Media Now Admits About Biden What it Long Denied; Is Biden a "Good and Decent Man"?; Ukraine War Appears Permanent During NATO Summit
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Media Admits Biden Impairment (6:51)
A Decent Man? (37:07)
Endless Wars (1:10:53)
Outro (1:20:08)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the story of Joe Biden's severe cognitive impairment is about so much more than whether the Democratic Party's presidential nominee for this year and the sitting United States president has any idea of what he's saying or doing.
That is actually an important story on its own, given little things like the president's sole control over the nuclear codes and the ability to deploy U.S.
troops into war zones.
But it really is an indictment of so many other key institutions of authority, starting with the Democratic Party itself and their allies in the corporate media.
Almost every day now entails some new pro-Biden head popping up to admit that they knew all along, well before the debate, That Joe Biden was severely impaired, including at times when the U.S.
media was viciously attacking anyone who was saying that then as part of the right-wing disinformation machine.
Now a new op-ed in the New York Times today that is much talked about by actor and major Democratic Party donor George Clooney And I know his views shouldn't matter, but in Democratic Party elite circles, it very much does.
He had an astounding admission in that op-ed that standing alone should cause the firing of major media figures and self-admitted shame from many media outlets.
That of course would only happen in a world where media outlets have any minimal degree of accountability or shame and since that's not the world we live in, it is very much worth taking a look at just how exposed they have become by this entire growing debacle around Biden and the now civil war between the White House on the one hand and the Democratic Party and their donor base and their media class on the other.
Then there is this creepy rhetorical formulation that has become almost obligatory for anyone to recite who then goes on to call on Joe Biden to step down.
Before anyone is permitted to do that, whether in politics, journalism, or anywhere else, They must first publicly profess, quote, I have a profound love for Joe Biden.
He is a good and decent man who has demonstrated a genuine commitment to public service and making our country better for the last 50 years.
It's not an exaggeration if you look at every single person claiming to be on Biden's side who calls for him to step down, they preface it with that profession of love and worship.
Now, aside from the fact that this creates a kind of leader worship climate, or at least when it reveals that, namely that one must profess this kind of admiration for a person, namely that it means that you have to Say that the president is this great and kind and compassionate person.
It also raises the really important question of what evidence is there that Joe Biden is actually any of those things?
What has he done or said in his life that evidences this supposed decency and compassion, these values and high character?
In fact, if one looks at his record of behavior and statements over his adult life in the last six decades since he was first elected to the Senate in the early 1970s while still in his 20s, most of what Joe Biden has actually done and the impact he has caused in this world and his own personal behavior demonstrate exactly the opposite of all of these virtues that must be attributed to him almost in an obligatory way.
But what Washington culture often does, and I think this is such an important point, is that it demands that we separate how we judge American political leaders from the policies that they advocate and the harm they cause in the world.
In other words, as long as they treat other DC elites politely and with courtesy, we're all supposed to genuflect to their depth and greatness of character.
We'll look to see whether Biden merits any of this praise and what it actually says about our politics that so many people feel obligated to be so reverential to the president before even expressing their views.
And then finally, as the NATO summit is set to begin in Washington, it actually began just yesterday, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the U.S.
and its European allies have no real goal in that conflict other than to continue to prolong it for its own sake.
In other words, to ensure not that one side or another wins or that there's diplomatic resolution, but the opposite, that the war never ends.
That's now the goal.
Contrary to all the propaganda about the war in Ukraine from the start, This is clearly now becoming, if not already become, yet another endless war that serves as a bottomless pit of spending and profit for the U.S.
arms industry, as well as the indefinite destruction of both Ukraine and the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, but no actual benefit to anybody else.
None of the war aims set by the U.S.
at the start is now even remotely possible, as virtually everyone even in the West admits.
NATO's primary goal is to ensure that this war rages on, now without any other purpose than ensuring that the war itself continues.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It's hard not to want to cover the debacle and controversy surrounding Joe Biden and his cognitive inability and the way in which certain parts of the media and Washington are finally admitting it only because they had to.
And one of the reasons why it's hard not to cover it every night is because each day seemingly brings a new way to understand just how rotted and corrupted these media and political institutions are.
It's sort of like an onion.
You just keep peeling it back and Every day there's just a new layer there that reveals so much about not Joe Biden and his cognitive incapacity, which is already extremely obvious and visible and clear to anyone being honest.
It's really a story about how our most influential institutions conspired to deliberately conceal the fact that the president was cognitively impaired in a way that I think is one of the worst journalistic scandals in years.
And obviously, I think there are a lot of journalistic scandals these days.
So when I say that, I'm saying that very deliberatively.
It is, I think, something that Americans will perceive as not just reflecting poorly on Joe Biden and his capacity to serve, but also will further erode the little bit of trust and credibility these media organizations had.
Now, let me just show you one example of what I mean by this.
And it is a new example, but it is an incredibly conclusive one.
There was an op-ed today in the New York Times by the actor George Clooney, and beyond being an actor, he is also a major Democratic Party fundraiser.
As he recounts in the article, he has raised millions and millions of dollars for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and for Democrats for many, many years.
He says what a proud Democrat he is, how often he raises money like most of them do in Hollywood.
They're often described as these far leftists.
They're not that.
They're just followers of the establishment of the Democratic Party.
They're just dedicated more than anything to the Democratic Party, regardless of what ideology it has.
And here is this headline in this widely discussed op-ed today.
And there you see in the headline, it was just referencing how people always have to say this before expressing their views on whether Biden should be president.
Quote, George Clooney, I love Joe Biden.
I love him.
I love Joe Biden so much.
My love for him is so great.
But We need a new nominee.
And here's how this op-ed starts and one of the admissions that it makes, which I find incredibly revealing.
He says, quote, I love Joe Biden.
As a senator, as a vice president, and as a president, I consider him a friend and I believe in him, believe in his character, believe in his morals.
In the last four years, he's won many of the battles he's faced.
But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.
None of us can.
It's devastating to see it, to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser, and this is the key here, the Joe Biden I was at three weeks ago at the fundraiser, that was the fundraiser where Biden appeared on stage with Barack Obama, And George Clooney was one of the co-hosts with Jimmy Kimmel and other big Hollywood celebrities that they raised $28 million, the biggest haul for Joe Biden of the year.
And there was a lot of concern that Biden looked very much, or Obama looked, that Biden looked very much there, like he was confused and disoriented and lost throughout much of that event, that he had no idea where he was, that Obama had to lead him by the arm off the stage.
Which Obama did, and I imagine Obama knew exactly the kind of image he was creating by taking Joe Biden by the arm, given all the things that have been said and helping him be guided off the stage.
So when George Clooney says, it's devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser, this is before the debate, a fundraiser that provoked a lot of people to say that Joe Biden seemed Disoriented and confused and lost like he has so many other times.
George Clooney is now confirming that he in fact was that.
He didn't say it at the time.
Almost no one did.
They're only saying it now after the debate when the debate doesn't allow them to lie and hide anymore.
