The Ghost of Biden Past

FLAYOSC, France — It was Jake Tapper himself who torpedoed Joe Biden's presidency. That CNN "debate" in June, a stopwatch-timed soundbite duel, allowed Donald Trump to smirk on a shared screen while preparing facile lies to counter substantive answers.

Biden, ragged from a long trip and hard diplomacy, was over-prepared for a serious exchange on complex issues. After he blanked, it did not matter if it was a momentary lapse or something worse. More than a lame duck, he was a dead one.

Now Tapper shamelessly flogs an anonymously sourced cowritten book that sucks up airtime and print space while a dictator-in-waiting, truly off the rails, bullies Congress into crippling democracy while pushing an imperiled world farther toward the edge.

CNN calls itself "the most trusted name in news." If Biden was already unfit for the job in 2022, it might have said so. In fact, he was all over the world map, including on an 11-hour train ride to Kyiv under Russian guns, to build alliances. Trump played golf.

Andy Borowitz was closer to truth with satire: "Biden Covered Up Health Woes with Four Years of Booming Economy."

"Original Sin," evoking that Adam and Eve apple bite, is a less overblown title if you make a metaphorical leap: a crabapple tree in human form is bearing poisonous fruit, turning an erstwhile Garden of Eden into uninhabitable wasteland.

Headlines focus on one big reveal. Biden might need a wheelchair.

Franklin Roosevelt spent four terms on wheels while bringing America out of a Great Depression caused by a Republican president's overuse of tariffs, then taking the lead with allies to keep Hitler and Hirohito from conquering the world.

The book says Biden needs eight hours of sleep, as most healthy people do. Instead, we have a manic would-be monarch who taps out brain farts on his phone at 3 a.m. which devastate struggling American families and imperil millions of lives across the world.

I began tuning out Tapper when he kept repeating CNN's original sin: blaming Biden, not Trump, for the Afghanistan debacle. I cringed at endless promos of his exclusive softball interview with Benjamin Netanyahu in early 2023.

Now he and Alex Thompson of Axios rake in fortunes on a book while negotiating high-figure film rights. Stepping back, this speaks volumes about how today's dis-United States is so obsessed with itself when the world badly needs its help.

Americans tend to see presidential elections like "Dancing With the Stars." They want showmen, not statesmen. Yet confronting international crises demands earned respect among friends and foes alike with personal contacts acquired over time.

Barack Obama was a more inspiring speaker, but Biden was better at calming global discord and conflict. Jen Psaki, excellent as a press liaison, explained his successes while he did his job. When she went to MSNBC, White House messaging suffered badly.

Biden aimed brief barbed signals at adversaries: Vladimir Putin is a war criminal who must be stopped; America will defend Taiwan. Aides walked them back as gaffes. His press briefings were substantive but few. Trump praises himself and lies nonstop.

History will likely count him as a great president. He contained wars Trump sparked and reversed his self-serving Covid calamity. He pushed through infrastructure vital to the future. Rather than shoot for Mars, he wanted to reduce poverty — and cure cancer.

Jennifer Rubin said it best:

"Instead of 'Who knew what, when?' the appropriate question is 'What will we lose when he passes from the scene?' (The answer: A statesman who defended the post-WWII world order and a clear-eyed, center-left champion of the middle class.)

"The notion that Biden was a feeble, inert, and nonfunctional figurehead during his presidency is utter nonsense. He made decisions, delivered some marvelous speeches, crafted far-sighted foreign policy alliances, and presided over a flurry of productive, bipartisan domestic bills.

On his worst day as president, he was more insightful, knowledgeable, productive, and effective than not only Donald Trump (as would be any sentient being) but many other presidents."

But she now writes on Substack having left Jeff Bezos's diminished Washington Post. So do Jim Acosta, who no longer demands answers in the Oval Office for CNN, and Paul Krugman, the Nobel-laureate who nailed economic flimflam in The New York Times.

Useful as it is, Substack amounts to innumerable silos, many with paywalls scaled only by the likeminded. Lachlan Cartwright's Breaker, for instance, said co-author Thompson did most of the work but couldn't find a publisher. Tapper was a big name.

He noted "wall-to-wall coverage, especially on CNN, where Tapper's show, The Lede, became a nonstop infomercial." Hunter Biden agreed to end his silence and speak to Breaker on the record, Cartwright wrote. After, "He told us..." the paywall loomed.

A functioning press corps needs to supply a critical mass of voters with factual news in a cohesive framework. Yet much of the mainstream dwells on the book. Even the noble New Yorker ran long excerpts, using up space for new challenges that need its analysis.

