One of the constants during Joe Biden’s 2020 run for office and throughout his presidency was conservatives commenting on footage showing his incoherent speech, brittle movements, and constant falls, along with notecards from his handlers practically telling him how to breathe. Conservatives always said the same thing: There’s something deeply wrong with Biden. He’s breaking down physically and seems to be suffering from fast-moving dementia.
The other constant during the same period was that the Democrat establishment—politicians and people in the media—pooh-poohed the idea. They assured us, and the American people, that Joe Biden was as sharp as a tack.
That is, they assured us of that until Biden’s disastrous debate appearance, when they all professed themselves “shocked! shocked!” to learn that Biden was cognitively impaired. At any rate, that’s the point of a much-talked-about new book CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson have written, in which they discover just how far gone Biden was.
All I could think of was the marvelously cynical Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca. In the classic scene, when the Nazis instruct him to shut down Rick's Café Américain, he announces loudly that he’s shocked to learn that gambling was taking place there, only to unselfconsciously accept his winnings within seconds of the announcement.
If you’ve watched the movie to the end, you also know that, while Bogie lost the girl, he and Renault joined forces to fight the Nazis. It was the ultimate mea culpa.
The thing about the leftist establishment is that it’s almost inconceivable that they didn’t all know, even if they didn’t want to admit it to themselves. That hasn’t stopped CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson from writing what purports to be a tell-all book about how shocked they all really are.
According to an excerpt at Axios, White House officials and aides were trying to figure out how to prevent the visibly frail, constantly falling-down Biden from ending up in a wheelchair because they figured the optics would be bad in the 2024 campaign. Ya think?
Meanwhile, per the New York Post, the same book claims that George Clooney was “shaken to his core” when Biden didn’t recognize him. You can just hear Clooney’s ego shatter a little bit as you read:
A rapidly aging Joe Biden couldn’t even recognize George Clooney at a Democratic fundraiser in Los Angeles during the 2024 campaign — leaving the Hollywood star “shaken to his core,” a bombshell new book claims.
The troubling incident, which unfolded at a June 13, 2024, star-studded fundraiser co-hosted by Clooney, was laid bare in the forthcoming book “Original Sin” by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper, which chronicles the attempt to cover up Biden’s decline while in office.
“It was obvious to many standing there that the president did not know who George Clooney was,” the authors wrote, according to an excerpt obtained by The Post.
“Clooney was shaken to his core. The president hadn’t recognized him. A man he had known for years.”
I kept hearing Clooney in my head crying out, “Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am?”
The authors contend that they were as unaware as everyone else about Biden’s infirmity until that awful debate and Biden’s failing to recognize a big star. Given how half of America was noticing, and that journalists are trained to notice things... But I have no idea what any of them were thinking; only they know.
My point here, though, is that, whether those in the Democrat establishment, both politicians and journalists, missed what was happening through self-delusion or intentionality, none of them are Renaults. Captain Renault repented of his sins and sought redemption by going into battle, real battle (if you can say that about a fictional character) against the Nazis. Instead, Democrats are trying to control the historic narrative so that, in retrospect, the worst that one can say about them is that they were hope-filled and naive.
The reality is that Democrats worked hard to hide from the public an obviously broken, senile man in the White House—and if they knew what they were trying to foist him on America, it was the most brazen act of election fraud this country has ever seen.
Image created using AI.