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‘Jetpack Joe’ and the CNN Town Hall

Posted on | October 23, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘Jetpack Joe’ and the CNN Town Hall

There were many weird moments during this week’s CNN town hall event with Joe Biden in Baltimore, but the one that attracted universal comment was the “Jetpack Joe” episode. CNN host Anderson Cooper was asking Biden about inflation, which took about 20 seconds, during which time Biden stood with his fists clenched and his elbows locked at a 90-degree angle, as if piloting an imaginary jetpack, causing the hashtag #JetpackJoe to trend on Twitter. Others compared Biden’s posture to the Beavis & Butthead character Cornholio: “TP for my bunghole!”

It was pointed out in real time that this clenched-fist posture is symptomatic of Alzheimer’s, but even if you didn’t know that, you could see how Biden was struggling to concentrate on the (prescreened) questions as he attempted to remember his (scripted) answers.

You might be wondering why Team Biden would risk exposing the elderly dementia patient to such ridicule, but this limited exposure — let’s face it, any bright seventh-grader could field those softball questions from Anderson Cooper — is part of the overall “Hiding Biden” strategy.

They did the same thing during their 2020 basement campaign. If your frail and feeble-minded septuagenarian candidate lacks the stamina and presence of mind to handle a full public schedule, part of the secret of successfully shielding him from scrutiny is to have him do occasional appearances in controlled environments, e.g., a 20-minute speech at a labor union convention: “See? He’s not hiding — he’s right here, reading aloud the script we prepared for him.”

It has been 100 days since Biden held a press conference (July 15) and this staged CNN event with Anderson Cooper was an obvious attempt to postpone any such high-risk engagement, by providing the public a simulacrum of spontaneous response to issue-related questions. If you tuned into CNN on Friday, you would have seen them using a few short clips from this town hall as the basis for “news” reporting, while completely ignoring the numerous awkward moments when Biden babbled like an idiot. The CNN event served the propaganda purpose for which it was intended, and was therefore a “win” for Team Biden.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention this — the audience for Biden’s CNN town hall was about 1.2 million viewers, less than half the size of the audience that was watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News.

It is difficult to quantify the diminution of CNN’s influence, now that their hourly primetime audience is often less than 1 million viewers. But here’s a telling comparison: Joe Rogan‘s podcast has 144 million subscribers, and about 7 million daily listeners.




 

Category: CNN, Joe Biden

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