International
Years Of Media Misdirection Over Biden Mental State Are Unraveling Before Our Eyes
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By JASON COHEN
Corporate media’s years-long effort to sweep questions about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness under the rug took a devastating blow after his debate with former President Donald Trump.
Voters have long been concerned about Biden’s mental fitness being insufficient to be president, and Republicans have repeatedly raised doubts about his cognitive competence, including during the 2020 campaign as he made numerous gaffes. Despite concerns from Americans, legacy media outlets have consistently downplayed their legitimacy and criticized those who voiced them, even suggesting the narrative of incompetence stems from Russia.
WATCH:
Joe Scarborough, March:
“I’m gonna tell you the truth, and f* you if you can’t handle the truth: This version of Biden is the best Biden ever” pic.twitter.com/RWij2c4Zfg— Philip Reichert (@PhilipReichert) June 28, 2024
CNN published an analysis in August 2021, concluding that concerns about Biden’s cognitive capabilities were mostly a “moot” issue. The analysis suggested it was primarily Republicans who were pushing the narrative that Biden is diminished.
“This is the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life,” the analysis by former CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza stated. “If Republicans have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward. If they don’t, they should stop doing what they’re doing. Immediately.”
The NYT published an opinion piece in November 2020 titled “Stop Worrying About Biden’s Age. We Need His Wisdom Right Now” that stated, “I can’t be bothered with the despicable Sleepy-Joe canard that the right is peddling, except to say that if this is what dementia looks like, I don’t know what to call my own flashes of forgetfulness, in which words, keys and hair scrunchies regularly desert me.”
Moreover, The Hill published a piece in November 2019 suggesting Biden’s frequent gaffes are due to a stutter he has had since he was a child rather than cognitive decline.
“Some have been quick to question Biden’s mental fitness, hinting at a possible age-related cognitive decline (he just turned 77 years old), but it’s important to consider that many of those missteps could have been caused by his lifelong struggle with a speech impediment,” The Hill stated.
Special counsel Robert Hur published a report in February finding Biden mismanaged classified documents, but he opted not to seek charges against the president because of the improbability of obtaining a conviction based on the likelihood a jury may perceive the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Corporate media defended Biden’s lucidity and attacked Hur as partisan and deceptive after a transcript of their interview was published, revealing memory lapses, such as appearing to forget when he began and ended his vice presidency and the date of his late son Beau’s death.
For instance, the NYT reported that “Biden appeared clearheaded most of the time” and that he “went into great detail about many matters,” while The Washington Post noted that “Biden doesn’t come across as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”
NBC News acknowledged Biden’s “memory lapses” during the interview, but highlighted the “detailed exchanges” that took place in its headline.
Several clips about Biden in June amassed attention for underscoring the 81-year-old’s diminished fitness and increased gaffes, including the president freezing and wandering off. The White House, in the month leading up to the debate, characterized concerning videos of Biden as “cheap fakes,” and the media picked up on the narrative.
“‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead,” a headline by The Washington Post on June 14 read.
“The use of these clips is an especially pernicious couple of examples of manipulated video… because it’s intended to create a false narrative that doesn’t reflect the event as it occurred,” the outlet asserted, stating that the style of editing made them misleading. The NYT published an article titled “How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts” on June 21, similarly claiming the cropping of the videos makes them deceptive.
The latest panic about Biden’s age and fitness has led to the president facing growing high-profile calls to drop out of the race, such as from a prominent columnist and a Democratic representative. Five significant media publications, including the NYT, called for Biden to withdraw, and two urged him to at least consider it, The Hill reported on Sunday.
“There’s ample speculation online about what the news media did and didn’t do with respect to covering the president’s age,” NYT executive editor Joe Kahn said in a note to NYT journalists on Wednesday that the outlet shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “What I’ve seen and what our readers have experienced from our team is steadfast, fact-based reporting on the subject that began a couple of years ago as we documented Biden’s age-related challenges in multiple, industry-leading articles. We have stayed on that story at every turn, always with nuance and context, through today’s outstanding report.”
The coverage of Biden’s competence should have been more intense, some reporters who cover the White House told CNN anonymously on Tuesday. One reporter told the outlet they erred by not probing more after Hur’s report.
“The right-wing media was calling him senile from day one, and that wasn’t true,” the reporter told CNN. “Then whenever you report on the age you were in some ways solidifying, giving credence to some people that were actually of bad faith.”
