The debate fiasco should make it clear that the elected president does not run the executive branch. Now the truth is too obvious to ignore.

After a disastrous debate performance, the news media, which had been shamelessly gaslighting the public over Joe Biden’s cognitive capacity for years, seemed to turn on the president in unison. Biden stuttered, stumbled, and bumbled his way through a grueling 90 minutes during which he alternated between slurring his confused answers and staring into nowhere with his mouth agape.

Examples of the president’s cognitive decline have become so prevalent that journalists were forced to label any embarrassing videos of the geriatric commander in chief as “cheap fakes” in the hopes of shaming the public into ignoring the obvious. Despite this deep investment in running cover for Biden’s senility in the past, anchors on networks like CNN and MSNBC spent their post-debate spin sessions speculating on the possibility that the elderly leader might need to step aside. This discussion was treated as a sudden revelation instead of acknowledging the self-evident fact: The Biden presidency was a scam from the start.

The election of 2020 was probably the most contentious presidential result since 1876. The American people were asked to believe that Biden, who hid in his basement for much of the campaign, also won the most votes in the nation’s history. The future president was in better shape back then, but it was still quite clear that he was starting to lose the ability to recall key facts or engage in discussion for extended periods. Even in 2020, several pundits joked that they did not care if Biden collapsed and was replaced after his election if he kept Donald Trump out of the White House.

The regime officials went all out to prevent Trump’s re-election. They raised pandemic fears to an apocalyptic level, actively encouraged coordinated race riots across the nation, and radically transformed the voting process forever. Even if one doubts the more salacious claims of voter fraud, Mollie Hemingway’s excellent book “Rigged” lays out how tech CEOs, government actors, Democratic operatives, and the media openly colluded to defeat the incumbent president. An oligarchy installed Biden as president, never expecting him to fulfill the duties of the office.

Biden started his term with at least some degree of awareness, but it has been clear for the last few years that he has not been running the show. The American people are completely unaware of who, in fact, is responsible for disastrous inflation, open borders, and endless foreign war, which is exactly how the ruling class likes it. Oligarchies prefer to avoid accountability, and Biden creates the perfect shield. An unspecified set of elites make decisions in the shadows, and then the shambling zombie of a president is wheeled onto the stage to read a teleprompter and take the heat.

None of this resembles the system outlined in Article II of the Constitution, but no one seems to care. The corporate press praises how spry Biden looks and dismisses contrary evidence as “fake news.” Conservative commentators play endless videos of Biden wandering the stage after forgetting where he is but still pretend the president is responsible for his administration’s decisions. While it’s common for presidents to delegate significant tasks to advisers, it’s clear that under Joe Biden, unelected bureaucrats and power brokers have completely captured the Oval Office.

When it comes to public discourse, setting the frame is key. The frame of a discussion delineates its boundaries. While endless speculation and debate may fill that frame, the discussion is ultimately defined by the space the media has created to contain it. If you, as a journalist with a duty to hold the powerful accountable, had instead propped up an obvious fraud, how would you avoid the consequences?

People are highly sensitive to status, which in our modern world is conferred by credentials, wealth, and media visibility. Even when something is obvious, if the facts go against the narrative power is advancing, people are scared to notice it. Everyone already knew Biden was a zombie. We learned nothing new last week. With his particularly embarrassing debate performance, however, the media gave people permission to acknowledge what was already clear. This permission acts as a pressure release valve, allowing all the pent-up discourse around the topic to fill the frame the media had constructed.

With proper framing, the entire discussion shifted seamlessly from “Biden is just fine; it’s all fake news” to “Biden is feeble; who should replace him?” Speculation about whether and how Biden can be replaced, along with the pros and cons of each alternative candidate, now dominates the discourse. The event has become part process story and part reality television show. No one takes the time to acknowledge the more serious implications of this revelation.

The Biden fiasco should make it clear that the elected president does not run the executive branch. This has probably been the case for a very long time and should have been evident as the entire deep state defied Trump. Now it’s too obvious to ignore.

An unaccountable oligarchy installed a senile fake president through a soft coup. Instead of grappling with this stunning truth, the media, both left and right, debates whether Gavin Newsom is too white to overtake Kamala Harris and run in Biden’s place. The Biden presidency was always a sham, but Americans seem more interested in speculating on who will get the rose next rather than facing the reality that our political system is fake.

Auron MacKintyre, The Blaze

The Biden crime family may fall. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of creeps. But they will fall (if they do) only because the traitors and tyrants ruining America want a newer, cooler puppet. They know they can likely pull Biden through with another fraudulent win by overcounting absentee votes in Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix, which is literally all it takes. They will do this no matter who their nominee is. So enjoy the sideshow of Biden’s collapse, if it happens. But it’s not justice. Justice would consist of arrests and prosecutions for treason. Not just for the Bidens — but for every single Democrat in power, and any of the Republicans who sanctioned this regime. I remain every bit as concerned as 2 weeks ago that Trump will be in jail, and the Communists and fascists we still call Democrats will retain and expand their awful, toxic power.

