Joe Biden just stuck up his middle finger and told Americans everywhere: Screw you.
In a taped interview that lasted only 22 minutes, the President insisted his dire poll numbers weren’t real — ‘fake news’, if you will — that the Democratic party has no concerns about his fitness to lead, and that the only way he would exit the race is ‘if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me’.
What — Barack Obama isn’t close enough?
If Americans had a shred of sympathy for Biden after last week’s CNN debate — if they felt that perhaps he didn’t know how dire his condition was, that likely his family were keeping him in the race for their own purposes — well, Joe took that notion into the public square and shot it dead.
This interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, meant to be damage control, has only further enraged Democrat politicians and big donors who, since that calamitous Trump debate, have pressed the President to step aside.
Make no mistake: Joe Biden, for all his hackneyed talk about ‘battling for the soul of America’, cares not one whit for that.
He cares about staying in power. Full stop.
Joe Biden just stuck up his middle finger and told Americans everywhere: Screw you.
Biden may or may not be lying to himself, but he’s for damn sure lying to the American people when he says all is well.
Stephanopoulos: Did you ever watch the debate afterwards?
Biden: I don’t think I did, no.
I don’t think I did?
That debate is seared into the frontal lobes of everyone who saw it. Biden’s performance is a national trauma, enough for his cheerleaders at MSNBC and the New York Times to finally express grave alarm and call for him to step aside immediately.
Yet in practically the next breath, Biden claimed that he’s certain he doesn’t need a neurological exam — because, he said with absolute surety, his doctors haven’t told him he needs one.
‘No one said I had to’, Biden said. ‘No one said. They said I’m good.’
Which is it? He can’t recall if he watched last week’s debate — effectively the end of his political career — or he’s utterly sure despite the panic among the liberal elite, party donors and all of America’s mass media that he’s fine and they’re wrong? Because it can’t be both.
Biden was spray-tanned and puffed up to the hilt, but he couldn’t mask his slurring, his garbled diction, or those moments where he lost a name or a fact and stared off with that vacant gaze.
‘I just… anyway.’
Nor could he hide his rage when Stephanopoulos pressed and pressed, refusing to accept Biden’s repeated talking point that ‘I just had a bad night’.
If that was a bad night, COVID was a mere inconvenience.
Asked four times if he would consider taking an independent cognitive test and publicly release the results to allay fears, Biden said no.
‘George,’ he said, ‘I’m the guy that put NATO together’.
He is not.
‘I’m the guy that shut Putin down.’
Ukraine begs to differ.
‘We invented the chip, the little chip, the computer chip.’
Another lie. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce invented the microchip in 1958. Biden would have been 16 years old.
This interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, meant to be damage control, has only further enraged Democrat politicians and big donors who, since that calamitous Trump debate, have pressed the President to step aside.
Biden may or may not be lying to himself, but he’s for damn sure lying to the American people when he says all is well.
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MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Jill Biden doesn't give a damn about America – or her husband
‘You know,’ he said, ‘the next president of the United States, it’s not just about whether he or she knows what they’re doing.’
It’s not? Isn’t that the baseline level of the job description: Know what you’re doing?
Biden — who we recently learned only works at his ‘best’ between 10am and 4pm, and post-debate asserted that he really needs to work even less, sleep more and stop doing stuff after 8pm — delivered this whopper:
‘It’s — it’s — it’s not — not about a con — a conglomerate of people making decisions.’
This is exactly our great fear right now: That a cabal of people we don’t know and did not elect, Jill and Hunter Biden among them, are the ones making decisions.
Semafor’s Ben Smith reported on a phone call he had with a ‘scared’ Biden aide on July 4:
‘It’s unclear even to some inside the West Wing… which policy issues reach the president, and how. Major decisions go into an opaque circle… and return concluded’.
What is that if not a conglomerate?
Yet Biden has the temerity to say that this race ‘is about the character of the president’.
If he had a shred of character, he’d have gone by now. He would have taken the dignified route out.
His refusal to do so, his ego-driven, megalomaniacal insistence on staying in this race — plummeting in the polls against Trump, who he calls our greatest ‘threat to democracy’ — means the party is going to make him suffer.
When the billionaire donor class drops you — Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and heir to the Disney fortune Abigail Disney are among those who have pulled funding — you’re done.
When Hollywood power-broker Ari Emanuel, brother of Obama’s one-time chief advisor Rahm Emanuel, says that Biden’s condition has left the Democrats in ‘F*** City’ — well, that’s saying the quiet part out loud.
And when George Stephanopoulos, the ultimate Democratic party insider, repeatedly cajoles you to leave in a glorified exit interview, you might take the obvious hint.
Indeed, the left-wing media has now abandoned its most baroque explanations for Biden’s age-related decline.
In March, one month after Special Counsel Robert Hur’s finding that Biden was ‘an elderly man with a poor memory’ who couldn’t remember when his son Beau died, or the years he served as Vice President, New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote a lengthy essay asserting that Biden’s forgetfulness was merely akin to the ‘late style’ of greats such as Matisse, Beethoven and Shakespeare.
You couldn’t make this up.
Our great fear right now: That a cabal of people we don’t know and did not elect, Jill and Hunter Biden among them, are the ones making decisions.
If he had a shred of character, he’d have gone by now. He would have taken the dignified route out.
In New York magazine, Olivia Nuzzi reported this week that Biden no longer recognizes longtime friends.
She quoted a guest who attended a White House event last year as saying that Biden’s condition was so alarming ‘the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president may not be the acting president after all’.
Terrifying stuff. Though equally suspect was Nuzzi’s admission, in said piece, that she’d been sitting on this information since January. Wonder why?
But as Joe Biden insisted in last night’s damning, delusional interview — one he and his loyalists will doubtless call a ‘cheap fake’ — his polling is strong (Trump is soaring since the debate), his approval rating is up (it’s at a dismal 36 percent) , and ‘all the governors’ support him (Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy reportedly told Biden’s chief of staff that his candidacy is ‘irretrievable’).
Lest there be any doubt that Biden’s mask of decency just fell and shattered into a million pieces, consider what he said about Trump in January: ‘He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy [to] put himself in power’.
When asked by Stephanopoulos if, by refusing to step aside, Trump — remember, greatest threat to democracy, the guy who will never leave, no matter what, ahem — wins this election, Biden shrugged:
‘I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and did the goodest [sic] job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.’
Women of America, reproductive rights, the Supreme Court, this vaunted democracy and rule of law — the President just said: ‘F-You. It’s all about me.’
It is now incumbent on the Dems to push him out, forcefully and finally, and make this race about the people of America.
Let Joe Biden’s legacy come to its ignominious and shameful end.