Research Shows Coma Patients Capable of Presidenting Better Than Trump
To Serve the Country, News Media Must Step Aside
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I wasn’t planning to write again about Pres. Joe Biden’s debate performance and the subsequent media freakout, but the algorithms tell me The League of Incredible Newsfuckers loved Friday’s rant, and we all work for the algorithms now, so even though everyone knows sequels suck1, what the fuck else am I supposed to do?
Before TFN addresses the arguments for Biden to step down, TFN wants to make its position clear, on the dubious assumption that anyone gives a shit other than you Incredible Newsfuckers.
It’s true that Biden is poorly suited to inspire the confidence of a nation whose concept of “President” was shaped by cartoons, “The West Wing,” and obviously “Independence Day.” We still see the president in paternal terms. Can Daddy arm-wrestle Vladimir Putin?
Biden appears unable to battle a cold. He suffers, at times, from inability to at least communicate his thoughts coherently. To his credit, his thoughts and points are often discernible … if you put in the work. So, yay I guess?
Do I think Biden should step aside? The question’s wording is imprecise. I can only guess whether Biden stepping aside would have a better outcome than not. My guess is that the world would be a better place if he stepped aside. So, yes, I guess Biden should step aside.
I guess we’d be better off with Vice President Kamala Harris running. Or Neil Patrick Harris.
Those close to Biden, who work with him (and ergo are both knowledgeable and biased) seem to think he shouldn’t step down.
But it’s less that Biden should step down than it is that somebody else should step up. And miss me with unity and loyalty. The American political system is a cage built for cage matches, with our future as the purse. We are supposed to fight. So fight.
But no one has stepped up. None of the people that the media are shipping as president agree with the media that Biden should step aside. Or these hypothetical candidates lack the non-gender-specific genitally-based metaphorical courage to say they want to challenge Biden. In other words, they lack exactly the strong leadership™ that ostensibly qualifies them to replace the not-strong-enough leader.
And there’s a strong argument guess to be made that we’d be worse off; that the Democratic nominee would do worse against Donald Trump.
A plurality of Democrats say they want a nominee who’s not Biden. But that’s not what they said with their votes.
Would these hypothetical candidates do better once people got to know them? Of course Maybe. Who knows how many people Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has buried in his obviously real torture man-dungeon?
But so far, there’s no evidence that any of them are better positioned now to take on Trump.
In polling earlier this year, Harris, Newsom, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), and even former First Lady Michelle Obama all trailed Trump.
And even the “disastrous” debate didn’t change that. Data for Progress dropped a poll yesterday showing how Biden and eight other Democrats stand against Trump right now:
So if the media say Biden’s being dragged down by lack of ability to process facts, they’re demonstrating a lack of ability to process facts.
Reportedly, Biden is discussing all of this today with his family (wife) and top Democrats. Great. Good. Long overdue.
But if the decision gets made now to step out, it won’t be purely on the merits. It’ll be happening at least in part because of the self-fulfilling freakouts of people paid to be on TV — people who ignored this issue when it would’ve mattered: Before the primaries.
All of this angst and energy could’ve been directed then at demanding the Democratic National Committee welcome and encourage…what’s the word?...democracy…and legitimize specific candidates in legitimate primaries. Voters at any time before now could have signaled their appetite for an alternative by backing one.
None of them did anything like that — except “fringe” dwellers habitually too correct too early. And because the pundits and party didn’t fix this then, it’s far from clear that Biden stepping aside is the best option now.
The fact that the people saying so now didn’t have the judgment to fight for a robust primary and push alternatives says everything you need to know about their judgment and credibility now. Actually, no it doesn’t. Which is why you’re reading TFN!
Most of the arguments that Biden should step aside now feel appealing because they benefit from the absence of a specific alternative; we imagine someone who checks all our boxes and/or makes us horny.
Y’know what should really step aside? Taxes! And red lights in the direction I’m driving! They suck! (Never mind the ensuing chaos in the absence of an alternative.)
One argument for Biden to step aside is that he claims the stakes have never been higher, that democracy itself is on the line, and therefore, by his reasoning, we need the best candidate possible. But wouldn’t that also mean we need the most supportive media possible?
“Yes, but it’s media’s job to tell hard truths,” the media might rightly say, without regard to their many failures in that regard. And besides, it’s also politicians’ job to politic. And that’s what Biden’s doing.
Still, let’s be fair and consider the arguments on their merits. As I never once thought I would say in my entire life, let’s dive in to this continent-sized circle jerk led by the esteemed editorial board of the inestimable New York Fucking Times.
