Today Is A Good Day For Jake Tapper To Remind Us That Joe Biden Is Old
This is what you've been doing with your time?
Before we talk about anything else, we’d like to note our personal annoyance with the shit Joe Biden said to the BBC last week, insisting that he didn’t wait too long to pull out of the 2024 election after that disastrous debate, as he continues to insist (on “The View,” for instance) that he would have won, when all signs were that he was heading toward a truly historic loss on a scale far greater than Trump’s squeaker over Kamala Harris.
Here is some of that, stitched with Jon Favreau from Pod Save America saying pretty much exactly what we think about it, no notes, nothing to add:
Your mileage may vary, and that’s fine, but we personally think Favreau is correct here: “He shouldn’t have run for a second term” — as per the original plan! — “and when he did run for second term, he should’ve stepped down much earlier after the debate, and his close advisers shouldn’t have told him to run again, and they shouldn’t have told him he was going to win. I think that every Democratic politician, particularly those who want to lead the party and want to run in 2028, have to just rip the fuckin’ Band-Aid off.”
Do we think Biden might have gotten a raw deal? Sure. Do we think the whole notion that Biden was secretly senile is still likely some cooked-up, overblown media bullshit, with little supporting evidence aside from some admittedly extremely embarrassing senior moments? Also yep. But the thing about politics is that perception is everything, and people’s perception in 2024 was that Joe Biden was old as shit, too old to do the job, they thought that before that disastrous debate, the debate sealed it, and we are sorry, but that’s just how it is. When politics decides you have screamed like a common Howard Dean or have olded like a common Joe Biden, them’s are just sometimes the breaks.
And that’s three more paragraphs than we ever wanted to spent on that subject ever fucking again. Some might say there are more pressing matters at hand.
Others apparently still think it’s the most important chicken to fuck to death for the rest of their whole entire journalism careers, like Jake Tapper from CNN and Alex Thompson from Axios.
Those two men have devoted apparently the last months of their lives — same first 100 days of Trump the rest of us just experienced — to determining whether Joe Biden is old, and whether it is Joe Biden’s fault that he is old, and how the nation can grapple going forward with knowing the most recent ex-president is old. Why have they done this? Is it because they are just bad journalists who aren’t great at determining what’s important at any given time? Or does the country falling into technofascist dystopia always take a backseat when there’s hot Joe Biden Is Old intel yet to mine?
The excerpt published in Axios is probably the most offensive, treating it as some kind of BOMBSHELL! that Biden’s doctor Kevin O’Connor believed that if (IF!) 81-year-old Joe Biden fell again, and if (IF!) it was bad, then he might have to use a wheelchair during his recovery. What kind of a president has ever, oh yeah, FDR.
Have some goddamned Axios bullet points:
“Biden's physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn't do so until after the election,” the authors write.
Biden aides believed it was politically untenable to have Biden use a wheelchair during his re-election campaign.
“Given Biden's age, [his physician Kevin O'Connor] also privately said that if he had another bad fall, a wheelchair might be necessary for what could be a difficult recovery,” the authors report.
Riveting stuff.
There’s more in the Axios excerpt if you want to read it — you do not — but if the premise of the book is supposed to be that Joe Biden was mentally unfit to serve as president, you might not be interested in a bunch of he said/she said about whether Joe Biden wore his walking boot long enough after he broke his foot in 2020, or whether that contributed to the way he walked. It’s basically a rehash of the 2023 Axios BOMBSHELL! that Joe Biden wears sneakers.
Biden’s spox commented on the Axios report/excerpt, and they of course put that into bullet points too:
“He was transparent about this, and it was far from ‘severe,’” the statement added. “Yes, there were physical changes as he got older, but evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity.”
“And so far,” the statement continued, “we are still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite — he was a very effective president.”
Seems fairly fair to us! Indeed, we have not seen any evidence of those things, and Joe Biden did indeed leave Donald Trump a literal dream economy, before Trump destroyed it in a matter of weeks by touching it with his tiny stinky fingers and his virulent, diseased brain.
If you’re interested in a longer and frankly more interesting excerpt, don’t look at Axios, but instead to The New Yorker, which has the most detailed account we’ve seen of that whole drama with George Clooney and the fundraiser and the mean op-ed he wrote about how he loved Joe Biden but Joe Biden needed to step aside. (Favreau is a character in that drama, too, as we all knew at the time.)
That excerpt is a good read. (We feel secure in saying you can totally skip the book.)
But again, it’s just … really? This is what we sat down and wrote a book about, Jake Tapper? Reliving the story of 2024, when Joe Biden was old? This is starting to take on the beclowned nature of But Her Emails, which as we all remember, was perpetrated and beclowned by the very same hack Beltway media.
The fascist Trump regime is so bloody corrupt, so bloody evil, so racist, so vile, so authoritarian, so Hitlerian, that journalists around the world struggle each day to pick and choose what to focus on. Is it the growing resistance? The omnipresent protests? His globally disastrous and mentally ill tariff obsession? The latest court cases? Trump’s Nazi shit du jour? The latest immigrants beaten in the streets by Trump ICE thugs that might actually just be Proud Boys playing dress-up (hey some journalist should investigate that)? The latest people kidnapped by Trump’s Gestapo without charges or due process and sent to a concentration camp outside the country? The latest little innocent children in Africa Elon Musk and Trump have murdered in cold blood with their aid cuts? The latest botched Pentagon operation with Secretary Shitfaced in charge? The latest self-inflicted national security breach? All the planes smashing into each other in the sky and on runways because of Musk’s masturbatory, galaxy-brained obsession with firing all the human air traffic controllers and turning everything into AI, which brain-damaged Republican men, desperate to feel smart for the first time in their entire fucking loser lives, appear to have bought into hook, line and sinker? The latest government official fired for no other reason besides she was a Black woman? The latest $400 million plane bribe from the Qatari royal family? The latest multi-billion-dollar Trump family crypto grift?
And? And? And?
Who has time to relitigate whether or not Joe Biden is old? Jake Tapper and some unfamous knob from Axios, that’s who!
Here we are, over 100 days into what is already showing itself to be literally the dissolution of any recognizable form of the Republic, and with it, the very ordering of the world’s alliances and powers, and these dudes are in the corner jerking off to rumors about Joe Biden’s Bengay-Of-The-Month subscriptions?
What a waste of a perfectly good platform.
Hey, want to talk about old?
Did we all see Donald Trump today falling asleep in Saudi Arabia like he always does?
Wonder if he loud-farted there like he was always doing during his criminal trial. Oh well, doesn’t matter. At least Trump told us this week that he invented the word “equalize” for us all to use. That’s a thing guys without dementia say! We’ve been enjoying saying “groceries” so much, all praise him.
Boy, that guy sure is old! Does he even know where he is? Is he running his own presidency, or is Stephen Miller ghost-presidenting the entire shebang, like he’s also apparently doing Pam Bondi’s job for her at the DOJ?
Somebody should write a book about it.
You know, if they can find the time.
OPEN THREAD.
[Axios / New Yorker]
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Talking with the kid I babysit on the train ride home. He asked what number is the first second? I had no clue what he was talking about. With glee he informed me it was one. Zero, one. So it is the second number but also the first. After that I got the old knock, knock banana joke. Which I stole the punchline and made him laugh loudly. I noticed an older man sitting across from me laughing too. Gonna miss this.
When the escalator stops working it’s a long walk down these stairs at the W. 181st St, subway station. Fortunately the escalators going up were working. https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-116937158?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc