and we're sticking with him even if he's been clinically dead for three years.
Unless it starts to look as if the scale of what's necessary to get him across the finish line is beyond even our formidable capabilities...
At which point, as handmaidens to Democrat power, we'll do what's necessary.
The scandal is not that Joe Biden was in "cognitive decline" during his 2020 campaign.
The scandal is not that Jill Biden is Lady Macbeth - you can't blame anyone for preferring to do multiple Vogue covers if the alternative is sitting in a Delaware basement watching Matlock reruns and spoonfeeding the drooler his tapioca.
The scandal is not that the Permanent State plucked Lunchbucket Joe to be the most biddable Potemkin president for their agenda: the mysterious elevation of hitherto unknowns to be stooge frontmen (Rishi Rich, Dinky Macron) is now a standard feature of our post-democratic age.
So what does that leave? The fourth estate's industrial-scale collusion in a hoax on their audiences not one of them could ever have believed - that "this version of Biden ...is the best Biden ever". Maybe the scandal is why Scarborough, Woodward et al are still in paid employment.
As I said, my conscience is clear - and it's nothing to do with his age: In March 2021, I observed to Tucker (in a show since vaporised by Fox) that the Queen was a generation older than Biden and had just hosted a round-table with public-health officials from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales carrying it off "like Bret Baier in a tiara". (Bret enjoyed the line enough to include it in his quotes of the week.)
Yet now we are expected to believe, per Bob Woodward and Michael Tomasky, that, after perpetrating a four-year fraud on the American people, the US media are finally ready to believe their lyin' eyes.
As opposed to moving merely to a new act of the world's least convincing dinner-theatre.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and especially all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
