Disservice To Democracy
It has only been a couple weeks since The Great Unmasking, the day that Joe Biden's cognitive decline went from "don't believe your lying eyes, Joe is sharp as a tack" to "we are all shocked, shocked! that Joe’s in mental decline!" The Democrats are in a full-on panic, and as is the norm with panics, there has been a range of responses and prescriptions. A few, laughably, tried to blame deepfakes, Joe having a cold, or Trump yelling off-mike for Biden's addled performance, but this was on the fringe and we all knew they were lying - to us and to themselves. Everyone else has been "what can we do to avoid losing the White House to Trump?"
A few realities quickly set in. While there was early buzz about drafting California Governor Gavin Newsom, who's been pledging his fealty to Biden even as he worked to position himself as the heir-presumptive, that idea quickly fizzled out thanks to two inconveniences: Newsom's oiliness and the constraints on Biden's $240M campaign war chest.
I won't digress much re Newsom. "Governor Important Hair" has been disastrous for California, and the rest of the country knows it.
The big problem for the Democrats is that, should Biden drop out, only Harris could spend the campaign money that Biden collected for his re-election campaign. With time being incredibly tight, returning and recollecting that money is probably too Herculean a task to even ponder. I call this a problem because of Harris herself, a cackling, platitude-spewing, not-ready-for-infomercials-let-alone-primetime affirmative action hire, and a despicable person who, as California District Attorney, imprisoned innocents, kept nonviolent offenders behind bars in defiance of the Supreme Court, and buried exculpatory evidence.
The bigger problem is that, by conspiring to hide Biden's decline across the past year and more, the Democratic Party and its cohorts in the legacy media have subverted the democratic process by which Americans elect their presidents.
As it stands now, the delegates that the party's state-level political machines are sending to the Democratic National Convention, not the voters themselves, are going to be who selects the Democratic Presidential candidate. Or, worse, a small sheaf of insiders will do the "smoke-filled room" bit, and decree who it'll be.
These are the people who are screaming "Save Democracy!," and proclaim to be its defenders with wild-eyed assertions that Trump will single-handedly usurp all governmental power and make himself a de facto dictator if elected. The people who have lied and lawfared in order to mislead or prevent voters from choosing Trump.
This is the problem with the modern Democratic Party. It abandoned its working-class base in favor of "know-better" technocrats, and replaced "public service" with "management of the ignorant masses" as its guiding principle. So, it should come as no surprise that the party managed to subvert the primary process by figuratively hiding Biden in the basement again.
As I recently blogged, the abandonment of journalism by the legacy media in favor of acting as an extension of the Democratic Party has troubling consequences for the future of the nation. Voters, if they are to cast informed votes, need to be informed, and doing so, even imperfectly, is the Fourth Estate's vital role in a free nation with representative government.
We will never know whether the hiding of his mental decline enabled Biden to win the Democratic primary. We don't yet know if he can be coaxed into withdrawing from the election. But, we do know that a massive disservice has been perpetrated on the American people by a small group of insiders and "know-betters," abetted by a sycophantic press and a whole lot of people who have forgotten that denial is not just a river in Egypt.
A footnote. Biden, or more accurately the Bidens (aka Jill and Hunter), are digging their heels in, and their orbit is engaging in dog-and-pony shows to try and convince people that the debate was an aberration rather than a revelation. Meanwhile, the people who fear that Joe won’t drop out are putting out their own spins. Here’s one:
The message? Even if Biden’s senile, it’s OK, because he’s not really running the country anyway.
I don’t recall any of that “team” being on the primary ballot. Do you?
Who knows how long they have been hoodwinking we the people. It's criminal.