Biden, ‘The Great and Powerful’ For now Joe Biden’s best hope is that some Emerald City media lackey does not play the role of the tiny dog Toto, rip away the curtain, and reveal the tiny man and his machinery behind the projection. By Victor Davis Hanson September 13, 2020 Media bias is not new. In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove? Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”? Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.” Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself. The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire. But reality has outdone art with the Biden campaign. The concoction is holistic, from the mundane construction of a fantasy, on-the-go candidate to the supposed middle-of-the road old Joe Biden from Scranton radiating an aura of kindness and moderation in times of plague, panic, and protest. Bunker Illusions For six months, Biden has run a Zoom campaign on the pretext of mandatory quarantines—our current version of a 19th-century, stationary presidential candidate, who campaigned by spitting out wit and wisdom while immovable on his front porch. Biden has conducted no free-wheeling, unscripted press conferences. He will not do extended one-on-one interviews with a disinterested journalist. He rarely will even try Trump-like cameo appearances on CNN or MSNBC to answer unscripted questions from supporters. His press events instead are Orwellian, requiring a media mass suspension of disbelief. The questions are canned. They are submitted in advance by “journalists,” whether formally or via electronic chatter. The inquiries are obsequious—seldom a word about Hunter Biden, China, Biden’s troubling racist remarks, his handsy past, his scary cognitive lapses, or his “contract” with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Instead the softball, known-in-advance inquiries are in spirit carried over from the Obama years, phrased in the manner of “Were you outraged enough by Trump’s outrage?” Biden’s Oz functionaries seemingly are always experimenting with all sorts of screen props. The trick is to discover how best their challenged candidate can square the circle of completing sentences and remaining semi-coherent, while not giving away the game that his illusionists are feeding him answers to synthetic questions. When asked point-blank on Fox News by Brett Baier whether Biden used a stealth teleprompter, his national press flak, T.J. Ducklo would not answer with a simple yes or no. Instead, he went on the attack, with the fossilized accusation that right-wing Fox News asks too many partisan questions. So we were left with a de facto “yes”: Biden does read off a stealthy teleprompter when answering canned press questions—and gives the impression he does not. But Biden, like the mirage of the Wizard of Oz, nonetheless can’t always keep the curtain closed. When he strains to see the teleprompter that sits just behind, and thus out of sight of, his camera lens, he slips and mutters “bring it closer”—reminding any who watch, except the media that helps collude in these orchestrations, that the question asked is not a serious one, but a prompt to facilitate the proper nonspontaneous response. Yet even then Biden cannot act out the part of the Star Trek federation’s addled Gill without someone either giving him the prewritten answer on the teleprompter or writing it out for him in real-time. Sometimes if Biden is not reading a hidden teleprompter script, he looks down in panic for notes or his smartphone instructions in ways that only expose the sheer ridiculousness of this faux media-staged event. Sometimes he shows off family pictures on screen that seemingly inadvertently reflect and expose the ghostly presence of a teleprompter’s reflection in the background. On other occasions when speaking, Biden searches in vain for his “schedule” and asks handlers to fetch it, whatever that exactly means. In a presidential campaign first, Biden even reads out the written directives of his controllers as if to say “I’m not really saying this myself, but so what?” So not surprisingly, during one of these sessions, out came a reference to his script’s talking point “topline” headings. When faking impromptu answers, Biden bumps into and voices his handlers’ notation of “end of quotation.” Occasionally a “citizen” questioner sort of rebels from the media Borg and asks an unapproved question (e.g. “I’m just going to be honest Mr. Biden, I