America's Talking - Biden Receives Support, Questions About Transparency Amid Cancer Diagnosis

Starting point is 00:00:00 Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAlipp, Chief Content Officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. Days after we learned former President Joe Biden is fighting an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had already spread to his bones, U.S. House Oversight Committee Chair, Representative James Comer, ratcheted up an investigation into the alleged cover-up of the former president's ongoing mental decline. Joining me to discuss this as Casey Harbour Washington, D.C. Bureau chief for the Center Square. Casey, let me first share that our thoughts and prayers are with Joe Biden and his family as he fights this humble disease.

Starting point is 00:00:41 Just tell us about the cancer diagnosis first. Yeah, I mean, so the former president, Joe Biden, sort of shocked the world by revealing this cancer diagnosis, very serious, very far along, very dangerous, suggests that he doesn't have too much time left. with us. And of course, I totally agree with you that thoughts and prayers are with him and his family. And of course, it's never any news you want to hear for anyone. But it pretty quickly became a story bigger than just the straightforward news because the former president is sort of embroiled in this scandal about his mental acuity and the decline that really happened before the eyes of the American people over really like the last, you know, five or ten years. But many critics of the president, of course, mostly Republicans, but not entirely Republicans, many in the media and elsewhere, continually raised the question of Biden's mental fitness, dating back even to the 2020 campaign. And it just got stronger as Biden's decline became more obvious to 21, 22, 23, up until 24 in that fateful presidential debate last summer where the former president really lost the plot. I mean, he,

Starting point is 00:01:59 became sort of incoherent on stage while debating President Trump. And that was really the end of his campaign. The media turned on him. The Democrats turned on him began calling for his resignation. He held out for a few weeks before eventually handing things over to Kamala Harris. It's raised sort of this ongoing question, this investigation that's been going on for a while from James Comer, as you made the point. And the question is, how long did the medical staff and the Biden family and the closest Biden staffers, one, know that Biden's mental decline was as severe as it was and then therefore covered it up. And two, how long did they know he had cancer? Because this cancer is very far along. The idea that he just found out,

Starting point is 00:02:49 you know, two weeks ago that he had cancer and announced it to the world when the president's health was being monitored as closely as you would imagine if president's health would be. it doesn't seem likely. It doesn't seem probable. Of course, some Democrats have already denied it. But with, you know, the alleged cover-up of Biden's mental decline, when this very advanced cancer news came out and immediately raised a question, well, how long have they been hiding this? And did they know about this when Biden was running for re-election last year? We all have eyes and ears, Casey. We all saw it at President Joe Biden's decline. But those close to him continue to defend him. You had. media anchors essentially saying Biden's never been sharper. We all knew that was not true. And now members of the mainstream media are blaming White House officials, those close to Biden for hiding his condition. While there might be a lot of truth to that and probably there is some truth to that, it was impossible for anyone to know who followed President Biden on a regular basis to not see that he had slipped significantly over the course of his presidency.

Starting point is 00:04:06 And now you've got people like CNN's Jake Tapper writing a book blaming their coverage, essentially, or lack of coverage of Biden's decline on White House officials. Tapper's been doing these media hits talking about his book. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things going on here. The first is that, and Jake Tapper actually, he alludes, he talks about how he alludes to this in his book for all the Democrats that he interviewed, which is that there's this belief in the Democratic Party that when it comes to Trump, the ends justify the means.

Starting point is 00:04:46 They see Trump as such an existential. threat to the country, to our institutions, to democracy, whatever it may be. They see him as such a huge existential threat that whatever it takes to beat him is necessary. And so that's why you saw the criminal investigations across multiple states against the former president, which is really unprecedented. And it's why you saw the media and other Democratic staffers covering up the mental decline of Biden because they've, I think, they felt that if they exposed it, they would hand the election to, you know, who the person they

Starting point is 00:05:25 view as, you know, the worst presidential candidate in American history. And so that's a common theme of kind of the antics, the, the extremeness that you see in the modern Democratic Party is that Trump's so bad, whatever it takes to beat him is acceptable. And it's actually played against Democrats. So for instance, you know, the criminal prosecution of President Trump is a large reason that he won the primary and won the presidency. If you look at the data, Ron DeSantis was actually beating Trump before the FBI raided Mar-Lago.

Starting point is 00:05:56 So it's really worked against them many times. But I think that's a big part of how they see it. And the second thing that's going on here, Dan, is this sort of this pattern that plays out in the media that has led to ongoing, really, deception, like on a mass level and media bias. And it's where the mainstream media

Starting point is 00:06:15 and liberal media in particular, they quote these sorts of, sources and they rely on sources and they won't report something unless the sources say it. But the problem is they only listen to certain sources. And then those sources are manipulating them. And so, you know, Jake Tapper is like, well, I interviewed all these Democrats in the White House and they during the campaign and they said Biden was fine. You know, what am I supposed to do if the sources tell me he's fine? But they're being actively manipulating deceived by the sources. And we see this happen in the media a lot. Another example is the Hunter Biden laptop

Starting point is 00:06:47 story. Over 50 intelligence officials said it's a hoax. Well, guess what? All those intelligence officials lied or they didn't really know the truth and they deceived the media. But the media can say, well, we're pointing to the sources. What evidence do you have? And so there's this pattern where the media wants to be biased, but they want to kind of maintain a sense of objectivism. And so they cherry pick sources who are willing to lie. They cite the sources and then they say, hey, we're just reporting the facts here. What are you, what are your facts? You know? And so we see this over and over, cherry-picking sources that are lying. And so I think it's just good for our listeners to be aware of that. When you're reading coverage, it's biased. Just keep it away,

Starting point is 00:07:23 a mind that this reporter or this news anchor purposely did not interview other sources. And so don't just take it as gospel when they say, well, these sources said, because as we've seen a lot of these sources lately have turned out to be pretty untrustworthy. And now Comer is investigating this. He says the American people deserve to know when this decline began, how far progressed, and who was making critical decisions on his behalf. So there's more to come on this. But thank you for joining us today, Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.

America's Talking - Biden Receives Support, Questions About Transparency Amid Cancer Diagnosis

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.