Keep in mind above all that the media has turned on Joe Biden because he threatens the prospects of the Democratic Party in November. Once Joe is gone, the media will return its partisan and demagogic fire on Trump and Republicans. See if you can spot the subtle differences in today’s example:
This week the media is acting as though they are the successors of Woodward and Bernstein in Watergate with the revelation that a neurologist visited the White House eight times late last year and early this year. But in fact this information was always available to anyone who took the trouble to look at the publicly available White House visitor logs. Fox News and a few other outlets have for more than a year been asking for information of who might be visiting Biden on his long weekends at the beach in Delaware (which is not disclosed), and finally this week this question is being asked, and the White House is saying—nope, no weekend visits by neurologists, or Hunter’s favorite pharmacists. Nothing to see here.
Say what you will about Woodward and Bernstein and their puffed up reputations, but they did contact dozens if not hundreds of potential sources in their obsession to bring down Nixon. And now?
Here’s an interesting fact from the good folks at Open the Books: Biden’s White House staff is the largest in decades, with about 560 people. But here’s the really curious detail in their report: there has been a 77 percent turnover rate in Biden’s staff. 435 staff people have left in the first three and an half years. This strikes me as an unusually high amount of turnover. What accounts for it? Moreover, with this many former White House staff people floating around, you’d think at least one reporter would be calling as many of them as possible for leads about Biden and the workings of Biden’s White House.
So far only the Wall Street Journal‘s news team, which was flayed alive by other media when they reported two months ago that Biden was “slipping,” seems to be digging deeper with present and past White House staff:
Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history.
The White House has limited Biden’s daily itinerary and shielded him from impromptu exchanges. Advisers have restricted news conferences and media appearances, twice declining Super Bowl halftime interviews—an easy way to reach millions of voters—and sought to make sure meetings with donors stuck to scripted pleasantries.
Senior aides dismissed travel suggestions over worries the president didn’t have the stamina for them, including an idea for Biden to make weekly cross-country trips in 2022 to tout the benefits of his infrastructure law.
This part of the WSJ story is notable:
Biden has had fewer small meetings with lawmakers as his term has gone on, visitor logs show.
German officials, aware of Biden’s fatigue at night, sought to accommodate the president by planning a June 2022 event with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the early evening.
The informal event, a soiree at the Alpine resort Schloss Elmau during the Group of Seven summit, was arranged as a confidential meeting on Ukraine in a relaxed setting. Biden didn’t show, surprising the chancellor and his aides, officials said. Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived and announced that Biden had to go to bed, according to two people who were there.
Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, denied that Blinken said Biden had to go to bed. “Secretary Blinken never said that or anything like it,” he said.
A U.S. official said the White House indicated early on that Biden wouldn’t attend. The official disputed the characterization that Blinken was standing in for the president.
And about that Biden White House staff: Our pal Mark Perry has done his annual review of White House staff salaries, and guess what? Apparently the Biden White House is a den of sexist pigs because women staff only make 80 cents for every $1 a male staff person makes. Shouldn’t someone ask Karine Jean-Pierre Paul-Sartre about this? Her answer could be one for the record books.
