Media Now Embarassed For Covering Up Biden’s Weakness

By John J. Duncan Jr.

duncanj@knoxfocus.com

It is both a little bit funny and a little bit sad, even a little pathetic, when a very old man tries to show he is as strong and active as a much younger man.

President Biden often tries to carry his arms and take a couple of quick steps when he comes on stage to make it look almost like he is running.

And because there have been many comments and reports about how weak his voice is, President Biden has begun to shout at times during his speeches, something he never did as a much younger man.

It is also both sad and funny, but certainly not surprising, to watch most of the national media jump as they always do on the Democrat bandwagon trying to get Biden to not run again.

In a survey released just last Dec. 30, Syracuse University’s School of Public Communications said the number of journalists identifying themselves as Republicans fell from 18% in 2002 and 7.1% in 2013 to just only 3.4% in 2022.

For many years, the national news media has been a very biased and very strong part of the Democrat Party.

I got a degree in journalism in 1969 and worked fulltime as a reporter for the Knoxville Journal, our morning daily newspaper, during my senior year. I then taught journalism for a year while I went to law school at night.

In those days, all respectable newspapers kept the opinion pages separate from the news pages. Real journalists prided themselves on their objectivity.

No longer. Now, most reporters seem to feel that they will not be respected by their fellow “journalists” if they don’t use words like “obviously false” or “without evidence” when reporting statements by former President Trump in what are supposed to be news stories.

The national media protected Biden all through the 2020 campaign. They would have crucified a Republican who hid in a basement like Biden did.

They knew they had to ask Trump tougher, even insulting, questions in very unfriendly, even hostile tones, while they asked Biden what kind of ice cream he was eating and other softball questions.

Now, beginning to feel guilty about being so easy on President Biden (and worried about potential Democrat losses) they are finally getting tough on him in hopes they can force him out. Even longtime Democrat George Stephanopoulos got tough on the President in his 22 minute interview with him.

And liberal newspapers like the New York Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the Chicago Tribune, and liberal magazines like the New Yorker and the Economist have said Biden should pull out.

It may be too late for the national media to recover what little credibility they once had. Witness for instance the recent attack on the far-left bias of NPR from one of its very own top editors.

Also, the resignation of Bari Weiss, who describes herself as a “left-leaning centrist,” after she was not allowed to run conservative and moderate views as opinion page editor of the New York Times.

Then on July 5, Alex Berenson, a former longtime reporter for the New York Times, wrote in his popular online publication, Unreported Truths, that “the greatest loser from Joe Biden’s catastrophic meltdown during his debate last week with Donald Trump is not Biden himself.”

He added: “No, the greatest loser is the media, specifically elite news organizations like the New York Times that have teams of reporters covering the White House. These teams either somehow missed Biden’s sharp cognitive decline – or worse, actively covered it up.”

Berenson said: “Either way, a reckoning for the way media outlets have turned into spear-carriers for the Democratic Party may be coming. I hope it will be. It is long overdue.”

Whether Biden or someone else is the Democrat nominee, the election will be close because there is still so much bitter, Trump Derangement Syndrome in the country.

One of the most hate-filled women on national TV is MSNBC’s Joy Reid. She said on July 4 that she would vote for Joe Biden if he was in a coma to keep Trump, who she referred to as Hitler, out of the White House.

After what everyone has described as “Biden’s disastrous debate,” one of my wife’s very closest friends immediately started spouting off the Democrat talking points that Trump had told so many lies. Vickie asked her which lies. She could not name even one.

A final example of the national media’s extreme bias is in the way they describe even moderate conservatives as “far right” while never calling the mostly socialist Democrats as “far left.” And the only Republicans they will praise or treat with kid gloves are ones who are bitter at the party for some reason.

https://www.knoxfocus.com/columnist/media-now-embarassed-for-covering-up-bidens-weakness/

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It is now five years since Emmanuel Macron, in one of those blunt outbursts for which he is known, told The Economist, in a reference to the collective West, “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.” 

The French president thereupon shocked officials across the Continent. “That is not my point of view,” Angela Merkel responded augustly. “I don’t think that such sweeping judgments are necessary.” Heiko Maas, the German chancellor’s foreign minister, added imaginatively, “I do not believe NATO is brain dead.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization celebrated its 75th anniversary last week, 32 presidents and prime ministers assembling in the same Washington auditorium where earlier leaders, 12 of them then, signed its founding treaty on April 4, 1949. 

Joe Biden presided over the anniversary proceedings, of course. And with this in mind, let us credit the French leader for his prescience in diagnosing the condition of NATO’s cerebral matter. 

As Joe Lauria put it in a Consortium News commentary at the summit’s conclusion last Thursday, this is an organization whose members are collectively losing their minds. 

