By Steve Huntley June 21, 2024 It’s so strange, so unprecedented and so bizarre that no one is talking about it being so strange, so unprecedented and so bizarre. That it is the debate scheduled for next Thursday, June 27, between President Biden and former President Trump. June 27 — that’s more than two weeks before the Republican National Convention, more than . Read More
It’s so strange, so unprecedented and so bizarre that no one is talking about it being so strange, so unprecedented and so bizarre.
That it is the debate scheduled for next Thursday, June 27, between President Biden and former President Trump.
June 27 — that’s more than two weeks before the Republican National Convention, more than seven weeks before the Democratic National Convention. And almost 10 weeks before Labor Day, the traditional date for the start of a general election presidential campaign.
And summer is a time when America is mostly on vacation. Folks are thinking more about beach time, airline schedules and the next hot travel destination. Politics is mostly shoved into the mental attic until the fall.
A debate between the two parties’ presidential candidates this early has never happened before. Never.
The explanation is that the Biden campaign, worried about his sagging poll ratings, wants to reassure voters about his age and mental acuity, contrast himself with Trump, and remind Americans that the stakes have never been higher. Meaning the evil orange man might get returned to the White House, and America needs to know how awful he is.
Really, the country needs to hear more Democrat reasons to hate Trump?
Already the legacy media daily sound the alarms about Trump’s supposed threat to democracy, mom and apple pie.
But that’s what Democrats are selling — an early debate exposé of the manifest danger of a second Trump term.
Let’s consider another possible motive, one perhaps animating Democrat leaders and party faithful who behind the scenes must be verging on panic over the increasing public perception of Biden as a senile old fool, an 81-year-old man who’s doddering, decrepit, feeble in mind and body.
That’s not a new worry. It had been building for months before the debate, and another one was announced for Sept. 10th. The president’s aging was officially and graphically described with the February release of a special prosecutor’s report about Biden holding on to classified government documents from his Senate and vice president days. In declining to bring criminal charges against Biden, the prosecutor described him as someone who would appear to a jury to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
This landed like an atom bomb because it confirmed what Americans had seen with their own eyes. Countless video clips revealed Biden stumbling, falling down, wandering aimlessly, mumbling and uttering incoherent ramblings about public policy and imaginary events from the past.
Since then, the picture has only gotten worse. The Wall Street Journal interviewed 45 people for an article headlined “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.” The New York Times exposed Biden’s tall stories as phony, or as its headline delicately put it, “Untangling Some of the President’s Favorite Yarns.” After Biden met with world leaders at the G7 summit in Italy, a London newspaper delivered a devastating verdict from the officials there: He was “losing focus” and “it’s the worst he has ever been.”
Still, nothing really new there.
