Those people doing most to confirm the damaging truth about President Joe Biden’s latest enfeebled onstage “freeze” are the ones trying hardest to suppress it. This is known as the Streisand effect, named for actress Barbra Streisand, whose attempted suppression of a photograph of her Malibu home in 2003 backfired by drawing wide attention to it.
As you would expect, therefore, the politically myopic Hollywood diva was among those who made sure millions of extra voters watched a 40-second video of Biden standing stolidly and perhaps confused in front of a $30 million fundraiser audience in Los Angeles last weekend before his old boss, former President Barack Obama, pulled him out of his stupor and led him gently away.
Responding to stories, posts, and a wider maelstrom centered on Biden’s next-worldly stillness, Streisand posted on X, “The NY Post is printing lies about President Biden. No other media outlets should amplify this disinformation.” With which, of course, she amplified it herself.
Not that the story was disinformation. Here’s what happened. At the end of a successful fundraiser for Biden’s reelection, the president, former president, and host Jimmy Kimmel stood on a blue-lit stage soaking in the crowd’s applause while a band played upbeat climactic chords to close the event. Biden turned to a section of the audience and stood stock-still for eight or nine increasingly weird seconds, during which Obama gave a thumbs-up to the crowd and waved five times in farewell.
Instead of moving off, Biden stayed rooted to the spot. Obama eventually stepped back toward him, reached over and took the president gently by the wrist, and gave him an indicative pull. The president then turned slowly as directed and Obama immediately put a hand on his shoulders and guided him tenderly toward the exit — appropriately enough, at stage left.
The White House and Left’s response to the story was swift and furious, condemning it as false. Many fellow travelers chimed in, saying “this did not happen.”
The problem with the word “this” is that it points to something that is, not something that isn’t. The naysayers demanded angrily that we believe what they say rather than what we see with our lying eyes. The White House has done this repeatedly for the past three years not only on the subject of Biden’s increasingly evident infirmities but also on his policy calamities, insisting, for example, that he inherited runaway inflation from President Donald Trump and that the southern border is secure.
At the White House on Monday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of Biden and Obama in the video clip, “They are friends. They are like family to each other. And I think that’s what you saw. You saw the president put his hand on the back of President Biden and they walked off the stage.”
No, that’s not what we saw. Everything about Jean-Pierre’s statement is false, perhaps even the commas and periods. Obama and Biden are not friends. Their relationship is well known to be tense, as was expressed by the former when he said of the latter, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”
The president and former president are not like family to each other except insofar as family members have the most abiding antipathies. And Obama did not simply “put his hand on the back” of Biden, he gave his former underling’s arm a pull, then seemed to guide him, first turning him toward the exit and then keeping him on track toward it. They didn’t simply walk off together, Obama ushered Biden out.
A key problem for those enraged by people noticing that Biden is wobbly, static, and otherwise afflicted with symptoms of decline is that they contradict each other. While the White House doesn’t want people to watch the disastrous video, others say the opposite, straining credulity, and insist people watch the clip because it proves characterizations of it are false. “This is a lie. It didn’t happen. Watch the video,” photographer Pete Souza posted. Still, others suggest, apparently without merit, that the video was doctored to be anti-Biden propaganda. But it cannot be both damaging and exculpatory.
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The irreducible truth is there for all to see. It cannot be explained away and reinterpreted. It cannot be spun as digitally manipulated deception. Biden is in sharp decline and both his defenders and his critics know it. The defenders say that he is sharp as a tack in meetings off-camera. But, as has been noted, it is odd how he never seems that way when the cameras are rolling. If all the stumbles are public and all the executive dynamism is private, voters cannot be blamed for thinking the private stuff is a figment of the Democrats’ desperately inventive imagination.
Biden is racing — actually, no, he is shuffling — against time. It is more than four months until Election Day. At the president’s pace, that’s a very long time.