By: Barton Swaim – wsj.com – July 10, 2024

When people said he seemed unwell, Democrats called it a Republican ploy. That was a costly mistake.

Any mildly observant person could see four years ago that Mr. Biden had declined further than a commander in chief should. These pages noted Mr. Biden’s diminished state during and after his 2020 campaign. In the 2012 debate with Paul Ryan, the editorial board remarked on Nov. 19, 2020, Mr. Biden “was aggressive and confident. In 2020, in the rare times he speaks off the cuff without a teleprompter, he looks more tentative, as if grasping for an argument or words that he knows are around here somewhere.”

Democrats disregarded this and 10,000 similar observations because they took them to be insincere, and the political left has become so accustomed to insincerity as not to recognize its opposite. On the left—particularly in the New York Times and other elite outlets—substantive complaints are routinely presented as procedural or ethical ones. Rather than make a straightforward argument that a person or policy is wrong on the merits, elected Democrats, following the media’s lead, typically raise technical or otherwise secondary objections they plainly don’t care about.

Any time a Republican president nominates a judge to the Supreme Court, Democrats can be counted on to fly quickly past the substantive reasons for their opposition and invent ethical lapses that, even if true, wouldn’t bother them in any other situation. No Senate Democrat cared if Brett Kavanaugh behaved badly at some unspecified time and place in the 1980s. They wanted him defeated.

Other defamatory inventions—against Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, among others—aren’t worth repeating because Democrats themselves didn’t care enough to believe or disbelieve them.

Last month the Times published a report claiming that Judge Aileen Cannon, assigned to adjudicate Mr. Trump’s classified documents case, had been advised to stand down by “two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench.” Judge Cannon hadn’t bowed to every Democratic demand in the Trump documents case, so she had to go. Progressive pundits dropped their feminist sensibilities and simply talked down to her. “Girl, stay in your lane,” legal analyst Melissa Murray advised Judge Cannon on MSNBC.

None of these talking heads cared a whit about judicial experience. They wanted Judge Cannon gone. The process argument was, as ever, a means to an end.

Did any earnest progressive journalist care, as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg pretended to care, that Donald Trump once “falsified business records” in furtherance of an unnamed second crime? Of course not. Mr. Trump’s business records were irrelevant to Mr. Bragg and his defenders. What they cared about was convicting him of a felony. Any felony.

Progressives in the Washington Post newsroom pretended to care that Will Lewis, the publisher brought on to turn the Post’s failing finances around, had once been connected to a phone-hacking scandal in the U.K. None of these newsroom activists cared the first thing about the “scandal” to which they wanted to attach Mr. Lewis. They wanted him fired.

Our pundit class and Democratic officeholders appear to believe that everyone else in the political realm thinks the way they do. Most don’t. When right-leaning commentators pointed out that Mr. Biden appeared weak and confused, they did so because Mr. Biden appeared weak and confused. Democrats evidently thought Republicans were making it up and only wanted to get rid of Mr. Biden. A week before the debate that forced Democrats to acknowledge the reality of Mr. Biden’s condition, the Times ran a long and amply illustrated article about how Republicans and “conservative news outlets” had circulated videos of the president that “lacked important context” in order to portray him as old and feeble. The writers of this risible work of advocacy might have reflected that Republicans had every reason for wishing Mr. Biden to remain on the ticket.

Having convinced themselves that the president’s infirmity was a right-wing invention, Democrats find themselves in the unenviable position of having to acknowledge the truth of what their opponents have been saying for years. The whole mess might have been avoided if Democrats had credited their critics with sincerity.

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Source: Biden’s Frailty and the Political Price of Insincerity – WSJ