Especially while trying to paint your party as The Defender of Muh Democracy? Gee, they may be on to something here!

This took place relatively late in the evening, which makes the tentative nature of this discussion so very, very amusing. The chyron that appears below NBC's Lester Holt and Biden flack Jen Psaki shows NBC's call of the state of Washington, which took place as all three Blue Wall states flashed red for at least an hour. The New York Times "dials" had at this point given Trump >70% chance of winning each of them, as I recall, with Pennsylvania and its decisive 19 Electoral College electors already a near-lock.

This almost qualifies as an "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln" moment in that context:

“Jen [Psaki], has the conversation begun yet about Joe Biden and about the decision to ask him to step aside?” NBC News host Lester Holt asked.

“It will begin, it will begin depending on the outcome,” former White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied. “And obviously there hasn’t been a race called yet, if this is not a Harris win, that will definitely be part of the discussion. She’s run a campaign over the course of 107 days, that is not something we’ve seen in history and there will be lots of questions about exactly that. The timing and the impact of that.”

Gee ... ya think? 

Actually, I'd be surprised if we see too much scrutiny of that decision. Not that it isn't richly deserved, but mainly because it would expose too many Democrats as complicit in a corrupt cover-up of Joe Biden's cognitive incapacity. Democrats forced Biden to retire after that cover-up became obvious in the June 27 debate with Donald Trump, after rigging their primaries to ensure that Biden didn't need to campaign and potentially expose it earlier. Rather than use the convention to select the replacement nominee democratically, they instead rushed to anoint the arguably-worse Kamala Harris as the candidate. And they did that because Harris herself and the entire White House was complicit in the cover-up. 

However, Democrats may not be able to avoid the scandal. The shocking nature of Harris' incompetence as a candidate (as well as VP) will anger the rank and file, not to mention the activist class in the party, too much to keep silent for long. 

In fact, it started last night on MSNBC, where former Biden spokesperson Symone D. Sanders angrily accused Democrats of conducting a "stabbing in the front" of her former boss. After NBC called the election for Trump, Sanders erupted in righteous indignation over the indignity:

MSNBC's Symone D. Sanders (a former Biden spox) just NUKED the Democrat Party over their coup to remove Joe Biden:

"I do have an indictment of some of the strategy, and again, the people that said, 'Joe Biden was the problem.' Where's my camera? ... I will just note that it is… pic.twitter.com/INR8ank1vz

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) November 6, 2024

"I do have an indictment of some of the strategy, and again, the people that said, 'Joe Biden was the problem.' Where's my camera? ... I will just note that it is probably not the best idea that Democrats orchestrated a very public stab fest, a proverbial stabbing in the front of the sitting President of the United States of America, and then didn't use him in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania."

Sanders isn't wrong as much as her argument is incomplete. Democrats did indeed pull a soft coup to get Biden out of the way, but only after coddling him through the primary. The party elites then did a bait-and-switch with their primary voters to push Harris into office, one of the most dramatically undemocratic sequences in American electoral history. 

That's the issue, not whether Biden got to go to Scranton PA. And that's the issue that the media refused to discuss and investigate until Election Day. Will they start asking about it now? Only if they can't keep activists like Sanders quiet about it.