And this is what he says about the Joe Biden that he saw at that fundraiser that we all watched.
The Joe Biden I saw at the fundraiser three weeks ago was not the, quote, Joe big effing deal Biden of 2010, referring to Biden's famous vulgarity that he uttered to Obama when the health care deal was signed.
He said, this is a big effing deal.
He wasn't even the Joe Biden of 2020.
Biden was the same man we witnessed at the debate.
In other words, what we all saw at the debate that prevented anyone basically from lying any longer about the true mental state of Joe Biden, he was saying that George Clooney is.
That's not the first time I've seen Joe Biden that way.
He was exactly that way at that fundraiser that I did.
He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.
Was he tired?
Yes.
A cold?
Maybe.
Our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn't see what we all just saw.
We're also terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we've opted to ignore every warning sign.
The George Stephanopoulos interview only reinforced what we saw the week before.
Now, as a reminder, there were two incidents before the debate where many people, obviously not Democrats, they're not allowed to, but many other people who aren't Democrats, We're saying Joe Biden is obviously in a state of cognitive confusion, both at that D-Day event in Europe and then a few days later at that Obama fundraising event that George Clooney hosted.
And there were video clips that were circulating on social media of both events, the one at the fundraiser and at the D-Day ceremony.
And yet, at the time of that debate, The media completely closed ranks and said that any suggestion that Biden at that fundraiser was in any way confused or lost or disoriented was an absolute lie.
It was part of the right-wing disinformation machine.
And it was only being bolstered because of fake videos, what they called cheap fakes that came from the White House and then ended up being reported by much of the media.
In other words, they were calling this a lie, that Biden was confused and disoriented at the fundraiser, even though George Clooney just admitted weeks later, now that he has to, that that's exactly what Joe Biden was like at that fundraiser.
It's gaslighting and lying of the most extreme kind.
Here's just one example, is the trained career liar, Nicole Wallace, who was previously the Bush Cheney White House spokeswoman and also the Bush Cheney spokesperson for the re-election campaign in 2004.
Where she was obviously a propagandist and a liar.
That's that job.
And now she has that same exact job, although she does it for the Democratic Party on MSNBC.
And listen to what she said about the attempts to suggest that Biden at that fundraiser looked cognitively impaired.
There's a growing and insidious trend in right-wing media broadcasts, print and social media.
It is to take highly misleading and selectively edited videos of President Biden directly from Republican National Committee social media accounts and then use those videos To spread messages virally to cast doubt on President Biden's fitness for office.
Here is this headline from the New York Post quote, Biden appears to freeze up has to be led off stage by Obama at Megabucks LA fundraiser.
The full video posted by Biden finance chair on Twitter shows something entirely different.
Biden reacting to applause and then walking off stage with former President Obama.
It comes less than one week after the New York.
Now, just do you notice there something incredibly interesting?
Nicole Wallace purported to be able to show the full video that reveals the real truth about how engaged Joe Biden was, and yet they didn't even show the video at all.
They showed it for about two seconds and didn't actually show the part where Biden was just like looking around with his mouth agape, having no idea where to go, and Obama had to take him by the hand.
She went on television and said, This is part of the right wing media.
You see their cheap fakes.
That was the term the White House applied to it.
How highly edited misleading videos of Biden make their way from the RNC to the right wing media.
And she didn't actually show the video, but she claimed that anyone who suggested that Biden looked disoriented or confused or lost exactly what George Clooney admitted he actually was at this event today.
was part of this right-wing RNC disinformation campaign.
And yet, here we are three weeks later with George Clooney saying, no, actually, that's exactly what he was like at this fundraiser.
Listen to the rest of this.
Post made a cover out of another piece of deceptively edited tape calling him meander in chief due to what they claim was Biden walking away during a skydiving demonstration during the G7 summit last week.
The only problem is that the full video which emerged almost instantly shows Biden was going over to congratulate one of the skydivers who's cropped out of the video entirely.
Both the articles are based on cheap fakes videos of real events that are Now there again, she didn't even show the video.
The video actually was all of the G7 leaders looking at the parachuter who had just arrived and they were all supposed to look at him and interact with him and then take a picture with him and Biden and Biden only wandered off just kind of with his mouth agape again.
And then Georgia Maloney had to do the same exact thing to Biden that Obama did to him at that fundraiser, take him by the arm.
And you can see other the G7 leaders whispering to Georgia Maloney, go get Biden.
He's wandering off.
They were all looking at him, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau.
You can see them saying, go get Biden, you know, like a little child.
You just keep your eye on him, see if he wanders off.
And then if he does, you go grab him by the arm.
And you could see it with your own eyes.
And here's Nicole Wallace saying, what you see with your own eyes is a lie.
The real video shows that didn't happen yet.
She doesn't even show the real video.
And this is what the media has been doing for years.
Anybody who in the past several years, including in the last year, suggested that it obviously looks like Joe Biden is declining cognitively got called a partisan liar, a member of the far right.
And now they're only admitting it because they're forced to.
This is why I say that this is at least as much of a scandal on the part of corporate media and the Democratic allies in the media as it is anything else.
Listen to the rest of what she said.
Remember, this whole segment, this is June 17, 2024, not even a month ago.
And the whole point of this segment is to say that anyone suggesting that Joe Biden seems impaired or lost is part of, as this says, is spreading cheat fakes, and it's part of misleading videos that come from the RNC to the right-wing media.
Intentionally manipulated to fool viewers.
Released on an RNC opposition research social media account with zero independent fact-checking by these so-called journalists and spread throughout the right-wing ecosystem.
And we would take the hand-wringing by right-wing media about Biden's mental fitness in videos intentionally manipulated to make him look unfit, maybe a little more seriously, if they weren't radio silent about the repeated glaring and real mental lapses happening behind podiums and on camera if they weren't radio silent about the repeated glaring and real mental lapses happening behind podiums I mean, can you even...
Do you even comprehend that someone goes on television and does that three weeks ago?
Says like, "Oh, there's nothing wrong with Biden at all." Anyone who suggests that there is, is just a liar, a disinformation agent, is deceiving the public through fake videos.
The real cognitive decline is taking place from Donald Trump, but there's nothing wrong with Joe Biden.
And then three weeks later, all of them go on television and say the exact opposite thing, that Biden has to step down because he's clearly not capable of Running against Donald Trump with no acknowledgement that just three weeks earlier, it wasn't just that they failed to report on what they all knew was Biden's serious mental problems.
It was that they actively attacked anybody who showed it.
You're not talking here about, you know, just a little bit of a character flaw.
You're talking about a major part of the American presidency that the person in charge of the nuclear codes, in charge of two wars, that the U.S.
is funding and arming, with huge amounts of executive power in his hands, is mentally unfit, does not know where he is, that other unelected people who he don't know are actually running the country.
And it isn't that the media failed to report it, it's they knew all that and they decided to conceal it.
Entirely for partisan ends.
