Politicians aren't exactly the most honest human beings on the planet, but the doozy put over on the American public by the President, his handlers and of course, the Wonderful Ms. Kamala is pretty spectacular. Oops I forgot all the virtue signalers and Hollywood Illuminati who called us all degenerates if we didn't fall for their falsehoods.
"How can you help us as a nation bring dignity back to our conversations". Hmmm...by being able to chew chum and pat your head at the same time?
Seriously, I say the above in jest. I have the deepest respect for Ms Windrey, followed only by Bill Burr who's writing her new Biography.
The President Who Wasn’t There
What we’re learning about the Biden White House is reminiscent of Woodrow and Edith Bolling Wilson.
By Peggy Noonan, WSJ
Dec. 26, 2024 6:52 pm ET
We button up the astounding year with the scandal of 2024, which won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.
The story is the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity, a word we use because it sounds both clinical and polite, and by which we mean the president has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn’t fully up to the job. His family and friends, top White House staff and other administration officials covered it up. Some no doubt thought his presidency was good for the country and some, perhaps, good for them.
In a front-page story this month, the Journal’s Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer and Siobhan Hughes spoke to nearly 50 people in and around the presidency and outlined how the White House adapted to the needs of “a diminished leader.” He met infrequently with cabinet members and congressional leaders, and the president’s staff seemed to be running things. This system “insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.”
The whole thing came crashing down on June 27, during the presidential debate in which the country finally saw what those in the White House saw every day: Mr. Biden had lost more than a step. He was too old to function as a fully engaged and hands-on president.
This resurrected the story of Woodrow Wilson, who in 1919, almost three years into his second term, was incapacitated by what was likely a series of strokes. His wife and top aides misled the public as to his condition, which forever colored Wilson’s legacy and darkened the historical reputation of First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson.
The historian A. Scott Berg is among the biographers who trace the conspiracy to suppress accurate information to Mrs. Wilson. In his judicious and comprehensive “Wilson,” published in 2013, Mr. Berg writes that she failed to acknowledge that during the president’s illness “she executed the physical and most of the mental duties of the office.” She “enshrouded the Presidency in as much secrecy as possible.” Some of those around her assumed duties the president had once performed himself. The president grew depressed, his thinking “faintly delusional.” Some of his actions were “highly questionable.” American foreign policy grew rudderless.
Mrs. Wilson told it differently in “My Memoir,” published in 1939. The president, she reports, developed severe headaches while barnstorming the country in late September 1919 to build public support for the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. One night, on the train to Denver, the pain became unbearable. (It is on this journey he might have suffered a mild stroke or strokes.) The press was told he was under the weather; the presidential party raced back to Washington. In the White House, an urgent message came from an agent of the British government: he had important information for the president. Mrs. Wilson said he wasn’t feeling well, she’d take the information and tell it to the president, and later she would make his response available.
And so it began. On the morning of Oct. 2, the president collapsed unconscious in the bathroom. He’d had an ischemic stroke, a blood clot in the brain. “For days life hung in the balance,” Mrs. Wilson writes. She doesn’t say she informed the vice president. When she thought her husband out of danger she asked doctors whether he should continue as president. “Many people, among them some I had counted as friends, have written of my overwhelming ambition to act as President.” No, she says, she pressed doctors for an assessment “so as to be honest with the people.” The doctors, she writes, “all said that as the brain was as clear as ever, . . . there was every reason to think recovery possible.”
He’d need complete rest. He must be released from every disturbing problem. She says she noted that presidents by definition face disturbing problems. She puts responsibility for what followed on Francis Dercum of Philadelphia, a neurologist. She quotes him: “Madam, it is a grave situation but I think you can solve it. Have everything come to you; weigh the importance of each matter, and see if it is possible by consultation with the respective heads of the Departments to solve them without the guidance of your husband.” She says she pushed back: Shouldn’t the president resign and get “the complete rest that is so vital to his life”?
No, says the stout Dr. Dercum. “For Mr. Wilson to resign would have a bad effect on the country.” Also on his recovery: he lived for his mission. “As his mind is clear as crystal he can still do more with even a maimed body than any one else.” The president had surely discussed public affairs with her, the doctor said. She’ll be good at it.
She was quick to take his guidance. “So began my stewardship.” She studied every paper, report, communiqué, translated them into “tabloid form,” decided which should go to the president. “I, myself, never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs.” (Interesting use of commas.) She decided “what was important and what was not.” The president, she says, gave her verbal replies, and she would take care of “transmitting his views” to cabinet members and lawmakers.
She closed the house and grounds to the public. She was with the president when an official was allowed in so there would be no “misunderstanding” on what was said. But a “whispering campaign” fanned by enemies never stopped. The Wilsons departed the White House on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1921. (Mrs. Wilson found Florence Harding loud and highly rouged.) Woodrow Wilson lived another three years, but the Wilsons’ historical reputation was never the same.
Nor will the Bidens’ be.
I end speculating on why the Biden White House and those close to them might have felt justified in misleading the public about the president’s true state. It isn’t only “Trump,” and “Biden’s the only one who can unite the party and beat him.” It was Ronald Reagan. It is Democratic Party gospel, their deep belief, that Reagan while president, certainly in the last years of his presidency, was neurologically damaged, that his Alzheimer’s had already begun, that he was an old man of 77 who was barely there.
Here I ask those reading online to hit on this link to Reagan’s last news conference as president. For those not online, it’s available at the Reagan Library site. Watch it.
That news conference took place on Dec. 8, 1988, six weeks before he left office. It was live, in prime time, wide-ranging, and covered the world. Compare it with what you have seen of Mr. Biden the past few years.
Political parties, like people, must beware the stories they tell themselves, the stories they weave and come to believe that just are not true. The not-true ones can get you in terrible trouble, especially the ones you use to justify your actions and that make poor personal motives seem noble.
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