Pun Salad

When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.

In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy projects was just a study, according to six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened. Johnson worried the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.

Republicans and their right-wing media propagandists have spent the last four years smearing President Joe Biden as mentally infirm. That argument keeps exploding in their faces when Biden appears before a national audience in debates and speeches, but the president’s mental acuity is a frequent subject of media attention, and polls show voters are concerned about Biden’s age.

That’s the context for the 3,000-plus-word investigation that The Wall Street Journal published Tuesday night, which concludes that “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping” based largely on the complaints of anonymous Republicans who hope Biden loses to Donald Trump in November so the party can implement its agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy, restrictions on abortions, and political retribution. The Republican National Committee, Trump’s campaign, and the legion of MAGA supporters, eager for a subject that isn’t their candidate's felony conviction, instantly jumped on the story.

[…] an examination of the report reveals a glaring problem: Most of the sources reporters Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes relied on were Republicans. In fact, buried in the story, the reporters themselves acknowledged that they had drawn their sweeping conclusion based on GOP sources who, obviously, have an incentive to make comments that will damage Biden’s candidacy.

Donald Trump’s allies in right-wing media have a problem ahead of CNN’s presidential debate: They’ve set the bar too low for President Joe Biden.

In the end, the Wall Street Journal piece with the spicy headline seemed to have more smoke than fire with one side of the aisle using a copy of the newspaper to fan the flames.

On the menu today: Now it can be told that plenty of people close to President Joe Biden have seen “a marked incidence of cognitive decline” in the past six months, that “an awful lot of major Democrats” have seen it but have publicly insisted that Biden is fine, and that Biden’s senior officials “curate the information being presented [to Biden] in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.” Last week, I wrote that Joe Biden is overdue to move to a retirement home. Now we learn that the White House is effectively operating like a retirement home — “Don’t tell Grandpa the bad news, it will only get him agitated.” It is more than fair to ask who’s really running the country if Biden has become so mentally, emotionally, and physically fragile that he can’t handle being told bad news. And yet for Democrats, the objective between now and Election Day is to figure out how to get you to forget what you’ve seen and heard over the past four days or so.

These are people, several of them, who are very close to President Biden, who love him, have supported and been among — among them are some people who have raised a lot of money for him. And they are adamant that what we saw the other night . . . is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed.

And what’s so significant is the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents, including some reporters, incidentally, who have witnessed some of them. But here we see tonight, as these people say, President Biden at his absolute best and yet these people who have supported him, loved him, campaigned for him, see him often say that in the last six months, particularly, there has been a marked incidence of cognitive decline and physical [decline]. . . .