Gaffespotting

Psychologist and science writer Steven Pinker offered up the observation that the media's idea of political coverage is just gaffe spotting.

Probably the truest words I've seen this year.

Rather than deep-dive journalism intended to expose corruption, reveal inconvenient truths, and pull back the green curtain on government's machinations, the legacy press is all about gotcha-gaming the political party they oppose. By extension, they play gotcha-defense for the home team when their ideological counterparts in the press do it to their favored sons and daughters (and aunts and uncles and other assorted fossils), either by press-splaining gotchas away or by offering up whataboutisms.

None of which serves the public in a productive sense... unless you consider this form of political ping-pong as "productive."

Which, sadly, based on the deluge of memes I typically see after each instance of gaffespotting, is what a sizable chunk of the public seems to want.

This makes the slow-motion defenestration (or under-bussing, if you'd prefer to keep him at ground level) of Joe Biden by the Left over the (on-going) discovery of classified documents in his Delaware garage and home rather interesting. That they’re talking about it at all means they’ve broken from the water-carrying and reflexive defense behavior, which bodes ill for Joe. That they’re giving serious press time to this despite George Santos being a glorious January gift seems quite the telltale. That members of his party are making some significant noises as well bodes ill for Uncle Joe.

The quick progression from "too convenient, they must have been planted" to "it's nowhere near as bad as Trump's" to "we have some serious questions and concerns" could be the result of the blatant, undeniable, red-handed nature of the discoveries, and therefore they really have no choice.

Or, an opportunity to either get Joe out of office or ensure he doesn't run again. Biden’s been a truly dutiful water-carrier for the Left's agenda, but the tea leaves may now be telling them he either can't handle another Presidential campaign or is apt to lose in 2024.

After all, Biden has proven to be the sine qua non of gaffes. Kinsley or otherwise. His unscripted utterances are so routinely walked back by his staffers that we might as well call him Yo Yo Joe, constantly being rewound after unwinding whatever garbled notions are bouncing around his frontal lobe at any given moment. In a world where gaffespotting sells, a gaffe-prone President is a problem.

Could this classified docs bit be what leads the legacy press to abandon Joe? Watch the next month or two, and see if another prominent Democrat (but not Kamala ‘Cackles’ Harris, who is DWW) suddenly starts getting a lot of press and air/face time on NYTNPRCNNMSNBC.

If they start grooming someone else's public image while continuing to grumble about Corvette-Gate, you'll have your answer.

---

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy The Roots of Liberty, please subscribe (if you have already, thank you!), please hit that “like” button to let me know, please share any article you like wherever you roam the Internet, and  please recommend the blog to your friends.

If you really like The Roots of Liberty and want to help keep it rolling, please consider becoming a paying subscriber here at Substack, or at a lighter level as contributor to the blog via Patreon.

Thank you, again, for your support!

Peter.