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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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I am old enough to remember when then-Senator John Edwards (D-NC), at the time the 2004 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, said:

If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.

I guess that we can blame all subsequent paralysis on the American voters, because they chose not to elect then-Senator John F Kerry (D-MA).

Well, former Vice President Joe Biden is older than I am, and was the senior Senator from Delaware at the time, so one would think that he’d remember that incredibly stupid statement from the Distinguished Gentleman from North Carolina. But, if he does remember it, it wasn’t enough to keep him from making an equally stupid one himself:

A lot of you understand what loss is and when loss occurs, you know that people come up to you and tell you ‘I understand’ if you lose a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter, a family member,” he said. “That’s why I’ve worked so hard in my career to make sure that — I promise you if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America, we’re gonna cure cancer.

That statement was so stupid, so over the top, that I’ll admit it, I wondered if it was #FakeNews, propaganda, an outright lie. After all, when I copied the statement and put it into Google, I got a return from Fox News and USAToday and a plethora of conservative sites, but there wasn’t one from The New York Times or The Washington Post.

So I went to the Times website, and did a site search for Biden cure cancer, thinking that, perhaps, the Times simply paraphrased it rather than giving the Grey Lady’s readers the direct quote. Well, as of 5:12 PM EDT, there was no report in the Times on the statement.

Then I went to the Post’s website, and ran the same search, at 5:22 PM. There was one return which could have mentioned it, but didn’t; it’s simply that those three words were in the opinion piece.

At any rate, I found the YouTube video of the campaign event, and listened to it myself, to see if it was really there. And I didn’t have to listen very long: the sequence starts around the 2:15 mark, and it’s right there. I’ll admit it: after watching that campaign video, I can understand why President Trump started calling him “Sleepy Joe.” 🙂

So, yup, it’s true, and Fox News had it and USAToday had it, and a bunch of conservative websites had it, but from the two most important newspapers in the country? Crickets.

It’s not like they just didn’t have the time; Mr Biden’s campaign stop was yesterday, not today; more than 24 hours have elapsed since he went boneheaded stupid.

It used to be said, before Al Gore invented this internet thingy, that in any argument, if you could find it in The New York Times, you won your point. Now it seems as though the editors of the Times are behaving as though if you don’t find it in their newspaper, it just didn’t happen.

“All the News that’s Fit to Print” is the Times’ long term slogan. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” the Post started using, thanks to their #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. Yet the editors of the Times apparently saw Mr Biden’s statement as news that was not fit to print, while the Post’s leadership seems to think keeping its readers in darkness about our 47^th Vice President’s over the top claim was a good thing.

We don’t really know how long the credentialed media have been simply avoiding news that was certainly fit to print to avoid weakening their preferred candidates and agendas, but once the internet took off, we could see what they were doing, including CBS News attempt to take down the younger President Bush with a story depending on forged documents. It’s becoming clearer every day: if you depend solely on the credentialed media for your news, you are going to be misled.
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