The Real Cheap Fakes Reveal Themselves

The first 24 hours or so after Thursday night's presidential debate, I watched in amusement as the Copium was passed around in media circles as reporters seemingly struggled to explain Joe Biden's disastrous performance, a performance that confirmed much of what Biden's critics have been saying all along about his physical fitness and cognitive health.

For instance, NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd, formerly of "Meet the Press" infamy, said as much in the immediate aftermath of the debate, as we previously reported.

"You know, one of the things was when either candidate looked like the caricature that the other campaign has been trying to paint of them - and at the end of the day, Joe Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting," Todd, a career Democrat apologist, said with a disillusioned look on his face. "And there were no clips [read: cheap fakes] tonight, right, this was - you saw it before your eyes."

The more I thought about it, though, the angrier I got.

A big reason why good-faith writers do what they do is to inform people to the best of their ability as to what's really going on, plain and simple. And if you're a conservative writer, informing people means cutting through the liberal media spin and lies in order to try and get to the full story - not just the sanitized or sensationalized ones the press wants you to see (or sometimes not see).

Conservative writers have been meticulously documenting Biden's questionable mental acuity since before he was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, taking a ball first launched by Biden's critics on the left in 2019 and running with it.

In response has been a vicious discrediting campaign from the Biden administration and the MSM, with the same media types who declared "democracy dies in darkness" after Trump was inaugurated rushing to flip those same glaring spotlights off - complete with cutting off the electricity to them - as fast as they can when anything negative or troubling about Joe Biden has been revealed.

One of the absolute worst things an elected leader can be accused of is being unfit for office. When those accusations start flying, all the accused can do is a) go out in public and try to prove their critics wrong or b) launch smear campaigns against the people making the claims in hopes that by the time all the smoke and dust is cleared, voters will view the accuser as the one with the real problem, and then move on to the next scandal.

In Joe Biden's case, he's had assistance in this endeavor, with the media being in his corner from the start - the same media, I should note, who used to trot out "medical experts" to speculate on then-President Donald Trump's mental health, and who once went nuts after Trump walked down a ramp slowly during a commencement address.

Case in point, here's what the New York Times wrote in June 2020:

Trump’s Halting Walk Down Ramp Raises New Health Questions
The president also appeared to have trouble raising a glass of water to his mouth during a speech at West Point a day before he turned 74, the oldest a president has been in his first term.

That was okay, but say one word about Biden's tendency to look lost and out of it, the bumbling and stumbling, having to be guided around by handlers and prodded by his wife when she's accompanying him, and you're an insensitive boor engaging in gutter politics.

Hey, you don't have to take my word for it. CNN's then-editor at large Chris Cillizza said it himself in 2021:

This is the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life. If Republicans have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward. If they don’t, they should stop doing what they’re doing. Immediately.

My RedState colleague Brad Slager has already covered a lot of ground in his post-debate indictment of the mainstream media. While I won't rehash his excellent points, I do want to emphasize one of them:

All of these voices in the media today are in defiance of the very same media voices yesterday. What was witnessed Thursday night confirmed everything the press denied — for weeks, for months, and for the past four-plus years. The journalists currently declaring Biden’s condition was blatant and needing to be addressed were just days ago bleating that this exact same video evidence was fake.

They knew. They've always known. And they lied, not just about Biden but about anyone who dared to raise the issue.

The cheap fakes, with their cheap talking points and fake shock over how Biden looked Thursday night, have once and for all revealed themselves: It's them, not us.

To further prove this point beyond a shadow of a doubt, look no further than the same New York Times which said Trump walking slowly down a ramp "raises new health questions" just four years ago: