Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Commentary by J. Peder Zane originally published by RealClearPolitics and RealClearWire
When a candidate runs on character, you know his record can’t be good.
Hence President Biden’s reported $50 million spend on an ad titled “Character Matters,” which features unflattering photos of Donald Trump while focusing on the Republican nominee’s legal troubles. Hey, we paid good taxpayer money engineering those court cases and we’re not going to waste it.
“Going negative,” as they say in politics, worked for Biden before. He was on the ticket in 2012 when Barack Obama became the first modern president to win reelection with fewer votes than he received the first time. And Trump gives the Democrats plenty more to work with than Mitt Romney did.
Biden will try to keep the discussion focused on Trump’s flaws with good reason: Only in the bizarro world of American politics could the current incumbent be cast as the candidate of decency and integrity.
With the unstinting support of the corrupt corporate media, which works to bury evidence of Biden’s troubling character rather than expose it, the president will memory hole his long history of dishonesty, deceit, and disturbing behavior to cast himself as a man of compassion and integrity.
Fortunately, we have the receipts.
Most politicians have a casual relationship with the truth, but Biden stands out in his insistence on repeating thoroughly debunked statements. At a Hollywood event with Obama last week he claimed that Trump promised a “bloodbath” of violence if he does not prevail this November – the former president used that term in describing the effect of Biden’s climate polices on the automobile industry. Biden also repeated the canard that Trump had told people to inject bleach to fight COVID-19. The Washington Post was among the outlets that give these falsehoods the stamp of approval by failing to provide context or correction as they do with most every word Trump utters.
Biden’s penchant for prevarication runs so deep that the New York Times recently sought to defuse the issue while reporting on it (neat trick, that) by addressing what it called his propensity to tell “tall tales.” While detailing some small-beer falsities – that he turned down an appointment to the Naval Academy and that an uncle might have been eaten by cannibals – the article ignored his bizarre pattern of turning personal tragedies into political talking points.
Read the entire commentary here.
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J. Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist. He previously worked as a book review editor and book columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing won several national honors. Zane has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