was told to go off this paper, but I can’t. We need the truth and I am a part of the truth”). In reaction, Biden’s handlers and fact-checkers rush to assure the public that the approved question was written by the questioner’s sympathetic organization rather than from Team Biden itself—as if we are supposed to believe the campaign had no idea what its own surrogates would ask. Sometimes the effort is scary. When old photos reappear in a CNN puff piece about a younger Biden holding his young son at a long-ago Washington Redskins game, the team logo—the now-politically incorrect Redskins logo—is airbrushed from his son’s stocking cap. And then presto, legions of “disinterested” “fact-checkers” in the media emerge to confess that Biden, not CNN, supplied the doctored image. But, in turn, the Biden campaign assures the press that the doctoring was only for “copyright” reasons, as if candidates routinely photoshop out all the cap logos they wear. The impression is that Biden is terrified that his new leftist friends in the Ministry of Truth are combing his past and ordering embarrassing moments to go down the memory hole. Oz Wizardry As a general rule, the Soviet-style apologia for the media-Biden fusion—usually outsourced to a now utterly corrupt left-wing institution called “fact-checking”—only solidifies the fact that the media and the Biden campaign are indistinguishable. In Soviet times, one easily just assumed the opposite from Moscow’s party-line efforts and, presto, stumbled onto the truth. In the case of Biden’s optics and press conferences and appearances, we easily deduce that the downside of scripting and programming a compliant candidate far outweighs the existential risk of turning Biden loose to answer questions like a normal human being. True, even before his cognitive decline, Biden was known in Washington as someone whose incoherent and impromptu loquaciousness usually embarrassed his friends more than hurt his enemies—in addition to his long history of plagiarism and inflating his thin résumés with false data about his past. But with the onset of his cognitive decline, Biden’s own once-feeble social antennae are now more or less unplugged most of the day.The result is that he has a creepy propensity to blurt out patently racist tropes as if the old inner Biden who talked of Obama as “clean” and the first “articulate” black presidential candidate, and pandered to his working-class Democratic supporters with references to the inner-city “jungle,” is now free of his harnesses, bits, and halters. For some time, Biden unchained has shouted about “you ain’t black,” and, earlier, his Corn Pop series of inflated tales as Biden, the white knight, equipped with a chain no less, protecting the inner city from itself. Biden showed his tough-guy mettle with putdowns of a transitorily noncompliant black journalist and sneered that he is comparable to a “junkie” and drug addict. To a liberated Biden, blacks just don’t think independently like Latinos. Given all that, the decision of his campaign and their media stand-ins to reinsert Biden into his safe space, wheel him out for scripted occasions, and pray at least that he can follow either the teleprompter, his iPhone, or written notes in his lap, or remember his cues—without including the prompts themselves—seems understandable. This was all known to Democratic primary voters who initially wanted little to do with Biden. The narratives advanced by primary rivals Kamala Harris and Corey Booker implied that he was either a virtual racist or cognitively challenged or both—insinuations the left-wing media was willing to fuel, in the heydays of a preferable Berrnie Sanders, Elizbeth Warren, or Beto O’Rourke prairie fire candidacy. All that media fantasy imploded when would-be savior Michael Bloomberg proved little more than a billionaire bore and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders cranky and shrill socialist septuagenarians with even scarier agendas. Floating to November So the lightweight Biden was reflated as a sort of centrist hot air balloon to be used to float the hard-Left basket carriage beneath across the election defining line. But fusion/collusion is not just a matter of a Potemkin veneer. Biden’s agenda is a fantasy creation. His role was to save the party from Sanders, win suburbanites, and pander to the party’s socialist sympathizers of Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is an impossible