Joe Biden was both senile and cancer-ridden during the last years of his presidency. That much is absolutely clear. According to "Original Sin," the new book from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Biden was exhibiting signs of senility for years; his staff worked to cover it up, and a compliant media did its least to investigate. This week, we found out that Biden also has stage four prostate cancer, which has already metastasized to his bones. There is virtually no way that nobody knew about the cancer until this week; prostate cancer is a slow-moving cancer that is easily detected by routine PSA tests.
This is, to put it mildly, one of the biggest scandals in American history.
The scandal raises a series of serious questions.
The first is obvious: Who the hell was running the White House while Joe Biden's brain wasn't working? The obvious suspects include Dr. Jill Biden, who must have known about Biden's senility and yet continued to press him to run for president; Mike Donilon, former Biden adviser; Jeffrey Zients, Biden's chief of staff; and even Hunter Biden, President Biden's closest confidante. In fact, according to "Original Sin," the answer appears to be the convicted felon and former crack addict: Tapper explained this week, "He was almost like a chief of staff ... It's bizarre because I think he is provably, demonstrably unethical, sleazy, and prone to horrible decisions." Well, yes.
The second question is similarly obvious: How long did the Biden family know about Biden's infirmity? Where the hell was Dr. Jill? Where was Hunter? Or were they all so focused on grifting off the family name that they couldn't be bothered to truly care for their ailing patriarch? That question turns extraordinarily dark when we consider the question of Biden's cancer. Was Biden deprived of necessary treatment? Did he go undiagnosed because the family didn't want to know the answer? We do know that the Biden family has covered up cancer before: when Beau Biden, then the attorney general of Delaware, was suffering from brain cancer, the family worked to lie about it.
Then there's a third question: Where the hell was the legacy media while all of this was happening? The job of the media is to investigate signs and symptoms of corruption or misconduct. It was perfectly obvious to everyone with a prefrontal cortex and working retinas that Joe Biden was in dire mental condition by 2022. Why weren't the media demanding answers? Were they so committed to the defeat of Donald Trump and the Republicans that they decided to simply look the other way ... until precisely the moment Biden's condition became undeniable, the first debate with Donald Trump?
Finally, there's a fourth question: Who can be trusted at this point? It's easy to point to the Democrats' cover-up of Biden's ailments as proof of their unique dishonesty. But the reality is less comforting: self-interest and malfeasance are human universals -- and if the American public are to know the truth about any of their elected officials, they require systems that demand answers. This means, at the very least, that Congress ought to immediately pass a bill demanding yearly complete and transparent physical and mental tests on the president. Our government was not built on trust; it was built on checks and balances. And the fact that the president of the United States was not the president for years, in the face of the blaring light of public attention, shows that our checks and balances have utterly failed. The greatest sign of an imperial presidency is that the president is so unanswerable that he can be nearly clinically dead in public without serious repercussion.
Enough is enough. Americans' trust has been abused over and over and over again over the course of the last decade. And it's not enough simply to blame those who abused that trust. It's time to rebuild systems that verify. And that requires actual forethought, honesty and realism about the flaws in human nature -- and the willingness of the politically motivated to justify just about anything in the name of desired ends.
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