A handy heuristic to understand the larger social world is not through a process of induction, but rather as a series of stories, narratives meant to bridges gaps in the data.
If you accept that premise, then the next logical step is an industry specifically geared to generating stories and narratives. It seems our social reality is simply the collective projection of competing spin doctors. Just hang back and watch how the larger issues of the day – from climate change, to BLM, to why we should care about Greta Thunberg or AOC – are presented to us by the political-media complex as heavily-processed, information nuggets that have little relation to the actual source material.
That would make Joe Biden the McRib of American politics.
The manufacturing of Biden began in March 2020 when the Democrats cleared the presidential primary field and declared Joe the winner. Ever since then we have been sold the story of Scranton Joe, the good old Catholic boy, doting father and husband, the sharp as a tack and wise statesman.
Never mind that these observations bore little if any connection to reality. Biden had a long track record as both a vindictive man and intellectual lightweight. His personal corruption and mental decline were there for everyone to see. However, with the type of rhetorical brutality that only a Stalinist regime could appreciate, dissent was quickly crushed.
In a sense the Joe Biden we were served up could only exist in tandem with Donald Trump. It was only the hatred that Trump generated on the Left that allowed those miscreants to swallow the Big Lie of Biden.
When did the Biden story take the wrong turn? When did it collapse?
I point not to the first debate in June 2024, but rather to a full year earlier when Biden announced that he was running for a second term. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Biden originally got the job, back in March 2020, on two conditions: the first was that he would agree to be a puppet, and the second that he would only serve one term. However, in a plot twist that seems obvious in retrospect, given Biden’s mendacious personality and the nature of the Biden crime family, the man was going to ask for a sequel to the story: he turned on his benefactors to announce that he was running again.
That was the proverbial “Bridge Too Far,” and we know how the story ended, with Biden getting pushed out in July 2024. The final chapter was when Biden’s chosen successor, Kamala, lost the 2024 election. The man who was sold to us as the one who “saved the country” from Trump, ironically was the very man who ensured the Orange Hitler’s return.
Or was that really the end of the story?
There were signs of a new final chapter, an epilogue if you will, earlier in 2025 when it was announced that one of the regime’s chief storytellers, Jake Tapper, would release a book in May about the physical and mental decline of Biden during the last year of his presidency. It was going to be a hit job, the implied plot being: “The Empire Strikes Back.” Since Biden had unilaterally changed the terms of the deal by deciding to run again, the “story” would be changed as well. Now Biden’s legacy would not go gracefully into the good night per the original terms of the deal, to await the verdict of historians long after Biden was dead. Rather, the new twist was that Biden’s legacy would be destroyed while the man was still alive.
Tapper’s book has yet to be released, but the outlines of the final chapter are already clear. The audio transcript from the interview with the special prosecutor was released, showing Biden’s mental decrepitude. Then came the leaking of the story that his aides were debating whether to put Biden into a wheelchair for his second term. Then there is the verdict of the avatar of the Upper West Side, Maureen Dowd, who called the story of Joe Biden a “tragedy”:
It was not just Joe and Jill who wanted to hang on to power, with all the perks and trips and, for Jill, glamorous Vogue covers. It was also their advisers, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini. The “palace guard,” as Chuck Schumer derisively dubbed top Biden advisers, slid from sycophancy to solipsism.
The more Biden was out of it, the more his hours and responsibilities were curtailed, the more of a vacuum there was at the top, the more power the advisers had. They treated his alarming deterioration like a political vulnerability, something to be concealed, not a matter of concern to all Americans, something we had a right to know.
Of course Dowd always knew. They all knew. We not only knew but we all knew that they knew. However, that’s the story the regime is going with. That Biden was a tragic figure, not from a lifetime of personal and political corruption, or that he was propped up for the past five years, a useful puppet, protected by the establishment. No, he was undone by his inner circle and by his own Lady Macbeth, who trashed his legacy by shielding a man who was no longer capable of running again from the truth, in order to further their own selfish ends. The real villains in the regime’s final chapter are not Dowd, Tapper, and the rest who lied to the American people for five years, but their former allies in the Biden inner circle.
