chill the fuck out, Joe Biden’s got this

last night, Joe took an hour-long cognitive test on live TV

French President Emmanuel Macron has a question for the rabid jackals of the Washington press corps: what the fuck is wrong with you?

Europe’s leaders have been in DC this week to commemorate the 75th anniversary of NATO’s founding, and the engorged dung-beetles of the corporate-controlled media have had only one question for them: how can you stand to work with icky old Joe Biden who smells like a dead person and probably doesn’t even know where he is?

here’s Macron, totally bewildered by the question.

“I don’t understand your question… he’s my counterpart, he’s the President of the United States, and we are happy to have him as the President of the United States”

ditto Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland.

“I had the opportunity to speak to President Biden on many occasions during the past 48 hours, and as I always say, we human beings, when we’re treated in the public eye, we’re never as good as we sometimes look, and we’re never as bad. I have absolutely no concerns about the capacity of the current president of the United States to lead his country, and to lead our fight for Ukraine, and to lead NATO.”

and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“it’s a big mistake to underestimate Biden. … as someone that is speaking with Biden, he’s very focused ... doing what the president of the United States has to do.”

goddammit, foreign leaders — the American media has a Narrative to push and every one of you is fucking it up by refusing to play along. the press is pining for a return to the days when the Real U.S. President brought the bubble-headed daughter he wants to quote-unquote “date” along with him to such meetings and set her down, front and center.

last night, to quote Lawrence O’Donnell, President Biden submitted to a televised cognitive test by taking questions in an hour-long press conference.

he did pretty fucking good.

no, Joe wasn’t perfect. right at the very start of it he called Nancy Pelosi Nikki Haley. he referred to himself as President Obama. he called his wife Melania Mercedes. he confused an ex-wife with E. Jean Carroll. he accused his opponent of wanting to start World War Two.

oh wait — Joe didn’t say any of that shit. those are actual brain-blurts vomited forth by the real demento in the race, Sundowning Grandpa Befuddlepants.

what Biden did do was to refer to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.” ugh, but that’s a one-word gaffe. very different from the extended delusional gibberish that Donny spits up every single day.

did Joe need to be letter-perfect? only in the minds of the media, who for two weeks now have been openly rooting for Biden to fail. the press was never going to be satisfied. what they wanted was for Joe’s brain to leak out of his ears on live TV. they prayed for was a Glitch McConnell moment — for Biden to freeze and have to be escorted off stage by his staff. oh my fucking god, think of the headlines they could have written!

they didn’t get that. what they got instead was a guy who didn’t speak perfectly — but always was in command of the facts.

Biden fielded complex, multi-part questions — often where the second part of question had nothing to do with the first — and didn’t lose his way.

as Lucian Truscott IV observes —

And then there was his nearly 10-minute answer about the intricacies of the U.S., NATO, and Pacific nations relationships with China; there was his command of information about NATO, which after all was the ostensible subject of the conference that just ended; there was his answer about Gaza, the Palestinians, and Israel, when he made one of his strongest condemnations of Israel’s “war cabinet;” and there was his quite detailed answer about discussions with NATO nations about increasing each nation’s capacity to produce its own military hardware and munitions.

Joe wasn’t just strong on foreign policy, he was on the right side of foreign policy. over to you, Rachel Maddow.

“there were some moments of startlingly impressive command of the issues. my opinion — he is not only strong on foreign policy, he is just fundamentally right on foreign policy … you can hear his command of the issues, particularly in his asides, mentioning in an offhand way that it was Turkey that needed to be talked into an expansion of NATO … it just shows you he is a master of the foreign policy field and has been for decades in his career.”

oh, and not once did Joe Biden say anything about Hannibal Lecter, or boats and sharks and batteries, or the great Revolutionary battles that protected our airports.

in fact, speaking of Sharky McBatterybrain —

I would fucking love for our worthless media to start demanding that Donald Trump face an hour-long unscripted press conference — because Donny could absolutely not answer a single one of those questions. he would be fucking lost.

much to the disappointment of CNN (check out the crawl at the bottom of the clip below), the voters think Biden did just fine.

host: “the two of you weren’t decided. my question for you: you weren’t decided before if he should stay in the race. how do you feel now after watching this news conference?”
voter 1: “relieved, and I think he should stay in.”
host: “so your opinion has changed, from ‘not sure’ to ‘he should stay in’?”
voter 1: “yes.”
host: “and how about you? how do you feel? you weren’t sure. how do you feel now?”
voter 2: “same. I think he’s a logical choice.”

even the donors think Biden did fine.

“Several Biden donors, who had expressed concern, are telling me they think @JoeBiden’s performance was ‘strong.’ One said ‘This is the person who can beat Trump. The mistakes are baked in and the upside is strong.’”

look, Joe Biden shit the bed at that debate. there’s no sugar-coating it — but I still stand by what I wrote two weeks ago:

look, I’m a realist. one bad outing does not a disaster make.

if Joe Biden stumbles in public a second time, I’ll start worrying.

three times, and I’ll run around with my hair on fire and scream as loudly as everyone else.

but above all: one ninety-minute poor performance does not erase three-and-a-half years of a successful presidency.

so right now, let’s stay the fucking course.

so far, we haven’t gotten that second bad outing.

I’m hoping that we can now dispense with the unworkable fantasies of how easily Joe Biden can be replaced by someone else, this late in the game.

it’s time to put away the crazy-ass ideas. there isn’t going to be a blitz primary hosted by Taylor Swift or Oprah Winfrey. James Carville’s clownfuck notion of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton hand-picking a new candidate is never going to happen.

I’m not expecting every Democrat to fall in line. that, too, is never going to happen. but remember: the naysayers are a small minority. it’s the press’s non-stop amplifying of them that makes it seem like they’re a majority. they’re not — it’s a mirage.

the clock is ticking. every day wasted on infighting is a day not spent fighting the fascists.

meanwhile, Joe Biden’s got another full day on his schedule.

as for Donny Convict — hey bro, what did you and Viktor Orban (and by proxy, Vlad Putin) chat about yesterday at your seedy golf motel?

folks, a word on a different subject before I let you go: we’re doing some quarterly fundraising at my other venture, The Smirking Chimp. I’m leery of even mentioning it because if you’re one of the people paying to support my own writing here, you’re already doing god’s work and you’re already doing more than enough to help out. but if you’ve got five dollars that you absolutely wouldn’t miss and you do feel like supporting the Chimp, well, that just makes you twice the hero. the donation link is here, or you can go straight to paypal if you need no further convincing. and if you don’t care to donate, that’s totally cool, too, and we will not speak of this again. in fact, we never had this conversation. thanks for listening and that’s it from me for now.