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The talking points must have gone out within minutes of the end of President Joe Biden’s lame debate performance. Among the first to tell us just how fine a man Biden was Barack Obama, who called his former vice president “someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life.” It is, of course, a lie. Biden is not a good man, and the idea he’s “fought for ordinary folks” for even a single day of his “public service” is risible.

Obama’s tweet also claimed that Biden is the candidate “who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight.” From there, the gaslighting grew exponentially worse.

At a July 2 fundraiser in Virginia, Democratic Rep. Don Boyer, whom Biden once called “Doug,” compared our disabled president to Jesus.

“​​He has been a good, good man. He’s resilient, optimistic, indefatigable, and above all courageous,” said Boyer.

On the day after the debate, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who admitted that watching the debate made him “weep,” assured us that Biden is “a good man and a good president.”

There are too many post-debate examples to list all the “good man” encomia, but here are few more:

-“​​Biden is widely believed to be a good man” — The Guardian

– The Delaware Democrat is “a good man and a nice man.” — Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear

– “Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably.” — Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, and a generous Democratic donor

– “I would still lead with President Biden. He’s a good man.” — Rep. Bennie Thompson, Mississippi Democrat

– Biden “is ultimately a good and decent man.” — Matt Wing, New York Daily News

– “Joe Biden is a good man and has been a good president.” — Rep. Julian Castro, Obama Housing and Urban Development secretary

– Biden is “decent man of strong character.” — Democratic Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly

– “I love Joe Biden. He’s a good man, he loves his country, he’s doing the best that he can.” — Van Jones, a CNN political commentator

– “He also is a good man, a strong president and Democrats still believe that this race is winnable.” — former Democratic national chair Donna Brazile

Four years ago we were told that Biden was going to return civility and virtue to the White House. Current First Lady Jill Biden said then that “decency is on the ballot.” Michelle Obama swore that Biden was a “profoundly decent man, guided by his faith,” and “as president” he would “honor the lives and experiences of every American — because that’s what he’s always done.” In October 2020, Brit journalist Jonathan Freedland ignorantly insisted that “most” – really, most? – “Americans regard Biden as safe, unthreatening and fundamentally decent.”

There was even a book published in 2020 that had the title “A Good & Decent Man: Joe Biden: Rescuing America.”

After wading hip deep through the malarkey, let’s look at the Biden record.

The man who occupies the highest office in the world is a pathological liar. We need go no further back than 1987, when he had to drop his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination because he plagiarized a speech from Neil Kinnock, then a Labor Party member of the British Parliament.

“The tapes of the two speakers, which were eventually aired on U.S. television, show Biden not only echoing Kinnock’s words but aping his gestures,” Time reported in 1987.

Decades earlier, “Biden also failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote,” Time remembers in a 2019 article.

A decent man would not steal the work of others and claim they were his own.

Biden also lied, Time added, when he rattled “off his academic accomplishments, including saying that he graduated in the top half of his law school, when in fact, he ranked 76th out of 85.”

The truth was also twisted by Biden when he said that he “went to law school on a full academic scholarship,” was “the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship,” and earned three undergraduate degrees. It was a neat package of lies.

There are many other self-aggrandizing inventions, such as his claim that he drove an 18-wheel rig; his oft-repeated implication that late son Beau died a war hero in Iraq; that he was a teen civil rights activist and once arrested for standing up for black family that had moved into a neighborhood during desegregation; that he “had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see (Nelson Mandela) on Robben Island,” a total fabrication; that he was the first in his family to go college (yet Biden also said his grandfather was a star college football player); and that he had been nominated to attend the United States Naval Academy.

The inveterate braggart has also implied that he had an uncle whose last act was to serve as featured guest at a party of cannibals and has told different audiences that he was “brought up by both the Puerto Rican community and the black community,” is “more Jewish than the Jews” and “came close to trying out as a walk-on in the NFL.“

We’re exhausted already, and we haven’t even gotten to Biden’s lies in regard to his and Donald Trump’s presidencies.

For instance, Biden said during the debate that when he took office the “economy was flat on its back,” unemployment was “15%” and “there were no jobs.”

“These are 100%, solid-gold lies,” we said, and we backed up our statement.

