Wall Street Journal Finds Brave Whistleblower (Kevin McCarthy) Willing To Say Joe Biden Old
Wall Street Journal Finds Brave Whistleblower (Kevin McCarthy) Willing To Say Joe Biden Old
Resign in shame, hacks.
The Wall Street Journal has done something any reporter would be ashamed to put their byline on, which is why it’s kind of amazing Annie Linskey (who is consistently dishonest and terrible) and Siobhan Hughes did so, instead of resigning and writing a tell-all book about how gross it is that their boss Rupert Murdoch’s 95-year-old penis keeps marrying human women.
“Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping,” blares the headline, and it’s one of those things where the headline graphic takes up the whole page, so it must be important. Have Linskey and Hughes been working on this for a decade, like some kind of fancy New York Times Magazine investigation? Or are they just eager servants of a newspaper that used to be important before Murdoch bought it, but now it’s just the New York Post without booby pictures?
What if we told you their main on-the-record source was Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker? Also, they found some people who have talked to Mike Johnson, the current speaker. Both men of course have a vested interest in their voters (read: idiots) thinking Joe Biden is too senile to govern, especially since he’s running against a 34-times-guilty convicted felon who still brags about a dementia test he allegedly passed six years ago.
What if we told you literally all the rest of their sources who say Biden is hopelessly senile are anonymous people who are also Republicans?
What if we told you all the previous reporting about Kevin McCarthy’s private statements about Biden feature him saying — when McCarthy’s behind closed doors instead of on the record — that Biden is sharp and prepared, which happens to be the exact same thing other Republicans say?
Here are the things the article reveals about Joe Biden:
He speaks softly sometimes. (Guess what that means he carries? It ain’t a Mario Kart stick, that’s for sure.)
Sometimes he reads from his notes, like a common person who has notes and reads from them.
He pauses! Aggravated pauser!
He closes his eyes during meetings when he’s thinking! Not like a man on trial for porn pussy payoffs in a New York courtroom sleep-farting while he awaits the guilty verdicts or anything, but still!
Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes, everyone. Go ahead and let them hold a Pulitzer before you award it to a real journalist.
Graf two says current Speaker Mike Johnson told six people that Joe Biden made a mistake in a meeting about a recent policy change of his own administration.
Graf three says Kevin McCarthy and two other people said Biden’s “demeanor” and “command of the details” were different on different days during different debt ceiling negotiations last year.
Graf four is a quote from McCarthy saying Biden isn’t the same guy he was when he was vice president, which is a direct contradiction of what McCarthy has said on the subject other times.
Graf five says Joe Biden is old.
Graf six says some people say Joe Biden is older than he used to be, in the past.
So does graf seven.
Graf 10 makes an important confession:
This article is based on interviews with more than 45 people over several months. The interviews were with Republicans and Democrats who either participated in meetings with Biden or were briefed on them contemporaneously, including administration officials and other Democrats who found no fault in the president’s handling of the meetings. Most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges.
Go fuck yourself, you stupid clownfucking, headline-chasing hacks.
You can read the rest of the article if you want, if you like epistle-length detail-fests about nothing. It is one million paragraphs long. By the time we finished it, we were older than Joe Biden.
Just kidding, ha ha, we did not finish that dogshit.
The White House pushes back hard, as you might expect, but everybody sees this for what it is.
The flaming woke mob on “Morning Joe” today noted how Kevin McCarthy’s previous statements on the very same meetings featured in Linskey’s and Hughes’s loaded diaper of an article directly contradict the things he says in the article. You’d think somewhere in their 48,000 words Linskey and Hughes might have seen fit to mention that. (White House spox Andrew Bates did, in the article: “Now, in 2024, House Republicans are making false claims as a political tactic that flatly contradict previous statements made by themselves and their colleagues.”)
Mika Brzezinski was curious why they didn’t just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert their academic opinions.
Joe Scarborough noted that in the same reporting where Kevin McCarthy spoke highly behind closed doors about Biden’s mental acuity, he was simultaneously mocking Biden in public. (McCarthy “mocked Biden’s age and mental acuity in public, while privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive in their conversations,” that’s the exact quote from Politico.)
Do we really think Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes didn’t know all this? That they were being played? That their editors didn’t know?
Fuck off.
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Sad that this passes as journalism.
Ah, yes. The comedy stylings of the Wall Street Journal, coming soon to the editorial and news pages of the Washington Post, courtesy of William Lewis, the latest hire of Jeff Bezos who used to work for none other than Rupert Murdoch in London at his fishwrap tabloid there.
The Britification of a great American newspaper. Goodbye, WaPo. It was great while it lasted.