I can't think of a worse scandal that journalists could do than lie about a major matter of public interest involving the presidency purely for partisan ends in order to manipulate the election to generate the outcome that they want.
And it's by far not the first time it happened.
One of the most significant reasons to have known that Joe Biden was suffering from serious cognitive decline Is because the special counsel that was appointed by the Biden Justice Department to investigate why Joe Biden had classified documents strewn all over in multiple places, in his house, in his office, even though he had no legal authorization to have it, the special counsel was appointed to investigate whether Biden should be prosecuted.
And as we've shown you many times before, the reason the special prosecutor said he couldn't prosecute Biden Is because no jury would believe that Biden was even capable of forming criminal intent.
He's just an old man with memory problems who couldn't even he's not even cognitively capable enough to commit a crime deliberately because he basically doesn't remember anything and doesn't know where he is.
And there's video of the questioning by the special counsel of Joe Biden that Democrats for extremely obvious reasons have been fighting tooth and nail to conceal.
Because I am absolutely sure that if you look at the video, he will appear exactly the way he did at the debate and according to George Clooney at this fundraiser.
And they're all fighting to conceal that from the American public.
Now, I wouldn't be surprised now that there's so many big major factions trying to push Biden out of the race against his will, if this video kind of now leaks and appears.
But the Response to that report from the Special Counsel basically saying that the President of the United States doesn't even have the cognitive capabilities to form criminal intent.
was to attack the special counsel as a liar, as a partisan operative.
Here from the Guardian, February 9th, 2024, the special counsel report on Biden is, quote, a partisan hit job, Democrats say.
There you see the headline on the screen.
It's a partisan hit job.
That's Robert Herr there, the person who issued this warning.
Quote, speaking to Politico, an unnamed top Biden campaign official said Herr's report, quote, felt like a Comey moment.
As the special counsel had put his, quote, thumb on the scale during an election season.
Dan Pfeiffer, a Barack Obama advisor turned commentator, called her report, quote, a partisan hit job, quote, it's hard to read the report and not think that.
Without the ability to charge Biden with a crime, her wanted to damage him politically.
Pfeiffer added, quote, if Biden acts like her says.
We'd all like to know.
We would all know, rather.
Biden meets with dozens of people daily.
If he was regularly misremembering or making other mistakes that suggested he was not up to the job, it would be in the press.
Washington is not capable of something, keeping a secret like that.
It was in parts of the press.
It was in the conservative parts of the press.
It was from a few journalists who'd actually take their job seriously in the corporate part of the media.
Like Alex Thompson at Axios and a few others who were very much trying to get that story out.
But there was a huge wall of resistance around this.
Here is Morning Joe.
Robert Herr wrote in his report released yesterday, quote, "Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen." He goes on to write that the president's actions, quote, "present serious risks to national security."
But then later in the report, her conceded that the evidence, quote, does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The special counsel wrote that the president could also portray himself at trial as an elderly man with a poor memory who would be sympathetic to a jury.
I mean, they're just attacking this report, which obviously was completely accurate.
And we all know it's accurate now.
There's nobody left to deny it any longer.
And this is what I say, I think it's very important that we don't formulate what the press did here, what the media did here, in some generously lenient way.
It isn't that they failed to report on this, it's that they knew this was all happening, and they deliberately lied and covered it up, specifically by attacking anybody who was trying to make it known, including the special counsel who was appointed by the Biden Justice Department.
And then before she can even read the report, Joe Biden, Joe Scarborough is interrupting with this snide commentary that, oh, I guess he's a neurologist now, in addition to being a lawyer, as though you need to be a neurologist in order to see.
That somebody can't remember a basic date?
Yes, you actually, as a lawyer, that is something you're trained to do.
You question people all the time.
And he listed all the things that Joe Biden was incapable of remembering, including the year in which his son died and a whole bunch of other events that even if you don't know the date, of course you would know the year.
He couldn't remember any of these things.
But this is what MSNBC and many other media outlets were doing, is deliberately running cover constantly for Joe Biden, just to try and drag him over the finish line in the hope that they could keep from the American public what everyone, including them, knew Well, it's true, namely that Biden, the President of the United States, is in severe cognitive decline.
Listen to the rest of this.
No, but we kind of need to stop there.
A neurologist?
You're talking about her.
Her, from Trump University.
And I mean, I'm sorry, I've just got to stop right here.
I know we want to go on and finish this report.
I've just got to start.
Ken, Ken Delaney, so bizarre.
And there's so many people that immediately heard this, these random, random conclusions, irrelevant conclusions, politically charged, Trump-like, Trump-like ramblings, who, first of all, wondered why in the world he would put that in a report.
his neurological assessment of Joe Biden.
And secondly, why Merit Garland would release garbage like that in the Justice Department report.
Can you give us any insight?
Because it sure sounds like James Comey in 2016, who July couldn't indict Hillary Clinton legally.
So he decided to hold a press conference and indict her.
Joe Biden, Joe Scarborough rather, they are basically the same.
This is the show, by the way, that Joe Biden loves to watch more than any other, and you can see why.
And they know they're talking directly to Joe Biden.
He watches every day.
And they just turned into complete mindless propaganda for him.
But not only that, And so Joe Scarborough went to ask Ken Delaney a question, and he just kept talking and defending Biden and defending Biden, attacking Robert Herr, and he couldn't even get the question out.
This is the kind of attacks that anyone sustained.
Now, when James Comey in 2016, just to remind you, decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton, he made a statement, which prosecutors don't usually do, in which he said, look, Hillary did do a lot of things wrong, but here's why I couldn't prosecute her.
And the reason it was important to do that Even though, and my defendant called me at the time, although I said it was kind of a difficult choice, was because a lot of people in the United States believed Hillary Clinton had committed crimes.
There was all kinds of reporting that she had, that she had a private server at home where classified documents illegally were being transmitted.
And so if he had just come out and said, under President Obama, Who's obviously wanting Hillary Clinton to win.
I'm not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
Most Americans would lose face in the Justice Department.
So he had to come out and explain why he wasn't going to prosecute Hillary Clinton despite all the evidence that she committed crimes.
Same exact thing here.
They're prosecuting Donald Trump.
For taking classified information without authorization, as they say, and having it in moral law go.
So if they also said, the Biden Justice Department, we're going to prosecute Trump for that, but not Biden, and left no explanation, then obviously people would say, wow, this seems very politicized.
So Robert Herrad to come out and say, look, although Biden did take classified information, here's why I don't believe I can get a conviction.
It's because He's obviously suffering from extreme memory loss, and the jury would see that and believe that he couldn't form any kind of real motive, let alone a criminal intent.
And he just got mauled for that, attacked for that, even though what he was saying, everybody now knows, was completely true.
This is what has happened over and over and over again.
Here from the Wall Street Journal, June 28th, again, before the debate, quote, the world saw Biden deteriorating.
Democrats ignored the warnings.
European officials expressed worries about Biden's focus and stamina before Thursday's debate.
So this is a little bit after the debate.
