It’s embarrassing. Our corrupt, partisan media are embarrassing.
Thursday night, President Joe Biden gave a speech to mark the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s delayed acknowledgment of the COVID-19 pandemic that China unleashed upon the world. The media swooned.
The speech was delivered off a Teleprompter by a man who wasn’t inspiring even when he had better command of his faculties decades ago. It was ungracious, going out of its way to refuse to acknowledge his predecessor’s Operation Warp Speed, the only pandemic response that has worked. And it worked so well: throwing money at private developers and getting rid of regulatory hurdles to do the impossible of obtaining vaccines within a few months.
The dark and depressing speech was reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” talks. He painted a horrible future with threatened future lockdowns if the people didn’t keep following his rules. The best-case scenario, he argued, was that if everyone did what he wanted, he’d let people have very small backyard barbecues with just a few select people on Independence Day.
“Just two to four Independence Day lockdowns to slow the spread!” is not a particularly uplifting sentiment. The Washington Post had claimed earlier this week that Biden was “impregnable” to mockery, but somehow it wasn’t difficult for the two main satirical news sites to do that immediately:
Biden Says If Everyone Is On Their Best Behavior He Might Allow Some Limited Freedoms On July 4https://t.co/qEdIhHrbDV
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 12, 2021
It was so bad that even The Onion mocked it:
Biden Announces Americans Will Be Able To Do What They Did At Christmas By July 4 https://t.co/zZxbkKFeum pic.twitter.com/cwK06a8Opo
— The Onion (@TheOnion) March 12, 2021
And yet. And yet.
See, the White House had asked reporters earlier in the day to spread their preferred messaging that the speech was uplifting, unifying, and hopeful. So they did. Before he gave it, the media dutifully claimed that was what the speech would do. After the speech was over, they reiterated this propaganda talking point, even though the speech was not at all what was promised.
Yes, admittedly, if you were a Democrat activist who was inclined to be encouraging in the face of failure, you might say it was hopeful. Let’s grant that. It reminds me of my favorite line from a friend that the media act like a family trying to help their 3-year-old family member win at Candyland.
It’s embarrassing! Absolutely embarrassing.
The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond wrote, “Another reminder tonight of how Trump failed at a traditional responsibility of being president: soothing the fears of a rattled nation.”
There is nothing soothing about being told that you face further lockdowns, or that you can’t celebrate Independence Day with more than immediate family. The word for that is “depressing,” or “sad,” not “soothing”!
Our media conflate their personal reaction, as Democrats, to politicians with a general reaction to same. It should not be news to people that even the most banal Democrat speeches might alarm folks who do not share their views. And to further blow their minds, they should consider the possibility that GOP speeches absolutely soothe the fears of those who share their views. Yes, even from Donald Trump.
If you think the country is at risk of imploding due to cancel culture, lack of border control, horrific foreign policy decisions going back decades, and bowing down to China – and many of us do – then absolutely a Trump speech is a breath of comforting and soothing fresh air. I know enough people who genuinely get turned off by his rhetoric to know it does not have the same effect on everybody, but let’s not pretend that there aren’t tens of millions of people who responded to his frank speech against the corruption of the elites with exhilaration and comfort. It works both ways, geniuses. The difference is the media.
One Twitter user noted, “Twitter – mean tweets notwithstanding – was Trump’s way of getting around the media filter and talking directly to Americans. Biden cannot exist without the media filter.”
So well put. Biden’s speech without the media filter is unmemorable at best, and depressing at worst. With the media filter, however, it’s supposedly the best speech you’ve ever heard. Here was the analysis from Ryan Lizza, Tara Palmeri, Eugene Daniels, and Rachel Bad, the bright bulbs over at Politico Playbook:
It is hard to imagine any other contemporary politician making the speech JOE BIDEN did Thursday night — both channeling our collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief. The latest in Playbook: https://t.co/jbe90Ob3pf
— POLITICO Playbook (@playbookdc) March 12, 2021
“This is what happens when you confuse agenda-driven political messaging with sincerity and empathy. How this isn’t obvious, I have no idea,” wrote one Twitter wag.
The actual article was somehow even worse.
Those are real words put into Politico Playbook, my friends.
Embarrassing, embarrassing, embarrassing.
Goofy Joe Biden as a pastor, is what Ryan Lizza puts forth. It’s what they all put forth, as if you will be forced to buy it with enough repetition. Word to the wise, when you’re copying Jen Rubin, who also describes Biden as the “mourner in chief,” you done messed up A-A-Ron!
AFP correspondent Michael Mathes last month also previewed the talking point that Biden’s horrible familial loss in the early 1970s – something no other politician has experienced, we are led to believe – makes him uniquely able to talk about loss.
AP’s Jonathan Lemire genuinely loves and adores the man whose propaganda he pushes, and it shows. It must be so nice for Biden! When Biden gave a speech last month, Lemire wrote of it: “A president whose own life has been marked by family tragedy, Biden spoke in deeply personal terms, referencing his own losses as he tried to comfort the huge number of Americans whose lives have been forever changed by the pandemic.”
Lemire’s commitment to propaganda is so serious that he also recently lied to a national audience by saying fatal BLM riots that caused $2 billion in damage were peaceful.
“Fact” “checker” Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post pretended to do a “fact” “check” of Biden’s speech on Thursday. This is the guy who said that every one of Trump’s denials related to the false claim that he was a traitor who colluded with Russia – and there were roughly 15,000 of those, probably – were on a list of lies. But somehow his ability to detect lies was so off that he missed the one in the opening lines of the speech!
I have no doubt that Glenn Kessler is a nice guy, but the job of “fact” “checking” the Washington Post’s ally Joe Biden will not rest with anyone so politically biased in his favor. It just won’t.
Propaganda like this even goes a bit far by Soviet standards.
