Tucker: Nobody has respect for Biden
Fox News host reacts to the president's blunders on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
It's hard to remember now because history is pretty hazy, but it was just three years ago that Joe Biden was considered too decrepit, too corrupt, too out-of-touch ever to be president. And that wasn't just the view from the right, by the way. They mostly stayed out of it. That's what faithful Democrats were saying.
In 2019, three separate neoliberal news outlets, the Guardian, the Week and CNN, all published op-eds with the exact same headline: "Why Joe Biden Shouldn't Run for President." Other publications made the same point with equal vehemence. "I really like Joe Biden, but he shouldn't run for president," said a columnist for USA Today.
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U.S. President Joe Biden (R) delivers remarks during an event to mark the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House on April 05, 2022 in Washington, DC. ( Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
"Joe Biden is not helping," declared Rolling Stone as if the goal was to help. And actually Biden's family agreed with this. This is true. They did not want him to be president, either. Some of Biden's closest relatives assured friends that Biden was running merely to work off the grief from his son's death two years before. It made a kind of sense. He needed to get out on the road and clear his head and a campaign was the way to do that.
He knew he wasn't going to win. And for months, it seemed all but assured that he wouldn't win. Biden's first debate performance in June was widely written off as a disaster. It seemed pretty obvious he had zero chance of the nomination and then Bernie Sanders started to win primaries. For the second presidential cycle in a row, Sanders proved to be the only Democrat in the field with legitimate grassroots support. Donors saw this and they panicked. The guy who hates billionaires! What's he going to do to Wall Street?
So, Sanders was unacceptable to the people who fund the Democratic Party, but there was a problem. What were the options? Pete Buttigieg and Beto O'Rourke? No. Both had turned out to be lighter than air. Elizabeth Warren, double no. Kamala Harris was horrible on every level. Absolutely nobody liked Kamala Harris and for good reason. So, it turned out to be Joe Biden by default. "Get out of the Biden signs. We're all in," and of course, the media got the message immediately. By the time he was inaugurated, here's what the Press Corps was telling you about Joe Biden.
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Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Barack Obama, and U.S. President Joe Biden arrive for an event to mark the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act in the East Room of the White House on April 5, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
DANA BASH: Anybody who has any connection to reality about what is going on around them should have watched that and said, "The adults are back in the room."
CORNELL BELCHER: It seems as though we have a professional adult once again in the White House who's just simply doing the work.
FAREED ZAKARIA: Really, the theme I would say is the adults are back.
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JEMELE HILL: Still, it is a relief to have adults in charge.
JOHN BRENNAN: Now we have adults in the White House.
DON LEMON: OK, the adults are back in the room.
NICOLLE WALLACE: There is a sense, I think, the world over, that the adults have returned.
JONATHAN CAPEHART: We have an adult in the White House now and it's glorious.
These people. Never an original thought among them! "He's an adult. It's glorious." Well, half true. Biden is certainly an adult. He'll be 80 this fall, but no one in Washington thinks the Biden presidency is glorious anymore. They think it's a disaster. Polls show that voters strongly agree. Joe Biden is now the most unpopular person in virtually any room he enters. If you doubt it, watch the scene at the White House today. You've never seen anything like it.
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It's the president United States in his own house, shunned. Nobody would talk to him. So Biden wandered off, looking vacant as a crowd formed around a former president, Barack Obama, who was obviously deeply grateful for the attention. And then it got worse. It got much more poignant than that. Biden tried to horn in on the conversation swirling around Obama. Everyone involved in that conversation, including Kamala Harris, who supposedly works for Biden, ignored Biden completely. Biden desperately tried to get Obama's attention. He puts his hand on Obama's shoulder. He even calls him "Barack" like they're friends, but Obama blows him off. He acts like Biden is not even there. Ask yourself if you have ever in your life, seen anything sadder than that?
It's awful. Now it's true that Barack Obama has never liked Joe Biden. For the eight years they worked together, Obama mocked him relentlessly as an old White guy. He did his best to keep Biden at the periphery. That's where he got the Ukraine account fatefully, but even someone as arrogant as Barack Obama can pretend, if he has to pretend, and that's the point of the video. Obama no longer has to pretend. He can tell the world in the clearest possible terms that he has no respect for Joe Biden because at this point, nobody has respect for Joe Biden. Even Biden's most faithful supporters in the Press Corps have turned on him. Watch this.
JON KARL, ABC: For President Biden, the outlook is pretty grim: war abroad, anxiety at home and inflation at its highest level in 40 years.
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TOM COSTELLO, NBC NEWS: Sky high inflation is erasing bigger paychecks. While hourly earnings are up 5.6% over last year, nearly one in five workers says they run out of money before they get their next check.
ABC NEWS ANCHOR: You have historic inflation. You have record gas prices. Americans are feeling it.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, POLITICO: Biden's numbers have dropped by double digits with young voters, and they were a big part of his coalition in 2020.