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said in March that the current “version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever. Not a close second and I’ve known him for years… If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”
Scarborough asked on Friday, after the debate, if Biden should withdraw from the race, raising concerns about his capability to run the country and beat Trump.
The Washington Post, NBC and The Hill did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Alberta
Ford and Trudeau are playing checkers. Trump and Smith are playing chess
By Dan McTeague
Ford’s calls for national unity – “We need to stand united as Canadians!” – in context feels like an endorsement of fellow Electric Vehicle fanatic Trudeau. And you do wonder if that issue has something to do with it. After all, the two have worked together to pump billions in taxpayer dollars into the EV industry.
There’s no doubt about it: Donald Trump’s threat of a blanket 25% tariff on Canadian goods (to be established if the Canadian government fails to take sufficient action to combat drug trafficking and illegal crossings over our southern border) would be catastrophic for our nation’s economy. More than $3 billion in goods move between the U.S. and Canada on a daily basis. If enacted, the Trump tariff would likely result in a full-blown recession.
It falls upon Canada’s leaders to prevent that from happening. That’s why Justin Trudeau flew to Florida two weeks ago to point out to the president-elect that the trade relationship between our countries is mutually beneficial.
This is true, but Trudeau isn’t the best person to make that case to Trump, since he has been trashing the once and future president, and his supporters, both in public and private, for years. He did so again at an appearance just the other day, in which he implied that American voters were sexist for once again failing to elect the nation’s first female president, and said that Trump’s election amounted to an assault on women’s rights.
Consequently, the meeting with Trump didn’t go well.
But Trudeau isn’t Canada’s only politician, and in recent days we’ve seen some contrasting approaches to this serious matter from our provincial leaders.
First up was Doug Ford, who followed up a phone call with Trudeau earlier this week by saying that Canadians have to prepare for a trade war. “Folks, this is coming, it’s not ‘if,’ it is — it’s coming… and we need to be prepared.”
Ford said that he’s working with Liberal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to put together a retaliatory tariff list. Spokesmen for his government floated the idea of banning the LCBO from buying American alcohol, and restricting the export of critical minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries (I’m sure Trump is terrified about that last one).
But Ford’s most dramatic threat was his announcement that Ontario is prepared to shut down energy exports to the U.S., specifically to Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, if Trump follows through with his plan. “We’re sending a message to the U.S. You come and attack Ontario, you attack the livelihoods of Ontario and Canadians, we’re going to use every tool in our toolbox to defend Ontarians and Canadians across the border,” Ford said.
Now, unfortunately, all of this chest-thumping rings hollow. Ontario does almost $500 billion per year in trade with the U.S., and the province’s supply chains are highly integrated with America’s. The idea of just cutting off the power, as if you could just flip a switch, is actually impossible. It’s a bluff, and Trump has already called him on it. When told about Ford’s threat by a reporter this week, Trump replied “That’s okay if he does that. That’s fine.”
And Ford’s calls for national unity – “We need to stand united as Canadians!” – in context feels like an endorsement of fellow Electric Vehicle fanatic Trudeau. And you do wonder if that issue has something to do with it. After all, the two have worked together to pump billions in taxpayer dollars into the EV industry. Just over the past year Ford and Trudeau have been seen side by side announcing their $5 billion commitment to Honda, or their $28.2 billion in subsidies for new Stellantis and Volkswagen electric vehicle battery plants.
Their assumption was that the U.S. would be a major market for Canadian EVs. Remember that “vehicles are the second largest Canadian export by value, at $51 billion in 2023 of which 93% was exported to the U.S.,”according to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, and “Auto is Ontario’s top export at 28.9% of all exports (2023).”
But Trump ran on abolishing the Biden administration’s de facto EV mandate. Now that he’s back in the White House, the market for those EVs that Trudeau and Ford invested in so heavily is going to be much softer. Perhaps they’d like to be able to blame Trump’s tariffs for the coming downturn rather than their own misjudgment.
In any event, Ford’s tactic stands in stark contrast to the response from Alberta, Canada’s true energy superpower. Premier Danielle Smith made it clear that her province “will not support cutting off our Alberta energy exports to the U.S., nor will we support a tariff war with our largest trading partner and closest ally.”
Smith spoke about this topic at length at an event announcing a new $29-million border patrol team charged with combatting drug trafficking, at which said that Trudeau’s criticisms of the president-elect were, “not helpful.” Her deputy premier Mike Ellis was quoted as saying, “The concerns that president-elect Trump has expressed regarding fentanyl are, quite frankly, the same concerns that I and the premier have had.” Smith and Ellis also criticized Ottawa’s progressively lenient approach to drug crimes.
