Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame recently told CNN views that people close to President Joe Biden -- people "who loved him, have supported him, and among them are some people who would raise a lot of money for him" -- say his disastrous debate performance wasn't a "one-off." There have been, according to insiders, "15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed."
Yeah, we know. All of us saw the horror show in a bunch of videos you hacks kept telling us was "misinformation" a week ago.
Last month, CNN's Oliver Darcy attacked the "glaring problems" of a well-sourced Wall Street Journal piece detailing a litany of Biden's slips. Not long before the first presidential debate, CNN ran another piece headlined "Right-wing media outlets use deceptively cropped video to misleadingly claim Biden wandered off at G7 summit."
Before the debate, NBC News senior politics reporter Alex Seitz-Wald ran an article headlined "Misleading GOP videos of Biden are going viral. The fact-checks have trouble keeping up." In it, Seitz-Wald regurgitates most of the White House's transparently ridiculous talking points about videos that very accurately illustrated Biden's mental and physical decline.
On the same day, David Ingram of NBC News -- a network that doesn't get nearly enough credit for its hackery -- published a piece headlined "The deceptive Biden G7 video was quickly debunked, but it kept going viral anyway." It was a full-court press.
The New York Times pre-debate headline was "Biden Battles Age Doubts and a Trail of Misleading Videos." The Washington Post activated its fact-checkers to show us "How Republicans used misleading videos to attack Biden in a 24-hour period."
It was a concerted effort to hide the truth. What was democracy-corroding MAGA misinformation only a couple of weeks ago has miraculously been transformed into the accepted narrative of virtually the entire political media. It is an act of preternatural shamelessness on their part. And not one journalist involved is going to explain how it happened.
I've seen many left-wingers contend that the press's reporting on Biden's struggles only goes to prove they aren't really as biased as we think. This is a ludicrous assertion to make after gaslighting efforts already failed. After the debate, there was no more pretending that examples of Biden's fragility and mental slips were GOP dirty tricks. What else were they going to do? The president is incapable of putting on a press conference right now. He is unable to speak coherently and spontaneously. They all knew exactly what was going on. They've known from the time they insulated him during the 2020 campaign.
Indeed, now the media is just doing the bidding of Democrats who want to remove the president to beat Donald Trump. Nothing has changed.
Take Politico, one of the worst offenders in the Biden-decline cover-up. It's now turned into a mouthpiece for a new cause. "We've all enabled the situation," sources within Biden's "inner sanctum" suddenly tell Politico. (Where were they last week?) "It's like, 'You can't include that, that will set him off,' or 'Put that in, he likes that.' It's a Rorschach test, not a briefing Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he's being briefed. It's very difficult, and people are scared s--tless of him. ... He doesn't take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it."
Is any of this new? Because anyone who's followed Biden's 40-plus-year career knows he's been an unpleasant blowhard with a middling intellect. Just watch the videos of the Clarence Thomas hearing or Joe going off on a reporter who asked him a legitimate question about his educational background. No doubt, his crankiness has been exacerbated by age. Let's not forget, either, that the establishment media also helped create this rehabilitative mythology around Middle-Class Joe, the patriarch of a shady political family who is just as likely to rent a 12,000-square-foot home for $20,000 a month as he is to take Amtrak.
Just like the Hunter Biden laptop incident, like the freak outs over every lost Supreme Court decision, like the concocted "ethics" problems of Supreme Court justices, like the entire Russia collusion hoax, the Biden cover-up is rationalized in the name of decency. Most of the big-money political media have internalized the notion that their duty lies not to the truth but to upholding "democracy" -- a malleable concept that can be roughly translated to mean anything Calvinball Democrats decide on any given day. And that allows them to seamlessly shift from one dishonest partisan operation to the next.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books -- the most recent, "Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent." His work has appeared in the National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post, and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.