For years the phrase “Big Lie” has referred to the false claim that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. The claim that it was not Joe Biden who won in 2020 but Donald Trump.
Increasingly however Americans are learning about another Big Lie – one that is far more pernicious in its consequence than the original spread by Trump & Co. I refer to the deception, the disinformation that surrounded Biden during his last year in office. That explicitly and implicitly spread the lie that he was perfectly fit to serve for another term as president.
Now, finally, much, much too late, the truth is cascading out. That Biden was both physically and cognitively far frailer than the American people were given to understand. That he was being protected by close family and friends, and by Democrats appointed and elected too timorous and, or, self-interested to speak out. To speak truth to power – to tell Joe Biden individually and in groups that he had to get out of the race in ample time for his party properly to field another strong candidate. Moreover, if Biden continued to refuse, to tell the truth to the press and the people so the pressure on the president would have been impossible to resist.
We now know the idea that Biden as he presented in 2024 would be fit to be president in 2025, and 2026, and 2027, and 2028, was, on the face of it, absurd. An outright and outrageous lie for which those who perpetrated it should be held politically and, yes, morally, accountable. How else to respond to a leadership class now apparently as comfortable fabricating as truth-telling?
For heaven’s sake, people, tell it to us straight!