Joe Biden just gave Americans everywhere the finger and said, Fuck off.
In a recorded interview that lasted just 22 minutes, the president insisted that his poor poll results weren’t real — “fake news,” if you want to call it that — that the Democratic Party has no concerns about his fitness to lead and that the only way he would withdraw from the race is “if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me.”
What — Barack Obama isn’t getting close enough?
If Americans had even an ounce of sympathy for Biden after last week’s CNN debate — if they felt that maybe he didn’t know how serious his condition was, that his family was probably keeping him in the race for their own reasons — well, Joe brought that idea out and shot it dead.
That damage control interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos only served to anger Democratic politicians and big donors who have been pressuring the president to step aside ever since that disastrous debate with Trump.
Make no mistake: Joe Biden, for all his tired talk about “fighting for the soul of America,” doesn’t give a damn about any of that.
He cares about staying in power. Period.
Joe Biden just gave Americans everywhere the finger and said, Fuck off.
Biden may be lying to himself, but he is certainly lying to the American people when he says everything is fine.
Stephanopoulos: Did you watch the debate afterwards?
Biden: I don’t think so, no.
I do not think so?
That debate is seared into the frontal lobes of everyone who saw it. Biden’s performance is a national trauma, enough for his cheerleaders at MSNBC and the New York Times to finally voice their deep dismay and call for him to step aside immediately.
Yet Biden claimed almost immediately afterward that he is certain he does not need a neurological exam, saying with absolute certainty that his doctors did not tell him he needed one.
“Nobody told me to do it,” Biden said. “Nobody told me to. They said I’m good.”
What is it? He can’t remember whether he watched last week’s debate — effectively the end of his political career — or he is absolutely certain, despite the panic among the liberal elite, party donors, and the entire American mass media, that he is fine and they are wrong? Because he can’t have it both ways.
Biden was tanned and puffed up to his waist, but he couldn’t hide his slurred language, the moments when he forgot his name or a fact and stared blankly into space.
‘I… anyway.’
Nor could he hide his anger when Stephanopoulos kept pressing, refusing to accept Biden’s repeated comment that “I just had a bad night.”
If that was a bad night, COVID was just an inconvenience.
When asked four times whether he would consider an independent cognitive test and make the results public to allay fears, Biden said no.
“George,” he said, “I’m the one who founded NATO.”
He is not.
“I’m the one who silenced Putin.”
Ukraine disagrees.
“We invented the chip, the little chip, the computer chip.”
Another lie. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce invented the microchip in 1958. Biden would have been 16 years old at the time.
That damage control interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos only served to anger Democratic politicians and big donors who have been pressuring the president to step aside ever since that disastrous debate with Trump.
Biden may be lying to himself, but he is certainly lying to the American people when he says everything is fine.
“You know,” he said, “the next president of the United States is not just a matter of whether he or she knows what he or she is doing.”
Isn’t that it? Isn’t that the basic level of the job description: Know what you’re doing?
Biden — who we recently heard says he only works at his “best” between 10am and 4pm, and who claimed after the debate that he really needs to work less, sleep more, and stop doing things after 8pm — came out with this bang:
“It’s – it’s – it’s not – it’s not a scam – a hodgepodge of people making decisions.”
This is precisely our greatest fear: that a cabal of people we don’t know and didn’t elect, including Jill and Hunter Biden, will make the decisions.
Semafor’s Ben Smith reported on a July 4 phone call he had with a “scared” Biden adviser:
“It is unclear even to some inside the West Wing … what policy issues reach the president, and how. Major decisions move in an opaque circle … and back again.”
What is it if not a conglomerate?
Yet Biden dares to say that this race is “about the character of the president.”
If he had had an ounce of character, he would have been gone long ago. He would have taken the dignified way out.
His refusal to do so, his ego-driven, megalomaniacal determination to stay in this race — his plummeting poll numbers against Trump, whom he calls our greatest “threat to democracy” — means the party will make him suffer.
If the billionaire donor class abandons you — Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and Disney heir Abigail Disney are among those who have pulled their funding — you’re done for.
When Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel, brother of Obama’s former chief adviser Rahm Emanuel, says Biden’s condition has put Democrats in “F*** City,” you say it out loud.
And when George Stephanopoulos, the ultimate Democratic Party insider, repeatedly persuades you to leave in a glorified exit interview, you might get the obvious hint.
The left-wing media has now abandoned their most baroque explanations for Biden’s age-related decline.
In March, a month after special counsel Robert Hur determined that Biden was “an older man with a failing memory” who could not remember when his son Beau died or the years he served as vice president, New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote a lengthy essay arguing that Biden’s forgetfulness was comparable only to the “late style” of greats like Matisse, Beethoven and Shakespeare.
You can’t make this up?
Our greatest fear right now: that a cabal of people we don’t know and didn’t elect, including Jill and Hunter Biden, will make the decisions.
If he had had an ounce of character, he would have been gone long ago. He would have taken the dignified way out.
Olivia Nuzzi reported this week in New York magazine that Biden no longer recognizes his old friends.
She quoted a guest who attended a White House event last year who said Biden’s condition was so alarming “that the guest was now open to an idea he had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda: The president might not be the acting president after all.”
Scary stuff. But just as suspicious was Nuzzi’s admission, in that piece, that she had this information since January. I wonder why?
But as Joe Biden insisted in last night’s damning, delusional interview — which he and his loyalists will no doubt call a “cheap phony” — his poll numbers are strong (Trump has soared since the debate), his approval rating is up (it stands at a paltry 36 percent), and “all the governors” are supporting him (Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy reportedly told Biden’s chief of staff that his candidacy is “irredeemable”).
If there was any doubt that Biden’s mask of decency has just fallen off and shattered into a million pieces, consider what he said about Trump in January: ‘He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy’ [to] ‘bring oneself to power’.
When asked by Stephanopoulos whether Trump — remember, the greatest threat to democracy, the man who will never leave, no matter what, ahem — would win this election by refusing to step aside, Biden shrugged:
‘I will feel it as long as I gave everything and did the best [sic] “I want to do the work that I know I can do, that’s what matters.”
Women of America, reproductive rights, the Supreme Court, this vaunted democracy and rule of law — the president just said, “F-you. It’s all about me.”
It is now up to the Democrats to remove him once and for all and ensure that this race is about the people of America.
Let Joe Biden’s legacy come to a shameful and embarrassing end.