‘The very attacks that Democrats with virtual unanimity today vilify as disgusting, racist smears were ones that emanated from their own party…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Democratic efforts to rehab and “normalize” current front-runner Joe Biden struck a disingenuous and hypocritical chord after months of voicing their reservations about the flub-prone former vice president with a history of racially and sexually inappropriate comments.
In a race to sugarcoat valid concerns about the cognitive capabilities of their preferred candidate, leftists in the media and elsewhere not only proceeded in short order to downplay Biden’s regular habit of gaffes following his Super Tuesday victories, but they desperately scrambled to deflect the criticisms back onto Biden’s opponents on both sides of the aisle.
Libertarian Glenn Greenwald noted the hypocrisy in a recent piece for The Intercept. The same sort of doubling-back on its own attacks played out during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 run against then-rival Barack Obama, he observed.
“[T]he very attacks that Democrats with virtual unanimity today vilify as disgusting, racist smears were ones that emanated from their own party,” he said.
The questions amplified by future President Donald Trump over Obama’s birth certificate came “either from the Clinton campaign itself (maliciously spreading the photo of Obama in Kenya in traditional Somalian clothing and suggesting he is Muslim) or from various Clinton supporters (falsely claiming he was not eligible to run for office),” said Greenwald.
“And now they are doing the exact same thing when it comes to plainly valid questions concerning Joe Biden’s cognitive fitness,” he continued: “expressing revulsion and scorn at the mere mention of these questions and declaring the topic off-limits to all decent people even though establishment Democrats were the ones who first spread insinuations” (emphasis is Greenwald’s).
Compounding the duplicity is the fact that many on the Left, despite the validity of the concerns, were not acting in good faith by relaying them, but were doing so with the hope of seeing Biden defeated by one of his rivals on the Left.
That included “even explicit accusations about Biden’s cognitive decline when they thought doing so could help them defeat him and/or because it genuinely concerned them regarding his ability to defeat Trump,” Greenwald said.
But while ignoring its own blatant echo-chamber chorus of newly converted Biden apologists, media liberals like Politico‘s Alex Isenstadt—a San Francisco native who wears his Trump antagonism as a “badge of honor” around the newsroom—are now, once again, crying “vast right-wing conspiracy” (to borrow another Hillary throwaway line) for audaciously casting aspersions over Biden’s objective mental decline.
“With Biden emerging as the likely Democratic nominee, Trump has launched a concerted, near-daily campaign to raise doubts about the 77-year-old’s mental acuity,” Isenstadt spun his yarn on Tuesday.
“The president has been bolstered by a conservative echo chamber flooding social media with video clips highlighting Biden’s gaffes,” claimed the activist–reporter.
Meanwhile, reported Town Hall, media leftists continued to grapple with another major thread—the corrupt conduct of several members of Biden’s immediate family, and notably his son Hunter.
As Senate Republicans continue to investigate the Bidens’ conflicts of interest in Ukraine as Joe oversaw U.S.–Ukraine policy and Hunter sat on the board of the Burisma energy company, some have abandoned the long-repeated trope that there was “no evidence” of misconduct and are lamenting the Bidens’ lack of a better explanation.
MSNBC laments that Biden doesn’t have a better answer on the Hunter and Ukraine (and China and Romania) question
Biden doesn’t have a better answer because there isn’t one! It’s corrupt politicians who’ve never had a real job using power to enrich themselves
Drain the swamp! pic.twitter.com/CKa2KnzeBS
— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizRNC) March 9, 2020
However, many tipped their partisan hand by also falling back on the old standby of blaming Trump and Republicans for daring to point out Biden’s shortcomings during a political campaign.
Washington Post liberal David Ignatius ranted—without evidence—that “Biden’s denials of wrongdoing have been entirely accurate, but … his patchwork of careful statements doesn’t address perceptions.”
Ignatius went on to claim that most Americans can relate to the Biden sob story of a nearly 50-year-old son with a serious drug-abuse problem who somehow was able to escape jail time or other serious consequences being forced, in a fit of desperation—a cry for help—to join the board of a major international energy company while receiving a million dollars a year for consulting, despite the conflicts of interest that it presented.
“It’s about a loving father and a son whose life was falling apart,” Ignatius claimed.