Axis hack #1…

Ezra Klein!

Axis hack #2…

Ethics Villain, CNN’s Jake Tapper!

Almost exactly a year ago, I excoriated the New York Times and Public Enemy Ezra Klein, the infamous “advocacy journalist” responsible for founding uber-Axis propaganda organ Vox, for a wildly unethical Klein disinformation piece titled, “Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It).” Guess what Klein didn’t see as a reason Biden was behind in the polls. Somehow, the fact that the alleged President was obviously suffering from dementia escaped his notice. (Suuuure it did…). The closest Klein got to that flaming, throbbing, flashing red alarm was “Voters think Biden is too old.” Just voters, mind you! I wrote, “[Biden’s] obviously declining mentally, and any fool can see he’s too old to hold any job, much less the most difficult one in the country.” But Ezra Klein, who was not declining mentally (and couldn’t possibly decline ethically, except into negative numbers), actually argued that Biden should do more debates with Trump, not just two, and that “all Biden needs to do is persuade enough voters that he is more capable than the erratic criminal defendant across the stage, who turns 78 next month.” What Klein meant was that all the complicit partisan media hacks—like Klein—had to do was to hide Biden’s incapacity from voters until election day. And that’s what they tried to do, except that Biden couldn’t even get through one debate without making it plain that his brain was mush.

Now, a year later, Klein interviewed Ethics Villain Jake Tapper, who moderated that debate, on his podcast. Megan Kelly Klein is not. Together, the Partisan Propagandist and the Audacious Hypocrite (basically, Tapper’s stance as he profits from “exposing” the conspiracy to dupe voters in which he was complicit is akin to the proverbial man who murders his parents and pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan) come up with this vomit-inducing excuse: they were the victim of “groupthink.”

“Like a lot of people, I was worried about Biden’s age when he ran for President in 2020,” Klein writes in his introduction to the interview. 2020? He wrote that Biden’s age was beginning to be a concern to voters in 2024! Then: “So after he won, I found myself continuously asking top White House staffers: How’s the president? How is he in meetings? What’s his energy like?” And receiving the obligatory, “He’s sharp as a tack!” cover story, Klein did…nothing, just like Tapper.

“These are people I had known for a long time. I didn’t think they were lying to me. But the harder question, in retrospect, was whether they were lying to themselves,” Klein then writes, lying his head off. Who did Klein think he was, a Boy Scout earning his journalism merit badge? He knew and knows that politicians and White House aides lie as often as they breathe. If what he saw in videos and heard on recordings made it clear—and it was clear—that Biden was not “sharp as a tack” bur rather as Robert Hur later described him, a confused, doddering old man, it was Klein’s obligation to 1) investigate, 2) expose the lie and 3) inform the public, who needed to know. Ah, but he was a victim of “groupthink” just like the staffers! Right.

Here’s what the group was thinking: “We lose our power and influence if anyone finds out that we’ve been manipulating a puppet President, so we have to make sure everyone thinks Donald Trump is a threat to democracy even while we are defying democracy. Luckily, we have the support of most of the news media, like Jake Tapper and Vox, while we try to pull this vast plot off.”

Now Ezra’s spin is that it was all such a dilemma. “In the last couple of months, I feel like I’ve watched a new conventional wisdom solidify. When I was writing pieces about how Biden shouldn’t run again, I got raked over the coals,” He writes. A note is prudent here: he wrote that Biden shouldn’t run again because he thought Biden would lose. He never wrote, “The man is a walking vegetable, and incidentally, who’s running the country?” Back to Ezra: “I will say it was definitely not something everybody believed.”

Me: Oh yeah? On what do you base that statement, since we know now that everyone allowed to deal with Biden did know how far gone he was?

” But now the argument is that everybody knew he was incapable of handling the job of the presidency — that they knew it and they were covering it up,” Klein writes. “Was there a cover-up?”

Me: Of course there was a cover-up! How dare you even ask that question now?

Klein: “A cover-up would at least reveal the core of cold rationality to this system. It would mean that people dealing with Biden every single day knew the truth, saw it clearly and decided to lie…In a way, that would be more comforting than what I think actually happened. So there are questions here that are relevant, long beyond the Biden campaign. How do you see what is right in front of your eyes when you don’t want to see it? How do you not let loyalty — to a person, to a party, to a cause — blind you?”

And from there, Klein and Tapper proceed to metaphorically lick each other’s genitals. “Thank you. What a pleasure!” Jake says after an interview engineered to avoid calling him out—and calling out the rest of American journalism—for allowing a fake Presidency to screw up the nation and tilt us toward totalitarianism for four years.

Your gift link is here. It’s long, but do read it to learn just hwo disgusting and vile these people are. “Enemies of the people” to the core. We must not let the Times, Klein, Tapper, their co-conspirators and the Democratic Party get away with this.

Added: Today, I see the Times is still spinning. “[Tapper’s] book’s subtitle claims that the efforts amounted to a cover-up,” writes Times reporter John Koblin. “Claims”???? The book describes a cover-up, and one that fair and objective Americans observed and recognized as it unfolded! Then, “Intentionally or not, by being an author of a major book on the subject, Mr. Tapper has allowed himself to become a symbol of the establishment press that conservatives have long accused of hiding the former president’s frailty from the public.” “Accused”???? Republicans pounce! The “establishment press” did try to hide Biden’s dementia from the public; so far, only Tapper has chosen to try to profit from his attempt at public deception and manipulation.