Here’s more evidence that the New York Times should never be trusted again.
In March, The Times noted that Joe Biden did not actually suffer from dementia, but instead behaved more like masters such as Beethoven, Wagner and Martin Scorsese.
They poured it on really thick. CNN’s last column caused a stir in their faces last Thursday night.
It’s fitting that Joe Rogan mocked their gaslighting on Independence Day. Today is a great day to declare that you are no longer manipulated by the legacy media that lies to the American public like it’s their job.
Joe Rogan Reply: “Oh, okay. I feel better now.”
Oh well. I feel much better now. pic.twitter.com/rfNpNyokHi
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) July 4, 2024
Here’s what the New York Times rebutted in March:
Author: AO Scott.
Edward W. Said, the literary critic who wrote “On Late Style,” believes that late works like this “have the capacity to present disillusionment and pleasure without resolving their contradictions.” Clint Eastwood’s recent films (notably 15:17, The Mule, and Crying Man), once among the corniest and edgiest films in his canon, fit this bill describe. The same goes for Philip Roth’s bitter and searing final books (The Ghost Exit, The Indignation, and The Avengers), which distilled the astonishing inventiveness of his great middle-period novels into a portrait of sex, death ‘s serious, jagged, and sometimes frankly funny musings.
What does this have to do with Joe Biden? Politics is not art. But it’s a craft, a profession, and not many practice it as long or as dedicatedly as Biden. Evan Osnos noted in a profile in The New Yorker this month that “for decades, there was a sense of ease about Joe Biden — a resilient, playful energy,” but now No longer exists. “For better or worse,” Osnos wrote, “he was now a more dignified figure.”
“Character” is a well-chosen word; the Biden the public thinks they know, like every other political figure on the national stage, has always been a concept, a persona, a persona. This “ease” — and the tendencies toward verbosity, sentimentality and convenience that are part of Biden’s brand as a senator and vice president — are a matter of style. That’s not to say it’s untrue. Quite the contrary; the style of a politician, like that of a writer or actor, expresses his true self through the discipline of performance.
Trump’s style hasn’t changed. His image has apparently not changed since at least 2015, when he entered electoral politics.But Biden’s tenure, especially in the early stages of his final campaign, seemed different. Osnos describes the “erratic mixture of confidence and insecurity” that defined his early character as giving way to “an almost quiet confidence.”
This is not a complete break with the past. During Thursday night’s nine-minute journey from the House door to the lectern, the president gossiped, kissed, mugged and took selfies, and it was what you’d call old-school Biden, delivering a speech as self-deprecating as the self-deprecating joke that opened…
…Biden, in his early unsuccessful presidential campaign, sought to articulate a version of this story that conjured folk images of middle-class America in the mid-century, and a vague and optimistic vision that America’s best days were yet to come. He’s not particularly convincing.
When he revisits these metaphors now, he senses their fragility. He uses them to argue that American liberal democracy finds itself in mortal danger. The staunch old rhetoric about struggling families and the long fight for justice is itself in danger, and that’s part of what the late Biden was trying to save. If this election is about the survival of democracy, then he sees himself not as its savior but, for the last time, as its most credible representative.
