“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.“

—George Orwell, “1984”

The increasing tendency of the Axis of Unethical Conduct—you know, the “resistance,” Democrats, and the mainstream media—to adopt totalitarian tactics to try to deal with the failure of the Biden Presidency and its alleged author’s obvious mental and physical deterioration is now nearing Code Red status. I wonder what more it will take to alarm partisan progressives sufficiently to have them slap their foreheads and exclaim, “What the hell am I doing? THESE people are the ones who threaten democracy!” If the latest bombardment of astounding “it isn’t what it is” denials doesn’t provoke that response, one has to despair that nothing will. Facts don’t matter.”Res ipsa loquitur” is dead to these zombies.

Insisting that what should be obvious to anyone isn’t real is unethical. Why should I even have to write that?

In three recent incidents caught on video, President Biden appeared confused, dazed, or just hopelessly doddering at public events. One took place at the G7 in Italy, as Biden appeared to wander off during a parachuting exhibition until he was tapped on the shoulder and lead back to the group by Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni. The other two are shown above: in one, Biden is led shuffling off stage by Barack Obama who appears to be leading and steadying the President. In the other, Biden stands oddly motionless with a frozen smile on his face as those around him bop to the music at a White House Juneteenth event.

All three episodes are subject to interpretation and confirmation bias. However, Biden has appeared doddering, unsteady, confused and dazed many, many times going back to before the 2020 election. He also mutters, slurs his words, and sometimes descends into gibberish. Even though one could, if one were desperate enough, insist that there is no reason at all to doubt the President’s mental fitness and health (another relevant context: he refuses to take a mental acuity exam) the Axis’s strategy for deflecting perceptions of reality sufficiently to get Biden re-elected has now shifted into an alarming new stage.

White House’s paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre earned her money by playing Baghdad Bob and explaining the incidents by insisting to the White House press corps that they didn’t happen. “They are cheap fakes video, they are done in bad faith and, and some of your news organizations have been very clear, have stressed that these right-wing, the right-wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because of the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation,” she said. “And so we see this and this is something coming from your part of the world, calling them cheap fakes and misinformation. And I’ll quote the Washington Post where they wrote, they wrote about this and they said how ‘Republican used misleading videos to attack Biden in a 24 hour period.'”

The risible claim is that the videos were selectively edited to make Biden look bad. The one that troubles me the most is the Juneteenth clip you can see above. It’s creepy. Biden looks like a cardboard cut-out of himself for a disturbingly long period. That prior to that period and after it he may have been behaving like a normal human being is irrelevant, and not including the pre- and post- zone-out doesn’t make the videos “cheap fakes.”

Of course the White House called on the its captive news media to endorse this latest Orwellian tactic. The Associated Press yesterday issued an alleged “fact-check” on the video of Obama walking Biden off-stage. It wasn’t a fact check at all; it consisted of citing a single anonymous source who attended the event who insisted that the President was just fine. That’s not a fact check, as the issue is what appears on video, not what some in the audience thought about it or said about it later. The Washington Post story Karine cited—imagine using the Post as an unbiased, objective authority regarding the Biden Presidency!— was headlined, “How Republicans used ‘cheap fake’ videos to attack Biden over 24 hours.” It claimed that the GOP and its conservative journalist allies used “deceptively edited videos — known as ‘cheap fakes’ because they misrepresent events simply by manipulating video or audio, or by leaving out context,” to portray the 81-year-old president as a doddering old man at the D-Day commemoration ceremonies in France. The Post called this “the latest example of the fast spread of politically damaging manipulated videos, highlighting … the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

But Biden really did look disoriented at the D-Day events, and many observers commented on it. The Juneteenth concert zone-out occurred the same day the Post’s attempted cover-up was published. If you can stand it and your sock drawer is in order, watch the whole 90 minute video: the Biden blotto freeze occurs about 18 minutes into it. How can anyone call that fake?

Answer: They can call that fake because they are panicked, they are desperate, they lie, they have no shame, and they think the public will swallow anything while the media will aide and abet their gaslighting. That Joe Biden is just this side of being a zucchini is, in my set of concerns, far less troubling than the Axis trying to make the public think he’s fit and a fiddle. This is Soviet Union stuff.

Then there’s the flagrant double standard. The Washington Examiner points out that on also the same day as the Juneteenth event, Washington Post columnist mega-hack (but he’s black and won a Pulitzer Prize!) Eugene Robinson authored a piece headlined, “Is Donald Trump OK?” As usual, the trigger was one of Trump’s more absurd spontaneous riffs, this one in a June 9 speech in Las Vegas. He was talking about government efforts to promote electric engines for cars and boats, and Trump mused about what happens if the boat sinks and its electric battery is submerged in water, facetiously claiming that those own the unfortunate boat would face electrocution or a shark attack. He was making fun of the government climate change mandates, and, as is often the case with Trump, exaggerating to make a point. But to the “Get Trump!” Axis propaganda merchants, that story, which Trump inexplicably likes, is “proof that Trump is dangerously deranged.” The Examiner writes,

The Atlantic published not one but two stories discussing the battery-shark tale. One was headlined “Trump Rants About Sharks, and Everyone Just Pretends It’s Normal,” and the other was “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish.” In the Washington Post, Robinson wrote, “It is irresponsible to obsess over President Biden’s tendency to mangle a couple of words in a speech while Donald Trump is out there sounding detached from reality.” Trump’s condition, Robinson concluded, “is a much bigger problem than Biden fumbling a name or garbling a sentence.”

The ones who are trying to detach everyone from reality are those claiming that the evidence of the President’s creeping dementia is all faked and solely in the imagination of conservative conspiracy theorists. It’s like Hunter Biden’s laptop: the Axis is hoping its false narratives can convince enough voters that the issue isn’t real until after the election, and then the Post et al. will say, “Oh, by the way, Biden is missing a few puzzle pieces after all.”

This is the version of democracy Democrats and progressives say they are trying to protect. It is the opposite of democracy.