The New York Times Signs On To Biden-Is-In-Decline

At Hot Air:

Have you noticed that there seems to be a campaign emerging to second guess Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection? . . . Over the weekend, two major newspapers published editorials pointing out that Biden’s age cannot be ignored.

. . . Concerns about Biden’s age are legit, says the NYT editorial.

This is behind a paywall, and like the Wall Street Journal's version, it says nothing new. What's important is that received opinion is deciding Biden isn't working out, but they're settling on a version that absolves them of complicity. Yes, they supported Biden in 2020 (in the WSJ's case, implicitly by being never-Trump) but that was before Biden went into his terrible decline. How were we to know? This isn't the candidate we told you to vote for!

But the recoxrd is pretty plain that Biden's shortcomings were visible well before this year. As of 2008:

Rolling Stone magazine's Ben Wallace-Wells related an amusing anecdote about Obama attending his first meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which happened to be a confirmation hearing for Condoleezza Rice.

About midway through the meeting, Joe Biden is "going on and on" and Obama scribbles a note and passes it back to his aide.

The note said simply: "SHOOT. ME. NOW."

Although the anecdote was told in 2008, Rice's confirmation hearing took place in 2005. Yesterday I linked to a TIME piece from 2019 that, in discussing Biden's unimpressive start in his presidential campaign that year, linked farther back to a 1987 post-mortem on his disastrous first presidential campaign, where observers were concerned that he was a "shallow vessel", and whose staffers discounted his gaffes by claiming he was on "autopilot".

What we've begun to learn only more recently has been the decades-long family influence-peddling grift, and in connection with the grift, the wild overspending that's so far been most visible with Hunter, but the extent of the back-door financial relationships throughout the Biden extended family has yet to be revealed with any clarity. As Hunter's ex-wife Kathleen Buhle put it in excerpts from her memoir,

After filing for divorce in 2016, Buhle begins the slow process of taking back control over her own life after 23 years as a stay-at-home mom, including over her own finances, only to discover that they had no savings whatsoever. “Both our houses had a double mortgage and no equity. We had credit card debt and medical bills. We were in terrible financial shape. The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me. We owed as much for both houses as when we’d bought them. We were underwater,” she writes.

But it's increasingly likely that Hunter's financial issues had metastasized further throughout the Biden family:

There could be upwards of 12 Biden family members who benefitted from influence peddling by the president and his son, according to the top Republican on the Oversight Committee.

. . . There are nine known family members involved in the shady business deals, according to [Chairman James] Comer, but he now says there could be at least three more.

. . . 'I mean, this was the Biden family influence peddling scheme,' the chairman from Kentucky continued. 'And when people say, well, they were involved in ventures around the world, I haven't found a legitimate business on the Biden end.'

. . . He said these decisions and moves are likely related to payments made to LLCs from legitimate businesses as a way to launder money to Biden's family members.

'I found legitimate businesses that were paying the LLCs that were then turning around and laundering the money back to the Bidens,' Comer detailed. 'But I haven't found any legitimate business dealings on the Biden end.'

. . . 'This is bad. There are more laws that appear to me that have been broken than just tax evasion. And there are a lot more Bidens involved than just the president's son and his brother.'

I noted yesterday that we know very little about Joe's rapid rise to the Senate from an unsuccessful attorney to obscure member of a local county council, although a brief review of those early years suggests he was able to garner support in what Alan Dershowitz calls a highly corrupt Delaware legal environment.

The question in my mind is how all of this is such a big surprise. What's coming out is that Biden has in fact been the same guy for decades. His sister Valerie has run most of his campaigns throughout his career, and it appears that much of his extended family has been in on the grift for the same amount of time. Hunter was actually a latecomer. Ted Kaufman, a DuPont retainer, was a Biden adviser from his first Senate campaign until he became Joe's successor in his Senate seat. Kathy Chung, recently interviewed by Chairman Comer's committee, is another lifelong Biden functionary

If there's been nothing new in Bidenworld, why haven't we had coverage of Biden as he is now and always has been well before now? I'm deeply suspicious of this new explanation that Biden is "in decline".