THE REVOLT OF THE DIAPER DEMOCRATS IS OVER

I think yesterday’s “performance” by what I call the Least and the Dimmest - the Ivy League white boys of the DC Press Corpse employed by what I now call the Sulzberger Sniper and the Bezos Bugle - at the White House press briefing may be the end of the 12 day Revolt of the Diaper Democrats. They took their best shot - that the Sulzberger Sniper “had the goods” from the White House visitor’s log that a “Parkinson’s specialist” had visited the White House eight times in the past eight months, thus “proving” President Biden must be debilitated - and got their asses handed to them with the letter explaining that the particular specialist visits the White House monthly to run a neurological clinic for OTHER PEOPLE at the White House; the final blow was the release of the president’s medical report, in which that particular “Parkinson’s specialist” signed off that President Biden showed no signs of Parkinson’s or any other neurological disorder.

As I noted last night, if he didn’t show any signs of Parkinson’s in February, there is no way that he is now debilitated by it in July, since Parkinson’s doesn’t work that way.

As with most battles, there are some who didn’t get the word, who are still popping away this morning, unaware that Pickett’s Charge failed yesterday.

Josh Marshall has a good post on what happened in the Editor’s Blog at TPM (available only to subscribers there, made available to everybody here by me):

“Yesterday evening I saw the first thing that made me think Joe Biden will weather this storm and remain the Democrats’ candidate for President. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared outside the Capitol stating clearly and categorically that Biden’s in the race and she supports him. Period. Interestingly she referred to having spoken to him “extensively” over the weekend. By my subjective impression, she didn’t say this, as I’ve seen some Democrats say things over the last week, in a way that struck me as a holding pattern remark. AOC obviously carries a lot of weight in the progressive wing of the party. But beyond that she has exceptionally good political instincts, both as to the general election as well as the mood within the congressional party. When I saw the video of her comments it was the first card I’d seen on the table in ten days which made me think this whole drama would go in President’s direction.

“Then after seeing this I saw something that happened earlier in the day but which I hadn’t seen yet. (I spent much of the afternoon working on something else.) The Congressional Black Caucus came out squarely in favor of the President. This fits a historical pattern. The CBC remained steadfast for Bill Clinton in his most beleaguered days. But it also lines up with what I’d heard anecdotally about reactions to the last week among many African-American voters.

“This thing has spun in so many directions I’m not inclined to make any predictions. But these developments strike me as very big deals.”

They are indeed Very Big Deals.

As to how these DC tempests in teapots can end up looking like Hurricanes Andrew, Sandy and Katrina combined, TPM’s David Kurz also has a good post in his Morning Memo today, explaining what he calls the “Do Something Caucus” in Washington:

“... But the feeding frenzy that has ensued, the type of coverage that we’ve been bombarded with for the last 12 days, and the expectation that this drumbeat demanding that he and/or the Democratic Party “do something!” is a choice, a whole series of choices in fact, rooted in a particular kind of news judgment. That news judgment is itself a product of a certain way of seeing politics and political journalism. A prism with some utility sometimes. But it also has its own distortions and limitations.

“The greatest of these limitations is that much of political journalism is divorced from policy and the substance of politics. It’s the horserace coverage, the who’s up and who’s down, the who’s in and who’s out. And no matter how complex the topic, or carefully balanced the various competing public interests are on a given issue, or how long the history of tackling the issue in a substantive way, once it enters the realm of political journalism it goes through a reductive process that distills it to whether it’s good or bad politically. Does it help or does it hurt? And if it hurts, what are you going to do about it?

“Once you’re in the lane occupied by political journalists, there are certain rules, customs, and expectations that subsume everything else. You’re in our lane now and you’re going to play by our rules. If all you know is politics, everything gets reduced to a craven political calculation. Actually, it’s worse than that. If all you know is political journalism, then it gets reduced to the political journalist’s projection of what politics is, what winning looks like, and who’s losing under that particular contrived set of calculations.

“In a complicated and challenging world that exceeds our capacity to understand it, there is comfort in certainty. Political journalism and sports journalism have many unfortunate parallels. Sports itself offers the comfort of reducing the world to what happens between the lines on the field or pitch court, where there are set rules and assigned enforcers of those rules. We can tune everything else out. But politics is not a sport.”

Scott Dworkin has a campaign going at his substack (a blog I highly recommend) for readers to contact the editors aty the major political media - broadcast and print - and ask them to apply as much reporting power to the questions around DonaldTrump’s obvious mental decline as they have to this nothingburger with President Biden. And keep it up, repeating the requests. He said today he is hearing from those people in the media that they are starting to get it. Maybe. Perhaps. I personally will believe they “got it” when I see some serious articles on this on the front pages at the Sniper and the Bugle. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea - in fact, it’s an excellent idea.

Several readers here have been doing this all along. I think it would be a good idea if everyone did it. And kept up the pressure.

The media doesn’t have to become pro-Biden. But if they want to be considered “fair and balanced,” then let’see them report on Trump the way they’ve reported on President Biden.

And Democrats need to put the Pampers and Depends boxes back in the closet and get on with the real work.

That being beating Trump like a drum.

There’s 118 days left to win one for Lady Liberty in the Harbor.

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