One of the great political scandals of the last few years was hammered home in the closing weeks of this year.
The Wall Street Journal’s report on Dec. 19th about how Joe Biden’s inner circle managed the cognitively dimished president is well worth reading.
“Presidents always have gatekeepers,” reported the Journal. “But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.”
This extended to his interactions with even Democratic lawmakers and members of his own Cabinet. “Interactions between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively infrequent and often tightly scripted,” reported the Journal. “At least one cabinet member stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said.”
And as many suspected when it came to public events, the Journal reported that aides ““were often with the president as he traveled and stayed within earshot or eye distance….They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage.”
Yes, the elected president of the United States, leader of the free world, one of the most powerful people on earth, was micromanaged by others because he was too diminished to be trusted to serve as presidents normally would.
There were alarms raised about all this ever since Biden was running in 2020 and virtually every year of his presidency. But the American people were chastised by mainstream media outlets for dating to call attention to it.
“What’s the goal here? To raise doubts in voters’ minds about Biden — and his age in particular,” lectured CNN’s Chris Cilliza back in 2021. “It might not have worked for Trump, but Republicans haven’t given up.”
Or MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who in 2023 declared that Biden “is so sharp. But he’s on top of everything.” Right.
Noticing that Biden, long in the public eye, was a shell of himself was not a partisan matter. It was obvious to anyone with common sense and judgment.
It was also confirmed earlier this year in the report of special counsel Robert Hur earlier this year in which Biden was described as “an elderly man with poor memory.” Hur’s report included much substantiation for that description.
For this, Hur was attacked by Rep. Adam Schiff as simply being a partisan during a hearing about the report.
“You must have understood the impact of your decision to go beyond the specifics of a particular document to go to the very general, to your own personal prejudicial, subjective opinion of the president,” Schiff complained. “One you knew would be amplified by his political opponent. When you knew that would influence a political campaign. You had to understand that and you did it anyway.”
Vice President Kamala Harris likewise condemned Hur. “As a former prosecutor, the comments that were made by that prosecutor: gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate,” said Harris, who always insisted in public that Biden was just fine when he obviously wasn’t.
And it was ultimately confirmed for everyone during the disastrous debate with Donald Trump over the summer. “We finally beat Medicare,” Biden declared in that debate.
It’s a sorry state of affairs that so few spoke up and that the mainstream press failed to shine much light on this as it happened. Such silence has been deleterious for the proper governance of our nation and for trust in institutions. We can only hope that genuine lessons have been learned from the strange four years of Biden’s presidency.