It was the Wall Street Journal.
They had actually published a story a couple of weeks earlier that we've shown you before.
Saying that people who meet with Biden in Washington say that he frequently loses focus, he checks out of the meeting, he can barely hear what he's saying, he doesn't understand what he's saying, he stops in the middle of sentences.
And after the debate, the Wall Street Journal went back to that D-Day celebration in Italy, where again, just like at the fundraiser, people were saying, it seems like Biden really is lost.
And you saw Nicole Wallace attacking people for not only that, not only for saying that about the fundraiser, but also about the D-Day ceremony.
And now here's the Wall Street Journal saying the world saw Biden deteriorating.
Democrats ignored the warnings.
European officials expressed worries about Biden's focus and stamina before Thursday's debate.
Quote, officials said that Biden's performance and focus can vary significantly between meetings and even within a meeting.
Two senior European officials cited the European Union-US summit in October in Washington, in which Biden struggled to follow the discussions.
Both said he stumbled over his talking points at several moments, requiring Secretary of State Antony Blinken to intervene and point out the lines he should use.
Quote, the reading in Europe is that he has been an unmitigated disaster, said Natalie Tocci, director of the Institute of Internal Affairs in Rome and a former advisor to the EU's foreign affairs chiefs, referring to Biden's attempts to reassure voters worried about his age.
Norget Roetgen, a senior lawmaker in Germany's center-right main opposition party and the former chair of the Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, said on X, quote, the Democrats must switch horses now.
Slovenian former Prime Minister Janice Johnson said he bet months ago that Biden would no longer be on the ballot in November.
So all of this has been known.
It's been out there.
And yet here from the Hill on June 19th is how those people got treated.
Quote, cheap fake Biden videos burst into national spotlight.
Quote, the rise of the videos, which do not use artificial intelligence, but are cropped or edited in a way that is misleading, marks the latest instance of how technology may be used deceptively during the 2024 campaign.
The use of, quote, cheap fakes.
Here's the Wall Street Journal article.
This was before the debate.
in recent days thanks to a trio of clips involving Biden that quickly went viral and painted him as confused or unaware of his surroundings.
Here's the Wall Street Journal article.
This was before the debate.
It was in June 4th.
And this was an article that provoked extreme attacks by Democrats and media and Democratic Party allies.
The Wall Street Journal, here's the headline, quote, behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping.
Participants in meetings said the 81-year-old president performed poorly at times.
The White House said Biden is sharp and its critics are playing partisan politics.
And it was a deeply reported piece about in how many meetings Biden has met with congressional leaders and just kind of looked into the distance, checked out, had aides who had to take over the meetings.
And yet when the Wall Street Journal reported this story, somebody who has never reported anything but is a hardcore Democratic partisan, more so than almost anyone in media and even in the Democratic Party, Oliver Darcy, the media reporter for CNN, he attacked the Wall Street Journal reporting on June 6, quote, The Wall Street Journal's story about Biden's mental acuity suffers from glaring problems.
Quote, Most of the sources, reporter Anna Elinsky and Siobhan Hughes, relied on were Republicans.
In fact, buried in the story, the reporters themselves acknowledged that they had drawn their sweeping conclusions based on GOP sources who obviously have an incentive to make comments that will damage Biden's candidacy.
The journal apparently ignored on-the-record statements provided by high-ranking Democrats.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed that she spoke to the newspaper but she was notably not quoted in the piece.
Other Democrats went public on Wednesday with similar experiences.
Indeed, one of the only on-the-record quotes in the entire story was delivered by the former Republican leader who would lie about the color of the sky if it pleased Trump.
This must be a CNN reporter.
His openly partisan allegiances.
All of these people have spent months calling anyone who raised concerns about Biden's cognitive decline a liar, a disinformation agent.
They insisted it was false.
That everything we were seeing with our own eyes was somehow manipulated.
They're now even blaming the Russians for being responsible for this perception.
This is not a media failure.
It is a media cover-up, an act of concealment campaign by the media, complete disinformation to destroy the reputation of anybody who was actually reporting the truth and attacking the character of those as well who were doing so.
And it didn't just come from the Biden White House.
It came from their media allies, the same ones now pretending to be so shocked now that they saw the debate.
And the reason why I started with the George Clooney op-ed is because he explicitly admitted That the way Joe Biden was at the debate was exactly the way that he was at that fundraising event.
And yet, I'm sure many of you remember, and if not, we showed you the vicious attacks that emanated against anyone saying that Biden seemed confused and disoriented at that fundraising event, only for George Clooney to now come out and admit that that's exactly what Biden was like, even though George Clooney didn't say anything back then.
He waited until every other Democrat is now trying to push Biden out of the race, but it really is so revealing of the extent to which these people are willing to lie, lie deliberately, lie continuously, and lie about the most significant matters, including the cognitive state of the president of the United States, in order to ensure that Democrats win elections that Donald Trump does not.
Now, as I noted in that last segment, almost everybody who starts off urging President Biden to leave the race.
I've seen journalists do this.
I've seen politicians do this.
They all start off by saying, Joe Biden is a very good man.
He's a good friend of mine.
And only then are they allowed to go say, he must bow to the race.
We showed you Van Jones on CNN after the debate when he basically started crying and say, it pains me to say this.
I love Joe Biden.
I love the guy.
I love him so much, but it's time for him to drop out.
Here's the New York Times, Tom Friedman on June 28th.
This is the headline quote, Joe Biden is a good man and a good president.
He must bow out of the race.
Here is hardcore Democratic partisan Rob Reiner, an actor in a Democratic Party fundraiser today.
Quote, my friend George Clooney has clearly expressed what many of us have been saying.
We love and respect Joe Biden.
We acknowledge all he has done for our country, but democracy is facing an existential threat.
We need someone younger to fight back.
Joe Biden must step aside.
Now, I've talked about before just about the herd behavior of these people.
Three weeks ago, it was prohibited to say this, and none of them did.
And now, after the debate, it became obligatory to say it, and so they all are saying it.
It's just they read from whatever script they're told to read from, no matter how much it contradicts what they were saying 24 hours earlier.
And also, this is quite creepy, this idea that you have to profess your love, your personal love and admiration and respect for the politician before you can criticize him.
It kind of has that leader worship climate that is so deeply unhealthy, and yet that basically attaches to not only every Democratic politician, but also any Republican politician who opposes or denounces Donald Trump.
We saw that with John McCain.
We see it with Mitt Romney.
We see it with George Bush, how Democrats who used to call George Bush Hitler are now willing to say, oh, George Bush, even though I didn't agree with him, is a good and decent and kind man.
So what does that mean, actually, when people say Joe Biden is such a good and kind and decent man?
Is it that the things he's advocated for in the 50 years he's been in power and in public life, are those good and decent things?
Let's look at some of those.
Here is Joe Biden giving the response to the State of the Union Address by then President George Bush 41 in 1989.
And remember when Hunter Biden was involved in all these difficulties and problems because of his crack addiction.
