President Biden sparked a wave of both outrage and mockery as he called for his predecessor to be “politically” locked up.
Biden was in Concord, New Hampshire to tout his healthcare and prescription drug cost legislation when he said former President Trump wants to eliminate his political adversaries and detractors. “I know this sounds bizarre. It sounds like if I said this five years ago, you’d lock me up,” Biden said. “We got to lock him up. Politically lock him up. Lock him out. That’s what we have to do.”
While Biden appeared to have caught himself in the moment, clarifying he did not mean imprisoning his political opponent, the incident nonetheless went viral across social media and both political parties.
Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson claimed that a former Biden admin official, noting this could be politically unhelpful to Vice President Kamala Harris, texted him, “we gotta lock Joe up.”
By contrast, a current Biden admin official allegedly told the reporter, “For better or worse, no one is listening to him anymore and his words have little power and less reach. It’s a blip. Gone in any meaningful way by mid-day tomorrow if it makes it that long.”
Trump Campaign National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to the incident by declaring: “Joe Biden just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square. The Harris-Biden Admin is the real threat to democracy. We call on Kamala Harris to condemn Joe Biden’s disgraceful remark.”
Republican communications professional Steve Guest argued, “After years and years of lawfare against Donald Trump, there is no cleanup that is possible for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats in the wake of this comment.”
“[T]he only reason this is offensive is because the Democrats have made sure all of the institutions they control pump out propaganda for years that they are the party of the rule of law and norms. Otherwise these remarks are just banal,” Washington Free Beacon reporter Joe Gabriel Simonson said.
The Atlantic contributor Tyler Austin Harper suggested the incident is shocking not because of Biden’s conduct, but because the Democratic Party is still relying on him.
“I do not think this is a meaningful gaffe. Who cares,” he wrote. “I do think it’s completely insane that anyone thinks this animatronic wax doll whose batteries are literally running out as he speaks is helping Harris on the campaign trail, and doubly insane he still has the nuclear codes.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign and the White House for comment.
You defended him in the days before and in the…..
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Kamala Harris pressed on whether she had been ‘honest’ about Biden’s mental acuityUnmute
Spike Lee’s comments against President Trump went low on the Democrat’s pole and his article was a “hit and run” stating it can’t be used or reprinted. Sounds rather cowardly – as we say in Texas.
Or, is that the way he operates?
Mr. Lee feels that Kamala should be elected even though it has been proven SHE IS NOT QUALIFIED AND WAS A DEI HIRE.
We need a full time President who is going to work for the country and bring us back to life – not the disastrous Biden/Harris Marxists – who have our country hanging by a thread.
All of these rich people all seem to have just one vote but a lot of negative opinions about our country. It seems like some of them could throw a few crumbs to help the struggling folks instead of digging in the dirt. Words are cheap.
Is he working with the One World Order/Soros/Obama?
*****
The facts that Harris is devoid of her own political accomplishments, that she has been part of an administration that has been disastrous — at home and abroad — and that the prospect of Harris in the White House for four more years is appalling for the country’s future are far more important than the color of her skin, or the color of Trump’s skin, or the color of the skin of the Americans who will be voting.
But colorblind, logical thinking doesn’t suit the Obama-Democratic mindset.
Back at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama claimed that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is that “when they go low, we go high.”
It wasn’t true then. It’s not true now.
The fusillade of insults Obama launched against Trump on Tuesday — as baseless as her jibe about his supposedly “narrow” worldview and shot about the presidency being a “black job” for the “black” Kamala Harris — showed that when it comes to going low, few are as proficient as the former first lady, even if she dresses it up in high-sounding rhetoric.
Kamala Harris speaking at an event this week – KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP
“That is false,” intoned a terse statement from CBS News on Sunday evening, in a belated denial that 60 Minutes, the network’s once-respected weekly television news magazine, allegedly deceitfully edited its October 7 interview with Kamala Harris. The edit’s widely suspected purpose was to make Harris, who notoriously struggles with any form of unscripted speaking, appear more coherent and competent on the question of US support for Israel’s war with Hamas.
CBS’s denial addressed no specific aspect of the Vice President’s interview, but unconvincingly maintained “we strive to be clear, accurate and on point. The portion of [Harris’s] answer on 60 Minutes was more succinct, which allows time for other subjects.” Presumably, her fuller answers were less succinct and might have distracted from other subjects in a way that might well have disfavoured her.
Obviously, the best way to answer such a critique would be to release the interview’s full transcript and allow the public to decide whether it had been fooled. After a week of scathing coverage, the issue weighed heavily enough that Harvard CAPS/Harris, a highly respected public survey organisation, conducted a nationwide poll on that very question.
It found that some 85 per cent of American voters – including an astonishing 87 per cent of Democrats – believe that CBS should release the full transcript. The network, however, released no materials and maintained another week of stony silence before dropping its denial on a Sunday evening, perhaps in the hope that it would be the least likely time anyone would pay attention to it.
CBS responds to allegations of deceitful editing in ’60 Minutes’ Harris interview
Rather than strive for transparency, CBS instead tried to dump blame on Trump, implying that he alone, and not anyone else in the network’s rising chorus of critics, had accused it of deceitful editing. Without a trace of irony, CBS further admonished anyone reading its denial, “Remember, Mr. Trump pulled out of his interview with 60 Minutes and the vice president participated,” and repeated its invitation for the Republican nominee to appear on the programme.
It takes little imagination to wonder why Trump pulled out of his 60 Minutes interview and will almost certainly not appear on the network before the November 5 election. Like most American legacy media outlets, CBS has long exhibited overtly Leftist bias in general and bias against Trump and his campaign in particular.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, in a bestselling book aptly titled Bias, award-winning CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg spilled a searing insider’s view of the network’s political favouritism toward the Left. Just last month, a report by the Media Research Center, a Virginia-based analytical watchdog, found that CBS’s coverage of Harris’s campaign had been 94 per cent positive, while its coverage of Trump was 77 per cent negative.
In the CBS News-hosted 1 October vice-presidential debate between Republican candidate JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz, the network’s moderators violated a much-touted pre-debate pledge not to engage in “fact checking” of either candidate, only to “fact check” Vance while leaving Walz virtually unchallenged. Last week, House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson accused CBS’s Face the Nation programme of selectively editing an interview he gave on October 13.
CBS’s bracing arrogance and evident favouritism for Harris’s campaign raise fundamental questions about the future of America’s troubled legacy media. But the court of public opinion already seems to be gravitating against CBS, which had the lowest ratings of America’s “Big Four” television networks before Harris’s interview.
As American television audiences vote with their remote controls, it is entirely conceivable that this year’s election will be the last in which Republican candidates agree to participate in media events hosted by biased and increasingly discredited legacy television media outlets. In all likelihood, Americans will overwhelmingly forgive them.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute