Biden should step down and finish term gracefully

Now is the time for Democrats to push President Biden to not seek re-election and find a candidate who actually can bringthe country together and return sanity to an insane political climate

By Ray Hanania

FREE/Politics President/Friday June 28, 2024

I struggled to write down notes as I watched the debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump Thursday night (June 27, 2024) at the “Spin Room” that CNN set up for reporters and audiences that circumvented the U.S. Commission on Presidential Elections.

Biden’s performance was disturbing and he seemed on the edge of being incoherent. He sounded like he was mumbling at times. And, he made a few gaffs. The look on his face at times seemed as if he was in some form of shell shock.

CNN did everything it could to try and protect Biden from being pummeled by Trump, who remained at the top of his game, exaggerating and blaming everyone else except himself for all of the nation’s problems.

But the CNN sleight-of-partisan-hand backfired. All of the rules and the rigidness of the debate had in fact corralled Trump forcing him to look like he was tamed, abiding by the rules, and not being the confrontational disrupter that he had been in the debate with Biden four years ago and that he still is.

It was in part Trump’s aggressive disruptive manner that cost him the debate to Biden when they first faced off four years ago in 2020. This time, CNN unknowingly helped Trump control it.

CNN’s intention was to help strengthen Biden in the debate by imposing rigid rules and by unfairly banning third party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Dr. Jill Stein from participating and creating a circus thatw ould over shadow Biden’s road to re-election.

CNN asserted disingenuously that Kennedy and Stein did not have enough state acceptances for the ballot placement to qualify for the debate. Their names were not yet officially on any ballots, CNN argued. But the fact is that neither Trump nor Biden had been slated yet by their parties and their names are not on the ballots yet either. That would come after the Conventions take place in July for Republicans in Milwaukee and in August for Democrats in Chicago.

McCamish Pavilion where journalists and candidate supporters were placed by CNN a mile from where Biden and Trump debated, earned its nickname as the “thriller dome.” Photo courtesy Ray Hanania

So CNN implemented a rigid system of rules that turned off microphones when the time allotted to each candidate had ended and eliminated an audience that would cheer and jeer their favorites regardless of debate answers. This was intended to prevent Trump from interrupting Biden and confusing Biden even more than he is.

CNN banned the audience from the debate, setting Biden and Trump up in a separate studio with only the CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash to ask the questions. The audience of supporters and campaign staff, party supporters and more than 800 journalists who would cover the debate from 34 countries were all packed into a pavilion more than a mile away from the CNN debate site at Georgia Tech University.

The entire debate was crafted to give Biden a stronger platform to continue for another four years, but it failed.

Rather than produce a debate that focused on issues, what CNN did was to force Trump to be tame, and put a brighter than bright spotlight on Biden that allowed the world to see with out provocation or interruption that Joe Biden just cannot hold his own as America’s president.

After the disastrous debate, CNN and other partisan and biased news media have tried to help compensate for Biden’s poor performance by focusing their reporting back on Trump, slamming him more as they have been doing now for eight years since he took down that horrible, dishonest and truly “deplorable” candidate, Hillary Clinton. Clinton carried an obnoxious air of entitlement that was just too much for most Americans to stomach. Calling Trump’s supporters “deplorable” only synched her image as being entitled and cost her the election among centrist voters.

The media did everything they could to help her, but again, they ended up helping Trump win, inadvertently through their compromise of their journalism ethics and by breaking their obligations to be fair.

This time, in their rush to help Biden four years later, CNN unknowingly set Biden up for a big fall.

At one point during the debate Trump captured the concern of nearly every one of the 800 reporters at the McCamish Pavilion in Atlanta, Georgia when he said “I really don’t know what he (Biden) said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said.”

It wasn’t just the stumbles that Biden made a few times during his sometimes hard to discern Biden’s responses to the softball questions that CNN lobbed. It was the image of an overburdened elderly Biden faced with challenges he could not fully grasp that raised red flags for Americans and will for voters, too.

That election is done. It’s over. Biden has no chance to win. This debate was supposed to refortify him for a second term but all it did was drive in the last nail.

The world around us is worsening and headed down a long, dark, ugly and dangerous path. Russia continues to steadily rebuild its old Soviet domination, murdering civilians in a war it started in Ukraine.

Unchecked, extremists that have taken over Israel’s government to prevent corruption indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from going to jail, have unleashed a wave of war crimes killing more than 37,000 people nearly half women and children in response to the terrorism launched on Oct. 7 by Hamas extremists.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have been indicted by the International Criminal Court over their actions in Gaza, along with Hamas’ equally terrorist leadership actions. The ICC is seeking arrest warrants, and rather than being forced to heel, Israelis continue to increasingly celebrate in the bloodshed vengeance in Gaza that is quickly spreading to the West Bank.

The American economy is in disarray. Costs continue to rise, not just in grocery stores but everywhere. Some wages have gone up, mainly minimum wages artificially raised by Democratic administrations in big cities with large economically strapped populations.

Americans need someone who can step up from the ashes of a destructively arrogant politics and find an alternative candidate better equipped to lead this country out of this darkening haunted forrest of world evil.

There is still time.

The early CNN debate has unintentionally given the American people an opportunity to glimpse the dark future, and the time to find someone to replace Biden before Democrats seal the destructive selfish deal at the Democratic Convention in Chicago on August 19.

Americans are desperate for sane leadership to end the turmoil the news media and extremist politicians have created. They have turned our nation upside down and fueled a polarization separating the country into two separate indistinguishable dangerous mobs.

Is there anyone out there who can lead this country forward and bring everyone back together?

It doesn’t have to be Kennedy, who is sometimes off the deep end on his own. But maybe it will be.

The American people have an obligation to find someone themselves and not allow sympathy for the aging Biden to stand in the way of doing the right thing. Trump only proved he can control himself when rigid rules are enforced on him. But can he stop himself from turning to the pettiness that characterized his first term in office?

But even as the better choice over Biden, with a felony conviction and more trials — mostly all politically driven by a Democratic political party that has pushed itself to the far and extremist edge, Trump represents at least four more years of what certainly will be a disruptive insanity to continue in America.

I don’t think America can take it.

But it’s not enough for the politicians to find an alternative or more sane leader to take control. Someone needs to reign in the partisan extremism that is running rampant in the mainstream national news media. The media is obsessed with helping keep Biden even if it means destroying America.

They are the ones who are out of control and who have allowed this to happen, trying to manipulate and manage “news” rather than simply doing their job to just report it.

As I left the pavilion and the debate in the dark early hours on Friday morning, I was sickened by what I witnessed, not encouraged at all.

This tragedy is great for the media. They love to report controversy and death, even when it is its own.

Americans can’t let that happen.

Sane Democrats and sane Republicans — not those driven by selfish greed like Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney — need to come together in the middle and let go of the anger and desire for revenge and redefine American politics, before insane political fanaticism redefines it for us.

America needs strong quality leadership now.

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