We were told that, oh my God, Joe Biden is such a great man.
Look at how compassionate and empathetic he is to drug addiction and to the need for drug addicts to be loved.
He only extended that to his own son, not to anybody else.
In fact, with anyone else, over 30 years, Joe Biden has demanded that drug addicts and drug users like his son Not have any empathy or compassion, but instead be treated as criminals and go to prison for a long time.
And even though in 1989 there was a Republican administration in office, Joe Biden, when he gave his State of the Union address, said that Republicans weren't going far enough.
In punishing drug users and imprisoning drug users that Joe Biden was demanding they become even more severe in their attempts to punish drug users, not an ounce of compassion or empathy when it was other people's families who are suffering from drug addiction.
Here's what he said in his State of the Union response.
It has to join us in making a significantly greater commitment to these six areas to stem the rising tide of violence in America.
And that's what it is, violence.
First, we have to join together to ensure that drug dealers are punished swiftly, surely, and severely.
And in line with what the President is calling for, we have to hold every drug user accountable.
Because if there were no drug users, there would be no appetite for drugs and there would be no market for them.
We have to hold every drug user accountable.
It's not enough to just punish the drug dealers.
We have to punish the drug users.
The poor guy on the street, struggling with a crack addiction.
He wanted to throw them all in prison, have no empathy for them, not treat it like a health addiction, a health problem, or give them rehab.
He wanted to punish them with jail time.
And then suddenly we heard when it was his own son, who he wanted not to go to prison.
Oh, he was such a compassionate and kind man, even such a good figure that he understood what drug addicts were going through.
Listen to what he was saying all his whole life.
Let's take a look at what the real problem is.
It's not just how many people are using drugs.
As the President said, the number of people using drugs, cocaine in particular, is down in our country.
That's true.
But the violence associated with drugs is spewing out all over America.
And that's terrible.
I know it's hard to believe, but this very day, Violent drug offenders will commit more than 100,000 crimes on this day alone.
And the sad part is that we have no more police in the streets of our major cities than we had 10 years ago.
And what the President proposes won't help much.
What he proposes is no increase over what the Congress has already approved last year.
In a nutshell, the President's plan doesn't include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, not enough prosecutors to convict them, not enough judges to sentence them, and not enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.
That's why right now, 6 out of every 10 criminals who are arrested on drug charges have their cases dropped.
That's why we think the president should triple, triple the commitment that he's made tonight for police, prosecutors, and judges for our cities and our states.
All right, now, just the only people who say what a good, compassionate, empathetic, kind man Joe Biden is are basically Democrats.
And if you look at this from a Democratic Party perspective, here he is criticizing a Republican president for not building enough jail cells to throw drug addicts and drug users into, not enough police officers to find them and punish them.
Now, it wasn't only that, but it was that Joe Biden has long been the leader, not to somebody who was fine with punishing drug addicts like his son.
He has been the leader.
And he has been very proud of the fact that he's the leader.
Of sentencing requiring that drug users and drug addicts be sentenced to many years in prison and taking away the discretion on the part of judges to express any empathy or compassion for them and say, well, I think it would be better for you, given that this appears to be a health problem, for you to go to rehab and get resources to help with your problem.
No, that's not what Joe Biden wanted with drug addicts until it was his son and his own family that had this problem.
This is what he wanted for other people's families.
Listen to this.
Statements.
But let's look at the facts.
Since 1986, Congress has passed over 230 new or expanded penalties for drug and criminal offenses in this United States.
230 new penalties.
And these penalties range from an automatic five years in jail for any person caught with a rock of Crack cocaine a piece of crack cocaine as small as a quarter.
I don't have a quarter with me But if you visualize what one looks like yeah, I do have a quarter if you have a piece of crack cocaine No bigger than this quarter that I'm holding in my hand one quarter of one dollar We passed a law through the leadership of Senator Thurmond and myself and others, a law that says, if you're caught with that, you go to jail for five years.
You get no probation.
You get nothing other than five years in jail.
Judge doesn't have a choice.
Now, the fact of the matter is, We've gone from there, all the way up to saying, under the leadership of Senator Thurmond, and I'd like to suggest that I take some small credit for it myself as well, and others, the presiding officer, that there is now a death penalty.
And we passed it a couple years ago.
If you are a major drug dealer, involved in the trafficking of drugs and murder results in your activities, you go to death.
Again, now look at it from a perspective of these Democrats who are saying what a good, kind, empathetic, compassionate man Joe Biden is.
Such a kind soul who's always wanted the best for the people of this country.
We've seen Hunter Biden with far, far more than a small quarter of crack cocaine.
But because Joe Biden didn't want his own son thrown into prison for five years or more the way all these other people By the way, overwhelmingly black people, because you notice what he's focused on is not cocaine or other drugs predominantly consumed by white people.
He was obsessed with imposing mandatory prison years on crack cocaine, which at the time was used overwhelmingly by black people in the United States.
It was an epidemic that primarily struck the black population.
He wanted all those black people thrown in jail.
He got them all thrown in jail.
Even if they just had a quarter of crack cocaine.
He was so proud of it.
He worked with Strom Thurmond, one of the Senate's proudest and longest term defenders of segregation and all forms of racial discrimination.
He came from the whole Jim Crow era and thought that that was a good thing, Strom Thurmond did.
Biden not only talked about how he worked with Strom Thurmond here to throw primarily black crack users into prison, Kamala Harris in that 2020 debate where she was on the stage with Joe Biden reminded him that he also worked with Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, to oppose school racial integration at schools through busing.
And that was when she told the little story about how only because of busing that Joe Biden opposed with Strom Thurmond, Was she able to end up going to a school that was integrated?
And she talked about this little girl who only got that opportunity because busing was finally allowed.
And then she said, that little girl was me, Joe Biden.
And basically implied that even though he may not be a vicious racist now, he has long spent his career devoted to racially discriminatory outcomes, including keeping schools segregated by race.
So in what way would, if you're a Democrat or a liberal, maybe if you're a conservative, you would actually stand up and say, hey, I kind of like that Joe Biden of the 1990s.
But from a liberal or democratic perspective, in what way does this suggest that Joe Biden is a good and compassionate man?
Now, I went over this many times, but it really actually sickened me.
It sickened me.
When all of those issues with Hunter Biden arose, not just Hunter Biden's personal life, but all the questions about what he was doing in Ukraine and China, the kind of business deals he was pursuing with the involvement of his father or trading on his father's name.
And every time Hunter Biden was raised as an issue that ought to be looked at,
Liberal columnists like Nicholas Kristof came forward and said this, as he said on June 24, 2023, quote, the real meaning of the Hunter Biden saga, as I see it, isn't about presidential corruption, but is about how widespread addiction is and how about how about a determined parent with unconditional love can sometimes reel a child back that can give others hope.
And there you see a picture of Joe hugging Hunter, and they tried to turn Joe Biden into this paragon of compassion and empathy for drug addicts.