It is important to understand what Macron did and did not mean with this remark. He was not, as might be easily misinterpreted, declaring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization purposeless or obsolete: That was Donald Trump’s line, and Trump was then three years into his presidency. 

Macron, indeed, was reacting to Trump’s complaints about the alliance as a budgetary sinkhole and his, Trump’s, consequent failure to point the other members in the imperium’s desired direction, as all American presidents had since NATO’s launch as the Atlantic world’s premier Cold War military institution. 

Specific to the occasion of his interview with The Economist, Macron was unhappy about the mess then unfolding in northern Syria. Some readers may recall it: Trump had ordered American troops withdrawn — albeit an order diplomats, Army officers, and spooks soon subverted — and Turkey, a NATO member, had immediately piled in to attack Kurdish militias based in the region. 

“You have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies. None,” Macron told The Economist. “You have an uncoordinated aggressive action by another NATO ally, Turkey, in an area where our interests are at stake. There has been no NATO planning, nor any coordination.’’

And then the French leader’s punchline: “We should reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States.’’

Macron’s “brain dead” remark was not the thought of any kind of peacenik, then. The man who now advocates sending French troops into Ukraine is a committed militarist. What interests me about Macron’s apparently bold utterances, again and again, are the contradictions you find in them. 

In this case, he was angry at Donald Trump for failing to let the Europeans pretend they had a say in alliance policy while taking the occasion to assert his then-new, now-familiar call for Europe to cultivate its  “strategic autonomy.”

This is the kind of thing — the self-doubt, the smoldering resentments, the fraying unity — that prompted President Biden to make revitalizing NATO a priority when he took office three and some years ago.

“Who’s going to be able to hold NATO together like me?” was prominent among his boasts in his July 5 interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “You’re going to have now the NATO conference here in the United States next week. Come listen. See what they say.”

The anniversary summit has come and gone. And two realities are now upon us. The other alliance leaders in attendance didn’t say anything of consequence — not a single statement of note. 

It was boilerplate and pabulum, start to finish. Two, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is nicely reunited — “Together Again,” as the old Buck Owens song goes — but there can be no doubting now that it is brain dead. 

Here is something frightening to consider. This is Larry Johnson’s take on the question that occupied minds during the July 9–11 gathering. Johnson, who now commentates regularly, is a former C.I.A. officer and also served previously in the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. Don’t let the vulgar imagery throw you; it is indicative of the prevailing mood: 

“The hot political event this year is the NATO Summit in Washington. All Western world leaders showed up, not to discuss NATO’s future, but to see if Joe Biden survives the meetings without dumping a load in his Depends or keeling over dead. Sort of the same reason people attend a car race—i.e., they are waiting for the crash. Nothing like a fiery car wreck to get the adrenaline pumping.”

We need to think about what it means when NATO members meet and what is on their minds are not the various crises into which they have led the world over the past many years but whether the man whose authority lies effectively beyond question will manage to deliver an address coherently. 

Frightening, Not Funny

We can laugh at President Biden’s public displays of ineptitude, and there were some of these, per usual, as he addressed the summit and then gave a press conference afterward. But I didn’t say funny: I said frightening. And this is what NATO has become during Biden’s three and a half years as the alliance’s de facto commander-in-chief. 

Yes, Biden introduced Volodymyr Zelensky to the summit as “President Putin.” Yes, he confused his vice-president with the nonexistent “Vice–President Trump.” But it seems time now to look beyond ridicule. It is certainly time for the mainstream media to cut out the everybody-makes-mistakes nonsense. 

Biden has made himself a sad figure these past few weeks, a character reading a little out of Shakespeare and a little out of Sophocles. But the NATO summit faces us with the bitter reality that Joe Biden has become, above all, dangerous. 

Is there another way to think about a man listing into senility while directing an inordinately powerful military alliance whose members know how to defer and follow but do not know how to think? 

I was struck last week by the sparsity of the coverage American media dedicated to the summit. Some stories on Biden making it to the end of his presentations — the summit address, the presser that followed — without blowing it too badly. Markedly fewer given to the substance of the gathering.

It seemed to me a tacit suggestion that nothing new was said or determined during the July 9–11 sessions. It was simply more of the same, and more of the same does not make good copy in the news biz. 

Let us consider what the same comes to, and then what it means that more of the same is on the way. To preview my conclusions, NATO has just committed the West’s post-democracies to an era of institutionalized war, global violence, and disorder — this with, by design, no plan to end it. The same threat of annihilation familiar to those who recall the Cold War will prevail once again. 

Spending on armaments will take automatic priority over the well-being of the societies paying for this profligacy. Russia and China will be normalized as permanent enemies. The West’s estrangement from the non–West will be an established fact of life. 

The Deep State, an entrenched trans–Atlantic phenomenon now, will ally with liberal authoritarian elites to enforce this regime and suppress all those who question or challenge it. 

Denial Required

There is no overstatement here. This is precisely the project America’s neoconservative cliques outlined when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and a decade of American triumphalism ensued. You will find all of this in the subtext of Biden’s keynote address as the 75th events opened. 

The remarkable thing now is the degree of denial required of NATO’s leaders as they profess adherence to this agenda in a world radically transformed in the ensuing three decades. 

After praising the “remarkable progress” of European members that are spending ever more on weaponry — what a terrific thing — Biden went straight into the proxy war the alliance wages in Ukraine against the Russian Federation. 

Among his various assertions: “Ukraine can and will stop Putin,” “Make no mistake, Russia is failing in this war,” “We’ve built a global coalition to stand with Ukraine.” “An overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans understand that NATO makes us all safer.” And then one of my favorites, a recurring theme and a real Bidenism: 

“And Putin wants nothing less — nothing less than Ukraine’s total subjugation. And we know Putin will not stop at Ukraine.”

The high officials listening greeted all of these statements with enthusiasm. None of them bears even a remote relationship with the truth. 

In an interview with Andrew Napolitano taped for Judging Freedom, conducted after the summit ended July 11, John Mearsheimer, the foreign policy scholar, called Biden’s speech “poppycock, full of deluded statements.” 

But exactly. Reading the transcript of these remarks, all the intervals of applause noted in brackets, NATO seemed to me too Soviet for words at this point. I thought of those Cold War Life magazine photos of the Russian Duma when votes were taken, all hands raised uniformly in assent. 

This is the trans–Atlantic alliance as it has become. It operates on the basis of fantastic conjurings, and no member questions them. You have read absolutely no mainstream media challenging these silly fabrications and none analyzing NATO’s purpose or policies with any seriousness. 

This is what I mean by frightening. This is what makes NATO as it is now dangerous. Its stated purpose makes no sense and its unstated purpose is as noted above. 

And here is the diabolic truth it is important not to miss: Biden and everyone in his summit audience knows Ukraine is losing its war, knows Moscow has no designs on Europe, knows there is no “global coalition” standing with the alliance. These are simple facts beyond dispute, matters of record. 

But Biden’s speech was not meant for the other leaders present and the other leaders present did not applaud for Biden: Biden’s true audience was the public in the trans–Atlantic post-democracies, and the applause he received amounted to their instructions in the necessity to approve. 

NATO summits as performance, as exercises in mass propaganda conducted entirely in the open: I confess I cannot fully register the implications of an organization as powerful as the Atlantic alliance operating this emptily and cynically. 

NATO has a purpose all right, but its political figureheads, generals, and bureaucrats must make one up for public consumption, its actual purpose — global dominance at whatever cost —being too objectionable to profess. 

As to more of the same, the anniversary summit appears to mark a turn in the alliance toward complete abandonment of the pretense of NATO as a defensive organization in favor of increasingly aggressive, provocative postures. 

Antony Blinken, speaking in the course of the proceedings, termed the thought of Ukraine’s membership in the alliance “inevitable and irreversible,” awaiting the Kiev regime across “a well-lit bridge.” I read this two ways. One, Biden and his policy cliques are doing what they can, which is limited, to reassure Ukraine in anticipation of a possible Trump victory in November. 

Two and closer to the ground, as Kiev continues to lose on the battlefield, NATO now intends to signal that settlement talks are out of the question and the alliance will plunge deeper into the morass however deep the morass eventually proves. To wit: John Helmer, a long-serving and highly reliable Moscow correspondent who now publishes Dances with Bears, reported last week,

“American, British, and Canadian troops in NATO’s forward bases in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania are being told to prepare for deployment to the Ukraine next year. They are also being warned to expect to fight under heavy Russian artillery, missile, guided bomb, and drone strikes.”

Note the nations from which these troops will be dispatched to the Ukrainian front. They are all former Soviet satellites nursing quite understandable but lethally unbalanced cases of anti–Russian paranoia. 

This is how aggression is sometimes engendered in the long-term war against Russia. Ukraine relies on the same visceral anti–Russian animus by way of the neo–Nazi units that lead its military. 

“And here with us — and here with us today are countries from the Indo–Pacific region,” Biden said midway in his address. “They’re here because they have a stake in our success and we have a stake in theirs.” 

I do not like this remark one bit. I read it as a barely veiled confirmation of a swell of hints and innuendo last year to the effect that NATO intends to expand its purview to East Asia, so following the U.S. in its gradually escalating confrontation with China. 

As if on cue, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s outgoing sec-gen, subsequently launched into an utterly inappropriate attack on China for “oppressing its own people,” for “crushing democratic voices,” for “more assertive behavior in the South China Sea,” for “threatening neighbors, threatening Taiwan,” and so on down the list of complaints Blinken and the Biden regime’s policy cliques favor when addressing the Chinese. 

