The President Who Wasn’t There
What we’re learning about the Biden White House is reminiscent of Woodrow and Edith Bolling Wilson.
by Peggy Noonan | Boxing Day, December 26, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST
We button up the astounding year with the scandal of 2024, which won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.
The story is the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity, a word we use because it sounds both clinical and polite, and by which we mean the president has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn’t fully up to the job. His family and friends, top White House staff and other administration officials covered it up. Some no doubt thought his presidency was good for the country and some, perhaps, good for them.
In a front-page story this month, the Journal’s Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer and Siobhan Hughes spoke to nearly 50 people in and around the presidency and outlined how the White House adapted to the needs of “a diminished leader.” He met infrequently with cabinet members and congressional leaders, and the president’s staff seemed to be running things. This system “insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.”
Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press
Journolism: Even now, the credentialed media try to blame their laziness on Joe Biden’s staffers
At 2:55 PM EST on December 17th, I asked the question to which The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal admitted the answer on the 19th: “Why didn’t the press play its ‘adversarial role’ when it came to Joe Biden?”
How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge
Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.
I check Bluesky so you don’t have to
My good friend Robert Stacy McCain has frequently written, “I watch CNN” or sometimes MSNBC, “so you don’t have to. Well, I went ahead and checked out Bluesky, the liberal version of Twitter, so that you don’t have to.
As we reported on December 3rd, Bluesky suspended the account of Libs of TikTok. Given that Chaya Raichik’s modus vivendi is to search out idiocy from leftists on social media and then publish it more widely, to mock the left, it seems that Bluesky just can’t handle the truth. No one, after all, accuses Miss Raichik of falsifying what she posts.
And now she’s tweeted out this one:
BlueSky Sees Surge in New Users and Child Sexual Abuse Material
Democrisy: the left who concealed everything about Joe Biden’s condition, are terribly worried over Donald Trump’s bruised hand
We noted, just yesterday, how the credentialed media, which the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer told us:
(President) Trump and his allies fail to understand the adversarial role the press plays in a healthy democracy.
Of course, that supposedly-adversarial press failed to tell us that President Joe Biden was in serious physical and mental decline during his term in office, failed to tell us until it was revealed to all in that disastrous-for-him debate on June 27th, and the in-the-bag-for-the-Democrats media couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.
But now? We’re getting the latest meme from the Democrats, telling us our 45th and soon to be 47th President is sick, or injured, or something, from what appears to be a bruise on the back of one of his hands. To me, it looks like bruising from an IV stick, but I’m not a doctor or nurse. It also looks like President Trump can actually walk, unaided, an ability which is increasingly eluding our 46th President. Continue reading
Why didn’t the press play its “adversarial role” when it came to Joe Biden?
Our regular readers — both of them — know that I am very much attached to the idea of print newspapers, despite them being slightly updated 18th century technology. I delivered newspapers as a teenager, and with my seriously degraded hearing, watching the news on television is difficult for me; even with close captioning, which is usually poor on live broadcasts, I can miss things. With the printed word, even though by printed I mean words on my computer monitor, not actual paper, I don’t miss much, and if there is a point on which I was confused, I can go back and read it again, to make certain I understood what was written.
So, quite naturally, I was reeled in by this story, that Rob Flaherty, the former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was “just no value” in candidates speaking to mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or Washington Post. Naturally, my mind went to the complaints by people like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard left columnist Will Bunch that newspapers specifically, and the credentialed media in general, were not hard enough on former and now future President Donald Trump.
But then came a second paragraph, which destroyed my preconceived notion of what the article was going to say: Continue reading
I’ll bet that Will Bunch and Taylor Lorenz are glad now that Joe Biden’s attempt to create a Ministry of Truth failed
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far left columnist Will Bunch skeeted an editorial by the UK’s left-wing The Guardian about protecting journolists, oops, sorry, journalists.
The Guardian view on Trump’s threat to the media: time to pass the Press Act
Bipartisan legislation offers historic protections for journalists, banning secret surveillance and ensuring source confidentiality
Tuesday, December 10, 2024 | 1:40 OM EST
Fears of a press crackdown under Donald Trump’s second term deepened with his nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director – given his calls for retribution against journalists. Yet a rare chance to protect press freedom has emerged. The bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (Press) Act, the strongest press freedom legislation in US history, is on the brink of a vote. While President-elect Trump has urged Republicans to block it, the Senate could still deliver it to Joe Biden before the lame-duck session ends in January. Continue reading
Loony Luigi is only the most visible part of a serious problem.
In an article on the American Free News Network, Mike Thiac notes the compassion and empathy of our good friends on the left concerning the assassination of Brian Thompson, the Chief Executive Officer of United Heaththcare. Many on the left believe that Mr THompson deserved to be murdered, because he was CEO of an evil health insurance company. The lovely but loony Taylor Lorenz told us that she felt “joy” when she heard he’d been killed, and we noted here how some on the left were celebrating.
There are already “Free Him” trends on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — and Bluesky, calling him a hero. The lovely but lunatic Taylor Lorenz celebrated the assassination, and has been drawing internet fire. Continue reading
Is it possible that our friends on the left prefer journolism to journalism?
It isn’t that much of a surprise, I suppose, that the heavily politicized cable news networks would lose viewers after the political season and elections are over, but it seems that our good friends on the left are giving up in droves on the hard-left journolists of MSNBC.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid loses roughly half her viewers since the election, primetime hosts also struggle
MSNBC lost a whopping 53% of its total viewerership in primetime since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Friday, December 6, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST
MSNBC host Joy Reid and her primetime colleagues have faced a brutal decline in viewership since the election. Continue reading
I check Bluesky so you don’t have to On that nice, polite, all-sweetness-and-light social media service, the Usual Suspects are cheering the murder of a health insurance CEO
A thus-far unidentified gunman waited for 50-year-old Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, and shot him to death, in what the New York Police Department labelled a “brazen targeted attack.” Naturally, some of the [insert plural slang term for the anus here] are celebrating the murder of this innocent man, as can be seen in the tweet screen captured at the right. The waste of water and air in the video called the murderer a hero.
In a land of fruits and nuts, in which anyone has the right to say stupid stuff and then put it on TikTok, it’s unsurprising that some deranged guy would celebrate a targeted murder like that. But, what would you say if a well-paid columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the winner of over twenty Pulitzer Prizes, celebrated the same attack? Continue reading