task because today’s Democratic Party is a conglomeration of squabbling tribes and looney agendas. Biden is now ordered to keep still on the issues of the day, because what he once said to get nominated and please the Left would lose him the election. He wants to defund the police, but not to defund the police. He wants to phase out fossil fuels and end fracking but not to end fracking in Electoral College-rich Pennsylvania. The rioting, Biden insists, is due to police brutality but not due to it entirely. Trump’s COVID policies killed thousands, but Biden’s own bromides are either identical or would be less effective. And on and on, as Biden is made to wink and nod to the Left that his only role is to get them elected before collapsing at the finishing line. The media thinks this will work, and so owns the project. Biden will stay sequestered, visit a key state occasionally, pop out of the plane to say he is “barnstorming” Michigan or Wisconsin and then fly back into his Biden bunker for more Zoom puff interviews—and hope progressive polls show that he can endure weekly bleeding until November 3. Every four or five days the media will blast the airways with, “Trump is ripping out mailboxes,” “Trump won’t concede and will have to be forcibly removed,” “Trump insulted our war dead as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ as he hid from the rain to keep his hair dry.” Most recently Bob Woodward’s book queued up for its turn of 72 hours of smears, right after gab-bag Jeffery Goldberg’s anonymous sources faded out. Will this joint project of progressive ideologues of the Democratic Party and the major media work? So far the rope-a-dope has succeeded in slowing down somewhat the pace of the erosion of Biden’s lead. And Biden as the tough-talking Wizard projection will continue until, when, or if the polls show an undeniable Trump surge ahead. For now Biden’s best hope is that some Emerald City media lackey does not play the role of the tiny dog Toto, rip away the curtain, and reveal the tiny man and his machinery behind the projection. Email Link https://conta.cc/33w7zFg RIP MCINTOSH |
Archives
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
-
Recent Posts
- IT IS BETTER TO LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE
- SO YOU DO NOT THINK THAT Benedict XVI IS THE LEGITIMATE POPE OF THE Roman Catholic Church??????
- THINGS WORTH DYING FOR
- BEING COOKED IN A STEW OF ONE’S OWN MAKING IS ABSURD BUT WE ARE WITNESSING THE GOVERNOR OF New York BEGINNING TO STEW IN A POLITICAL POT INTO WHICH HE PLACED HIMSELF THROUGH HIS OWN INCOMPETENCE AND MORAL DEPRAVITY
- ARE YOU A NEADERTHAL LOVER
Top Posts & Pages
- THE MOST AMAZING HOMILIST I HAVE EVER WATCHED, WATCH HIM!!!!
- A MESSAGE FROM MARY
- SO YOU DO NOT THINK THAT Benedict XVI IS THE LEGITIMATE POPE OF THE Roman Catholic Church??????
- IT IS BETTER TO LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE
- The Unconscionable Act by the Biden Administration of Releasing COVID Positive Illegal Immigrants in Terxas over the objections of Governor Greg Abbott
- WITH CARDINALS TOBIN AND CUPICH NOW REPRESENTING THE CHURCH IN AMERICA ON THE CONGREGATION FOR BISHOPS THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE APPOINTMENT OF A CONSERVATIVE ORTHODOX BISHOP TO ANY AMERICAN DIOCESE WHICH WILL BECOME VACANT (OF A BISHOP-ORDINARY) AS LONG AS JORGE BERGOLIO OCCUPIES THE CHAIR OF PETER
- JIM CAVIEZEL'S NEW FILM OPENS TODAY IN MOVIE THEATERS ACROSS THE NATION
- ARE YOU A NEADERTHAL LOVER
- According to adverse incident reports collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 966 individuals have died after having received an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19.
- ALEXA, WHAT IS THAT SOUND I HEAR? "THAT'S JUST ME TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE! I THOUGHT I WAS DOING IT QUIETLY BUT EVIDENTLY YOU HEARD ME; DON'T BE ALARMED, I AM JUST ACTING IN YOUR BEST INTEREST"
Top Clicks
Isn’t VDH just terrific!
We should go visit him at his farm. That would be fun!
Fondly, F ¡Viva Cristo Rey!
On Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:00 PM ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP wrote:
> abyssum posted: ” Biden, ‘The Great and Powerful’For now Joe Biden’s best > hope is that some Emerald City media lackey does not play the role of the > tiny dog Toto, rip away the curtain, and reveal the tiny man and his > machinery behind the projection.By Victor Davi” >