Weeks after the first presidential debate, the Media Research Center continued to take partisan glee (which would be the opposite of actual media research) in the aftermath of President Biden’s shaky performance. For instance, Alex Christy huffed in a July 17 post:
Since President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, 20 Democrats have called for him to step aside as the party’s presidential nominee with California Rep.(and Senate candidate) Adam Schiff being the latest to make the call on Wednesday.
It’s not just the elected officials, AP’s latest poll found “Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say President Joe Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate a different candidate.”
Some liberals in the media have tried to spin the debate amongst Democrats in a positive light, claiming that it shows that Democrats have debates and aren’t slavishly devoted to their leader, unlike Republicans.
However, many of them are only doing so for a selfish reason: because they are worried he will lose to Donald Trump, and could cause down-ballot losses. It’s not because he is incapable of running the country. In fact, several have promised to support Biden even if he does not withdraw.
When Biden did ultimately withdraw on July 21, the MRC had to pivot. A post that day by Nicholas Fondacaro whined that it was accurately reported that Republicans would try to make a mess of things as a result:
President Biden was finally cogent enough to read the writing on the all on Sunday and announced via X that he was going to “stand down” from his bid for reelection. But will over 14 million Democratic Party primary votes already cast in his favor, and more than enough delegates to be named the nominee, what about democracy? Well, during ABC’s Special Report covering the breaking news, chief Washington Correspondent Jon Karl huffed that Republicans were gearing up to take the Democratic Party to court to protect the voters and their rights.
Of course, the MRC was angry that people said nice things about Biden afterward. Jorge Bonilla raged:
President Joe Biden’s late decision not to seek reelection has scrambled both the media’s Sunday plans and collective brains. In the wake of the expected but nonetheless surprising news, the galaxy-brain takes are flying.
Watch as former U.S. Senator for Missouri and MSNBC contributor “Air” Claire McCaskill drops a head-scratcher in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s announcement: that Biden had no one hoping for some other candidate.
[…]Wait, are we in the Twilight Zone? Did we not arrive at this historical juncture PRECISELY BECAUSE there were “loads of people saying, ‘oh, I wish it were somewhere else’”? Do vast majorities of the American population and even Democrats not count as “loads of people”?
The same media that gaslit the American public over Joe Biden’s mental fitness to execute the office of the presidency and abetted the DNC’s suppression of the 2024 primary, which would’ve flushed Biden’s deficiencies out a lot sooner than the June 27th debate, are now going to attempt to gaslight the American public into believing that this is “democracy”. Proof evident of that is a former United States Senator appearing on MSNBC air and saying that no one clamored for someone other than Biden to be the 2024 Democrat candidate.
Bonilla returned with a nasty post headlined “VOMITOUS HAGIOGRAPHY”:
The ongoing in-life eulogies of President Joe Biden, in the wake of his announced decision to not seek re-election, have veered into the ridiculous. A prime example is CBS’s John Dickerson’s lionization of Biden.
From listening to Dickerson, one would think he’s talking about George Washington in 1796, and not Joe Biden in 2024:
[…]This vomitous hagiography omits the fact that Biden did not voluntarily give up his campaign for president. Rather, he was ignominiously forced to step aside in a slow-rolling coup and leak campaign orchestrated between senior Democrats and the media, which began in earnest after the catastrophic June 20th debate.
Were it not for that debate, and for its painful exposure of the terrifying decline in Biden’s cognitive capabilities, there would not have been the public outcry for removal that led to today’s announcement.
[…]Tonight’s beatification of Joe Biden into patriotic sainthood was expected, ahead of the coronation of Kamala Harris. That doesn’t make it any less savory.
Mark Finkelstein sneered:
Pro Political Tip For Mika Brzezinski: When praising Joe Biden, DO NOT, under any circumstances, talk about his “touch.”
And yet, on today’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski violated that rule. Expressing her sadness at Biden leaving the race, Mika thrice extolled Biden’s “touch.”
Mika, Mika, Mika! You say “touch,” and for millions of Americans it brings to mind unsettling images. Biden’s “touch” with the daughter of Dem Sen. Chris Coons, seen here, is just one of many such examples.
Bill D’Agostino complained about another George Washington comparison:
Corporate TV journalists are so thrilled with President Biden’s decision to step aside that they’ve begun comparing his “selfless” act to George Washington’s choice not to seek re-election in 1796.
Since last night, legacy media have been falling all over themselves to applaud Biden for the supposedly heroic decision to exit a presidential race in which he stood no chance of winning. Gone are the worrisome reports of his creeping mental fatigue and infirmity; he’s transformed quite literally overnight from an incompetent candidate to a valiant savior of “democracy.”
It’s worth noting that when searching for clips of people comparing Biden to George Washington, we noticed a fairly telling pattern. On CNN, almost everyone making this absurd comparison was an elected Democrat, whereas on MSNBC, the comparisons were coming from the network’s own talking heads. And actually, that’s a pretty great analogy for the difference between those two networks on the whole: CNN is a willing platform for Democrats’ political messaging, whereas on MSNBC, “journalists” flat-out recite the political messaging themselves.
Apparently these two cable networks have done away with the notion that George Washington was a racist, slave-owning white man — at least for long enough to use his memory to heap excessive praise on Joe Biden:
Bonilla returned to complain about a different Biden comparison:
The first draft of history, specifically, President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from his campaign to seek reelection, is being rewritten in real time. In addition to being likened to Washington and Cincinnatus, Biden is now drawing media comparisons to Lyndon Baines Johnson.
[…]We were told that Biden is stepping down due to bad polling, proof evident that he had no path to victory in 2024. But now we are getting a sliver of an admission that health was always a concern. The media are slowly circling back to what everyone else already knew to be true.
Of course, the big rewrite of history here is that Biden is somehow walking away from a second term in a patriotic exercise. This isn’t the case, either.
The truth is that Biden was pushed out of the race by his own party due to the aforementioned bad polling after the disastrous June 20th debate, which exposed the cognitive decline that people talked about for so long but never drew coverage in the media.
Tim Grtaham’s podcast made it a Washington trifecta with lots of Biden-bashing:
Joe Biden is finally dragged out of the race, kicking and screaming, and then he’s suddenly praised for a graceful exit and compared to George Washington. Biden should be compared to less-than-great presidents like Millard Fillmore.
There’s nothing funnier than the Democrats spending three weeks trying to drag Biden out of the race, and when he finally knuckles under, then he’s like George Washington, and he’s shown honor and grace and patriotism. Suddenly, Biden is Washington, Lincoln, JFK, LBJ, the Roman leader Cincinnatus, and I keep waiting for a comparison to Superman now isolating with Covid in his Fortress of Solitude.
If he was all about gracefully resigning, why didn’t he do it weeks ago? He’s been at the center of a long and ugly Democrat spat, but they want to make it sound like they’re in a serene moment. It’s a Potemkin Moment of Zen. He didn’t show grace. He climbed the greasy pole of power and had to be dragged away from it, stubbornly insisting that only God himself could take him out of the race. He told an interviewer last week that only an adverse medical condition would make him get out, which effectively underlines he has an adverse medical condition.
By contrast, Graham will never say anything the least bit critical about Trump, especially since he’s Graham’s current meal ticket.