Other Biden falsehoods during the debate include the whopper that he is the “only president this century, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world” when in fact 13 U.S. service members were killed in action in Afghanistan during Biden’s bungled August 2021 pullout; that the U.S. Border Patrol union had “endorsed me, endorsed my position”; and that Trump “wants to get rid of Social Security. … He’s wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

Biden followed up the debate with an ABC interview in which he said “I’m the guy who put NATO together” and “I’m the guy that shut (Vladimir) Putin down,” both of which are such obvious fabrications that we don’t even need to provide the evidence to the contrary. And, as we pointed out yesterday, he lied about the lies he’d previously told about how economists did or didn’t endorse his economic plan.

Now would a decent man continue to stack lies on lies? Of course not.

Biden also has a nasty streak. Surely there are voters who recall him condescendingly telling New Hampshire teacher Frank Fahey while campaigning in 1987 that “I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect.” All the man did was ask which law school Biden attended and where he placed in his class. And Biden might have been right: The teacher was gullible enough to endorse Biden in 2019 because – get this – he liked Biden’s honesty.

Four years later, it was Biden who led the “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks” during U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing. Biden was earlier complicit in the smearing of Robert Bork, who was nominated for the Court but rejected by the Senate. Our former Investor’s Business Daily colleague, the late George Neumayr, wrote in 2020 that “Supreme Court nomination hearings have gone from serene to savage, thanks largely to Joe Biden.”

Biden’s shameful conduct was on display during the 2012 campaign, when he said Republicans were going to put black Americans “back in chains,” and again repeatedly over the years claiming that truck driver Curtis C. Dunn “drank his lunch” before the 1972 collision in which Biden’s wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed. The truth is “the state official who oversaw the investigation” and Dunn’s daughter “said that wasn’t true,” says the Washington Times.

Former Biden staffer Tara Reade might also have an opinion about how “good” Biden is. She accused Biden of sexual assault. In all, according to Business Insider, “eight women have alleged that Biden either touched them inappropriately or violated their personal space in ways that made them uncomfortable.”

We wonder, as well, what Biden’s daughter Ashley might say, if pressed, about her father. She wrote in her diary that she took “showers with my dad” and it was “probably not appropriate.”

The “good man” tale has also been exposed by credible charges that Biden profited from his office through his son Hunter’s business deals with foreign interests. Would a decent man pad his bank accounts in the millions through influence peddling?

We further ask if a good and decent man who promised to unite the country if elected president would later demonize roughly half the population with a speech that looked as if it had been stage-managed by Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl?

Joe Biden is not a good man and the many who have claimed he is know better. But in the same way, Biden’s mental and physical infirmities have been covered up, Scranton Joe’s nastiness has been concealed, as well. God help us if this unprincipled man who has served only himself and his family is reelected in November.

Issues and Insights Editorial Board

Socialism is inhumane. So is environmentalism. Destroying the middle class — through hyperinflation — puts millions and millions of people into impoverishment, stagnation and permanent dependence on the government. It can’t be what most immigrants want, and it’s IN NO WAY what most middle class Americans are prepared for.

It’s unkind to decimate the electric grid by passing laws requiring everyone to buy an electric car. Most cannot afford electric cars as it is; and the cost of electric cars will skyrocket once demand goes up with the government (for the most part) outlawing gas vehicles in many of our states (and in all of them if either Democrats or RINOs remain in charge of the federal government).

People say idiotic things like, “Well, socialism and environmentalism are the right thing, but they’re not really feasible.” No. Socialism and environmentalism are the WRONG thing. They are destructive of man’s rights, and they are an annihilation of our prosperity. Overnight, if implemented consistently (as they’re presently on a track to do, within a decade), they will turn America — and therefore the rest of the planet — into a third world country. China and Russia, since they possibly now have the superior military systems, will literally rule over us. Even if China and Russia do not presently have military superiority, America’s military will be ruined by a stagnant or collapsing economy, as Ronald Reagan correctly warned us back in the 1980s.

These ignorant, moronic fools voting for Democrats — since most of them are middle class, and vulnerable to everything I’m saying — are beyond persuasion. RINOs, establishment Republicans and frankly many people who call themselves limited government advocates (libertarians, “Objectivists”) are little better these days. They are so caught up in virtue signaling that “I’m a nice person because I don’t like Donald Trump” that they’re forgetting (or outright evading) what the actual issues are: Quite literally, the survival of life as we’ve always known it, especially in America.

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Socialism wins in Great Britain in a mega-landslide, maybe the biggest ever. How much more left can Britain go? 100 percent taxation (elites and politicians excluded)? White slavery? Mandatory Muslim practices for all citizens? Socialized everything? Immediate outlawing of fossil fuels? Collective farming? The King — a paleo Communist who thinks he’s enlightened — seems delighted. Maybe they can take 100 percent of the Royal family’s wealth to pay for it all. This will be interesting — and tragic — to watch. Britain was once the epicenter of civilization. The Mother Country is going down. It will not survive 5 years of this.

