Joe Biden and The Mistakes We Keep Making
Is Joe Biden still president?
Is he the one at this very moment who is dismantling our democracy? Is he tanking our economy and isolating us from the rest of the world? Is he buddying up to dictators and white supremacists and spouting nonsense and vengeful lies? Is he eroding our moral fabric and corrupting our ethical standards? Is he the one who is turning our country into a semi-fascist state and each day transgressing what remains of our values?
Well, no, he isn’t. But you sure would think so if you’ve been following the news.
The talk these days in the serious news outlets and many of the not-so-serious ones is all about the awful scandal of how Biden and the Democrats lied to us and deceived the American public. It’s all about how they conspired to conceal the former president’s cognitive and physical decline and hid those damning truths from all of us.
Nearly 150 days into the worst, most destructive presidency in American history, four months into the administration of a raving, cognitively impaired, lying, incompetent, elderly demagogue who is now even going after Taylor Smith and explaining what the word groceries means, is what happened nearly a year ago the story that should be occupying us?
Should there be op-ed column after column in The New York Times and report after report in Politico and segment after segment on CNN about the deceptions and about how the Democrats right now need to be debating who was at fault for what happened in 2024 and what was done and wasn’t done during the four years of Biden’s tenure?
The ostensible reason for all this hubbub is the release of a new book, called “Original Sin,” about how Biden and his coterie and their enablers horribly let us all down and opened the door to today’s terrible chaos. The book has been the starting point for a seemingly endless stream of op-ed columns, news stories, podcasts and interviews. That stream has widened with the news of Biden’s diagnosis of an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Did the Bidens and aides also deceive us about that?
And while all this uproar also has been the occasion for a lot of soul-searching on the part of Democrats, even with worries that it will affect in three years the 2028 presidential election (!), it hasn’t caused very much soul=searching on the part of the media.
No, the media didn’t fully inform us about Biden’s decline, and it would seem that their giving so much attention to the story now is a sort of mea culpa. So, yeah, let’s make up for our deficiencies before the election by being equally deficient about Trump after the election and pile on Biden instead.
No, the media didn’t inform us about Biden, but they also didn’t inform us about Trump, both then and worse, now. They didn’t fully convey to us then about the incoherent babble they sanewashed into “plans.” They didn’t inform us about the dangers of Project 2025—all when it could have made a difference.
And they are now fixated on Biden when they aren’t telling us, even today, that the current president of the United States, not the former president, has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. They are not informing us that the 47th president is lying, not “engaging in falsehoods.” They are not telling us he spends most of his time babbling nonsensically, pushing one policy after another and then abruptly changing them, and posting bizarre semi-literate notes on Truth Social.
Instead of endlessly asking these days what should the Democrats do, how about asking what should the Republicans do? What should they do about being led around by the snout? What should they do about having their Congressional power totally usurped?
How about what should Americans do about having their rights stolen? What should the public do about saving their healthcare and their retirement funds and their rights to due process?
But instead, we’re still debating who was at fault besides Joe and Jill? Who should be nailed to the cross?
Maybe it should be those who keep fixating on the past and refusing to see the present.