As commentators argue over a bogus sin, the House committed a monstrous real one. Republicans rammed though Trump's "big, beautiful bill" by a single vote as though it were an emergency. Few legislators had time to absorb its 1,000-plus pages.

It offers a few temporary sops to ordinary people, but nonpartisan studies expect tax cuts for the rich to add at least $3.8 trillion, if not more than double that, to an unmanageable deficit.

And now Trump is pushing a "Golden Dome" to protect America. He estimates the cost at $175 billion. Experts say when and if it is finished, it is likely to surpass $500 billion. And by then, it will almost certainly be vulnerable to new Chinese weaponry.

As controversy deepens, advocates dredge up special investigator Robert Hur's report on minor classified documents that went home with Vice President Biden, which were immediately returned as asked to the National Archives.

In an assessment Hur was unqualified to make, he portrayed Biden as a dotty old man with a bad memory. Few mentioned the circumstances. His two-day grilling began the morning after Hamas invaded Israel. The president had other things on his mind.

Much of the media adhered to a damaging double standard. The slightest Biden misspeak was a story, even if quickly corrected. Trump's habitual howlers and non sequiturs are just his quirky style.

Trump is so often incoherent that, according to a Huffpost analysis, aides scrubbed 80 percent of his remarks from the public record.

His only foreign venture so far has been a gimme round to the Middle East that netted untold — or at least unreported — real estate deals and kickbacks.

He would be stupid, he said, to refuse the $400 million flying palace that Qatar is giving him to win back favor after its past support for Hamas and other terrorists.

In Saudi Arabia, he walked arm in arm with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, declaring even more love than he lavished on Kim Jong Un in North Korea, who after Trump's clumsy diplomacy is now building nuclear weapons that can reach America.

Bin Salman had Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who wrote for The Washington Post, cut up with a bone saw at the Saudis' Istanbul consulate. When Biden went to Riyadh to deal for oil after sanctions on Russia, reporters excoriated his chilly fist bump with MBS.

Trump made the trip without the Associated Press, banned from access over that Gulf of America nonsense. Karoline Leavitt packs the press room with amateur, conservative lapdogs. She shills for Trump on the public payroll, slandering Biden at every turn.

Trump reigns in his gaudy gilded Oval Office like Alice's mad queen down a rabbit hole. He humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky, blaming him for the Russian invasion that is bleeding out Ukraine in a valiant struggle to thwart Putin's imperial dreams.

When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa came to beg for tariff relief, Trump charged him with "genocide" against white farmers. South Africa's agriculture minister, a white farmer, firmly denied it.

Trump showed video of an extremist charged with hate speech who chanted "Kill the whites" at a rally. He claimed that 1,000 white victims were buried under roadside crosses. Ramaphosa, maintaining his cool, asked for details. That was news to him.

Larry Madowo, CNN's Nairobi correspondent who knows South Africa well, weighed in. If that many white landowners had been suddenly murdered, people would likely know about it. But Elon Musk and his money shape the message.

While Trump blocks visas for Afghans left in peril when he capitulated to Taliban, he welcomes scores of white South Africans, some of whom have posted racist and anti-Semitic remarks in the recent past.

In the end, it comes down to decency. In Trump's first 50 days, he slurred Biden at least 350 times, calling him the worst president in history. Even if Biden had not been a good president, that weakens the nation Trump is sworn to defend.

My view is that Biden had run his course but reluctantly came out of retirement after that Charlottesville neo-Nazi mayhem, which Trump blamed on "both sides."

He took some regrettable action in the Senate over the years. Nearly his age, I watched the details at firsthand. Young critics who rely on often biased accounts get crucial facts wrong, without essential background.

That is the value of longevity. Effective leaders learn from mistakes and adapt to changing times.

As 2020 elections approached, Biden was a solid old salt who could steer a wayward ship off the rocks, then hand over to younger successor in 2024. But Trump didn't go away. His odd devotion to Putin and support for Israeli extremists portended disaster.

And then, after a life of personal tragedies and battered by the Tapper book, Biden volunteered details of a surprise diagnosis: aggressive prostate cancer had spread to his bones.

Don, Jr., whose sidekick JD Vance is a few Big Macs away from the Oval Office, displayed his cruelty and ignorance in an online post within hours:

“What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup???” She is a Ph.D., an educator, not a physician. Choose your own descriptives for him.

What I want to know is what kind of human beings are ready to condone such avaricious lunacy by faithless authoritarians while heaping scorn on a defeated man who did so much of the right thing for so long to keep America decent.