by Neo
You may wonder how it is that Biden (or those handling him) thinks he can get away with a lie such as this one:
Joe Biden is at it again with yet another lie about the vaccination plan, claiming President Donald Trump didn’t have a plan, despite the demonstrable fact that Trump was getting about a million people vaccinated a day by the time that Biden came in…
Here’s the Biden statement that’s being referred to:
BIDEN: "Just over four weeks ago, America had no real plan to vaccinate most of the country. My predecessor, as my mother would say, 'failed to order enough vaccines,' failed to mobilize the effort to administer the shots… That changed the moment we took office." pic.twitter.com/TVo4tBEKyb
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 19, 2021
The first point – an obvious one – is that there is no serious effort by the press to call Biden on anything he does or says. If Biden knows anything at this point (and he does still know quite a few things) he knows that. Here and there you may see some mild fact-checking, but the administration knows it has a general pass (what in one of my earliest blog posts I called a “press pass”) to make whatever claim it wants.
In addition, in the case of the COVID narrative, this idea – that Trump did nothing and had no plan, and Joe will do everything and has a plan – has long been a basic meme of the Biden campaign. And the American public appears to have bought it. I certainly know people who did, and most of them had been saying since last March that Trump was doing everything wrong regarding COVID. That’s what they read in the MSM, that’s what they heard their friends say, and everyone knew it was true. In vain I would point out certain facts – for example, I’d ask them when they thought Trump had appointed the Task Force on COVID. No one ever got it right, and they had trouble believing me when I told them that Trump had announced its formation quite early – on January 29, 2020 – and that Fauci and Birx were already onboard at that time.
But even learning that, or any other fact about what Trump had done early on to fight the disease, didn’t really change much in their minds. That’s because the media was relentlessly pushing another story, and to open oneself to the possibility that the media was lying was just a bridge too far and would require too great a reorganization of reality. If reality was that Trump was an incompetent liar, it would take a lot more than a few facts to change that idea, and why bother when all the smart people were on the “Trump is an incompetent liar” side?
So at this point it’s not all that hard for these same people to believe that Biden – or at least, the people under Biden who are really in charge – are finally going to fix everything that Trump did wrong. Declining numbers of cases will be used as proof. It isn’t really that hard to avoid the perils of cognitive dissonance because the MSM will guide and lead the way.
As for Joe Biden himself and the obvious indications that he’s cognitively challenged, I really haven’t had that particular discussion with any of the Democrats I know. But I think I can imagine what most might say: “It’s worth it just to get rid of Trump.” They also almost undoubtedly think that the people who will be running the show in the Biden presidency will be far better than anyone Trump appointed. Once Trump was successfully demonized, almost anything can be rationalized.