(For what it’s worth, a recent Léger poll found that “Just 29 per cent of [Canadians] believe Trump’s concerns about illegal immigration and drug trafficking from Canada to the U.S. are unwarranted.” Perhaps that’s why some recent polls have found that Trudeau is currently less popular in Canada than Trump at the moment.)
Smith said that Trudeau’s criticisms of the president-elect were, “not helpful.” And on X/Twitter she said, “Now is the time to… reach out to our friends and allies in the U.S. to remind them just how much Americans and Canadians mutually benefit from our trade relationship – and what we can do to grow that partnership further,” adding, “Tariffs just hurt Americans and Canadians on both sides of the border. Let’s make sure they don’t happen.”
This is exactly the right approach. Smith knows there is a lot at stake in this fight, and is not willing to step into the ring in a fight that Canada simply can’t win, and will cause a great deal of hardship for all involved along the way.
While Trudeau indulges in virtue signaling and Ford in sabre rattling, Danielle Smith is engaging in true statesmanship. That’s something that is in short supply in our country these days.
As I’ve written before, Trump is playing chess while Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford are playing checkers. They should take note of Smith’s strategy. Honey will attract more than vinegar, and if the long history of our two countries tell us anything, it’s that diplomacy is more effective than idle threats.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
Daily Caller
LNG Farce Sums Up Four Years Of Ridiculous Biden Energy Policy
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By David Blackmon
That is what happens when “science” isn’t science at all and energy reality is ignored in favor of the prevailing narratives of the political left.
As Congress struggled with yet another chaotic episode of negotiations over another catastrophic continuing resolution, all I could think was how wonderful it would be for everyone if they just shut the government down and brought an end to the Biden administration and its incredibly braindead and destructive energy-policy farce a month early.
What a blessing it would be for the country if President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were forced to stop “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” 30 days ahead of schedule. What a merry Christmas we could have if we never had to hear silly talking points based on pseudoscience from the likes of Biden’s climate policy adviser John Podesta or Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm or Biden himself (read, as always, from his ever-present TelePrompTer) again!
What a shame it has been that the rest of us have been forced to take such unserious people seriously for the last four years solely because they had assumed power over the rest of us. As Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead spent decades singing: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
Speaking of Granholm, she put the perfect coda to this administration’s seemingly endless series of policy scams this week by playing cynical political games with what was advertised as a serious study. It was ostensibly a study so vitally important that it mandated the suspension of permitting for one of the country’s great growth industries while we breathlessly awaited its publication for most of a year.
That, of course, was the Department of Energy’s (DOE) study related to the economic and environmental impacts of continued growth of the U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) export industry. We were told in January by both Granholm and Biden that the need to conduct this study was so urgent, that it was entirely necessary to suspend permitting for new LNG export infrastructure until it was completed.
The grand plan was transparent: implement the “pause” based on a highly suspect LNG emissions draft study by researchers at Cornell University, and then publish an impactful DOE study that could be used by a President Kamala Harris to implement a permanent ban on new export facilities. It no doubt seemed foolproof at the Biden White House, but schemes like this never turn out to be anywhere near that.
First, the scientific basis for implementing the pause to begin with fell apart when the authors of the draft Cornell study were forced to radically lower their emissions estimates in the final product published in September.
And then, the DOE study findings turned out to be a mixed bag proving no real danger in allowing the industry to resume its growth path.
Faced with a completed study whose findings essentially amount to a big bag of nothing, Granholm decided she could not simply publish it and let it stand on its own merits. Instead, someone at DOE decided it would be a great idea to leak a three-page letter to the New York Times 24 hours before publication of the study in an obvious attempt to punch up the findings.
The problem with Granholm’s letter was, as the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board put it Thursday, “the study’s facts are at war with her conclusions.” After ticking off a list of ways in which Granholm’s letter exaggerates and misleads about the study’s actual findings, the Journal’s editorial added, “Our sources say the Biden National Security Council and career officials at Energy’s National Laboratories disagree with Ms. Granholm’s conclusions.”
There can be little doubt that this reality would have held little sway in a Kamala Harris presidency. Granholm’s and Podesta’s talking points would have almost certainly resulted in making the permitting “pause” a permanent feature of U.S. energy policy. That is what happens when “science” isn’t science at all and energy reality is ignored in favor of the prevailing narratives of the political left.
What a blessing it would have been to put an end to this form of policy madness a month ahead of time. January 20 surely cannot come soon enough.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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