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Biden and Trump, ironically, will soon be in the same situation. The elites and the oligarchs who control America apparently want Biden out — Soros, the media, the government dominated corporations. He served his purpose. When THEY say he’s gone, he will be gone. It doesn’t matter if Biden wants to stay. He’s not the boss, and never was. Neither will his replacement. Kamala is just fine with that, just so she gets to be President, a now meaningless figurehead of a ruined republic. Michelle is greedy: She wants to be a real dictator. They still might get her in. Or Gavin. It really doesn’t matter. Without an actual revolution, we’re screwed. Yes, I will vote for Trump, assuming there’s even an election. But I am realistic.

Speculation aside: It’s no fun to watch America fall. But it is fun to watch the DemComs turn on each other — like the sociopathic savages they are!

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Richard Ruggiero asks a great question: “How is it, on Independence Day, the most sacred day of the year for me, so many people celebrate “the 4th of July” with barbecues and fireworks and at few of those parties do people actually read the Declaration of Independence and discuss the ideas of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Is it too intellectual an undertaking to understand the ideas which have made our lives possible and to transmit them to a younger generation?”

Sadly, the widespread cluelessness about the ideas and values required to sustain a free society are eventually what killed America. To me, the final proof came during the mass submission seen during COVID. Most think that freedom (and its magnificent side-effect, prosperity) will just go on, as if on automatic. They think it will go on despite the wrecking ball applied to our freedom daily by a wildly insane, out of control government — a government that millions of them will continue to support and vote for.

Boy, won’t most of them be surprised to wake up one day, especially under hyperinflation, and realize all that they lost. They still won’t understand why they lost it; and they will blame things like capitalism, Trump, “too few” taxes/regulations, Republicans and “climate change.” You can’t fix cluelessness of this magnitude.

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[The following was posted on Facebook, and the original source is unknown.]

What’s your favorite line from Star Trek?

There are two different lines from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Drumhead” which I have always really loved. Not because they are particularly brilliant rhetorically, but because of the underlying message they convey.

To quickly set it up for those who haven’t seen the episode, there is an explosion aboard the Enterprise and an investigation begins, headed by Admiral Norah Satie, a very well regarded Starfleet officer who has uncovered many conspiracies in her career.

She determines that a visiting Klingon officer was, in fact, a spy, and suspects that he — helped by members of the crew — was responsible for the explosion. Her investigation grows more paranoid and she starts to see conspirators everywhere, including a junior enlisted crewman who had lied about his supposedly Vulcan grandfather on his applications to Starfleet, in order to hide the fact that he was in fact Romulan.

The witch hunt completely spins out of control, and Captain Picard, who was at one time working well with her, decides to actively fight against her increasingly irrational investigation. After this, Satie calls him into her hearing and ends up accusing him of treason with no evidence.

Her outburst at the trial humiliates her in front of the Chief of Starfleet Security, who walks out of the hearing. She eventually leaves the ship in disgrace, and the Enterprise returns to normal.

The title of the episode comes from the concept of a “drumhead trial” where soldiers would dispense summary justice on the head of a drum, with no due process or respect for the rights of the accused. Satie, in this episode, was attempting to do the same thing.

Now that I’ve set this up, my first, and probably most favorite line comes from the end of the episode when Worf is talking to Captain Picard in the aftermath of the trial.

Worf: I believed her. I, I helped her. I did not see what she was.

Picard: Mister Worf, villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.

Worf: I think… after yesterday, people will not be so ready to trust her.

Picard: Maybe. But she, or someone like her, will always be with us, waiting for the right climate in which to flourish, spreading fear in the name of righteousness. Vigilance, Mister Worf – that is the price we have to continually pay.

Not only is that statement true, but what a wonderful way of putting it. And of course, the delightful Patrick Stewart’s Shakespearian delivery of the lines makes the whole thing all the better.

My second favorite line from this episode, and with it the franchise, is Picard’s speech at the trial itself.

After Satie says that she “questions [Picard’s] loyalties,” he calmly and quietly responds:

“You know, there are some words I’ve known since I was a schoolboy: With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie, as wisdom and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.”

After which she goes absolutely bonkers and starts ranting and raving about her father (who spoke the words Picard recited) and how she has “brought down bigger men than you, Picard!”

In this speech, Picard delivers a broadside against the disregard for personal liberty and human freedom, directly challenging the idea that society can tolerate abridgments in that freedom in the name of security.

And, might I say that both of these remarks, spoken in the early 1990s, proved to be eerily prescient about the coming societal debates we would be having less than a decade later, and beyond. Really top quality stuff, there.

Michael J. Hurd