The question I’m not seeing asked is: Who will speak to the manipulation of Democratic primary voters?
It is becoming increasingly clear that I was swindled out of my franchise, along with many other voters in the 2024 Democratic Primaries.
Like millions of others, I voted for Biden in the hopes that 2024 would be a rerun of the last election and he would again eke out a narrow victory over Donald Trump.
And it was an easy choice because I assumed that Biden was a known quantity and that replacing him with anyone else would be a tactical mistake.
But would I have voted for the Biden I saw in the debate, had there been a realistic alternative?
And now, reporting makes it clear that Biden's mental lapses had been apparent to those around him for months, perhaps years.
And that I – and millions of voters like me – had sold a bill of goods about Biden’s fitness for office, and thus deprived of the ability to make an informed decision about which candidate would best represent their interest in the coming election and which candidate will have the best chance of defeating Trump.
FWIW, I don’t think one has to assign malign motives to Biden and his handlers to be convinced by the evidence of the debate performance that they mislead the voters.
They could, and probably did, mislead the public at least in part because they were sincerely convinced that Trump was an existential threat to stable governance and that Biden was the candidate best positioned to defeat him.
But there is a toxic symmetry to Trump himself in this conviction:
Trump believes that “I alone can fix it”.
And Biden and his handlers (at least according to media reporting) are convinced that “I alone can stop him”.
And that has created a situation where the sincerity of that conviction does not much matter in terms of that same existential threat.
Because that conviction led to an “ends justify the means” mentality, and that led to a campaign strategy based on a “Big Lie” premise: that a strategy of limited media interaction and public misdirection about Biden’s declining abilities could deceive voters long enough to lock in the nomination, and then defeat Trump in the following election.
The first half of the plan (if wishing and willing public ignorance can be considered a “plan”) succeeded.
But the second half delaminated in the first five minutes of that debate once Biden was off teleprompter, on his own, and swimming upstream against Trump’s torrent of lies, misdirection and misinformation.
This is not the fault of the Democratic voters who had endorsed Biden’s candidacy in the primaries.
The blame lies first with the family and handlers surrounding Biden, and secondly with the “responsible” media who failed – despite mouths of reporting on how Biden was being protected from probing interviews and unscripted appearances – to pierce the veil of secrecy and raise hard questions about his continued fitness for the role of president.
Now, the same operatives and advisors insist that they must be rewarded for their duplicity, that to “change horses in midstream” would be its own tactical disaster.
And that, in any case, we did not see what we saw, and that Biden is fit for the responsibilities as president and will be so for another four years.
When in fact I now understand, as many other Democratic voters understand, that we must accept the mortifying fact that all those MAGA propagandists who insisted that a declining Biden would increasingly be the “puppet” of a duplicitous cabal who operated by misleading the public while manipulating Biden for their own end were right all along.
Because there is a cabal.
They lied to us.
They are still lying to us.
Some of them are encouraging an obviously unfit candidate to stay in the race.
And they are doing it to advance their own agenda.
If this is not an incarnation of a cabal of “deep state” actors engaging in a conspiracy to maintain control of a government by deceiving its citizens, then I don’t know whar *would* qualify as such an attempt.
This crew didn’t have to incite a riot to achieve their ends.
Instead, they undertook a concerted effort to poison the information stream available to voters with a Big Lie.
And now that they have been caught out by their inability to maintain the fiction, the response extends beyond continued deception.
Now, the same voters are being subjected to moral blackmail: shut up and let us have our way, or the chaos of replacing us will lose the election.
And if Biden succeeds, against the apparent odds, at winning reelection, what will be our reward for acquiescing to their demands?
We will be living under a presidency that lies to its citizens whenever convenient to advance a better agenda, instead of living under a government that that lies to its citizens to advance a worse one.
Knowing that we are likely also increasingly living in a rerun of Woodrow Wilson’s last years in the oval office, right down to a cast of characters featuring a highly influential wife fiercely “protecting” her husband and his presumed agenda.
I hear plenty of voices of concern, but none in the terms above, which I believe are likely entirely realistic and factually accurate.
But whatever shades of gray apply, and even if my opinions are mostly wrong, the one question remains.
Do commentators telling us that Biden is our only option really suppose that the same voters, if they realized the man they were voting for was the man in that debate, would have selected Biden?
And if not, who is speaking for the tens of millions of voters who were deprived of their right to an informed opinion in selecting the Democratic candidate in an extremely important election with enormous policy consequences?
Where is the outrage over the Democrat's own Big Lie specifically as that applies to the voters?
A lie that effectively robbed us of our franchise and deprived us of agency over our futures.
If the perpetrators of that lie have their way they are going to walk… apparently all the way to a November disaster.
And in the face of this profound betrayal of public trust, who in the ranks of Democratic officeholders and professional political operators speaks out, unequivocally - if not in outrage, at least in profound disappointment - against this betrayal of Democratic voters?
As far as I can tell, no one of importance or influence.
And if an alternative is chosen, it will be on entirely "pragmatic" grounds, a tactical decision made without reference to the moral dimension of the deception, and its long-term effects on confidence in the Democratic party's fitness to govern, or to public trust in government generally.
Meanwhile, as far as Biden and his advisors are concerned, we are expected to shut up and line up at the polling booths in November, lest *we* further damage the Democratic "brand".
We have no other rational choice.
Because as part of this cabal's refusal to acknowledge the moral bankruptcy of their deception and the damage they have done, and may yet do, to public trust in the Democratic party and to a half-century of social progress, they are doing everything in their power - including continuing to promulgate the Big Lie - to deny us a better one.