Post-Debate Analysis - The Emperor Has No Clothes

With some perspective and analysis you may not have seen

Seven months after Joe Biden was inaugurated, I authored an article in The Federalist, “If Joe Biden’s Team Will Lie About His Dog Biting People, What Won’t They Lie About?” Watching the debate last night, we got the answer once again: There is nothing that they won’t lie about, even when it damages the country.

Let’s take a short look. This morning, CNN provided a transcript of the debate. It is here.

What we all saw.

The hapless Karine Jean-Pierre has assured us that the numerous videos of Biden appearing oblivious to where he is and his inability to find his own way off a stage are out-of-context “cheap fakes.” Well, The Eagles had something to say about that: “You can't hide your lyin' eyes.”

Biden’s demeanor had multiple faces that sometimes alternated between a slack-jawed gape off into space, and uncontrolled anger.  But the one I thought was the strangest were the multiple instances when he simply stared with unblinking eyes for extended periods of time. It was so bizarre that it made me think that maybe Trump really was on to something when he suggested that both candidates undergo drug tests.

Photo credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, Moira Donegan/The Guardian

In fact, Biden’s obliviousness to his surroundings was on display from the beginning. When he walked onto the debate stage he turned, waved and said “hello” to a non-existence audience.

Then, less than five minutes into the debate I turned to my wife and said, “This debate is over. Biden is cooked.”

In response to Tapper’s first question about inflation and continuing high prices, Biden had given a rapid-fire answer that appeared to have been rehearsed every hour of every day when Biden’s support team had him sequestered for rehearsals in their movie theater and airplane hangar.

After more than forty-five years of preparing witnesses for deposition and trial testimony, I know an over-prepared witness when I see one.

But even a week of preparation could not train Biden to give a coherent and focused answer to a question that a fifth grader could have predicted: Among other things this is Biden said in response to Tapper’s very first question, “What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency [because of high prices] than they were under President Trump?”.

We’ve got to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me. We had an economy that was in freefall. The pandemic was so badly handled. Many people were dying. All he said was it’s not that serious, just inject a little bleach in your arm. You’ll be all right.

So, in response to a question about how he would reassure voters about the higher prices under his administration, Biden’s non-response reiterated a variation of the lie that he told in 2020, when he claimed that Trump told people to combat COVID by drinking bleach:

And when it comes to COVID-19, after months of doing nothing, other than predicting the virus would disappear, or maybe if you drank bleach, you may be okay, Trump has simply given up. 

Even liberal outlets such as PolitiFact have confirmed that this was a lie, that Trump never said any such thing.

Believe your eyes.

Missteps and lies.

In common law, there is an expression, “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.” It means “false in one thing, false in everything.” It is a principle that judges have used for centuries to instruct juries on how to evaluate the truthfulness of witnesses’ testimony.

It is difficult to separate missteps that may be due to Biden’s progressing dementia from calculated and intentional lies. Personally, I would include false statements that have repeatedly been shown to be incorrect in the latter category. But each reader will have to judge on their own.

It is not feasible in this short article to catalogue all the missteps and lies by Biden, so here is a sampling based upon notes I was making during the debate.

• One of Biden’s most bizarre claims was that women had to have full access to abortion pills because they were being raped by their sisters. And again, it was part of an incoherent and incomprehensible response:

Look, there’s so many young women who have been – including a young woman who just was murdered and he – he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by a – by –by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that.

What that had to do with abortion is unclear, but Biden continued:

But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their – by their in-laws, by their – by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by – just – it’s just – it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it.

Frankly, it is difficult to know if this nutty claim is an innocent misstatement due to Biden’s dementia, or if it is a bow to the transgender wing of Biden’s base by affirming that “transgender” women can indeed rape their sisters.

• Biden claimed that the Border Patrol had endorsed his candidacy. That is not true. Trump responded by noting that the Border Patrol had endorsed him, not Biden, but Trump was not alone in making the correction. The Border Patrol Union promptly issued their own correction.

  

  “Never have and never will ….”

• Consistent with his strategy of blaming Trump for everything, Biden claimed that Trump left him an unemployment rate of 15%. Did he rehearse that? The real rate when Trump left office, with the economy still in the throes of COVID, was 6.3%.

• Once again, Biden claimed - albeit incoherently - that his son Beau was killed in Iraq, even though that story has been debunked numerous times and no one else defends it. He combined that claim with another lie about Trump supposedly saying that Nazis at Charlottesville were “fine people.” Judge the incoherence for yourself:

  What got me involved to run in the first place after my son had died, I decided – in Iraq – because of Iraq. I said, I wasn’t going to run again, until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torches and singing the same anti-Semitic bile they sang back in Germany.