NATO in Asia is now to be taken with the utmost seriousness. It is NATO now and the NATO to come — brain dead NATO, NATO everywhere with no legitimate business anywhere. Shortly after Stoltenberg delivered himself of his preposterous tirade, Biden hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In  recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/18/patrick-lawrence-brain-dead-dangerous-nato-proceeds/

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFq1So9c4Bo

APOLOGY ACCEPTED (WE DID NOT USE THIS INFORMATION AS A STAND ALONE THOUGH)...

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Last week, the Republican nominee for President Donald Trump was shot in the ear during a campaign rally by a 20-year-old would-be assassin who had climbed up on a nearby roof less than 180 meters from the stage. The incredible failure of the Secret Service has led to theories that forces other than a lone gunman were involved.

Former US President and Republican nominee for President Donald Trump might not make it to the election, former CIA analyst and co-founder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Ray McGovern and Former US Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts speculated in separate interviews with Sputnik.

“My question is whether they (the deep state) will take another shot at Trump,” McGovern said on Friday. “I’m serious here. There’s so much at stake. So damn much at stake. And I just wonder if he’s going to make it and, call me a conspiracy theorist, but these people, they don’t have much conscience if they tolerate genocide in Gaza, if they tolerate half a million Ukrainian youths being killed for their whims.”

Roberts expressed similar sentiments on Sunday. “The real question is: will the deep state get away with its assassination attempt and will it attempt another?" Roberts said. "I expect that there will be more attempts on Trump's life.”

Roberts pointed out that they utilized multiple tactics to get rid of Trump before turning to assassination: "Russia-gate, two impeachments, porn star-gate, documents-gate, insurrection-gate and then 4 criminal indictments and several civil indictments."

"The Democrats acting for the deep state believed they could get rid of Trump in these ways," Roberts said. "When these attempts failed, they turned to assassination. Acoustic evidence of the shootings makes it completely clear that there were more than one shooter. [Thomas Matthew] Crooks was the patsy. Trump survived the assassination because he turned his head."

Crooks, the alleged deceased shooter, allegedly managed to get through security carrying a laser rangefinder and scaled a nearby building as onlookers attempted to warn police officers and Secret Service agents to no avail. Information from authorities has also been inconsistent, with initial reports saying Crooks carried his rifle with him, later reports said the gun was planted before the event.

During live coverage of the shooting on US media, several eyewitnesses reported that they heard two shooters, with at least one mentioning a nearby water tower which has since become the subject of online speculation.

The excuses for why the building was not covered have also been inconsistent. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle initially said that the local police were in charge of the building an assertion state authorities denied. Later, she claimed the roof was too steep to safely place an agent on it.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240722/deep-state-could-take-another-shot-at-trump---two-former-us-officials-1119453400.html

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Trump shooter studied JFK assassination – FBI
Thomas Michael Crooks also managed to fly a drone around the rally site without being detected, Christopher Wray told Congress...

Would-be assassin Thomas Michael Crooks researched the assassination of John F Kennedy before opening fire on former President Donald Trump earlier this month, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers on Wednesday.

Crooks shot Trump in the ear during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Firing from a rooftop that Trump’s Secret Service detail had inexplicably left unguarded, the 20-year-old gunman killed one person in the audience and injured two others before Secret Service snipers shot him dead.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Wray said that an FBI examination of Crooks’ computer revealed that he began researching the JFK assassination on July 6, the same day he registered to attend the Trump rally.

“He did a Google search for – quote – ‘how far away was Oswald from Kennedy’,” Wray said, referring to Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman accused of shooting Kennedy in 1963.

That’s a search that’s obviously significant in terms of his state of mind,” Wray said, adding that Crooks had become “very focused on President Trump and his rally” at the time.

Wray’s testimony shed little light on Crooks’ motivation. The FBI chief insisted that the shooter was not in contact with any accomplices or co-conspirators, and did not speculate about his political leanings. Before becoming fixated on Trump, Crooks did “a lot of searches of public figures in general,” Wray said, warning that “it is, quite frankly, a dangerous time to be a prominent public official.”

Wray did not comment on how many Secret Service snipers were present at the rally, nor did he comment on allegations that the agency had pulled some staff from Trump’s detail before the event. Wray did, however, reveal that Crooks visited the site in Butler on three occasions, and on the day of the rally “was flying the drone around the area” just two hours before Trump took to the stage.

Republicans have fiercely criticized the Secret Service for failing to secure Crooks’ rooftop vantage point, despite it being around 150 meters from the stage, and for apparently disregarding reports of an armed Crooks crawling around on the roof minutes before opening fire.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday, a day after telling the Oversight Committee that she took responsibility for the “most significant operational failure at the Secret Service in decades.”  

https://www.rt.com/news/601609-trump-shooter-jfk-fbi/

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