BY SEAN WALSH
US punditry has learned nothing from its Biden cover-up
For the first three years of his Potemkin presidency the US legacy media, as always under instruction from the Democratic Party, colluded in the lie that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack.
One election defeat and millions of lost viewers later the DC punditry fellowship has realised that this might have been professionally sub-optimal.
Cue the publication this week (the same week Biden’s doctors have told him he has terminal cancer) of Original Sin by Beltway commentators Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, the inside story of Biden’s mental decline and the campaign to keep the extent of it hidden from the public.
Now given the level of self-delusion that has been allowed to fester in polite Washington these last few years, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the only inside story worth reading would be the one written by an outsider.
You have to admire the chutzpah of the people behind all this. The purpose of a cover up, traditionally, is to prevent the rest of us finding out about something, not to flat-out deny what’s right in front of our eyes. At that point things have arguably gone too far. As with magic, the point is distraction, and the decent conjurer does more than just tell you what you’re seeing isn’t real.
Jake Tapper and his equally culpable commentariat colleagues abandoned the magic of crafted dissimulation for crude ventriloquy, and were willing to say anything, no matter how absurd, to keep Trump out of the Oval Office.
I’m not sure that there has been anything quite like it in the history of reporting. It’s as if a commentator had argued in 1963 that the Zapruder film showed that Kennedy had committed suicide. Or perhaps that the bit where his head explodes was proof of life.
That clip of Biden falling up the stairs of Air Force One? He’d dropped his keys (twice). Inviting a deceased congresswoman onto the stage at her own memorial event? Who hasn’t done that? Not remembering his friend George Clooney at a fundraiser hosted by George Clooney? The actor’s shorter in real life.
Could there be an argument, admittedly baroquely Jesuitical, that having been instrumental in the cover-up Tapper et al are best placed to describe it? Sure. But that would require what AA members call a “fearless moral inventory”, and an honest acknowledgement of fault. The commentariat pivot is too cynical to count as such. The Tapper strategy, more a pitch for rehabilitation than an analysis of error, is to act the victim. They should, they now concede, have seen what was going on but were themselves lied to by a White House cabal, one which operated at several degrees of separation from those trying to report on it.
And let’s not forget, they add, that Biden had good days as well as bad. There were mornings when he was able to dress himself and brush his own teeth, although admittedly not in the right order or necessarily with a toothbrush.
Let’s call this out for what it is: a “one step forward two steps back” movement towards genuine apology. Something worse than nothing.
There’s much to be said for a decent confession. It leaves you feeling lighter on your feet. As someone who devoutly pretends to be Catholic, Joe Biden, on a happy day, might get something of this. But it doesn’t work if you describe your sins in ways that are personally expedient. That’s recidivism, not contrition.
The truth is that these commentators are so marinated in the practices of Washington politics that they have lost the ability to do what the effective journalist must: be counter-cultural. Like a decent church, to be successful in that world it is essential not to become of that world.
Say what you like about Trump and – true or not – somebody will have got there before you. When it comes to disordered analysis, he is a force multiplier. This is why “Trump derangement syndrome” is an accidentally right diagnosis. It isn’t just that his opponents hate him, it’s that he has a unique gift for inhabiting and corrupting their mental algorithms. He bugs up their coding.
There are some syndromes you can be shocked out of, others need a longer period of therapy, and possibly a generous sabbatical. This book was written too soon. You don’t restore your credibility by writing a frankly incredible account of how you lost it in the first place. These journalists have not been able to come up with a way of covering Trump. It’s as if they are using the language of darts to analyse a game of chess.
It’s fun to watch them try, of course, but only in the same way it would have been fun to watch Stephen Hawking go at a bowl of soup with a pair of chopsticks. But there is a serious point. This generation of Washington journalists will no longer be listened to, and nor do they deserve to be.
The US left, including the media, cannot bitch that Trump is denying Venezuelan gangbangers “due process” when it was happy to contract out the presidency to who-knows-who. They have, in all things, disqualified themselves from calling Trump out. The Biden cover-up was an unforced error of generational consequence.
And this book will come nowhere near correcting that. If anything, it’ll make things worse.
Sean Walsh is a former university teacher in the philosophy of mind. That was a while ago – but he keeps up with the subject. 2015-2017 he was slightly homeless. He now writes and is the very proud father of a wonderful child. He is grateful for everything he has.