The craven behaviour of the USA’s court media has hidden for too long the president’s deep flaws.
Source - Daily Telegraph 20/08/21
The world appears to have woken up to an important truth this week: which is that Joe Biden is a truly terrible president. It is a shame that it took America gifting Afghanistan back to the Taliban for so many people to realise this.
To be charitable, there were perhaps two reasons why this had not become more obvious before. The first is that Joe Biden is not Donald Trump and for a lot of the planet that seems to be recommendation enough to occupy the Oval Office. A break from the Trump show appealed to an awful lot of people.
But the second reason why too few realised what the world was going to get from a Biden presidency is that the US media simply didn’t ask the questions it needed to ask. Before the election a near entirety of the American media gave up covering it and simply campaigned for the Democrat nominee.
It was the same with the Big Tech companies. So persuaded were they (Twitter in particular) that they had been responsible for Donald Trump’s election in 2016 that during the 2020 race they did everything they could to get Biden in. That included – and this cannot be said often enough – effectively muting America’s oldest newspaper: the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained serious allegations of corrupt tail-coating by Hunter and other members of the Biden family when Joe was vice-president. But Big Tech restricted the story from being shared and almost no other journalists bothered to follow it up.
Instead, they just hung on his every incoherent sentence and accepted his pronouncements (generally beginning with “Look”) as if they had any more idea than he did about whatever point he was forever struggling to make. Worse was the strange sort of cooing that journalists made whenever Biden appeared in public ahead of the election. They would thrill when he jogged over to speak to one of them. They were flattered when he made even a wave in their direction. Then there was the most irritating Biden schtick of all – the one he has of going to ice-cream parlours. The US media can never get over the novelty of this miraculous type of excursion. It is as though nobody in high office ever eats such a thing. “What a crazy down-to-earth guy,” they think. “He likes ice cream!”
Whenever he exits one of these joints and emerges solemnly with his cone, the US media can be relied upon to shout questions about which flavours he has chosen. He will say “double-choc-chip cookie” or whatever it is that day and the court media will “ooh” or applaud and make notes as though Dorothy Parker had just offered them an epigram.
Until you see it up close you just cannot believe the cravenness of most of the American media. Last month the CNN presenter Don Lemon was selected to quiz Biden at a “town hall” event before the cameras. Biden was, as usual, meandering and unfocused as though lost in the fog of his own sentences. But Lemon would not press him properly. Rather, you could see him urging the president on, willing him to get to the end of the sentence or to reconnect with one of those trains of thought that been left derailed several clauses or sentences back. It wasn’t journalism. It wasn’t even kindness. He was rooting for the president.
The footage this week from Afghanistan has at least exposed the some of the problems that have resulted from this lack of critique. Not least the fact that the Commander in Chief appears unfocused on the serious questions.
Just last month the president had assured the nation that, following the withdrawal of American troops, there would be absolutely no collapse of the Afghan army or government. He said that there would be no reason to compare events with Vietnam and he even specified – in what turned out to be his worst hostage to fortune – that there would be no Saigon-like airlifting from the roof of the US embassy.
Yet all these things, and far more, occurred this week. And the footage from America’s defeat in Vietnam looks positively orderly by comparison. Afghan women trying to push their babies over barbed wire to US troops so that they will take them out. Men trying to hold onto the sides of the last planes heading out of Kabul. Bodies falling from the sky as their attempt to hold on fails thousands of feet up in the air.
What was Biden’s response to all this? It was to give a belligerent press conference explaining that all this was perfectly as it should be, and as he had expected, and that he stood by his decision. And what did Biden do after he’d just about managed to read that teleprompter script? He walked away without taking any questions. That was it. If Donald Trump had done any such thing, let alone after such a catastrophe, the US media would have declared it the work of an unaccountable dictator.
Eventually Biden did give an interview, late in the week, to George Stephanopoulos of ABC. During that interview, granted no doubt because the White House knew it would be lenient, Stephanopoulos quizzed the president as much as the protocol of the sycophants’ circle allows. As ever, it showed its limits.
At one stage the interviewer asked about the footage that had come out of Afghanistan. “We’ve all seen the pictures,” he said. “We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17. You’ve seen Afghans falling …” An angry, bug-eyed, blustering Biden interrupted his interviewer. “That was four days ago, five days ago,” he said furiously, in one of the most heartless non-sequiturs I have heard for quite some time. And what did Stephanopoulos do? Certainly, he did not do what an Andrew Neil or an Emma Barnett would have done.
Stephanopoulos didn’t even pause to notice the psychological weirdness of this reply. He did not ask what needed to be asked, which was: “What the hell does that mean? What has something happening four days ago got to do with what I’ve just asked you? Does the passage of five days make something ancient history in the fog of Biden head?”
The ABC interviewer did none of this. Instead, he asked Biden what he thought when he had seen these pictures and allowed Biden to boast that US personnel had got on top of the situation at the airport.
This is just one week in the life of Joe Biden, but you could select almost any other week in his career and find a similar soup of certainty, unknowingness, falteringness and arrogance. It is what you get when you have spent a career with a court media asking you about your choice of ice cream and reached the highest office in the land because you weren’t the other guy.
The world always gets serious again. And it just got serious on Biden’s watch and has shown something that should have been revealed during the primary season long ago: that the man who is now commander-in-chief is not remotely in command of his brief.
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