First and foremost, those who aren’t hiding their heads in the sand about the Joe Biden catastrophe (which lets out most of the lost-in-denial HE commentariat) need to listen to this All In podcast discussion between Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg. This is it, this is it, this is it.
Gurgling Joe Biden‘s taped, make-or-break interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos airs tonight at 8 pm, and I mean make-or-break for Stephanopoulos. He’s generally regarded as a “safe”, sensible-minded liberal Democrat, but if he goes too easy on Biden his reputation as a hotshot TV journalist will be instant toast.
Conversely if George’s questions for the Rotting Pumpkin are tough and unsparing and Biden stutters and chokes, Stephanopoulos will have earned a golden place in U.S. history.
Issue #1, obviously, is not Joe’s “one bad debate” bullshit (“That’s 90 minutes onstage…look at what I’ve done over the last three and half years”), but observations by many that Biden has been in a state of cognitive decline for at least a couple of years and that the administration and mainstream media types have been covering this up like obedient mafia goons.
So the “Joe is sharp as a tack” narrative has been a Big Whopping Lie — a major coordinated effort at gaslighting — and the current term for this is “agewashing.” The inevitability of neurological decline is obviously not a crime or anything to be ashamed of, but lying about the obvious is vile and infuriating and self-destructive.
Earlier today (7.5) The Ankler‘s Matthew Frank reported there’s a full-scale, anti-Biden revolt among the donor class.
Barry Diller told Frank he’s no longer a Biden supporter. Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings has called on Biden to step aside. Producer and showrunner Damon Lindelof “also published an op-ed urging Democratic contributors to seal their wallets until Biden is replaced.” At the Aspen Ideas Festival, speaking just after the 6.28 debate, Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel said “we are in Fuck City,” adding that Biden “is not the candidate anymore” and suggested his campaign will hit a dead end as a result of big money ‘drying up.'”
Frank: “Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who cofounded The Walt Disney Co., told CNBC yesterday that she plans to withhold donations until Biden drops out.
“I intend to stop any contributions to the party unless and until they replace Biden at the top of the ticket,” she said. “This is realism, not disrespect. Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably, but the stakes are far too high. If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”
Three days ago the N.Y. Times Peter Baker, David E. Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Katie Rogers co-authored a report (7.2) titled “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome.”
The first two paragraphs read as follows:
“In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.
“Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.”
The same day Carl Berstein told Anderson Cooper that sources have told him Biden’s cognitive issues have definitely become worse over the last six months and were evident within the last year.
In 7.2 New York’s Jonathan Chait posted an article titled “It’s Not Just an Age Problem. It’s a Trust Problem.”
Yesterday afternoon (7.4) Intelligencer‘s Olivia Nuzzi posted a piece titled “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” with a subhead that read “the president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.”
The gaslighting thing, in short, has become the burning issue behind the “Joe is falling apart and should probably resign” swamp fire, and it’s now time for all the really bad people who’ve been saying the same thing on Hollywood Elsewhere threads to come forward, drop to their knees, admit they’ve been part of the lying throng and beg for forgiveness. Because they have no honor now — zero — and they need to atone before it’s too late.