{"id":14136,"date":"2020-03-15T12:02:56","date_gmt":"2020-03-15T19:02:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=14136"},"modified":"2020-03-15T12:02:59","modified_gmt":"2020-03-15T19:02:59","slug":"democrats-and-their-media-allies-impugned-bidens-cognitive-fitness-now-they-feign-outrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2020\/03\/15\/democrats-and-their-media-allies-impugned-bidens-cognitive-fitness-now-they-feign-outrage\/","title":{"rendered":"Democrats and Their Media Allies Impugned Biden\u2019s Cognitive Fitness. Now They Feign Outrage."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Glenn Greenwald<\/a> March 9 2020, 9:23\u00a0a.m. (theintercept.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Kansas City, Mo., on March 7, 2020. Photo: Charlie Riedel\/AP<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

IT IS VIRTUALLY REQUIRED in Democratic Party politics to periodically express revulsion about the bigoted political attacks wielded for years against former President Barack Obama: images designed to emphasize his African roots, false claims he was Muslim, the campaign of de-legitimacy based in the racist allegation that he was born in Kenya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that mandated Party denunciation often obscures the undeniable fact that \u2014 while Republicans seized on and drove them \u2014 all of those attacks also emanated from within the Party, particularly from the 2008 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which employed them to try to sink Obama\u2019s rival presidential candidacy. In February, 2008, Clinton campaign officials widely circulated<\/a> a photo of Obama meeting with tribal elders while dressed in Somali garb<\/a> on a trip to rural Kenya, an act which Obama\u2019s campaign chief David Plouffe angrily denounced as \u201cthe most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we\u2019ve seen from either party in this election.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

In December, 2007, the Clinton campaign \u2014 weeks before the Iowa caucus \u2014 was forced to \u201crequest\u201d<\/a> one of its volunteer county coordinators leave the campaign when it was revealed that the official, along with numerous other Clinton supporters, were forwarding and posting emails claiming Obama was Muslim and sent by \u201cmadrassas\u201d to infiltrate the U.S. on behalf of radical Islam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Donald Trump, in 2011, began pushing the \u201cbirtherism\u201d attacks against Obama into the mainstream, Politico\u2019s Ben Smith and Byron Tau wrote an article<\/a> entitled \u201cBirtherism: Where it all began,\u201d and explained: \u201cThe answer lies in Democratic, not Republican politics, and in the bitter, exhausting spring of 2008.\u201d While the blatantly false theory that Obama was not U.S.-born first originated on fringe right-wing sites and not from Democrats<\/a>, Politico documented that it was during the 2008 Democratic primary, not the General Election, when the repellent theory first gained traction as a result of Clinton supporters spreading it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, as Obama marched toward the presidency, a new suggestion emerged: That he was not eligible to serve. (See:  Birther debate alive across U.S.<\/a>)<\/p>

That theory first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama\u2019s citizenship.<\/p>

\u201cBarack Obama\u2019s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth,\u201d asserted one chain email that surfaced on the urban legend site Snopes.com in April 2008.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

All of that was consistent with a very deliberate and carefully crafted strategy from the Clinton campaign of depicting Obama as an exotic, foreign, non-American Other. In early 2007, the Clinton family\u2019s long-time chief political strategist Mark Penn wrote a now-notorious memo<\/a> proclaiming Obama \u201cunelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,\u201d and decreed: \u201cI cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values,\u201d and directing that Obama be targeted for his \u201clack of American roots.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, the very attacks that Democrats with virtual unanimity today vilify as disgusting, racist smears were ones that emanated from their own party \u2014 either from the Clinton campaign itself (maliciously spreading the photo of Obama in Kenya in traditional Somalian clothing and suggesting he is Muslim) or from various Clinton supporters (falsely claiming he was not eligible to run for office).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now they are doing the exact same thing when it comes to plainly valid questions concerning Joe Biden\u2019s cognitive fitness: expressing revulsion and scorn at the mere mention of these questions and declaring the topic off-limits to all decent people even though establishment Democrats were the ones who first spread insinuations and even explicit accusations about Biden\u2019s cognitive decline when they thought doing so could help them defeat him and\/or because it genuinely concerned them regarding his ability to defeat Trump.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PRIOR TO JOE BIDEN\u2019S MASSIVE VICTORY in the South Carolina primary and his even-more impressive Super Tuesday showing, many viewed his candidacy as all but dead. A fourth-place finish in Iowa was followed up by a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, causing the corporate donors on which he centrally relies to flee<\/a> and his political obituaries to be widely written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But since then, he has consolidated his status as Democratic front-runner and, as is customary, he is receiving far greater attention than previously, particularly on the question most on the minds of Democratic voters: his \u201celectability\u201d against Trump. And one of the towering questions in that regard<\/a> is his cognitive fitness: it is visible to the naked eye that the 77-year-old six-term Senator and two-term Vice President is in serious cognitive decline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n