If you spend your entire life throwing drug addicts into prison for a long time, taking away any discretion that judges have, and going around boasting of it, But then suddenly when it's your own family that might have to go to your own son that has to go to prison, you suddenly turn around and say, Oh, actually, I don't think he deserves prison.
I'm proud of him.
He deserves praise for overcoming drug addiction.
That doesn't make you empathetic.
That makes you disgustingly selfish.
It's not a virtue to only care about somebody and their welfare when it's in your family or someone you know, but not care at all when you're doing it to other families that you don't know.
That's the opposite of virtuous.
Here from the New York Times, in August of 2015, when there was a question about Joe Biden would run for president in 2016 against Hillary, they said, quote, Joe Biden's role in the 1990s crime law could haunt any presidential bid.
Quote, when Joseph R. Biden became the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987, a few months ahead of his first and ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign.
He told aides his goal was to enact legislation that would take a comprehensive approach to reducing crime.
The effort, which defined much of his time as committee chairman, culminated in the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a sweeping bipartisan bill that touched nearly every aspect of American law enforcement that was signed into law by Bill Clinton.
Despite reservations, Mr. Biden, who has served as the Obama administration's unofficial liaison to the law enforcement community, has not only stood by the 1994 legislation, but has also frequently taken credit for it.
As recently as this spring, in an essay on community policing for a book of bipartisan reform proposals put together by the Brennan Center for Justice, Mr. Biden referred to the legislation as, quote, the 1994 Biden crime bill.
The Biden crime bill, he called it.
In an interview with Time Magazine in February 2014, he said, quote, I am not only the guy who did the crime bill and the drug czar, but I'm also the guy who spent years when I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee trying to change drug policy relative to cocaine, for example, crack and powder.
So it's not like something he believed in way back then.
and then apologized it for whatever.
He is somebody who wanted crack users and crack addicts in jail until his own son became one.
And then the media rushed forward to say, oh, my God, look at how compassionate and what a loving father he is.
And then even said that anyone raising questions about Hunter Biden's business deals was trying to stigmatize addiction.
One of the big issues right now is whether or not we should spend huge amounts of money on our military and then at the same time cut Social Security and Medicare for seniors.
And from a Democratic Party perspective, this is the ultimate sin to try and cut Social Security for old people in retirement.
In fact, they constantly accuse the Republican Party of doing that, even though Donald Trump ran a campaign of never allowing Social Security to be cut.
Here is Joe Biden in 1995 in the Senate demanding After he was spending billions and billions of dollars on all the work that he supported, that the way to balance the budget was by taking benefits away from seniors in their retirement years, even though they had paid for it.
When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well.
I meant Medicare and Medicaid.
I meant veterans benefits.
I meant every single solitary thing in the government.
And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.
Many, many efforts to cut Social Security from old people so that we could pay for the wars that he was supporting.
Now, when we talk about whether Joe Biden is a good and compassionate and lovely and wonderful man of high moral stature and great values, there's also this little matter of the Iraq War.
A invasion based on lies that killed up to and thought more than a million people as well as thousands of American soldiers and caused immense chaos for many years in the Middle East.
Here's Joe Biden in a hearing in 1988.
This is still under the Clinton administration.
And he was interviewing Iraqi weapons inspectors, including Scott Ritter.
And they were trying to explain to him that they believe that Saddam Hussein has been complying and didn't have an active weapons program, something Scott Ritter also argued to him in 2002 when he was supporting the Iraq war then.
And here's the exchange.
And Joe Biden was one of the most influential senators because he was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
And here's what he was saying in 1998.
The ranking minority member on the Committee of Foreign Relations, when the opening statement he would like to make.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me begin by saying I think, Major, you have provided and are providing a very, very, very valuable service to your country by coming forward as you have.
Because, quite frank, I think what you've done is you've forced us to come to our milk here, all of us in the United States Congress.
I think you and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam's at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam's program relative to weapons of mass destruction.
And you and I both know, and all of us here really know, and it's the thing we have to face, that the only way, the only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone, start it alone, and it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down.
You know it, and I know it.
So I think we should not kid ourselves here.
So there's Joe Biden in 1988.
Saying we're going to have to take this son of a bitch out because he's going to get nuclear weapons.
That was before 9-11, before the neocons.
Actually that was when only the neocons were calling for this as well.
And now here he is in October of 2002 as the Senate was debating whether to authorize George Bush's Invasion of Iraq, Joe Biden became one of the most vocal advocates of that word, defenders of the Bush and Cheney administration's desire to go and invade Iraq.
And so when you go to assess the character of somebody, the morals of somebody, do any of these things matter?
How many black drug users you've thrown into prison for immense amount of time?
How many wars you started?
How many people you've killed?
The kinds of policies that you've advocated, the desire to take away old people's social security in order to become, in order to fund more wars.
Here's the New York Times in July 15th of 2019.
This is when Biden was still a primary candidate in the 2020 race, when a lot of Democratic Party factions were already raising concerns about his cognitive decline, trying to push him out of the race, concerned that he couldn't beat Trump.
Here's what the New York Times was doing to Biden.
How Joe Biden Became the Democrats' Anti-Busing Crusader.
With a school desegregation lawsuit rolling Delaware in the 1970s, Mr. Biden led an effort in the Senate to end court-ordered busing.
Quote, Mr. Biden plunged headfast into one of the most politically fraught and racially divisive topics in America.
He emerged as the Democratic Party's leading and anti-busing crusader, a position that put him in league with Southern segregationists at odds with liberal Republicans.
Does that play any role in how Democrats assess its character?
turning even some leaders in his own party against busing as a desegregation tool.
Quote, no issue has consumed more of my time and energies, Mr. Biden declared with a flourish as he opened a Senate hearing in 1981, adding, we want to stop court-ordered busing.
Does that play any role in how Democrats assess his character?
Or is this, are all these things that a politician does, all the harm they cause in the world, all the destructive policy that they advocate, is this just all separate from As long as you're around Washington long enough and you abide by their protocols and rules, none of this matters.
All the wars you start, all the people you kill.
Donald Trump isn't.
That's all that matters for him being a good, kind, decent person.
As long as you're around Washington long enough and you abide by the protocols and rules, none of this matters.
All the wars you start, all the people you kill.
Then there's his actual personal conduct, if we wanna say that's really that what matters.
If somehow the things he did in his political career don't matter, which I think is a very strange thing to try and say.
Imagine saying, look, Fidel Castro, you may think he killed a lot of people and suppressed a lot of people, and maybe he did, but he was a really nice guy to his kids, to other people around him.
He gave charity.
Nobody would accept that.
Nobody would say you can separate your view of his character from the kinds of things that he did.
It's only for American politicians where this happens.
But on the personal level, just let's remember what Joe Biden's character has long been and still is.
He had to drop out of the 1998 presidential race and the reason was is because he had enormous amounts of ethical transgressions including plagiarism and chronic lying about so many of the things that he said about his own life.
So let's just take a look at some of these news clips from 1988.
