Warnings All Around

Erick-Woods Erickson

On March 12, 2024, the Washington Post’s Matt Viser tweeted that, “Biden doesn’t come across as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be…”. He had previously authored an insider’s account of how the Biden interview with Hur had gone.

In the view of Biden’s team, the interviews proceeded in a routine, even dry, manner, as prosecutors asked Biden where he bought a particular file cabinet and how certain boxes were packed.

Biden himself was focused at the time on more immediate and world-shaking matters, having just made a round of phone calls to U.S. allies that would affect the roiling situation in the Middle East.

Viser clearly had access to the Biden team to deeply report the views of the Biden Administration. With the release of not just the Hur transcript, but audio, Viser looks more like a propagandist now for the Biden Team.

His latest at the Washington Post attacks those questioning the timing of Biden’s diagnosis as “conspiracy theorists” and was able to find a doctor to rebut noted oncology expert Zeke Emanuel who had appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to insist there was no way Biden went from no cancer to spreading to the bones in a few months.

Oncologists specializing in prostate cancer said even aggressive cancers can appear suddenly or without symptoms. “It’s certainly possible for more aggressive, advanced cancers to develop in a setting with low PSA, or develop and spread rather quickly, on the order of less than a year,” said Jason Efstathiou, a prostate radiation oncologist at Mass General Brigham.

For the record, some doctors also believe vaccines cause autism and others believe that transgenderism is real. It does not make them accurate or authoritative. In fact, the overwhelming medical consensus on prostate cancer is that it does not develop and spread in a matter of months. It is also extremely notable that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all had PSA test references in their medical records and Joe Biden explicitly did not.

In February of 2023, Politico’s Jonathan Martin ran a piece filled with Democrat insiders lamenting Joe Biden’s decline and Kamala Harris’s failures to rise to the occasion. A year later, Martin declared in a piece, “Get Used to It: Biden Isn’t Going Anywhere.” Once Harris was in the race and lagging behind Trump, Martin first wrote a fan fiction piece on how Harris could turn around her campaign with an appeal to bipartisan governance, then another piece complaining she was not taking his advice. After her defeat, he penned a piece titled, “Democrats Wonder: Are We Too Correct?” in which he sympathized that Democrats had “wanted to redouble their commitment to those under duress at a time of threat.” They were, you see, a noble class trying to protect people from Trump.

Yesterday, after Vice President Vance raised the very common question about those around Biden and Biden’s fitness for office — something chronicled in a new best seller by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson — Martin declared, “this is most interesting as a real-time depiction of somebody struggling between the responsibilities of high office and the temptations that come w being totally online.”

Apparently, the very real world view of offline Americans that Biden has mental issues and, clearly, physical issues, is “being totally online,” right where Martin is.

There is a class of reporter in Washington that drips with disdain for MAGA, Trump, and the present state of the GOP. They have allowed that disdain to radicalize them to the point where, in their professional jobs, they now consider a view shared by 70% of Americans as “being totally online” and believe Zeke Emanuel, a world-renowned oncologist, is spreading conspiracy theories about Biden.

Having spent four years with Joe Biden in their mouths, these reporters were comforted to reinsert him this weekend and again fluff up the Biden family narrative. They can’t help themselves. And it’s hard for them to see the truth while gazing a Biden’s navel.

It is another reminder of just how broken the press corps is. Don’t forget how so many of them rushed out with “he has a cold” to explain his debate performance.

Again, we should pray for Joe Biden. But he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on his health claims.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

America, we have a problem.

Stock investors and crypto investors consider themselves smart. Some are. Some aren’t.

Government bond investors are shrewd geniuses. They are the ones who must be taken seriously whether you like them or not.

Yesterday, for a short time, the yield on the 30-year treasury went above five percent. That means the government is paying 5% interest to anyone who bought a 30-year treasury during that period, which is quite pricey. Interest payments on the national debt now exceed our defense budget.

Moody’s was the last major company to downgrade the United States. It only matters a bit. What matters a lot is the bond investors. The troubles over our economy are far worse than you can imagine and boil down to a simple thing — will.

Only the House Freedom Caucus has the will to reform entitlements. Entitlements are weighing down the country and pushing us off the fiscal cliff. The “big beautiful bill” does not reform entitlements enough, does not close the deficit, and grows the national debt further.

This is not sustainable. At some point, bond investors will give up on the American economy. In the worst-case scenario, they’ll stop buying leaving the government without an influx of cash. In the less worst scenario, they’ll demand much higher yields, which will suck up more tax revenue and expedite the debt spiral of doom.

Without massive reforms, all our taxes will go up and our economy will shrink. In the meantime, our costs of doing business will go up, including higher mortgage costs, etc.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats are serious about fixing the situation and Republicans intend to raise the debt ceiling by $5 trillion more. Something wicked this way comes.

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. He replies, “Gradually, then suddenly.” We are almost to suddenly.