By Anne Keala Kelly, The Kennedy Beacon
In case it wasn’t clear, now we know why the White House has been hiding an unscripted President Biden from the American public. The emperor has no clothes.
Biden’s performance at CNN’s illegal debate on June 27 was like watching a man in the political equivalent of hospice care. And because of his condition, all Trump had to do was stand next to him to win the debate. It was a bloodbath, with Biden struggling to piece together a coherent sentence. As he sputtered the phrase, “the idea that…” over and over, he looked like a deer caught in the headlights. For ninety painful minutes. A sad sad spectacle.
If presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been there, it would’ve been an energized evening of democracy in action, and his character and intellect would have shown him to be the strongest of the three.
For reasons that ought to be obvious to the American people, CNN, the DNC and the RNC didn’t want Kennedy, or any other independent candidate, anywhere near the debate stage. Kennedy staged his own debate on X, garnering over 5 million viewers while eloquently answering the same questions hurled at Trump and Biden. (See https://www.therealdebate.com/.)
Kennedy was strong, intelligent, and forceful. Biden was an embarrassment for the Democrats and extremely painful to watch. He mumbled and stammered and couldn’t keep track of what he was saying. After this fiasco Biden will now have to fight his own party for a place on the ballot.
Nothing in CNN’s airbrushed, sanitized debate was a surprise, except the cost of letting two over-the-hill politicians go Full Monty for a puny audience of two highly paid broadcast journalists reaching for professional relevance. A live audience would have given it weight and a sense of being about the people. Without any other life forms in the room, the space felt dead and empty, and that made both candidates appear small. Biden came across as a fragile elder, visiting from a retirement home, as he made his way to and from the podium, while Trump looked angry and burdened, his forward stoop more pronounced than usual. His answers were full of lies and misrepresentations.
And neither Jake Tapper nor Dana Bash brought any energy or emotion beyond what they had prescripted.
Words like elder abuse and human sacrifice came to mind, watching Biden work so hard, mumbling some of his answers, yet managing to stop himself just before his thoughts drifted off completely. After a week of rehearsing his performance, there is simply no way his team did not know how this would go. His severe cognitive decline has been discussed publicly for well over a year. It’s as if the strategy was to get him through an early debate with his challenges on public display, to make it easier to politely replace him when his polls get worse.
As noted in The Kennedy Beacon, we can expect to see an avalanche of interviews with Biden’s potential replacements – Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Josh Shapiro – to appear over the next week on all the chosen shows and in all the mainstream newspapers, defending the hypnotic binary message that Americans only have a choice between a Democrat and a Republican.
So, what was substantive about the debate that might matter to people who didn’t subject themselves to 90 minutes of watching the duopoly argue with itself about which team gets to run things next year?
Inflation, NATO, Ukraine, Israel, Black people, child care, Roe v. Wade, climate change, and a few other things made for a nice mashup of the long list of issues on the minds of Americans. But the candidates avoided the questions and argued over who had done what in their respective administrations.
And for a few petty moments, they ate up 90 seconds of primetime slapping at each other over who has the better drive, a spat that will make sense only to golf fanatics.
There was one subject, however, that Trump dominated and managed to revisit several times as he masterfully avoided answering the questions asked. And that was immigration and the border crisis. He drove it like a stake into Biden’s liberal heart, almost to the point of drawing actual blood. He railed effectively about Biden foolishly opening the border to millions and blamed him for the recent rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Texas.
Trump made another good point about how we are rapidly moving toward World War III. Kennedy in The Real Debate said we are closer to WW III than we have ever been since 1962.
The most concerning thing about the debate is that it should now be clear that Biden is going to lose. He mumbled and stammered, looked away and could not sustain his arguments.
By not including other candidates, specifically Kennedy, CNN’s presidential debate created an undeserved advantage for Trump. People who profited under Trump will now certainly pour more money into his campaign.
The Democrats simply could not allow a viable person to appear on stage, as that would have upset their contingency plan to replace Biden with a hand-picked insider.
On X, Kennedy told Americans, “If you want more of the same, you should vote for President Biden, President Trump. You know what’s going to happen. You know that. They’re going to give you four more years of the same stuff. If you want things to completely change, you’re going to support me because I’m going to change everything.”
Kennedy took aim at both Biden and Trump, continuing, “This is a moral battle for the soul of our nation to restore our moral authority around the world by projecting economic power abroad rather than spending $8 trillion on regime change wars that have left every nation we’ve touched worse off than we found it and restoring our moral authority here at home.”
He added, “I’m going to unravel the war machine. I’m going to unravel the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.”
Seventy-five years ago this month, George Orwell published 1984, a prescient novel about a dystopian, uniparty state where everyone is censored and where state-sponsored lies are enforced by the Ministry of Truth. Reality is whatever the Party says it is. Thinking wrong thoughts is a crime.
The corporate dominance of our politics has turned us into an Orwellian America where major candidates and dissenters are silenced.
What we’re left with is two old guys, from their respective decaying parties, arguing about golf.
Blake Fleetwood contributed to this report.
