Growing up in Toronto we watched the local Buffalo stations whose signals from across the lake could easily be picked up with a basic antenna. Every night one of the local stations preceded its late-night newscast with this public service advisory: “It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
A more apt advisory these days would be, “It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know who is running the United States of America?”
The New York Post last night posted this article that if true — and truth these days is very nebulous – should alarm all Americans. Citing a source “close to the Biden family,” the Post reported that “operatives at the very highest levels of the Democratic Party” threatened President Biden “with forcibly removing him from office unless he stepped down.”
The Post called it a “well-orchestrated palace coup” but “stubborn Biden fought it every step of the way.”
President Biden, the legacy media has repeatedly assured us, was a duly and legitimately elected president. The Post didn’t identify the persons with the power to threaten and remove Biden, referring to them as “party bigwigs.” While Biden has agreed not to run for reelection, he remains the president for another five months.
What’s especially alarming about the Post’s story is that it said the bigwigs threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allows for the vice president and members of the cabinet to declare the president is unfit to serve and remove him from office. Vice President Kamala Harris vehemently insisted right up till the moment that Biden agreed to step aside that he was still very much a capable and inspiring leader. If Democratic leaders indeed threatened to remove him because he was unfit, Harris is either clueless, a bald-faced liar, and possibly both.
Legacy media reporters no doubt will dismiss the Post as not being credible, as they did when the tabloid published its blockbuster “laptop from hell” story containing damning emails and other information on a computer Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The legacy media promoted a letter signed by some 50 beltway spooks saying the laptop had “all the hallmarks” of Russian disinformation. More than a year later, the Times buried in a story that unnamed sources had “authenticated” the emails the Post reported on before the 2020 election when the disclosures might have alarmed and influenced voters.
It’s notable the Post said its source was someone “close to the Biden family.” It was reported that Biden was angered by the “Democratic party elite,” which the New York Times and Washington Post are closely aligned with. The New York Post’s source was media savvy and knew better than leak their story to the Times, the Post, or some other beltway entrenched publication because it wasn’t consistent with the media’s preferred narrative that Biden’s resignation was a selfless act of patriotism, yet another example of him being one of the greatest presidents of all time.
Check out the montage FOX News put together featuring MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and a cast of other cable news notables breathlessly hailing Biden for his momentous leadership. Little wonder that a judge tossed a defamation lawsuit filed against Maddow on the basis that “a reasonable viewer” wouldn’t mistake her comments as being “factual.”
Lending some credibility to the Post’s story, Politico reported last week that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had “an extraordinarily candid confrontation” with the president, threatening him that Democratic lawmakers “would start to grow louder in their griping about (Biden’s) political weaknesses.”
“The speaker does not want to call on (Biden) to resign, but she will do everything in her power to make sure it happens,” Politico reported, citing a source close to Pelosi.
The 2024 election campaign is unfolding as a real-life Netflix series, one that would have been deemed a farce not all that long ago. The leading characters literally were made-for-TV. Donald Trump, the frontrunner, gained national popularity with his reality show The Apprentice, which aired on NBC for more than a decade.
Kamala Harris is also a media product. Harris was ineffective in every job she ever held and might have forever remained an unknown if years ago her then 60-year-old controversial boyfriend Willie Brown hadn’t appointed her to a couple of high-profile positions when she was all of 29. As a prosecutor, Harris turned a blind eye to alleged wrongdoing at utility PG&E, which was convicted by federal prosecutors on six felony charges relating to negligence resulting in an explosion that destroyed an entire Bay area neighborhood and killed eight people.
Harris chose not to prosecute PG&E and was alleged to have quashed an investigation into the company’s business practices and political connections. Yet the media has re-imagined Harris as a fearless tough-on-crime prosecutor possessing incredible integrity and focus. Ask anyone familiar with Willie Brown’s background and I guarantee you “integrity” won’t figure into the conversation.
The results are disastrous whenever Harris diverts from the script her political handlers prepare, like this NBC interview with Lester Holt, which was so badly panned that Harris avoided media interviews for a year. And, of course, there was Harris’s viral “coconut tree” remarks, which even NPR admitted they didn’t quite understand.
Election 2024 has some dramatic subplots like the near assassination of Trump. The actual shooting would have made a riveting ending for an episode, leaving viewers wondering if Trump survived. The next episode would have featured Trump getting up and raising his fist triumphantly.
My guess is the assassination attempt is going to become a more riveting story line in the weeks ahead. Prior to resigning, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testified before the House Oversight Committee on Monday that the agency routinely records and saves radio communications between agents but didn’t do so at the recent Pennsylvania rally where Trump was nearly killed. This is the same Secret Service that erased text messages from both Jan. 6 and the day before the attack on the Capitol after the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog requested records of electronic communications tied to the insurrection.
The president issued a statement today praising Cheatle’s “honor, courage, and incredible integrity.”
The legacy media is responsible for the presidential election becoming so farcical. Reporters today are looking for scoops that will generate clicks and the broadcast outlets prefer attractive candidates who perform well on TV. It’s unfortunate I can’t find the supporting news article, but I recall Biden saying he considered Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as his 2016 running mate because he was impressed with how she handled herself in TV interviews. That’s about all he knew about Whitmer, yet he seriously considered her to serve as vice president.
Whitmer has an undistinguished record as Michigan’s governor. In fact, she’s caused great harm to her state, which is why Michigan ranks high among states whose residents are moving elsewhere. A shout out to New York Times contributing opinion columnist Jane Coaston, who unlike her colleagues, isn’t all that enamored with Whitmer.
“(Whitmer is) a very successful politician in Michigan in part because the Michigan G.O.P. is a box of rabid cats locked in a closet,” Coaston said. “Not sure how she’d do nationally.”
Coaston’s Michigan insight is impressive and understandable. She knows the state because she attended the University of Michigan for four years and possibly even grew up there.
The media today is too simplistic to focus on meat-and-potato issues that truly matter. An organization called Open The Books, which advocates for government transparency, reported yesterday that Harris experienced a 92-percent staff turnover rate in her first three years as VP — a dysfunction the Atlantic reported in an unflattering profile of Harris last November. The Washington Post wrote about the alarming turnover in December 2021.
What America desperately needs is a proven leader who readily understands complex issues and can rapidly put together a competent team to address them. Michael Bloomberg has the requisite skills, having built a world class financial, software, data, and media company from the ground up and did a superb job in his three terms as mayor of New York City. I lived in New York when Bloomberg was mayor, and I was always impressed with the caliber of city agency leaders he installed.
Bloomberg understands critical issues, such as America’s vulnerability to cyberattacks from China and other foreign entities. As NYC’s former mayor, he understands terrorist risks and how to address them. Had Bloomberg received the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and gone on to become president, America would be a much safer, saner, and decidedly a more respected country than it is today.
Sadly, Bloomberg lacked the performing skills required to keep America’s media entertained and engaged, which is why at this writing it appears that Americans in November will have to choose between two uninspiring candidates to lead them.