Well, that’s the way that Dowd, Tapper, and all the rest of them want the final chapter to be written. I’ll be watching, for anthropological purposes, to see how they try and pull it off.
In reality, the final chapter in the “Tragedy of Joe Biden” isn’t of the Shakespearean sort that Dowd likes to depict — of hubris receiving its reward. Rather, it’s something more smelly, like the ending of a cheap crime drama, where the criminal gang finally comes apart as members seek to gain advantage by being the first to rat out the others. Dowd and Tapper want to be Mencken when in fact they are Henry Hill.
Of course the Biden family won’t go gently into the good night. They are fighting back. Biden has hit the speaking circuit and The View to get his story out. Anybody who has been paying attention for the past five years should look at the recent revelation of Biden’s cancer diagnosis with suspicion, given its timing in relation to the release of Tapper’s book; it’s an attempt to blunt the ongoing assault. I imagine Dr. Jill and the rest are making calls, dropping hints, that if they go down they aren’t going alone. They know where the bodies are buried.
It’s about stories. All about stories.
I think there’s some “wheels within wheels” here. I’ve seen some reporting that Biden’s kitchen cabinet was thinking re-election from the very start of his term. If the DNC and MSM could fraud him in 2020, why wouldn’t they do it again if he was reasonably (physically) healthy and compliant? I’ll echo something I’ve read which is that the real issue was always Harris. True to exactly what has been reported about her, she turned out to be lazy, entitled, and completely uninterested in doing any prep work to be credible in the top spot. That made it necessary for Biden to run again. They expected to take Trump out with lawfare rather than a real campaign but that effort largely fell apart due to both the legal issues and the fact Trump got more popular the more he was attacked in court. I still think the debate was a put up, and Biden was supposed to walk away rather than “platform a convicted felon” but the public reaction to the convictions and Jack Smith’s inability to get results with his J6 and Mar-a-lago documents cases made that impossible. Endorsing Harris does seem like a ‘F U’ to the Democrats who forced him out after the debate but the DNC was always going to have to carefully control who actually got nominated to avoid exposing what was happening in the Biden White House.
The DNC-adjacent press are trying to thread of very thin needle of doing just enough “we were lied to!” damage control for their reputation with not entirely trashing their leaders… I mean, the leaders of the Democrat Party. It wasn’t just the Biden Crime Family, or even his inner circle. Tapper’s reporting indicates that back in 2020 it was obvious to campaign staff that Biden was in no shape to actually fulfil the duties of President. Everybody who greased the skids for his nomination in 2020 or interacted with him significantly over the first term was complicit in not exposing his infirmity. I think he was forced out because by June because the consensus became that somebody was going to have to run an actual Presidential campaign since Trump wasn’t going down due to lawfare, and Biden’s debate performance raised too many questions about his fitness.
I take it as a given that the cancer diagnosis has been known for years. At least by the inner circle. This put them in a difficult spot. He could not simply ‘fess up and start treatment. He was already so frail, just think what surgery would have done to him….other than perhaps a chance at a pre-metastasis cure. The only hope was to destroy his nemesis. I wondered at the time why they’d go full Banana Republic and send armed agents to raid Mar a Lago. It was a Hail Mary move. When it failed all they had was the purported “integrity” of Biden, who was scheduled to step aside at some point so Harris could move into the Oval Office. I’m certainly not the only one who decided post Mar a Lago that I’d hold my nose and vote Trump.
Thought question: Did he refuse to step aside as a total F.U. to the people who set this deal up? Or, less plausibly, that even he could see that a Harris presidency would be an unmitigated disaster and he tried to “take one for the team”? Any other explanations? What does a demented man muse upon in his less foggy moments?
Christopher B: “…she [Harris] turned out to be lazy, entitled, and completely uninterested in doing any prep work to be credible in the top spot.”
And yet — she still got 75 Million (!) votes, at least some of which were cast by actual US citizens. Houston, we have a problem!
