"Sir, there is something on your chin," read the aide's discreet note, whereupon President Biden swiped something yellow off his face with his finger, peered closely at the little blob of goo, and then proceeded to nonchalantly pop it into his mouth.
I guess it could have been worse. Biden could have been choking on his own word salad again, and the aide, perhaps privy to a recent top-secret PET scan, could have discreetly written "Sir, you have swiss cheese for a brain. When you refer to the talking points that we so carefully write down for you on your cue card, could you just for once also please remember to keep it out of camera range?"
Luckily for Biden, neither the gross food/bodily secretion recycling incident nor any other "gaffes" are receiving any coverage at all in establishment liberal media. You just have to grit your teeth and hold your nose and gingerly descend into the deepest depths of right-wing and click-bait media like Yahoo!, Fox, and the The Daily Mail to see either the above clip or the recent suggestion by former White House physician and current congress-critter Ronny Jackson that Biden should be subject to emergency cognitive testing. Of course, given that Jackson had also once opined that the overweight and hypertensive Donald Trump would live to be a hundred, you can pretty much rest assured that his concern about what could be early signs of dementia in Biden are not altruistically medical, but crassly political.
On the other hand, you can also rest assured that if it had been Trump oafishly wolfing down a glob of mystery goo that he'd just picked off his face, it would have been trending at Number One on CNN, the most trusted name in nooze. That's why it's always a good idea to get your nooze from the entire duopolistic spectrum of A to B, the better to bypass all the censorship by omission while at the same time using your own critical thinking skills to sidestep all the virtual La Brea tarpits bubbling over with gooey propaganda. Swallowing whole, no matter how outrage-inducing or delectable that any given nooze-morsel might seem at first glance, is not only a choking hazard, it can wreak havoc with your overloaded information digestive system.
That's a daunting prospect for sure, especially given that most of us are too beaten down by neoliberalism and too worried about our own precarious lives to indulge in media criticism as yet another side-gig. But here's where we might finally be getting lucky ourselves.
On the surface, it might seem lucky for Biden that he is still being treated with kid gloves by the liberal establishment media. But anybody with a functioning brain can also plainly see that their myriad official narratives have so many holes in them that they're collapsing faster than an overbeaten swiss cheese souffle. When powerful establishment figures start turning on each other, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now turning on the White House for not extending the national eviction moratorium, that leaves a fleeting power vacuum that the rest of us can and must fill.
When progressive "squad" maven Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is so cowed by Medicare For All agitators that she has to close her district office, she has received the message that her pithy tweets against Republicans don't cut it any more. She should be smart enough to realize that unless the "progressive" wing of the House of "Representatives" uses its very real leverage in the here and now, she might even lose her seat.
Notwithstanding the establishment media's tacit agreement to ignore Biden's cognitive issues, the role of the establishment media as a government mouthpiece is beginning to wobble. There is widespread agreement that both the White House and its private corporate partners jumped the gun in declaring victory over the pandemic early this summer, as they made a euphoric return to "normal" their highest priority. Watching the poobahs undercut each other on mask-wearing, eviction moratoriums and the spread of the virus even among the vaccinated is a sign that the ruling class is weakening, at least insofar as their propaganda narratives are concerned. They all look bad, because they're all, in fact, guilty of putting profits over people. Nothing points to their cynical self-dealing more than the current eviction crisis.
Take the White House's pathetic rationale for not extending the eviction moratorium. Since Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a majority opinion upholding the moratorium that any further extension would require an act of Congress, Biden's flouting of this judicial opinion could, his legal minions claim, lead to the Court overthrowing further executive public health actions, possibly even declaring that in the future, no president can ever again declare a public health emergency for any reason whatsoever. The Black Plague could make a comeback and wipe out half the population, and the US president still would be powerless to order a mass lockdown. Therefore, Biden claims he has no other choice but to let millions of people lose the roofs over their heads during the current pandemic. It's a flimsy claim at best.
Now, if Biden were really proactive, he would have attempted to overhaul the court by now, so that reactionary ideologues like Brett Kavanaugh would not have such outsize power to effectively dictate public policy.
Instead, Status Quo Joe did the cynical thing. He appointed a commission to study Supreme Court reform, and he even appointed a stalwart Brett Kavanaugh defender to sit on it, all but ensuring that, once again, "nothing will fundamentally change."
Just as Biden punted tenant protections to Congress just as they were leaving for their summer vacation, he is now using the Supreme Court as another excuse to do nothing. As The Nation's Elie Mystal writes,
Perhaps even more troubling, instead of balancing some of the center-left people on the commission with more, or any, outspoken advocates of court reform, Biden went the other way and put Federalist Society scholars and judges in there to drag the whole thing to the right. I cannot recall the last time a Republican president bothered even to consult a Democratic voice, never mind a genuinely left voice, on how to proceed with a matter related to the Supreme Court. But Democrats continue to act like they need a hall pass from Republicans before they take any action.
If Biden didn't have the Court as his partner in crime, he can always fall back on such useful idiots as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, not to mention Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough, all but designated by Biden as America's official Pope-Queen for her power to impede Democratic reconciliation bills. This is legislation introduced by the ultra-slim liberal majority to great fanfare, great grandstanding, and most important of all, great re-election fundraising campaigns to show how much they care and how hard they are fighting for us.
But, gosh darn it, their poor grasping hands are tied. They like to say they're being thwarted by those nasty old Republicans. But let's get real. It is more obvious with every passing day that these supposed handcuffs are nothing but cheap canned silly string.
They all have egg on their faces, not to mention the ice water mush flowing sluggishly through their tortuous veins.
