When Biden’s ‘Bubble Wrap’ Burst
The political/media establishment that lied to you about President Joe Biden will lie to you about the new Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
When Special Counsel Robert Hur in February declined to prosecute Biden over his technically illegal mishandling of classified documents, in part because a prospective jury would be disinclined to convict an “elderly man with a poor memory” who has “diminished faculties in advancing age,” the reaction from the White House was swift and terrible.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” the president snapped to reporters that evening. “My memory is fine.” (Alas, not fine enough to prevent Biden at that same brief press conference from mixing up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico and falsely accusing Hur of bringing up during questioning the subject of his son Beau’s death.)
Hur’s assessment of the president’s memory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre charged the next day, was “gratuitous,” “unacceptable,” and “does not live in reality.”
But the most over-the-top administration attack on the Department of Justice messenger, and on a message that would be so undeniable by July that Biden felt impelled to drop out of the presidential race, came from Harris.
“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and [is] clearly politically motivated,” Harris claimed at a community forum the day after Hur’s report. “We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”
We Americans have, through soul-deadening experience, come to expect a piddling level of integrity from our elected officials, particularly as they push ever higher up the greasy pole of political power. What makes Harris’ February brazenness all the more difficult to digest this fall is the knowledge that an entire swath of allegedly truth-seeking individuals and institutions will be enthusiastically abetting the Democratic nominee’s attacks on veracity, much as they disgraced themselves by doing the same with her boss.
Let us not forget before being subsumed by subsequent events (including the July assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump) that Hur’s report did not exactly arrive in a cognitive vacuum. In just a handful of days prior, Biden confused French President Emmanuel Macron with the long-dead François Mitterrand (while initially saying Mitterrand was from Germany), attributed a comment by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the also-deceased Helmut Kohl, and blanked on the contemporarily relevant name of “Hamas.”
Watchdog groups had already by this time documented Biden’s historic aversion to public questioning—just 32 press briefings (most of them joint appearances with foreign leaders) in his first three years, according to the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, compared to 52 for Trump, 66 for Barack Obama, 65 for George W. Bush, and 111 f
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