The really interesting issue is — Who was actually running the show? Who are the hidden figures who knew they could steal the 2020 election with no risk of consequences and manipulate “Joe Biden” as a Presidential puppet? Lots of people in the DC Swamp must know, and yet none of them are talking. Is the whole of the Swamp in on the lie?
Without a few spies or turncoats I suspect our kremlinology will remain forever speculative.
I wonder how cooperative Biden has been with his medical team. Czar Nicholas II had rotten teeth, which probably bothered him — but who’s going to tell the czar he has to go to the dentist?
Gavin – that is what gets me. Trump’s win was touted as a “landslide” – by popular vote not really – was there a 5 million vote separation? The fast that she got 70 million votes – with her ineptitude shown to all (who would pay attention) – that is what gets me.
Then I have heard talk that she was drunk much of the time – which would explain some.
I think the term bests describes Trump’s victory is “decisive”
The next logical question to ask, whether you believe the seriousness of the diagnosis offered or not, is when Biden was originally diagnosed with cancer.
Biden’s last official physical as president was in February 2024. Informed speculation, that is medical opinion without access to the records, was that he had cancer while he was president perhaps early in his term
https://x.com/WesternLensman/status/1924436167333744982
True? I don’t know but it does raise the strong possibility that there was a conspiracy, well beyond the Biden family and inner circle, to cover up the fact that not only did POTUS have cancer but to cover it up during an election.
This is like finding the proverbial fork on the moon, something that in another context would seem yes newsworthy but not extraordinary; Biden is 82, think of when Jimmy Carter entered hospice. However context is everything. If I find a dinner fork on the sidewalk not a big deal it’s just littering, if Neil Armstrong found a dinner fork on the moon that would be one of the greatest discoveries in human history.
Biden is an 82 year old man with advanced prostate cancer, but he is also an 82 year old man that until a little over 100 days ago was president. I mentioned in the post about the media turning on Biden like a gangster ratting out his former partners. Biden announcing his cancer diagnosis is the gangster showing a brief flash of the merchandise, of the the threat to gain silence in much the same way the Godfather when Frank Pentangeli’s brother showed up at the Senate hearing.
I laughed when I saw Tommy Friedman’s column today https://archive.is/sKbp4
Really his first thought was about Biden and America’s place in the world? Not what a poor guy or about the Biden family? Well that’s Friedman for you. Not what the implications of a diagnosis like this a few months after his leaving office means?
Really the second thought for any American outside of the Acela corridor was “what did they know and when did they know it”
As a aside note, I wonder if in the Friedman household when his wife wants to get him to actually listen to what she is saying they go to the part of the house that she has decorated as if it was in the inside of the taxi. She puts on the uniform of a taxi driver, puts Tommy in the back seat, and tells him to quit stalling and clean out the gutters.
The fact that she got 70 million votes…
Nope. There is no way this is true. There are literally endless allegations of vote fraud which the Deep State oh-so-carefully ignores- especially the allegations regarding Dominion voting machines and vote switching, or the claims about the software being controlled from Venezuela.
A functioning country would be very interested in such stories if only to disprove them and ensure that they couldn’t become true- yet nothing is done. Worse, every election the left loses, we get serenaded by endless claims about how the Gee Ohh Peeee has stolen the election- and still nothing is done.
But this post is about Joe Biden, isn’t it? So let me talk about Joe.
He is an evil man complicit in endless crimes. His actions further enabled more evil to be done by many others. He did severe damage to the country, and it may not recover. He is a worse president than James Buchanan or Lyndon Johnson, with less excuse than either.
He was also certainly involved in the vote fraud which gave him the office he defiled, and once- being senile- openly spoke about having the largest vote fraud operation in history.
If anyone deserves to die screaming in agony, he does.
Everyone says that the money men in the Dem party lost faith in Biden’s chances after the debate with Trump. But there is perhaps a second possibility. They lost faith when they saw that his team couldn’t even pull off a perfectly straightforward assassination.
