By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked
This whole unsightly circus has exposed the moral rot of the Democratic establishment.
And so the spin begins. Within minutes of Joe Biden announcing that he was dropping out of the presidential race, his sycophants were gushing over his ‘grace’. The New York Times marvelled like a wide-eyed idiot at the ‘historical rarity’ and ‘fundamental humility’ of a president bowing out for the good of the nation. Celebs lauded his ‘integrity’ in stepping down to ‘save democracy’. He has restored ‘honesty’ to politics after years of ‘scandal and chaos’, said Mark Hamill, as if Old Joe was Obi-Wan Kenobi to Trump’s Darth Vader. One Democratic governor hailed Biden for setting the ‘ultimate example’ to the American people. That example being what, exactly? That you should stubbornly stay in your job even when you know you can’t do it any more?
The propaganda machine is in full swing. The spindoctors are working overtime. They’re determined to depict Biden’s retreat from the race as an act of unparalleled altruism. As a brave effacement of the self in order that democracy might yet live. As something ‘utterly extraordinary’, in the words of the NYT. Be awed at the ‘bigness of what Biden just did’, it says. Get a room. History is being rewritten in real time. And we cannot let it stand. Not in order that we might kick Biden when he’s down, but in order that we might uphold the truth. The truth here being that Biden’s late retreat, and his anointing of Kamala Harris as his rightful successor, speaks not to the integrity of his administration but to its chaos and corruption.
The speed with which Biden’s relinquishing of his candidacy has been turned into a tale of ‘integrity’ should horrify everyone who cares for truth. It is three weeks – three long weeks – since he took to the stage of that CNN debate and shocked the world with his confusion and incapacity. And in those three weeks we all saw him furiously cling to the Oval Office desk. We all watched him haughtily dismiss concerns that he was no longer fit for office. We all heard that Jill Biden was batting aside his critics – from George Clooney to Barack Obama – as just so many Brutuses come to remove her perfectly capable husband. Grace? Humility? This was one of the most unseemly spectacles of jealous power preservation of modern times.
The truth is that Biden has not elegantly bowed out – he’s been forced out by Democrat big dogs and donors. He has not fallen on his sword – he has fallen victim to an internal coup executed by Dem elites who realised they could no longer keep up the lie about him being perfectly compos mentis. That Biden was ousted from the race by a bloodless mutiny of coastal power-brokers, rather than waking up one morning and heroically deciding to step down, is clear from how messy his exit has been. The ‘vast majority’ of his aides, including people who’ve ‘spent years working on his re-election campaign’, found out he was stepping down the same way every other American did: from the news. Does that sound like a considered exit to you, or more like a sudden, Saigon-style fleeing from power following weeks of bitter in-house brawling?