  And what did – and the young woman got killed, they spoke to the mother. And she – they asked him, they said, what – well, what do you think of those people? The people who wanted to get killed, the ones who tried to stop it, and the ones who said, I think they’re fine people on both sides.

  What American president would ever say, Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same anti-Semitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people.

Trump’s suppose praise of Nazis and white supremacists as “very fine people” has been refuted even by liberal sources such as Snopes (“No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists 'Very Fine People'”) and Jack Tapper himself. Here is Tapper:

Elsewhere in those remarks the President did condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists. So, he’s not saying that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists are very fine people.

• As I predicted in yesterday’s article, Biden claimed that numerous courts had rejected Trumps claims of election rigging: “Not one single court in America said any of your claims had any merit, state or local, none.” As I discussed yesterday, this was a lie because these claims were never tried and dismissed on the merits. Biden surely knows better.

There are many more examples, some of which were cataloged in The Federalist this morning.

Who is running the country?

The man we saw on display last night is not capable of running the country. He lacks the mental capacity to do so. He is unable to stay focused or to complete a coherent thought even on relatively simple topics. That means that he cannot possibly be capable of making complex decisions about the economy, the war in Ukraine, and how to avoid war with Russia, the complexities of Mid-East politics, the Iranian nuclear program, Chinese and Russian expansion into the Western hemisphere, or other serious and complex problems.

So, the question is, ‘Who is running the country?’ And ‘If Biden is reelected, who will be running the country?’ We can all speculate but no one knows for sure. What we do know for sure is that a vote for Biden will be a vote for someone else to run the country.

We also know that Biden’s performance in the debate was not the first time this has occurred. The nature of the thing is that this is a continuing problem.

They knew. Biden’s wife, his press secretary, his other White House handlers, his cabinet secretaries, the sixteen people who prepped him for the debates, and much of the media now professing their dismay, could not possibly have been blind to what we all have now seen for ourselves. They all knew. And they have been lying to us about his condition and competence, hoping that we will not notice. They put power over principle. They do not care about the good of the country.

Remember them.

What now?

Who knows? I, for one, still will not predict the results of the election, especially given the innovative ways of rigging elections that I discussed in my debate-eve article. Nevertheless, a few observations are in order.

• The Dems and their media allies, all loyal to a fault yesterday, today constitute a cacophony of calls for Biden’s replacement now that we have all seen that the emperor has no clothes. These are the same people who purported to worship “our democracy” and warned that Trump’s election would mean the end of democracy. Now that their fraud has been exposed, they want essentially to void the votes of Democrat primary voters and replace the winner with . . . . well, whom? So, by their lights is this the end of democracy?

• In his heart, Gavin Newsom hopes to be the replacement. He will try to deceive us by professing loyalty to Biden, but he has been campaigning for the job for months and only a fool would think that he does not covet it. Coincidentally, as I was finishing this article, I received a request for donations from none other than Gavin Newsome. He concluded his plea with a photo, not of Biden, but of another candidate:

  

• Kamala Harris, on the other hand, will continue to support Biden despite his obvious disqualification for the job. That is because if he is elected and she remains Vice President, then she will be President before Biden’s term is over. That is her best route into the Oval Office.

• Unfortunately, we were not the only ones watching. You can be sure that the intelligence agencies of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and numerous others, were glued to their TV sets. They see Biden’s weakness and incompetence confirmed. We are entering a very dangerous time.

A confession: I was wrong; the moderators did a good job.

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure I make my confession: I was wrong about the expected performance of the moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. In my Substack article published just a few hours before the debate, I predicted that, based upon their prior track record of anti-Trump rhetoric, they would be biased and would parrot Biden’s lies. Although I could quibble with the phrasing of a couple of questions (such as Bash’s question equating pills causing a spontaneous abortion with “abortion medication”), Tapper and Bash generally did a good job. They let the debate be about the candidates, not the moderators. They enforced the rules evenly and moderated, and, for the most part, avoided assuming a partisan role as commentators.

Now, of course, some Biden supporters are blaming the moderators for Biden’s abysmal performance.

I close with the headline from an article by my law school classmate and friend of many years, Jim “Pappy” Moore: “Biden's Epitaph: ‘We Finally Beat Medicare!’”