After all, The New York Fucking Times enjoys unique clout in this debate as the journalism titan without which we never would have known that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Hillary Clinton does not laugh pleasingly.
Let’s start with the editorial’s accompanying picture, typically a pretty good tell of the emotional space the editors have acquired as their mental Airbnb for the day. Here’s the image they chose to top their editorial:
Because the actual, unretouched image apparently wasn’t sufficiently forlorn to inspire the suicidal ideation that the Times editors were aiming for, they fucked with the photo, drawing darkness isolating and closing in on Biden. It’s black and white because what part of old don’t you understand?
The ultimate effect: Wow, Biden sure looks like he secretly agrees with NY Times editors!
(Can you imagine if Getty Images had an entire category of pictures that make Trump look unqualified?
Someone retouched a Biden picture so it would feed the anxieties the editors feel, to condition your brain to agree with their words.
Never mind that the expression on Biden’s face might be nothing more than simple fart-suppression. Which would mean he was multi-tasking like a freaking ninja.
The Times’ arguments — the ones that aren’t doctored pictures — consist of an inventory of Biden’s failings that are literally shared by TV news, if not all media.
“He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to Mr. Trump’s provocations. He struggled to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans.”
That’s TV, my dudes! All media have failed to articulate what they will do better in the future. Literally in the debate the media failed to respond to Trump’s provocations or hold Trump accountable for his lies, etc.2 More from The Times:
“[T]he president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency.”
True! And none of them agree with the Times enough to run. In other words, their judgment on this is just as bad in the Times’ editorial eyes as Biden’s is.
“In polls and interviews, voters say they are seeking fresh voices to take on Mr. Trump.”
They all say that in both parties. In voting, they didn’t.
“Democrats who have deferred to Mr. Biden must now find the courage to speak plain truths to the party’s leader.”
The Democrats who must speak those plain truths include the Times’s hypothetical alternative candidate … who they’re implicitly acknowledging currently lacks the requisite courage. And there’s a classic political tell here: Refusing to name names signals lack of seriousness. The Times could have gone on record putting the onus here on Harris, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).
The Times’ braintrust is equally unbraintrustworthy in its half-hearted jabs at the finally unmasked Republican Party.
“The Republican Party … has been co-opted by Mr. Trump’s ambitions.”
How gracious of the merciful passive tense to let GOP leaders off the hook this way, transmogrifying perpetrators into victims: Oh nooes, I’m being co-opted by some ambitions!
Trump, the Times editorial board acknowledges, is “an erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust.” That’s how most Americans see news media.
Who else can’t focus and engage with complex subjects? The news people saying Biden can’t.
So maybe media are doing more damage to the cause they claim to serve — stopping Trump — than Biden is doing by staying in. And not just in editorials.
Take Saturday’s print-edition front page of the NY Times. Two days after the debate, the first front page after one of the most consequential Supreme Court rulings of our lifetimes.
I helpfully circled the most important story of the previous 24 hours so you can find it. That ruling didn’t even make CNN’s weekend wrap-up of the top five stories. Warren Buffet’s estate planning did.
So maybe, just maybe, the media’s cognitive abilities are worse than Biden’s.
Maybejustmaybe our crappy-ass media are more of a threat to a Biden victory, and democracy, than Biden is.
We see this all the time from the media. Something annoys them and so they deem it deserving of endless fucking coverage. The job is supposed to be finding new things that actually fucking matter, and then presenting them with context and history.
Maybe America’s media moguls should be huddling with close family and advisors to hear the message that they’re unable to carry out the duties of their jobs. They can’t focus. They can’t maintain a coherent line of thought over a sustained period of time. Their memory is shot.
So why freak out over alarm bells being rung by people who don’t remember the alarm bells they rang last week? We’ll see how urgent this all is after Trump’s sentencing or the Supreme Court ruling on whether presidents must obey laws
Because media executives are constantly distracted to something new by what their metaphorical intestines tell them is interesting now rather than focused on what’s obviously of most direct importance to the quality of people’s material lives. Climate change, anyone?
Which means media constantly direct the attention of voters to issues and non-issues in ways that imperil our democracy, no matter who’s president.
So maybe this should’ve been the editorial:
Not because they don’t have the right to their opinions, but because they’re not living up to the democracy-in-danger standard they’re ostensibly policing.
It makes zero sense to tell Biden to get out. To serve the country, you need to pressure who you think should get in. To serve the country, you should have pressured Biden to have a goddamn legitimate robust primary.
But guess what? Biden had a strongman’s grasp on his entire party. Which is the quality you say he doesn’t have now.
