Sunday Smiles

David Strom 1:30 PM | December 29, 2024
Grok/David Strom

The media is doing its inevitable "looking back at the Biden presidency" pieces, and they are about what you would expect. 

On the one hand, they include "revelations" about the Biden regime's admissions of "mistakes" or missteps, while on the other they downplay the most important stories about Biden's failures and lies. They are the equivalent of answering the "What is your greatest weakness?" question with "I work too hard and strive for perfection too much."

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Some of this is standard covering for Democrats and pretending that the American people just don't understand how outstanding a president Biden was, but it's easy to overlook how much the spin is a distraction from the many failures of the media to cover the Biden administration in any manner other than pushing propaganda. 

Here's the bizarre opening to The Washington Post's profile of the Biden administration:

Earlier this year, Rep. James E. Clyburn met President Joe Biden at the White House to deliver a stern message: Biden had to find a way to revitalize his flagging campaign. Clyburn, who had been pivotal to Biden’s 2020 victory, also made a confession about his own long-standing belief that substance is more important than style in politics.

“I have come to the conclusion in recent days that I’m wrong about that,” the South Carolina Democrat, 84, remembers telling Biden. “The new environment that we currently live in — style seems to carry the day more than substance.”

“Your style,” he told the president, “does not lend itself well to the environment we’re currently in.”

Yep. The real problem Biden had was that his focus on substance over style was not sufficiently appealing to the American people. 

As always, it is a failure of the Narrative™ and had nothing to do with the fact that Biden's substance was destroying the economy, selling influence, pushing lawfare against his political enemies, and weakening the United States on the world stage. If only Americans focused on selling his awful policies better Americans would have loved him. 

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Biden now says he regrets pulling out of the race, and he, too, thinks his major problem was not selling his awful policies and his corrupt management of the country well enough. 

“He governed through traditional processes and institutions,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “It didn’t change the picture of where he started, this anger in the electorate toward institutions, this support for a pretty radical conservative vision that Trump embodied. It didn’t do anything to end the very intense polarization that exists in this country.”

Previous articles in this series examined the pillars of Biden’s leadership — how he absorbs information, makes decisions and communicates with Americans. They showed that Biden, even at the peak of his power, struggled mightily to communicate his decisions and vision. This article, based on interviews with more than two dozen people close to Biden, reveals the ways in which his theory of how to succeed in an era of American politics dominated by Trump fell apart in the final phase of his presidency — and how he has been publicly and privately rethinking whether he should have handled some decisions differently.

As always, the problem really was Trump--and the failure of the American people to appreciate Biden's brilliance as a leader. 

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the Biden regime--we are past the point of pretending that Biden was really president on a day-to-day basis--is trying to sell a narrative that the administration was just too good at defending democracy and setting policy and its unpopularity is based solely on Americans being insufficiently grateful for good policies. What stands out to me is how the media is still willing, even after their precipitous decline in the eyes of Americans, to repeat these absurdities. 

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It's a bold but stupid strategy. The more the media tries to sell this nonsense the worse the opinion of them people will have. On the other hand, what else can they do? It's not just the Biden advocates who have pushed this narrative--the media has been their megaphone, and if they admit that Biden was a corrupt failure, what does that say about their sycophantic coverage.

The one area where they are willing to admit a tiny bit of fault is the coverage of Biden's decline. But in that they have no choice because the claim that Biden was "sharp as a tack" exploded on live TV. The best they can do is soft-pedal the story, halfheartedly admitting they made a mistake not in their coverage but in not being more aggressive. 

The half-admission may work with people deeply invested in trusting the media, but the wound to the media's credibility with most people will be difficult to heal. All those "cheap fake" and "sharp as a tack" stories float around on the internet and will keep the wound raw. 

This gets me to a point that I keep repeating: the Democrats are not our biggest enemy, but the media itself. Democrats can be defeated at the ballot box, but the media must be destroyed completely because they will remain in power as long as they control the flow of information. That control is weakened, but their power remains. 

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