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JON KARL, ABC: Voter anxiety is about more than rising prices or Russia's war in Ukraine. Violent crime in American cities remains persistently high and there is a growing problem at the border.
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN: President Biden's approval rating still hasn't found bottom and it's been slowly trending down all year.
Wait a second. Correction! Breaking news. It looks like inflation is real. It's not transitory. It's actually making us poorer. Crime and disorder in the cities are real, too. And guess what? It looks like a totally pointless war with Russia is not as popular as we thought it was. You're not a traitor for not wanting it. All of a sudden, they're admitting all of this. For months, Biden's been telling us that every bad thing you notice around you is, of course, Vladimir Putin's fault and the media have backed him up, but suddenly they aren't backing him up anymore. Ready to be shocked again? A group of liberal toadies demolished the Biden White House's favorite talking point.
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President Biden speaks about status of the country's fight against COVID-19 in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus, Wednesday, March 30, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
JONATHAN LEMIRE, POLITICO: And every time we talk about gas prices, Democrats and President Biden say, as always, "Putin's price hike." They're trying to blame, of course, the Russian president and the invasion of Ukraine for the jump in prices, but of course, as polling suggests, this president is going to take a lot of the blame here.
JON KARL, ABC NEWS: Biden has called it a "Putin price hike,' but most Americans aren't buying it.
ABC REPORTER: With the midterms now just a few months away and inflation at a record high, the president is now putting the blame squarely on Vladimir Putin, calling this the "Putin price hike," but his Republicans and the president's critics have been quick to note gas prices were already rising before Russia started this war.
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN: The White House is trying to do both: blame Putin, blame the oil and gas companies, but Americans just don't agree.
What? Now they tell us. Is your head spinning yet? Yeah, OK, just one more. Here's Sandy Cortez, who has finally turned on Joe Biden. That was just a year and a half ago that Sandy's job was to use all the street cred she earned growing up in the leafy suburbs of Westchester and then heading off to Boston University, to use all of that urban credibility to convince the young people that actually Joe Biden was OK. Yeah, he's old and White, but go ahead and vote for him anyway. He's got Sandy's seal of approval.
Selling Joe Biden was her job, and of course, she did it. She's always been more, much more, a dutiful party apparatchik than a revolutionary, but not anymore. Sandy Cortez sees change coming. If there's one thing she's good at, it's knowing the prevailing wind, so she's happy to attack Biden.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: We need to acknowledge that this isn't just about middle of the road and increasingly narrow band of Independent voters, but this is really about the collapse and support among young people, among the Democratic base feeling like they are not, that they worked overtime to get this president elected and they aren't necessarily being seen.
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U. S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at the rally where she endorsed progressive candidates in upcoming election for city wide offices in City Hall Park. ( Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Oh, so Sandy's out? That means everyone's out. What's going on here? Well, exactly what it looks like. The Democratic Party and its media wing have decided to jettison Joe Biden. There was never an official order to do this. What you're watching here, as always, is the hive mind at work. Democrats have the same reactions because they have the same instincts, "Biden is week, we must get rid of him."
Now, to most people, that sounds harsh and unforgiving, but in the animal kingdom, it's an entirely natural response. It's the first rule of dog packs. For example, if a single dog wavers or lags behind, the other dogs will kill him, even if they're from the same litter. Yes, it's fratricide, but it's nothing personal. It's a matter of group survival and that's exactly how the Democratic Party operates.
Individuals are irrelevant to the party. The group is all that matters. No one at the DNC actually cares about Joe Biden or ever has, or for that matter, cares about George Floyd or Greta Thunberg or David Hogg or anyone else they tell you is an irreplaceable hero. All people are expendable. What matters is the party and the party matters because in numbers, there is power. And of course, on some level, Joe Biden knows this. He's spent his life in the Democratic Party. He's never worked outside of the Democratic Party, so he understands how this ends. Inevitably, after 50 years, it is his turn to be eliminated. Will he scream for mercy like Beria did or will he take it like a man? That's the only question.
Biden can't lead, therefore, at some point soon, he won't be allowed to lead. It's that simple and if you doubt it, watch Biden talk sometime. Biden the other day told us that Jill Biden was, in fact, once Barack Obama's vice president.
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President Biden and first lady Jill Biden speak with the NORAD Tracks Santa Operations Center on Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., via teleconference in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus in Washington, Friday, Dec. 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
PRESIDENT BIDEN: And I'm deeply proud of the work she's doing as first lady with Joining Forces Initiative. She started with Michelle Obama when she was vice president and now carries on.
You know, it feels mean even to play that, but it's not a unique example. We see examples like that every single day and his fellow Democrats see them too. So, they've decided to replace Joe Biden, period, but how will they do it and who will they replace him with? That's what we don't know.
This article was adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the April 5, 2022 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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