And even if the media are still laser-focused on the debate after Trump’s sentencing, the premise will still be that Biden can’t possibly recover from this in the space of just ::: checks calendar ::: four infinite months. Let’s consider how bad a hit a candidate can take, with even less time to recover.
When there was just one month left in 2016, a tape emerged in which Trump said that:
He tried to fuck a married woman.
He failed to fuck said married woman.
Said married woman later acquired “big phony tits.”
He kisses women he finds beautiful, without regard to consent.
Women let stars do anything.
When you’re a star you can grab women “by the pussy.”
And then he fucking won.
But even if the debate isn’t fatal to Biden’s campaign, if he can’t debate for shit within the artificial confines of TV, Jesus’s dumbest medium, does that mean he can’t do the job of presidenting?
Well, we don’t have to guess whether Biden COULD do the job, because he’s literally doing it right now. In fact, he’s doing two jobs: He’s also running a presidential campaign.
Trump, meanwhile, is half-assing the one job of campaigning, which means Biden is literally doing four-ass the amount of jobs Trump is doing. So there’s an important distinction to be made here between ageism and ableism.
CNN’s article on Buffett didn’t even mention the possibility that he’s unfit to do his job at the age of 93. And Penske’s CEO is 87.
But no one’s not buying Skechers because Skechers CEO Robert Greenberg is 83. No one ever not went to KFC because Colonel Harland Sanders was too old. No one cares that Burger King’s monarchy is now in its 69th year.
No one skipped this Forbes article about old CEOs just because the author is 98 years old.
Hell, President Ronald Reagan had actual goddam Alzheimer’s and that didn’t stop him from shoving America’s future off a cliff and covering up the crimes of his international organized-crime cartel.
The reason the debate isn’t moving voters is that we’re not electing a superhero, we’re electing an administration. We don’t need a president who can stop Russia’s nukes with his heat vision; we need a president whose team will prevent nukes from flying in the first place.
Youth are more likely, evolutionarily speaking, to engage in bravado. The people who really don’t wanna die from nuclear hellfire are the ones just about to die from sneezing too hard.
And y’know who absolutely remembers when a faulty 46-cent computer chip almost caused a global thermonuclear holocaust? People who were senating when that happened. (Assuming they still remember senating.)
Reaction time matters when you’re president…in a movie. In reality land, when someone tells the president Russia’s nukes are flying, there’s a team of (please God) informed and wise people responding. And what you really, really, absolutely want when deciding whether to launch nuclear missiles is someone whose reaction time is slower than Merrick Garland’s prosecution decision-making.
In other words, age can have advantages. The issue isn’t age, it’s the disadvantages, whatever the cause. So the focus should be on the abilities that Biden’s age is ostensibly impairing.
And it’s worth noting that both ageism and ableism are real things. Things that Democrats and media and humans are not supposed to do.
Yes, there are some jobs people should not have if they’re unable to do them. You should not be Superman if you are differently abled when it comes to invulnerability or the power to fly. On the other hand, you should not be disqualified from being Superman just because you weaken and die when exposed to Kryptonite.
The question is, can you do the job, even if it means you need accommodations. Pretty sure we just answered this with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)! He may be cognitively impaired when it comes to thinking about war crimes, but that’s a very common condition!
If Biden were making radical, wildly off-base decisions — not counting Gaza and subsidizing Big Oil, which are not senility but mass delusions — then his cabinet has options. Just as they do for younger presidents. Just as Trump’s nearly exercised with him.
As ever, your trusty TFN bottom line is this: Keep calm and carry on. Biden will step aside or he won’t. Either way, Newsfuckers seek the wisdom to recognize what they can change and the courage to change it, and self-medicate for the serenity to accept what they cannot change.
The decisions we make, collectively, will drive the outcome. If you want Biden to step aside, say so. If you want Dream Candidate X to run, say so. If you want media to stop sucking, stop consuming sucky media. If you want good media to thrive, support it.
We don’t get to know outcomes, so we don’t sweat outcomes. Or counterfactuals. Biden can win. He might lose, but so might whoever would replace him.
As I said last time, we don’t have to keep calm. But FFS carry on. We can only live right now. In this moment. Where everything is rocking good.
Except Godfather, Superman, Star Wars, Star Trek, Mad Max, Aliens, Terminator, Evil Dead, Marvel shit, Dark Knight…
Fun fact: You don’t have to say “that’s a lie” to fact-check. You can ask a follow-up: “Given the fact that X is X, rather than π, as you just said, blah blah…”
Coma patients can't lie either. Like every time their mouth opens.
There's lots of cognitively impaired presidents that made it through the eight years without destroying the country. However they weren't dealing with Trump. Think about Reagan in his last term!