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.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
War Secretary Pete Hegseth is moving forward with a massive shakeup of military leadership, restructuring top commands and moving the U.S. focus away from Europe and the Middle East, according to a report out Monday.
Five sources with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post the Pentagon is set to consolidate U.S. Central Command in the Middle East, U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command into a new larger combatant command, the U.S. International Command. Other commands would be similarly consolidated, reducing the total number of combatant commands from 11 to eight. The intended restructuring is designed both to reduce the number of admirals and four star generals and refocus the U.S. military on the Indo-Pacific and Western Hemisphere, according to the sources.
The plan would be one of the most significant changes to the military’s upper echelons in decades, and the move would bring the Pentagon more directly in line with the administration’s refocusing of priorities in the recently released National Security Strategy.
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“As a matter of Department of War policy, we will not comment on leaked documents that we cannot authenticate and rumored internal discussions, as well as specifics of architectural discussion or pre-decisional matters,” a War Department official told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Beyond this, any insinuation there is a divide within the Department is completely false – everyone in the Department is working to achieve the same goal under this administration.”
The Post also reports the proposal was crafted under supervision by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, at Hegseth’s request. Caine will also be sharing two alternate proposals on potential restructures.
Hegseth has been looking for ways to reduce the number of four star generals in the Armed Forces, which has roughly the same amount of generals now as during World War II.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Steve Milloy
The Paris Climate Accord was adopted 10 years ago this week. It’s been a decade of disaster that President Donald Trump is rightly trying again to end.
The stated purpose of the agreement was for countries to voluntarily cut emissions to avoid the average global temperature exceeding the (guessed at) pre-industrial temperature by 3.6°F (2°C) and preferably 2.7°F (1.5°C).
Since December 2015, the world spent an estimated $10 trillion trying to achieve the Paris goals. What has been accomplished? Instead of reducing global emissions, they have increased about 12 percent. While the increase in emissions is actually a good thing for the environment and humanity, spending $10 trillion in a failed effort to cut emissions just underscores the agreement’s waste, fraud and abuse.
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But wasting $10 trillion is only the tip of the iceberg.
The effort to cut emissions was largely based on forcing industrial countries to replace their tried-and-true fossil fuel-based energy systems with not-ready-for-prime-time wind, solar and battery-based systems. This forced transition has driven up energy costs and made energy systems less reliable. The result of that has been economy-crippling deindustrialization in former powerhouses of Germany and Britain.
And it gets worse.
European nations imagined they could reduce their carbon footprint by outsourcing their coal and natural gas needs to Russia. That outsourcing enriched Russia and made the European economy dependent on Russia for energy. That vulnerability, in turn, and a weak President Joe Biden encouraged Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.
The result of that has been more than one million killed and wounded, the mass destruction of Ukraine worth more than $500 billion so far and the inestimable cost of global destabilization. Europe will have to spend hundreds of billions more on defense, and U.S. taxpayers have been forced to spend hundreds of billions on arms for Ukraine. Putin has even raised the specter of using nuclear weapons.
President Barack Obama unconstitutionally tried to impose the Paris agreement on the U.S. as an Executive agreement rather than a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate. Although Trump terminated the Executive agreement during his first administration, President Joe Biden rejoined the agreement soon after taking office, pledging to double Obama’s emissions cuts pledge to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Biden’s emissions pledge was an impetus for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that allocated $1.2 trillion in spending for what Trump labeled as the Green New Scam. Although Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced that spending by about $500 billion and he is trying to reduce it further through Executive action, much of that money was used in an effort to buy the 2024 election for Democrats. The rest has been and will be used to wreck our electricity grid with dangerous, national security-compromising wind, solar and battery equipment from Communists China.
Then there’s this. At the Paris climate conference in 2015, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stated quite clearly that emissions cuts by the U.S. and other industrial countries were meaningless and would accomplish nothing since the developing world’s emissions would be increasing.
Finally, there is the climate realism aspect to all this. After the Paris agreement was signed and despite the increase in emissions, the average global temperature declined during the years from 2016 to 2022, per NOAA data.
The super El Nino experienced during 2023-2024 caused a temporary temperature spike. La Nina conditions have now returned the average global temperature to below the 2015-2016 level, per NASA satellite data. The overarching point is that any “global warming” that occurred over the past 40 years is actually associated with the natural El Nino-La Nina cycle, not emissions.
The Paris agreement has been all pain and no gain. Moreover, there was never any need for the agreement in the first place. A big thanks to President Trump for pulling us out again.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
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