Interesting, and not just in the Now you tell us sense that Mark Hemingway flagged today — and for good reason.
Outgoing NBC anchor Chuck Todd and former Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt look back on the absolute disaster around Joe Biden and the upcoming accountability in both the Democrat Party and the media. Todd and Schmidt even get around to discussing the upcoming Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson quasi-exposé Original Sin, which bases the scandal of the 2024 campaign on the idea that the decision to run for a second term.
Nonsense, Todd argues. The actual original sin is that Biden ran at all, and not just in the context of his cognitive decline. Todd points out that the Hunter Biden trial made it clear that the Biden family knew damned well that Biden’s children all had substance-abuse issues, and still decided to drag the family out into a national campaign anyway. Todd calls that decision a “craven” attempt to pursue Biden’s personal ambition of nearly 50 years without considering the damage it would do, not just to the country but to the people Biden supposedly cared about.
And that’s an angle that we haven’t heard, or at least not much:
Chuck Todd and Steve Schmidt unleashed: Joe Biden and his crackhead children edition
Steve also takes a swipe at the Lincoln Project. pic.twitter.com/4hJJFTFCij
— The Researcher (@listen_2learn) March 3, 2025
TODD: Joe Biden never should have been there in the first place. Number one, he shouldn’t have run for president. I completely got so angry at Joe Biden the man when I read the transcript of the Hunter Biden trial. And when I realized that not one, not two, but three Biden children — and I count Beau’s widow — were all dealing with drug problems in 2018, and Joe Biden and Jill Biden said, ‘Now’s a perfect time to run for president. Who cares about our family?’
I have to tell you something about Joe Biden. There’s this mythology about Joe Biden that the man cared so much. It’s all bulls***. This man supposedly cared so much about his family that he commuted every day. This man cared so much about his political career that he commuted every day. Right? I could take the same fact, and we’ve created a myth — and he did it for forty years, God bless him, that he was this incredible family man. And instead, what he was was a craven political animal [crosstalk].
The man considered a run for president every four years he was eligible. You know why he didn’t run in ’76? He wasn’t 35 yet. That’s the only reason.
Ahem. Who created the mythology, and who perpetrated and amplified it? Granted, we didn’t have the Hunter trial transcript in 2019, but the whole Family Man and Deeply Empathetic Figure mythology got repeated ad nauseam by the Protection Racket Media. That includes NBC as well as MSNBC, and that includes Chuck Todd — or at least Todd wasn’t contradicting it at the time. Hence Hemingway’s cogent sneer at this late admission, but to be fair, no one in the mainstream media is bothering to make Todd’s point about Biden’s Macbeth-esque ambitions nor Jill Biden’s efforts at playing Lady Macbeth even now.
Hemingway’s criticism is even more on point in relation to the issue of Biden’s senility. It turns out that Todd had been warned — by a Biden cabinet secretary, no less — that Biden was in no shape to run for a second term. That warning came in 2022, not 2023 or 2024, and came with the admission that the other Cabinet secretaries couldn’t get a one-on-one meeting with Biden. The only exception was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Todd suggests that was only because Blinken was “in on it,” meaning the cover-up of Biden’s senility. This sequence starts around the 6:40 mark:
Everyone knew Joe Biden was in cognitive decline. The state media just didn’t talk about it and now they are paying the price for their dishonesty which is Trump 2.0. Chuck Todd said Tony Blinken was in on the cover-up.
Chuck and Todd also talk about Ukraine, censorship and… pic.twitter.com/0YAt5mFaHR
— The Researcher (@listen_2learn) March 3, 2025
Todd rips the “Baghdad Bob” West Wing with their Sharp As A Tack® messaging and then claims credit for making the country aware of Biden’s senility. “It was us who reported that Biden was taking the short stairs,” meaning on Air Force One. But that’s not really accurate either. The cameras may have shown that, but the “reporters” exerted themselves mightily to put it into “context” and amplify the Baghdad Bob messaging. The networks all castigated anyone who dared ask the question that those images clearly demonstrated by talking about Biden’s childhood stutter instead. Even Schmidt can’t swallow that explanation, pointing out that the “best Joe Biden ever” narrative originated on Todd’s own network, which Todd attempts to deflect it as “idiot colleagues.”
He also deflects it to the White House press corps, which is currently arguing about their necessity for transparency:
SCHMIDT: In the day-to-day game, I think you would have asked different questions if you were in the briefing room.
TODD: Well, I think the briefing room — I think that press corps let us down. I completely agree.
It seems to me that this gets the problem backwards. The briefing room deals with daily messaging from the White House; the anchors and the analysts are supposed to deal with the bigger picture. If Todd wasn’t getting access to Biden, he should have made that more public. (Same for Harris, for that matter.)
But if Todd was being told in 2022 that hardly anyone was getting direct access to Biden even in key executive positions, that was NEWS in all caps. It would have been the greatest constitutional crisis in American history, or at least since Woodrow Wilson’s stroke. Why didn’t Todd or NBC dive into that with the same zest that they did with the Russia-collusion hoax? That should have prompted a full-blown investigative journalism effort to determine whether the elected president had become a puppet, and if so, for whose purposes.
Instead, we are only now hearing about this because accountability is coming despite the efforts of the Protection Racket Media, not because of it. And thus far, the media’s reaction to it is still to create responsibility-deflecting narratives that have at least a slight odor of Baghdad Bobism themselves.
It’s still an interesting conversation, and worth considering. However, it’s not entirely convincing either.
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