It’s been over three weeks since Joe Biden crapped the sheets at the CNN debate and we’re still talking about how Joe Biden crapped the sheets at the CNN debate.
Three weeks in an eternity in an age when the average news cycle lasts about 48 hours.
Even the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13 couldn’t push the “Is Biden too old to run for reelection” news cycle off the front pages. Not that the crack-brained imbeciles of BlueAnon haven’t tried with their “fire won’t melt steel”-level conspiracy theories about the shooting. But it isn’t working.
This news cycle has a level of stamina and endurance that old Joe wishes he had.
I was in my 30s when the Monica Lewinsky story broke. Even that didn’t generate this level of media attention. In fairness, no social media was driving the news cycle back then. Plus, every Congressional Democrat rallied to Bill Clinton’s side and dismissed the Lewinsky scandal as no biggie while the press provided ample cover fire for the pervy president.
Joe Biden isn’t enjoying unified support among the Democrats and the media. I cannot remember a single time in my adult life when the press and the news media turned on a Democrat president like this.
Biden’s mistake was believing that the cover fire the media and Democrats provided up until three weeks ago was because they were personally loyal to him.
They’re not.
Joe was a means to an end.
The goal was always to defeat Donald Trump.
When Joe crapped the sheets at the debate, all of the people who ran interference for him and willingly hid his declining mental capabilities dropped him like a hot rock and ran for the exits.
Trump’s attempted assassination didn’t push the story out of the news cycle because it only further highlighted just how old and weak Joe Biden is.
There’s a reason a prominent photo editor suggested that outlets stop using that iconic photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist in defiance with the American flag in the background.
Optics mean everything to these people, and the optics of a hale and hearty Trump bravely raising his fist just moments after an assassin’s bullet hit him in the ear are a brutal counterpoint to the unsteady old man who struggles to make it up the kiddie stairs of Air Force One.
It must have been a kick in the gut when Grandpa Joe contracted COVID for the third (or was it the fourth?) time and had to toddle off to Rehoboth Beach to convalesce.
Karma has a sense of humor.
Panic-stricken media outlets have spent the last few days dropping anonymously sourced stories suggesting that the Biden family’s resolve is beginning to crack and old Joe is just days away from dropping out. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats, furious that they’ll lose in November if his half-dead corpse remains hanging around their necks like a millstone, are leaking to the press like a bunch of bitter, gossiping fishwives.
Do they make a Narcan for Schadenfreude overdoses? Just curious.
The longer this drags out, the harder it will be to extract the Biden family. They’re dug in deeper than a tick on a dog’s back.
I’ve said before that Jill Biden will not surrender her position as First Lady without a fight. To borrow a quote from the Dowager Countess of Grantham, “I expect they’ll have to drag Jill out as she rakes her fingernails, catching at the doorcase.”
Waiting in the wings is Kamala Harris, the thoroughly unlikeable anti-assassination device the Biden campaign stuck the country with to ensure that Joe remained untouchable.
The Biden campaign is sending Kamala out on the campaign trail while Grandpa hides away in Rehoboth Beach. Why? Who knows? Kamala’s approval rating drops a few points after each public appearance. Making her the face of the campaign will only remind voters why she dropped out of the 2020 presidential race two months before the Iowa caucus.
Democrats love to point to the “chaos” of the Trump presidency as the reason voters should elect, and now re-elect, Joe Biden. Joe was supposed to usher in an era of normalcy, civility, and unruffled steadiness in difficult times.
There is nothing normal about covering up a president’s dementia. There is nothing civil about accusing your political opponent of being a “threat to democracy” who must be stopped by any means. And Donald Trump showed more unruffled steadiness after nearly getting shot in the head than the Democrats have shown in the past three weeks.
Even if the pressure campaign to oust Biden succeeds, the chaos that followed the CNN debate will not end. If anything, it will only get worse.
If the debate debacle had the shelf life of every other news story to come over the transom in the last eight years, voters might have forgotten it by November. But thanks to the Democrats and the media, this story is never going away, even if the Bidens do.