When Joe Biden started off as a viable, even a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, and ended up pulling out just several months later because of a huge waft of scandals involving his personal character.
Senator Joseph Biden may have more explaining to do.
The new questions stem from taped remarks of Biden during an April campaign appearance in New Hampshire.
I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.
Went back to law school and in fact ended up in the top half of my class.
I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year.
I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits, only needed 123 credits.
Biden now concedes he did not graduate in the top half of his law school class.
Newsweek says Biden actually went to school on a half scholarship, ended up near the bottom of his class, and won only one degree, not three.
Joe Biden ranked 76th in a class of 85 at the University of Syracuse Law School.
I mean, this guy comes off this whole thing as a flyweight.
Now Biden says Newsweek is right.
His memory had failed him.
And I'd be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours if you'd like, Frank.
Joe Biden was victimized by the truth.
Bye-bye Biden.
He may not know it yet, but I think this is going to be very difficult for him to recover.
Is Joe Biden dead meat?
Yes or no?
I think so.
Bob?
He's in terminal condition.
Terminal?
Eleanor?
Yes, unless he comes in third in Iowa.
Morton?
Dying.
I say dead.
We'll be right back.
Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden today faces a controversy.
Three weeks ago at a debate at the Iowa State Fair, he used phrases identical to those delivered by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.
Biden seemed to be claiming Kinnock's vision and life as his own.
And then it goes on to just copy this signature speech by Neil Kinnick.
And all of that created this huge ethical cloud around Joe Biden that forced him out of the presidential race.
And if you think that's just decades ago, he's been continuing to lie constantly, even to the point where the media is forced to admit it.
Inventing stories about how he's so heroic that he got arrested while marching for the civil rights movement, that he got arrested while trying to support and see Nelson Mandela, none of which has any basis in reality, but he lies about it constantly.
That's called a pathological liar.
Somebody who gets caught lying and continues to lie.
In fact, telling the same false stories over and over.
Now, maybe you could say, well, look, like he's a good family man.
He loves his children.
And I don't know, probably he does.
That seems like an extremely low bar.
Like anyone who doesn't love their own children is basically a psychopath.
It's like a natural feeling.
You have to love your own children.
I don't think that's the bar for being able to be a great and wonderful person of high decency and values and the like.
But even there's questionable behavior when it comes to that.
Hear from CNN in August of 2023.
Quote, why it took four years for the Bidens to acknowledge their own seventh grandchild.
Hunter Biden asked his parents not to publicly acknowledge the girl as a lengthy child support battle played on in an Arkansas court, according to sources familiar with the matter.
But in recent months, that stance became increasingly uncomfortable at odds with President Biden's image as a loving family man and subject to criticism from his political rivals.
The president began looking to right the opportunity to break the silence, quote, I have six grandchildren.
And I'm crazy about them, Biden told a group of kids on the White House lawn in the spring.
The dedication to Jill Biden's 2020 children book, Joey, read, quote, to my grandchildren with six names listed.
So they purposely just refused to acknowledge the seventh child that Hunter Biden conceived out of marriage because they were embarrassed by her.
Quote, in public, the White House routinely described the issue as a private matter in which they had no role.
Behind the scenes, however, some on Biden's team recognized that the situation was eroding the carefully cultivated family image underpinning his political persona.
So whatever metric you want to use, like personal life, what they do with power, and I think what they do with power is the far more relevant one.
In what way is there any basis for saying that Joe Biden is some sort of Some sort of kind, compassionate, good, decent man.
And that's to say nothing of the fact that many Democrats, people on the left, people in liberal politics have spent almost a year now accusing Joe Biden of being guilty of genocide for arming and funding the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
Here from the Nation Magazine, which is still a Democratic Party magazine, but one more on the left, from April 27, 2024, quote, Israel's genocide in Gaza is a world historic crime.
When Jews are being slaughtered by the Nazis, the world turned away.
Now the world has awakened to Israel's crimes.
So does that play any role at all?
If you are a Democrat and you believe that the That Joe Biden is actually arming and funding and enabling a genocide?
Is that at all incompatible with calling him a good, decent man of high values and high morals who is dedicated to the welfare of people in our country?
But there always has been this extremely bizarre attempt in Washington
To say that when it comes to American leaders, whatever they do, it doesn't matter if they start wars based on lies, it doesn't matter if they kill huge numbers of people, if they cause a great recession that makes people suffer for decades, if they advocate what people now consider to be racist policies of blocking desegregation or putting crack addicts in prison for five years and then suddenly stopping only when his own son is an addict.
People in Washington insist that that has no bearing what they do in their lives on whether they're a good and kind person.
An excellent example of that is how virtually all of Washington considered John McCain to be the paragon of decency.
In fact, here's The Atlantic in August of 2018, John McCain and the Lost Art of Decency.
In decades of covering politics, I've encountered no one with McCain's unflinching combination of bracing candor, impossibly high standards, and rueful self-recrimination.
John McCain has been an advocate of every single American war.
A very vigorous, vehement advocate of all those wars that killed huge numbers of people in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Libya, and on and on and on.
He's also proposed many other wars.
Remember when he sang bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran during his campaign?
Is it conceivable to reconcile that kind of a record as a When I started writing about politics, it was in the middle of George Bush's second term, right at the start.
of decency just because the press corps likes you.
When I started writing about politics, it was in the middle of George Bush's second term, right at the start.
And every day liberals accused George Bush of things like torturing people, authorizing a worldwide torture regime, a worldwide network of CIA black sites where the CIA would abduct people and keep them in secret away from human rights organizations so they could torture them without anyone knowing.
Kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and sending them to Egypt and Syria to be tortured.
Spying on American citizens with no warrants.
Being responsible for the invasion of Iraq that killed huge numbers of people.
And yet now when you hear Democrats talk about George W. Bush, they will say, look, I didn't agree with him, but he was incredibly kind and decent person.
Now, in part, that's just because George Bush and his family finds Trump vulgar.
And the only metric that matters these days is whether you condemn Trump or not.
You could be Adolf Hitler.
I've often said if Adolf Hitler got reincarnated, and he decided to denounce Trump, he would probably get an MSNBC show the next day.
That's really the only metric of character.
But Democrats spent years comparing George Bush to Hitler, accusing him of all kinds of war crimes.
And now here's how Democrats talk about the same George W. Bush.
Here's Nancy Pelosi in 2023.
I'll just say this honestly, that the Bush family is because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion.
Once again, it's an honor to be associated with President Bush in this.
He said this was his second time to be here.
I've been here many, many times.
So I've been with him 100% of the times he's been here.
Because we were both here for the groundbreaking when I was speaker and he was.
So what this really is, is just class loyalty.
All of these people belong to a certain class.
We had a video of Nancy Pelosi's daughter talking about how she considers George W. Bush her father or a member of their family.
And all these accusations they hurl at each other is just theater.
They're all part of the same club.
They all love each other.
