"I'm Not Making this Up"

Poor Joe Biden. His factual recall is weak to non-existent, his thinking is muddled, and his presence is ... well ... "impressive" only if you fervently believe that face masks are a required preventive measure when you go to the beach. 

There is growing evidence that even in friendly Q&A sessions (to call them "press conferences" is laughable), Biden must have a teleprompter or cue cards that guide his responses to every question (might be worth knowing if his handlers are given the questions in advance, but the media is disinterested).

This past Thursday, in an "interview" with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Biden made the following comment responding to yet another 'let's-hate-on-Trump' softball question*:

"If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all people would still be alive. All the people– I'm not making this up. Just look at the data. Look at the data."

So Biden is suggesting that all 195,000+ people who have died with or from COVID-19 would be alive if Trump "had done his job"? If we had an honest media, this ridiculous statement would make Biden a laughingstock. Where are the touted "fact-checkers" that always seem to appear when Trump says anything even remotely controversial? 

So let's deconstruct Biden's idiocy. What EXACTLY could Trump have done to do "his job" and keep "all the people" alive? What magic could he have performed? Maybe he should have followed Biden's advice, not been a "xenophobe," and kept the flights from China coming by welcomed COVID-19 cases into the USA. Nah, I don't think that would have worked. Maybe Trump should have followed the advice (often wrong, but that's a whole different matter) of the nation's public health gurus. Wait ... that's exactly what Trump did. Maybe Trump should have bolstered the capacity of hospitals in big cities or put the nation on wartime footing and produced copious PPE. Heh ... he did that as well. Maybe Trump should  have resisted a lockdown (worth consideration), but I can guarantee that the Democrats would have called him a murderer had he done that against the recommendations of their oracle, Anthony Fauci, MD. Maybe Trump should have tested every person, every day ... no wait, every hour of every day ... but that's logistically impossible, and people still would have died regardless. 

Joe says, "I'm not making it up" (with lots of emotion). He tells us to "look at the data." What data exactly? What scientific studies tell us that a force of nature—a viral pandemic—can be stopped so that "all the people would still be alive" by the actions of a president? What public health organization (e.g., the WHO or the CDC) would back Biden up on his outrageous claim?

Of course, the same people who wear masks at the beach believe Joe and do think that "all the people would still be alive" because Biden tells us he's "not making it up." After all, he has such empathy.

Those of us who are more grounded in reality might argue that Joe is a cognitively disabled old fool who is rambling on about stuff he's no longer able to understand. You might argue that Biden was simply parroting what his handlers wrote for him. But what does that say about his ability to understand the concept of viral transmission and self-edit statements that are patently false? Or is it that Biden and his Democrat handlers believe that any level of dishonesty, no matter how outrageous, is justified during his grasp at power?

UPDATE:

In an orgasm of adoration spawned by Biden's session with Anderson Cooper, someone named Jess McIntosh wrote on op-ed on the CNN site that began:

For a couple of hours Thursday night, America was treated with honesty and compassion by a man who wants to hold its highest office. That could be the entire review right there, how jarring and unusual it was to visualize a president who could clear the extremely low bar of telling the truth and caring about pain. We've had presidents like that before, of course, but after a particularly brutal news week it was starting to feel like that kind of leadership belongs to a different era.

Joe Biden is at his best in this format, easily connecting with audience questioners and frankly answering moderator Anderson Cooper's follow-ups during the CNN town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Biden was prepared and he was angry. It was a tautly restrained outrage as he described the failings of President Donald Trump, and he seemed to hold back tears multiple times as he fielded questions from Americans experiencing overwhelming fear and loss amid the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

I'll betcha that Jess McIntosh religiously wears her face mask at the beach.