It’s lost in the frenzy of Democratic recriminations after Joe Biden’s strange debate performance last Thursday night, but it’s worthwhile, as an exercise in examining journalistic myopia, to remember what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote just hours after the incumbent’s meltdown on CNN. It’s pathetic, a new low for the 70-year-old Friedman, who’s relished his access to top Democrats and his almost-equally blinkered and bankrupt friends and colleagues who’ve insisted up until, oh, a month or so again, that Biden, “in private,” is sharp, sharp, sharp.
Friedman: “I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep. I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime… Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.” If I were given to charity towards washed-up, self-entitled “elite” members of “The Fourth Estate,” I’d say that Biden’s Dr. Robert was in a fog of his own and brought his bag of potions and notions and steroids and amphetamines to Lisbon, rather than Atlanta, and shot up Friedman instead of the President. But I’m not that charitable: Friedman’s admission of “weeping” (readers need to imagine that?) after seeing Biden freeze and bumble and talk about female-on-female rape was an inadvertent (I think!) plea to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger to “make the hard decision” and metaphorically put the old cow out of his misery and dump him into the Potomac, Hudson or Atlantic Ocean.
Biden’s a hack, always has been, and his live breakdown wasn’t “heartbreaking.” It was expected, and wholly unnecessary: as I’ve written many times, Dr. Jill Edith Wilson, in a fair world, would be perp-walked in Washington, arrested on charges of spousal abuse. Friedman, like equally noxious colleague Paul Krugman, claims that in his one-on-one sessions with Biden found him “up to the job.” But now, it’s time for his “friend” to step aside in favor of someone who can complete a sentence. (I wonder if Friedman wept when Maureen Dowd ended Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign in ’87, exposing his plagiarism.) “If he does,” Friedman writes, “everyday Americans will hail Joe Biden for doing what Donald Trump would never do: put his country before himself.”
Incredulity over American politics today is rare because citizens are numb to incompetence, corruption and double-talk, but I was taken aback at Friedman’s disgusting condescension. “Everyday Americans” (translated, a class of people that Friedman, who lives in a Bethesda, MD mansion, doesn’t associate with) won’t “hail” a Biden withdrawal, but rather (for those who voted for him in the 2020 Covid election) heave a sigh of relief and wonder what took so long.
As of June 30, the day I’m writing, Biden and his enablers have given the middle finger to the liberal media calling for his sacrifice and plan to push on. That’s good news for stand-up comics—normally, it’d be rude to satirize an 81-year-old in failing health, but Biden’s president (even if a figurehead) so it’s cricket—and the one or two journalists who still have a sense of humor. Which wouldn’t include The Washington Post’s David Ignatius (who, like the Times’ Dowd, was ahead of the curve in calling for Scranton Joe to set up camp at one his Delaware homes and eat ice cream, watch re-runs of Get Smart and pet cute dogs) who wrote: “Thursday night had the sense of an ending. There was something Shakespearean about the gaunt, haunted face of Biden on stage squinting as if to see in a dwindling light, struggling for words even as the nobility of his purpose remained.”
Not every political event is “Shakespearean,” and Biden’s public humiliation evoked a crummy made-by-Netflix political whodunit rather than King Lear.
The Times’ editorial urging Biden to step down was just a shade less hyperbolic than Ignatius’ nonsense: “It’s the best chance to protect the soul of the nation… from the malign warping of Mr. Trump. And it is the best service than Mr. Biden can provide to a country that he has nobly served for so long.”
I’ll protect my own soul, thanks.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023