And that's why people can stand up and say George Bush or Joe Biden is a kind, decent man of the highest values, even though everything he's done in his life has nothing to do with that, because all that matters is that he placate and act properly within their Washington circle of power.
And the reason they hate Donald Trump so much is because he doesn't.
But it is really bizarre to just completely segregate The assessment of a person like Joe Biden's character from the actual impact he's had in the world, the actual things he's endorsed, let alone the things he's done in his personal life.
And that's why it's incredibly bizarre to watch at the same time it be an obligatory vow that Joe Biden be decreed to be this wonderful, kind man of the highest values, the deepest character.
when his entire adult life, both in his personal realm and more importantly to me at least, in the things he's done with power, suggests that the exact opposite is true.
All right, the war in Ukraine, you may have forgotten, is still ongoing.
And there is all kinds of changes that have been happening over the last year, almost all of which have been in favor of Russians.
They've been breaking through Ukraine's front line.
They've been taking not a lot more territory, but certainly more.
Ukraine has had made no progress in driving the Russians back, let alone out of Russia, out of Ukraine rather, which is the definition of victory.
The definition of victory for the United States and NATO, which they say they will fight until the end, until they get, is that every inch of Ukrainian territory has expelled every single Russian soldier, not just eastern Ukraine, but also Crimea.
And now you can watch the bar being completely lowered, the goalposts completely moved, on what this war is actually about.
Here from the New York Times.
On July 9th, U.S.
officials say that Russia is unlikely to take more Ukrainian territory.
So they're already occupying more than 20% of Ukraine.
Now the declaration of victory is, oh, they're not going to take much more.
No more talk about pushing them out of Ukraine because that is impossible.
Quote, Russian forces continue to inflict pain, but NATO leaders gathering in Washington can say that their efforts to strengthen Ukraine are working.
Quote, the months ahead will not be easy for Ukraine, but Allied leaders gathering in Washington this week for the 75th anniversary of the founding of NATO can legitimately argue that their efforts to strengthen Ukraine are working.
Leaders at the summit are expected to promise new funding for Ukraine, As always, just more new funding for Ukraine, announced plans for the alliance to coordinate weapons delivery, and strengthen a promise to Kiev that it will eventually become a full ally.
It is that last point that has become the focus of the war.
More important even than reclaiming territory.
Do you see how war aims to shift whenever they need them to shift?
No, it's not anymore about reclaiming Russian territory.
The Russians are going to occupy 23%, I guess, of Ukraine.
We're not interested in that anymore, but we want to keep the war going and then elevate our security commitments to Ukraine.
Quote, while Ukrainian officials insist they are going to fighting to get their land back, growing numbers of U.S.
officials believe that the war is instead primarily about Ukraine's future and NATO and the European Union.
While Russia is not in a position to seize large parts of Ukraine, the prospect of Kiev retaking more land from the invading army are also waning.
Prided by American advisers, Ukraine is focused on building up the defenses and striking deep behind Russian lines.
The United States, said one official, has always defined its strategic objective as, quote, a Ukraine that is democratic, prosperous, European, and secure.
The United States and its allies will need to make long-term investments to enable Ukraine to hold its lines without Russia and do damage.
But that was never how the war was defined.
The whole war was always defined about whether Russia should be able to take and keep parts of Ukraine.
Now they're basically saying we accept that Russia's taking and keeping parts of Ukraine.
The only thing we want to make sure is they don't take more.
And as long as we end up putting Ukraine in NATO, We will have somehow considered this a victory.
Here is Joe Biden appearing at the NATO summit earlier this week, and I think it was yesterday, and listen to what he's saying about the ongoing commitment to, we'll show you that in just a second, but essentially the entire The goal of NATO right now is to say that we are going to fund this war in Ukraine forever.
None of them is talking about a diplomatic solution.
None of them is talking about a way to try and stop the war.
They're just opening the money spigots, demanding that their citizens fund this war forever, pouring more money to Ukraine with no accountability into Kiev with no accountability.
And the goal seems to be we just want to keep this war going forever.
We don't even care any longer whether We stopped the Russians from occupying major parts of Ukraine.
He basically just stood up and said, we're going to do everything possible to ensure that Ukraine gets the funding that they need until the very end.
And he announced more additional funding, more promises of weapons going to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, there is a little bit of movement in the West.
Here's the Financial Times today, publishing a letter from some very influential ambassadors in the West.
And the letter reads, quote, seize peace in Ukraine before it's too late.
Ukraine's latest military gains in the Donetsk region reinforced the case for a negotiated settlement of the war in Ukraine.
The US and its allies support Ukraine's key war aim, which is a return to the 2014 frontiers, i.e.
Russia's expulsion from Crimea and Donbass.
But all informed analysts agree that short of a serious escalation of war, the likeliest outcome will be continued stalemate on the ground, with a not insignificant chance of a Russian victory, The conclusion points to the desirability, even urgency, of a negotiated peace, not least for the sake of Ukraine itself.
Reluctance by the official West to accept a negotiated peace rests on the belief that anything short of a complete Ukrainian victory would allow Putin to, quote, get away with it.
But this ignores by far the most important outcome of the war so far that Ukraine has fought for the independence and won it as Finland did in 1939.
Some territorial concessions would seem a small price to pay for the reality rather than the semblance of independence.
If a peace based on roughly the present divisions of forces in Ukraine is inevitable, it is immoral not to try for it now.
Washington should start talks with Moscow and a new security pact, which would safeguard the legitimate security interests of both Ukraine and Russia.
We urge the world's leaders to initiate or support such an initiative.
The longer the war continues, the more territory Ukraine is likely to lose, and the more the pressure for escalation up to a nuclear level.
And here you see Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, the former British ambassador to Russia, a journalist and author who's a columnist for Unheard, senior fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statesmanship,
Ambassador to the USSR during the Reagan and Bush years, The former chief of the British Embassy in Moscow, a professor emeritus of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, and a former official at the British Embassy in Moscow.
So very influential foreign policy experts inside the West.
And it's actually shocking how little Talk there is, even a pretense of trying to foster a diplomatic agreement in Ukraine.
It is very clear that NATO leaders have no interest in a diplomatic solution.
They're more than happy to have Ukraine be destroyed, to have more and more young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers lose their lives.
Even if it doesn't succeed in any war games, even if it ends up losing more Ukrainian territory, For whatever reason, it's too important to them psychologically and emotionally, and I think they think geo-strategically, certainly financially, to allow this war to be settled through a negotiated peace that sooner or later is going to be the end of this war.
And as this article says, it is immoral to refuse to negotiate.
Remember, they could have had this war solved diplomatically at the start of the war.
Boris Johnson, Joe Biden intervened.
And blocked that from happening, causing Ukraine to be destroyed, hundreds of thousands of lives to be lost, hundreds of billions of dollars to be squandered.
And two and a half years into this war, it seems like their goal more than ever is to ensure that this war, now as pointless and purposeless as ever, continues endlessly and indefinitely.
All right, that concludes the show for this evening.
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