WSJ: Dem Cover-Up of Biden Senility Began in October 2021

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Kamala Harris will not stand alone as burdened by the cover-up that has been. The entire Democrat Party created this constitutional crisis by knowingly cooking their primary to ensure the renomination of a president they knew was incapable of carrying out the duties of the office. As I have repeatedly argued, everyone including the media knew that well enough in April 2022, when the White House had the Easter Bunny body-block Joe Biden from contact with Easter Egg roll attendees and reporters.

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The Wall Street Journal today reports on the start date of the cover-up -- October 2021. The setting: Biden's infrastructure bill. The stakes: His main legislative agenda. Biden's focus ... almost entirely absent:

President Biden had just finished trying to persuade a group of congressional Democrats to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill when Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, took the microphone.

In 30 minutes of remarks on Capitol Hill, Biden had spoken disjointedly and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers, according to Democrats in the room. After he left, a visibly frustrated Pelosi told the group she would articulate what Biden had been trying to say, one lawmaker said. 

“It was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen,” recalled Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.), who would go on to mount an unsuccessful primary challenge against the president. 

That was October 2021. That month was the last time Biden met with the House Democratic caucus on the Hill regarding legislation.

Emphasis mine. And there's a good reason Pelosi didn't invite Biden to come back, too.  

People may not remember just how big a clusterfark the infrastructure bill became, and how large a role Biden played in making it so. In October 2021, Nancy Pelosi wanted to pass the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill separately so that House Democrats could get a W on the board. Progressives wanted it tied to the larger Green New Deal bill that Biden had proposed at the start of his term, a bill that had started off as a $6 trillion ask but had been cut down by that point to $3.5 trillion. 

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Biden was supposed to go to House Democrats to argue that the infrastructure bill get a separate vote. Instead, he not only pulled his aphasiac act during the meeting but argued the opposite, crossing up Pelosi and confusing nearly everyone, as Allahpundit noted on October 2:

Biden shocked Dems yesterday when he attended their caucus meeting for what everyone expected would be a pep talk about passing the bipartisan bill immediately and trusting him and Senate Dems to deliver on reconciliation eventually. The president wants to put some legislative points on the board, right? His job approval is tanking and this would be a major win for him. Instead, Biden endorsed the progressive position that the bipartisan bill and reconciliation should remain linked, which means the first doesn’t get passed until there’s a deal on the second. “The fact that the president came to the Hill and whipped against his own bill is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” said one source to Politico, marveling at Biden’s strategy.

 By the end of October, Biden still hadn't improved. Given numerous opportunities to push for the infrastructure bill, Biden continually waffled or simply never acted. He went back to Capitol Hill in the last week of the month -- apparently the meeting to which the WSJ refers -- and never asked House Democrats for their vote on either bill. Punchbowl covered it at the time:

Yet there’s no denying Thursday’s episode was an embarrassing setback for Democrats, Biden included. Biden was supposed to help Pelosi bridge an ugly split between moderates and progressives. That didn’t happen. In fact, it may be even worse.

Strangely, when Biden met with House Democrats Thursday, he didn’t ask them to vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Pelosi was trying to get to the floor. ...

Biden called a member of the House from Air Force One as he flew to Rome to thank her for her public support for the Build Back Better Act. Yet Biden never once mentioned the infrastructure bill, said sources familiar with the call.

“We would have had a victory today if only he had asked for it,” one Democratic aide said of Biden.

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Pelosi finally got her separate vote on the infrastructure bill a week or so later -- after which Biden dawdled on signing it, apparently wanting a good photo op. This series of events looked bizarre to everyone at the time, but in the context of what followed, the WSJ report makes perfect sense. It wasn't just political incompetence -- it was cognitive incompetence. And every Democrat in the caucus, especially Pelosi, knew it. 

Now they're all running for the hills, trying to blame White House staffers and the Biden family for hiding the president's cognitive decline:

The drawbacks of Biden’s age were clear to voters, with polls showing that nearly three-quarters of them last year deemed him too old to seek another term. Yet inside the party’s uppermost ranks, revelations about the toll aging has taken on the president seemed to catch many people by surprise in recent months.

“I am really concerned about what we were not told during these months,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) in an interview. “I remain concerned about that—that for whatever reasons, this overprotective, stage-managed kind of operation not only appears to have denied the American people broadly of an understanding of the president’s current situation, but also other elected officials.”

Really? Didn't any of them find it curious that the president didn't meet with his party's congressional caucus on legislation after October 2021? Didn't any of them see this seven months later and wonder why the Easter Bunny was ordering the president to leave the rope line?

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And are they really arguing that none of them could see what 75% Americans could see clearly from their living rooms -- that Joe Biden was slipping into dementia and was clearly unfit for office? 

The media should have a field day with these claims. And they would ... if they weren't too busy attempting to extricate themselves from complicity in the same cover-up. 

They all lied. They're all lying now. And they will keep lying until voters finally make them pay the price for it.

And that's why it's so important to have independent media survive. The Protection Racket Media and their Big Tech allies hid Biden's condition from voters, and worse yet, actively suppressed anyone who dared to raise it. They labeled it "misinformation" and "cheap fakes," and until the debate blew the lid off the cover-up, they allied with Democrats to marginalize critics and dissenters. 

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 22, 2024
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