All the President’s Liars

“The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline,” former New York Times editor Jill Abramson claimed. “Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.”

How could the media have possibly penetrated that “veil of secrecy” when Biden confused Iran and Ukraine during the State of the Union address in front of the entire nation, when he falsely claimed that his son died in Iraq, couldn’t remember in an interview when he had served as vice president, and finished a speech with “God save the Queen.”

There’s no way the estimated 85,000 reporters in the country could have cracked this case.

The 60% of Americans who said they weren’t confident about Biden’s mental capacity had somehow penetrated the “massive cover-up” that no one in the media seemed able to do.

Where are Watergate’s Woodward and Bernstein when you need them?

Bob Woodward popped up on MSNBC to blather that, “I think the answer here is in reporting, in seeking very aggressively, an explanation — what happened here?”

Carl Bernstein emerged to tell CNN that he had sources “very close to President Biden” who described 15-20 similar incidents. And a ‘rigor mortis’ like freeze a year ago. This would have been big news if Bernstein had possessed the guts to actually break the story instead of jumping on the bandwagon when it was popular. What did Carl know and when did he know it?

And the same is true of the rest of the corrupt media which spent years lying to us and is now acting as if it were fooled by some vast conspiracy when the only conspiracy was by the media.

Was there really a “massive coverup” or a “veil of secrecy”? There were hundreds of videos circulating of Biden moving feebly, spouting random nonsense and appearing to be out of it.

As recently as the week before the media was arguing that those videos were “cheapfakes”.

The ‘cheapfake’ slur was hurled at videos of Biden appearing to be out of it at the G7 meeting.

On June 21, the New York Times ran a story claiming that the Trump team and the Republican National Committee were circulating “misleading videos” showing that he had “wandered off during a meeting with other Group of 7 leaders” and had “struggled to sit down at a D-Day commemoration ceremony”.

On July 2, the New York Times belatedly reported that “Mr. Biden appeared to wander off from the group of leaders to talk to paratroopers and the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came up behind him, and gently brought him back.”

The story further mentioned that “a senior European official who was present said that there had been a noticeable decline in Mr. Biden’s physical state since the previous fall and that the Europeans had been ‘shocked’ by what they saw. The president at times appeared ‘out of it,’ the official said, and it was difficult to engage him in conversation while he was walking.”

“Ms. Meloni and the other leaders were acutely sensitive to Mr. Biden’s physical condition, discussing it privately among themselves, and they tried to avoid embarrassing him by slowing their own pace while walking with the president. When they worried that he did not seem poised and cameras were around, they closed ranks around him physically to shield him while he collected himself, the official said.”

The New York Times lied about Biden’s appearance at G7 and then, when the signal had been given, suddenly began reporting that the accounts it had been calling “misleading” were true.

Like the rest of the media, it did this without a word of apology. The Times would like us to believe that it didn’t or couldn’t have talked to that same European official two weeks ago about Biden’s mental and physical state when the videos came out. It chose to follow the narrative.

The Wall Street Journal was the only mainstream media outlet which ran a story about Biden’s decline. The story in early June came under fire not only from the Biden administration, but from other members of the press. And no Democrat was willing to go on record for it.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called the WSJ story a hit piece.

“If you want to talk about international affairs, if you want to talk about how to get bipartisan legislation, Joe Biden is light-years ahead of all of them,” Scarborough rambled. “And the fact that The Wall Street Journal knew these quotes were out there, that editors — I’m not looking at the reporter. People always blame the reporter. … I don’t even know what to say. I really don’t even know what to say here.” After the debate, Scarborough called for Biden to drop out.

Juan Williams at FOX News claimed a little over a week ago that not only were videos of Biden’s senility “cheapfakes”, but that there was a conspiracy by Republicans and Russia to spread disinformation claiming that “an aging President Biden is mentally incompetent.” He urged censorship by “Congress and big tech to shut down political fraudsters on the internet. The price of inaction is that we lose our democracy.”

There was no massive cover up, just a massively complicit media which buried the story.

Biden’s decline was public knowledge. It’s not just a conservative echo chamber. Random Democrats I spoke with have called him senile and too old. If there was a “massive cover-up and a veil of secrecy”, how did a black nurse whom I spoke to in New Orleans, during the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s previous Restoration Weekend, call him a “dementia case”?

How did she pierce the “massive cover-up” and the “veil of secrecy” when the Times couldn’t?

There was no veil. The media just spent years lying about Biden for political gain. And it’s still at it now. Now that the media is reporting on Biden’s mental decline, it is no more trustworthy than when it was lying about it. The media is not telling the truth and no longer even sees journalistic objectivity or unbiased reporting as valid values. The only thing it cares about is winning.

The media conducted that “massive coverup” because it believed propping up Biden was its best bet for keeping its party in power. Now that bet looks bad and the media is hurriedly authorizing stories about Biden’s decline to get him to drop out. If that doesn’t work, the stories will get buried all over again and we’ll be told that it turns out that Biden was fine all along.

If the media had the faintest shred of decency left it would stop playing Captain Renault and insulting the intelligence of the entire country by pretending it didn’t know about Biden’s state.

There was no cover-up here except by the media. And now the media is engaged in a cover-up of its cover-up. We’re supposed to believe that no one in the media noticed when the president took to shouting random gibberish and there was a national debate on the subject of his sanity.

And now we’re supposed to believe that the media is trying to take down Biden, not because polls show he might lose the election, but because it’s suddenly committed to the truth.

Nobody believes anything the media says. And they’re right not to.

A shambling human wreck occupied the highest office in plain sight because there was no one to hide it from. The media’s first and only priority was putting a Democrat in the White House. That is still its first and only priority. The media will tell any lie and cover up any story to do it.

The media hasn’t stopped lying to us. It’s only begun to lie.

(Daniel Greenfield will be appearing at the AFA's Literary Cafe on July 14th, Bastille Day, at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel, to discuss the American and French revolutions and the origins of our struggle against the Left.)

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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