It is hard not to feel bad for President Joe Biden at least a little bit. At the age of 78, he finally achieved the job he spent 40 years pursuing, only to have his time in the spotlight cut short after four years as he was forced out of his reelection campaign in a humiliating fashion.
So, with just a week left until the 2024 presidential election, Biden has reminded everyone he is still here by overshadowing Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing argument rally and calling supporters of former President Donald Trump “garbage.” Meanwhile, his staff and supporters in the legacy media immediately leaped into action to reassure everyone that what the president said wasn’t actually what he said.
If you watch the video, it is pretty clear what Biden said.
“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage,’” Biden said. “Well, let me tell you something. I don’t — I — I don’t know the Puerto Rican that — that I know — or a Puerto Rico, where I’m fr- — in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”
Pretty straightforward transcription. Some standard Biden mumbling but mostly clear sentences, with a clear break between his comment about Trump supporters being garbage and his declaration that Trump’s “demonization of Latinos is unconscionable.” In the video, the pause is quite clear.
So, what did the White House staff do to cover up for the president’s gaffe? They added an apostrophe and claimed the garbage sentence was about Trump supporters demonizing Latinos. Here’s the White House transcript version:
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
It’s an Orwellian edit that would make Joseph Stalin blush. If Biden meant to say Trump supporters were demonizing Latinos and that that was garbage, he would not have paused at the end of one sentence before starting another one. In fact, amid Biden’s very visible cognitive decline, it was among the more coherent sentences that he has uttered in public in recent memory.
But the legacy media, eager to clean up a mess that could easily hurt Harris’s campaign in the last week before Election Day, bought the White House’s apostrophe trick hook, line, and sinker.
Take Jonathan Lemire, who is employed by MSNBC and Politico. Lemire, eager to calm the outrage, said the president’s comments were “taken out of context.”
On CNN that same night, Democratic Party operative Franklin Leonard suggested that Biden made the comment because he has a stutter.
Wednesday morning, on MSNBC, Lemire struck again, refusing to show the video during an appearance on Morning Joe while reading from the transcript.
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Despite the White House, Lemire, and others attempting to clean up Biden’s comments, the video is so obvious that among the only people who didn’t try to explain away the president’s comment by adding an apostrophe was Harris herself, who said she “strongly disagree[s] with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”
It’s a rather insincere remark for someone who has spent the last few weeks calling Trump a fascist and suggesting that his rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend was akin to a Nazi rally. After all, if you vote for the fascist or attend the Nazi rally, the implication is that you are a fascist and a Nazi, too. At that point, being called “garbage” pales in comparison. But at least Harris recognizes that insulting millions of voters is not a good path for a winning presidential campaign. It’s a lesson that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wishes she had learned before the 2016 election.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
