Fresh off calling out a woman in the audience of a speech and stating, “we go back a long way, she was 12, I was 30,” Biden appeared with Elton John on Friday evening at a White House event to celebrate the passage of money to fund AIDS and HIV work.
Naturally, The New York Times made it about Donald Trump.
Apparently, it’s supposed to be a total own that John didn’t want to play for Trump but that he played for Joe Biden. You know, because it’s totally unusual and not at all standard fare for leftwing celebrities to shun Republicans. No, it must be because Trump is uniquely evil or something.
Regardless, in short order, Biden managed to frame his praise of the iconic singer in a way that raised eyebrows.
Now, before the Post’s Glenn Kessler, who recently made an absolute clown of himself falsely claiming ultrasounds convert electrical activity into fetal heartbeats, slaps me down here, I’m not suggesting that Biden is actually meaning to make a homophobic inference that Elton John, a gay man, is responsible for AIDS. In fact, I’m well aware that what the president is actually trying to say is that John is an advocate who has lobbied Congress to spend this money.
That’s all well and good. The problem isn’t Biden’s intention. It’s that he’s a senile, old man with a persistent habit of having his filter break. There are certain things you don’t say, and telling a gay guy that the need to spend money on AIDS and HIV is his “fault” is the kind of thing you don’t say.
I’m going to delve into the most overused cliche in politics at this point, but could you imagine if Donald Trump said this? Heck, could you imagine if Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, or any other Republican all the way down to dog catcher told a gay man that they are at “fault” that the country is spending $6 billion on AIDS and HIV prevention and research? The accusations of stigmatization would flow non-stop.
In other words, I’m not really writing this as a slap at Biden because I know his framing was just his typical fumbling. He’s an old dude with a mouth that just spews whatever comes to his mind without any thought for how it might come across. That’s why we shouldn’t have 80-year-old presidents.
Rather, it’s the double standard of the press that really gets me in this context. The same “journalists” who will try to shoehorn Trump into completely unrelated stories because they simultaneously hate him and are sustained by him won’t even comment on things that they would have lambasted any other Republican for.
I can hear the libs now. “Oh, Bonchie, you are just being hyperbolic. The press would never take something said by Trump that is completely innocuous and twist it into something it’s not.” Here’s CNN’s Jim Scuitto showing how right I am.
If you watch that clip, what Trump was actually saying was that he was physically in the room with China’s Xi Jinping at a meeting, not that he shared the same ideology “with” him. The former president was telling a story about the fierceness of our adversaries and the need to have a president who stands up to them. Yet, the press (Scuitto wasn’t the only one) rushed to frame it as Trump admitting to his own supposed authoritarianism.
So yeah, don’t tell me there’s not a double standard when it comes to how the news media reacts to framing issues between Democrats and Republicans. Biden gets a pass because he has the “right” politics. If he were a Republican, the calls for the 25th Amendment would be deafening.