OPINION:
Van Jones, a former adviser to ex-President Barack Obama, said Democrats should apologize to the American people for misleading-slash-lying about former President Joseph R. Biden’s mental and physical frailties, else the next election, and maybe the next and next and next, will go Republican.
It’s true. Americans don’t like lying politicians and media. But what Americans hate even more than being lied to is being patronized and gaslit. Democrats can apologize all they want. But it doesn’t change the fact that they lied, they lied, they lied.
Jones, for instance, could’ve pointed out Biden was unfit for the presidency any time along the president’s four years of mumbling, bumbling, stuttering, doddering, meandering and obviously mentally compromised, mentally incompetent, mentally frazzled White House years. But he preferred being protective. He doubled down on being defensive. He couched his words carefully so as to suggest Biden, at choice points of his four-year struggle to appear alive and well, was simply having a bad day — not a complete mental decline.
In 2019, on the heels of the November election, it was this, from The Guardian: “Political commentator Van Jones cried as CNN called the US election for Joe Biden. Jones said: ‘It’s easier to be a parent this morning … to tell your kids a character matters.’”
In 2022, as the world watched Biden fall off his bike, fall up the stairs, fail to get his arms into his coat sleeves and high-step his way through sand while wearing his special shoes, it was this, from AOL: “Van Jones compares Biden to Reagan, calling out ‘foggy meandering’ press conference.” In other words: Biden may have struggled to speak coherently, but so what — Reagan was said to be foggy and meandering as well.
That’s a cover.
That’s a sly way of covering the truth.
Then in 2024, after Biden’s disaster of a debate with Donald Trump, it was this, as the Daily Beast wrote: “I love that guy. He’s a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can. But he had a test to meet tonight to restore the confidence of the country and of the base. And he failed to do that.”
That is true.
But what is also true is that Biden’s failed debate performance was no surprise. He showed himself to be mentally incompetent in the same manner he had been showing himself to be mentally incompetent for years — only this time, Democrats and the media couldn’t cover for him. This time, Biden had been on his own. And Democrats and the media couldn’t run interference, couldn’t explain away his brain damage, couldn’t cover up his mushy thought process.
All of America saw.
But truthfully, all of America had been seeing for years. So, too, the world — and the world’s leaders who took full advantage and took actions they wouldn’t have dared to under a different administration, with a different president, with a commander-in-chief who didn’t present like the dead man in “Weekend at Bernie’s.”
So when someone like Jones, who had been part of the cover-up of Biden’s utter incapacities for years, comes along and now says the Democrat Party owes America an apology, it strikes as more of that patronizing head-patting the Democrats do so like to do.
“Before we get out here and start trying to tell people why they should like us, we need to look in the mirror, reorganize ourselves, get bad people and bad ideas out of the way, and then we will be able to come forward in the midterm. Right now, we need to apologize to the American people that we were part of something that wasn’t on the up and up,” he said, during an interview on “State of the Union” over the weekend.
No you-know-what, Van Jones.
Only Democrats would find it necessary to dig deep and self-reflect on something so obvious: Americans don’t like liars. Americans don’t like hypocrites. And Americans really don’t like politicians who lie and then hypocritically and in all seriousness pretend if their own years of lying can be whitewashed with a simple apology — but then have to debate that, as well.
It’s just not that complicated.
Democrats pushed into office a brain-dead president, knowing full well he was mentally compromised, and they did it because they thought he’d be a great puppet they could control. And he was. And they lied about it. And they’re caught in their lies. And now they fear they can’t win politically. So they’re lying even more.
Simple.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.