What the world saw during that TV debate was a President who clearly suffers dementia
The real story of the presidential debate is the denial and wilful blindness to a dangerous reality. It raises the question of why so many media outlets covered it up.
Opinion
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The biggest news from Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in Thursday’s presidential debate is that the White House has been caught telling its biggest lie yet, and the media left just swallowed it.
How did Biden’s team dare claim this 81-year-old was mentally fit to serve another four years as president?
And why is the media left shocked to only now discover he’s a bumbling wreck?
What the world saw during that 90-minute TV debate was a President who clearly suffers dementia.
He mumbled and slurred, was often incoherent and twice lost his train of thought completely.
His performance was so disastrous that even the fiercely pro-Democrat New York Times called for Biden to step aside for another candidate.
Democrat media shills such as CNN’s Van Jones also called on Biden to quit.
But why was Biden’s mental decline obvious to them only now, when we’ve seen so many clips in the past three years of him stumbling on stairs, falling over, freezing during speeches, launching into bizarre anecdotes about even his hairy legs, nodding off, falsely suggesting son Beau was killed fighting for his country, wandering lost on a stage – clips I’ve run on my Sky News show almost weekly?
That’s the real story here: the denial and wilful blindness to a dangerous reality.
Just two week ago, White House spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about videos supposedly “edited to make the President appear especially frail or mentally confused”, and attacked them as “cheap fakes”.
This denialism hit its peak in February when special counsel Robert Hur, appointed by Biden’s Attorney-General, refused to prosecute Biden for mishandling secret information partly because his memory was so shot that he couldn’t remember when he was vice-president, when Trump was elected and when his son Beau died – even to within a few years.
Hur concluded a jury would just find Biden to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
The White House has since refused to release the tape of that interview, and Jean-Pierre claimed Biden was in fact mentally “sharp” and doing “more in one hour than most people do in a day”.
Media outlets such as Vox attacked Hur, saying his “claims about Biden’s memory appear cherry-picked and exaggerated”.
The questions now are: Why this cover-up, and why did so many outlets need the debate to finally face the reality?
What else did they refuse to notice, or say?
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Originally published as What the world saw during that TV debate was a President who clearly suffers dementia