James Morrow: Joe’s mental woe or is it merely a ‘cheap fake’?
By any honest assessment, US president Joe Biden has not had the best run of public appearances over the past week or two.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
By any honest assessment, US president Joe Biden has not had the best run of public appearances over the past week or two.
In no particular order, there was a bizarre scene where the president was seen to freeze for a full minute, staring slack-jawed at entertainers performing at a “Juneteenth” celebration on the White House lawn.
At that event, none other than the brother of George Floyd – whose death led to 2020’s Black Lives Matter riots – put a concerned arm around the president, seemingly snapping him back to reality.
There was another moment where Biden again seemed to go blank on stage at a celebrity fundraiser for his campaign in LA.
That incident ended when former president Barack Obama took Biden by the wrist and led him off stage.
Then there were a series of peculiar moments for the big guy during last week’s G7 summit in Italy.
These included a widely reported incident at a skydiving display, when Biden appeared to wander away from a group of politicians before being drawn back by Italy’s thoughtful Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The troubled US president was also reported to have skipped a big G7 leaders’ dinner as word buzzed around the venue that behind the scenes Biden swung noticeably between being lucid and engaged for one minute and totally out of it and incoherent the next.
But anyone concerned about the mental and physical state of the leader of the free world in a time of increasingly grave crisis should relax.
Because apparently none of this is evidence of an 81-year-old man having to cope with the effects of age under the glare of a national – hell, international – spotlight.
No. It is all fake news.
And now, the White House has even come up with a clever term for vision of the president seeming to have trouble coping.
You’ve heard of AI “deep fakes”?
Well, all these clips apparently are “cheap fakes”.
Asked about vision of Biden appearing to wander off after a skydiving display, and having to be pulled into line for a photo by fellow world leaders, chief White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said this: “That was, as I said, a cheap, you know, a cheap fake. That was definitely a cheap thing.”
Asked about Biden’s “Juneteenth” brain freeze, Jean-Pierre said: “I didn’t know not dancing was a mental health issue.”
And pushed by a reporter as to whether the president is “totally normal,” Jean-Pierre deflected.
“So, instead of Republicans, you know, focusing on the President’s performance in office and what he’s been able to accomplish his actual record, they do these cheap fakes. “They’re cheap fakes.”
This is an act of brazenness straight out of every gaslighter’s playbook.
It is every bit as big a whopper as claims — shamefully backed in by the FBI and a swag of former intelligence officials — four years ago that Hunter Biden’s laptop, with all its X-rated and alarming evidence of sleazy dealings and influence peddling scams by the now-first family, was just an artful piece of “Russian disinformation”.
And it suggests that, with Biden scheduled to debate Donald Trump in less than 10 days, the White House is already preparing the battlespace to explain away any brain fades at that event.
Karine Jean-Pierre is saying, don’t believe what you are seeing, that the President of the United States is far more mentally and physically frail than he was just five years ago.
Joe Biden, according to not-very-convincing Democrats, is as vigorous as he’s ever been, and the White House should be your single source of truth on the matter.
Again, nonsense.
One only has to go onto YouTube and look at videos of Biden speaking as recently as 2019 to realise he has become an entirely different person, and one who should be allowed a dignified retirement rather than being forced to bear the burdens of public office.
But as silly as the White House’s claims are, they are also sinister.
The Democrats’ technique is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, where “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Had Donald Trump campaign surrogates tried to explain away similar public catastrophes, the internet would be flooded with memes referencing Joseph Goebbels’s “Big Lie” technique faster than you could say Nuremberg Rally.
Americans should be thankful they have First Amendment rights, rather than mooted Australian-style misinformation laws or even an e-Safety Commissioner to roll in and demand videos that might embarrass Joe Biden be spiked.
Yet even that was not enough in 2020 to keep the private sector — including a pre-Elon Musk Twitter — from doing everything it could to squash the Hunter Biden laptop story, lest it help Donald Trump – including suspending the Twitter account of the New York Post, which broke the story.
Now, the White House is trying to eliminate the middle man, hoping to embarrass at least the more compliant wings of the media into staying schtum about whatever clangers the president drops at next week’s debate.
Voters, with access to the internet, will be able to see what does and doesn’t happen with their own eyes.
Which is what the White House is most concerned about.
The real reason why Harry and William will reconcile
Striking similarities between Charles and his younger son at the mid-life crisis points of their lives suggest Harry will eventually mature and find happiness — and make up with William, argues Angela Mollard.
Forced into a corner, Labor finally finds a little spine on Israel
After a year of muddle that has seen pro-Hezbollah marches in our streets, a shocking rise in anti-Semitism, and society all but torn apart, Labor has begun to find its voice on the Middle East.