Debate: 2024/06/27
Assassination attempt: 2024/07/13
Biden pulls out: 2024/07/21
I think the overlooked facet of the “cancer diagnosis” is whether it is true. As a way to short-circuit the criticism and the legal probing, ‘a dying old man with cancer’ is pretty much a get of jail free card. The brilliant part of this strategy is that HIPPA law prevents anyone but Joe and his doctor/medical team from knowing the truth. Even the most cursory of physicals would have turned up the tumor long ago and the ‘saving money on a PSA test’ is really a blatant lie. My money is on the diagnosis being completely fabricated and he’ll take that lie to the grave with him unless congress deposes his physician.
So, Joe didn’t get a PSA test because the White House was saving money? hahahaha!
Retail price for a PSA test is $69.
PSA tests are merely a screening tool, and have a real false positive risk that only gets worse as you get older. You don’t diagnose with PSA, you need a biopsy. Once a man reaches 75, the risk/reward of proceeding down the test/treat pathway are not so clear that a high PSA result (which can be due to other causes) warrants more invasive testing. Thus it is no longer recommended for men over 75 to regularly test PSA. It’s not that the test is a waste of money per se, it’s that the information it gives you doesn’t allow you to select an intervention that has a net favorable result.
Prostate cancer won’t kill you unless it metastasizes. Exactly how and when it will do this is still not well understood, making early treatment hard to evaluate. If you treat and the cancer does not progress, did the treatment work or was the cancer not a threat in the first place? If you treat and the cancer metastasizes was there nothing you could have done or did the treatment allow the cancer to metastasize?
Prostate cancer does not readily metastasize. But it seems to me that poking holes in your prostate looking for cancerous cells creates a rather obvious pathway. If you’re younger, maybe it’s worth the risk. It’s a lot harder to justify if you’re pushing 80.
A personal anecdote. My father died from prostate cancer. It was first treated when he was 77 (with seed radiation) after a biopsy returned some malignant cells. It seemed to go well, and he didn’t show any signs of progression until he developed a UTI just after his 80th birthday. At that point a pelvic scan revealed cancer throughout all the bones in the scan. He died 6 weeks later. In the prior year we were far more concerned with his advancing dementia than his prostate (my father was diagnosed with dementia not long after his prostate treatment – his first reaction was “I could have done without the *&%$ prostate treatment then”) and if we had realized the UTI was due to the spreading cancer we would have told them not to treat it and spared him the agony of his last weeks.
The parallels with Biden should be obvious. My dad’s dementia was worse than Biden’s (his featured aphasia (loss of language), and by his 80th birthday he was no longer able to speak in any meaningful way, but was still physically strong and active), which denied us any insight from him as to what was actually going on in his last few months, so under different circumstances his cancer might have been picked up a bit earlier, but it wasn’t like we and his doctors didn’t know about the possibility. But it really came out of nowhere.
This is, of course, a sample of one. But I can certainly imagine a set of facts in Biden’s case that amount to – 1) his doctors knew or suspected some degree of prostate cancer for some time but decided that watchful waiting was the appropriate approach. 2) his progressing dementia further reinforced this approach, as there was no real long-term upside even if the cancer was treated successfully. 3) at some point in the last few months it became clear that the cancer was now spreading. 4) the Bidens felt now was the best time to release that information.
Is this the only possible set of facts? Of course not. But it’s plausible enough to me. A year ago Biden’s dementia was bad enough that Harris really should have been installed as acting president under the 25th amendment. The state of his prostate at that time pales in comparison. He is, after all, still alive today and making public appearances. It’s just a distraction.
Biden hubris brought this upon him. He was no coerced, and acted of his free will seemingly until post the June debate.
I am finding it extremely difficult to feel any pity for him. It is not my place to determine any sort of retribution for his ill-advised policies and the hurt and damage he has willed upon the US.
That said, I do not think he is a nice person by any standard. He alone will have a one-on-one with St Peter. He was, IMO, a poor example of a ‘practicing Catholic’, and absolutely opposed some doctrines. Most would have been pushed to change their outlook or leave.
He has not appeared to have done anything to help anyone except his family, contrary to the life of Jimmy Carter. I have doubt that he will be missed, and likely will have a poorly attended funeral.
I would not wish bone cancer on anyone. I do not like what I know of Joseph Biden, personally or politically.