The Original Sin - of a Once Reputable Journalist

 

Surely everybody knows now that Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book 'Original Sin' accused the Biden administration of covering up Joe Biden's alleged monstrous cognitive decline. Naturally it hit the headlines and the content spread like wildfire, fulfilling the book's intended mission. To cause a stir and make money.

I've worked with patients in various stages of cognitive decline, from early onset of dementia where short term memory sometimes functioned but mostly didn’t, to severe dementia where communication was impossible and there was nothing left of the executive function in the brain. 

None of the people I worked with were capable of running their own lives, let alone a country, which Biden was doing with astonishing skill, something Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson could have presented evidence of with a minimum of effort. Instead they went looking for a specific type of 'evidence' because it was clickbait. 

Did the authors investigate the motives of the people who spoke to them? Did they question what they said? Did they look for evidence to show that Biden was cognitively sound, so they could in all conscience present an unbiased account? Did they look at all of Biden's achievements right up until he stepped back from running? Did they ask all the people they spoke to why not a single one of them ever said anything? Did they remind their intended audience about Biden's speech difficulties and make sure they didn't conflate that with cognitive decline? Did the authors remind themselves of the same thing, in the interests of presenting a truthful account? Rhetorical questions, these. 

Tapper and his fellow anchors at CNN have shamelessly used the channel to market the book as the truth. But it's not the truth. It is good clickbait though. If truth were an issue, Tapper and Thompson would have acknowledged that it’s a biased opinion and speculation based on the ‘evidence’ of anonymous sources. A right rabble rouser. 

But more than anything else, why did these two choose to write this superficial tabloid-type book when what's really needed is an in-depth expose of Donald Trump, who is destroying America, causing chaos with the global economy and global alliances and is a thoroughly evil man with serious cognitive issues? Why publish a book that would give that thoroughly evil man a weapon against Democrats? I can’t think of a single rational reason other than the desire to raise their profile as authors and make a pile of money. 

I don’t know anything about Alex Thompson, but I do know something about Jake Tapper. I thought he was doing a good job covering the mess that is the Trump administration, speaking truth to power without fear, which made me respect him as a journalist, particularly since Trump's witch hunt against freedom of the press is on full display. I'm disappointed. I really thought Tapper was better than this.

Fortunately, Joe Biden's cognitive capacity is also on full display. It's there for all to see, showing that even now he's not in a state of cognitive decline. Despite having cancer he's still functioning and looks physically fit. As for his legacy, it's already cast in stone. He will be remembered as the iconic president that he was.

Global IT Crisis - or Media Frenzy?

 

Global IT crisis! Media goes crazy. Catastrophe! Chaos! Thousands of flights grounded! Hospitals disabled, GP surgeries disconnected – people will die! Disease will spread. World could conceivably grind to a halt. It could take months to fix, small businesses could go under. Stock markets will plummet. Economies will crash. The blue screen of death!

Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. The media licks its chops: clickbait galore. I fall for it for a while. Then Microsoft identifies the problem – a faulty driver deployed by a Crowdstrike Falcon cybersecurity tool used to protect computers from cyberattacks.

All you have to do is reboot your computer in safe mode. But, shouts the media, that’s still a global catastrophe, because small businesses may not know how to do it. Big businesses will be fine but small businesses won’t be able to get hold of experts even on the phone – they’ll be too busy. inequality could skyrocket! Mass unemployment looms.

24 hours later

It's nearly sorted out. Oh. Microsoft says you may need to reboot your computer 15 times. Chaos and catastrophe downgraded to inconvenience, predicted to last for days, not months. Media hunts around: what can we create anxiety about now?

Hah! What if it happens again and this time it really does destroy the world. Or we could go back to hounding Joe Biden.

President Joe Biden, Saving America, Fulfilling His Destiny

Sometimes things don't go, after all,

from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.

Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people will sometimes step back from war,

elect an honest man, decide they care

enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for...

                                                       From "Sometimes" by Sheenagh Pugh

President Joe Biden held his first press conference yesterday, responding to questions with his unique brand of passion, compassion, honesty and dry humour. Against so many predictions, and in the face of tremendous hope but little faith, he is succeeding in starting to impact on the damage done to the US – and the world – by the last administration and too many years of Republican abuse of power.

This despite that Democrats don’t have an easy majority in either the Senate or the House. The one thing that stands out for me is that he’s so unafraid. Combined with his profound integrity it makes him a powerful man.

Professor Paul Krugman recently wrote a piece in the New York Times about reasons for the GOP’s sudden ineffectiveness in blocking progress. “Republicans may simply have lost the ability to take policy seriously,” he wrote, agreeing with Jonathan Cohn’s argument (with regard to the GOP’s inability to destroy Obamacare) that Democrats do the work but Republicans, who don't, “no longer know how to think through hard choices, make the compromises necessary to build alliances and get things done.”

My take on it is this. Since 2008 I've never thought that there were any brilliant minds or hard workers in the Republican Party or that any of their strategies had an ounce of common sense, apart from gerrymandering and voter suppression which, together with a mind-bending right wing media exploiting racist fear, is all they've needed to hold onto so much power.

When you use corrupt methods to acquire it and you can abuse it with impunity you get lazy, believe you’re infallible, and don't notice when your hold on it is becoming tenuous and when opposition is building momentum. It’s the oldest story in the history books.

There’s also the possibility that Republicans weren’t/aren’t smart enough to discern intelligence in their opposition. Remember when they touted Paul Ryan as the party genius? 

Truth is that Democrats have had all the brains for a long time but as a voting group they’ve been an undisciplined bunch, squandering opportunity when it was there for the taking because compromise of any sort was anathema. But this crisis, of what they lost and what Trump and the GOP were doing to the country, forced them to band together.

That’s the "bipartisanship” that has needed to happen since 2010, and Biden was/is experienced, wise and smart enough to recognize it. This president, with a universe of compassion in his heart and wisdom of the ages, who has had the strength and courage to allow repeated trauma to fashion him into a man of great stature, fears nobody, not least of all Republicans. He gave them a chance to work with him and since they won't he has shrugged and moved on, undaunted. 

At his conference yesterday, when asked about his promise during the campaign to work with the GOP President Biden came back smartly with, "I may not have united Congress but I'm uniting the country." 

At this time of monumental crisis, he's risen to meet the challenges and become the progressive I suspect he always wanted to be. Humanity, supreme competence, expertise and experience reign supreme. Black Americans, minorities and progressives are represented in government and have clout. They’re energised! It's all coming together for them now and falling apart for the GOP, who’ve finally reached that tipping point of being too weakened by their own corruption to be effective. 

When asked about 2024 and who he thought he’d be running against, he quipped, "I have no idea whether there’ll be Republican party. Do you?"

Joe Biden. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

For a list of top political blogs, visit Feedspot's Top 100 Political Blogs