President Joe Biden in word and deed has consistently honored the service and sacrifice of America’s war veterans. Donald Trump has not. On Saturday, Biden laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery and then delivered a speech to mark Veterans Day.
CNN reported that in his speech, Biden said:
“We come together today to once again honor the generation of Americans who stood on the front lines of freedom, to once again bear witness to the great deeds of a noble few who risked everything – everything to give us a better future, those who have always, always kept the light of liberty shining bright across the world – our veterans.”
Biden called Veterans Day personal for his family as he talked about his late son, Beau Biden, who served in the Delaware Army National Guard. “On this day I can still see my son, the attorney general of Delaware, standing ramrod straight as I pinned his bars on him the day he joined,” the president said. “We miss him.”
The president recalled his son explaining why he joined the military. “He said, ‘Dad, it’s my duty.’ Duty. That was the code my son lived by and the creed that millions of veterans have followed.”
The Associated Press, CNN, and other news outlets saw nothing amiss about Biden’s Veterans Day appearance, including the wreath-laying ceremony.
But the Murdoch-media empire, Fox Spews and the fish-wrapper known as The New York Post somehow saw this scene as disqualifying Biden to be president because of his age. This was the front-page of Sunday’s New York Post:
Neither Trump nor his two adult sons have served in the military. The patriarch of the Trump family Friedrich Trump, fled his native Bavaria to avoid the draft and emigrated to the U.S. where he made his fortune running hotels, restaurants, and brothels for miners during the Yukon Gold Rush.
And his grandson, Donald, has repeatedly disparaged those who served in the military as “losers” and “suckers.” On Nov. 10, 2018, Trump canceled a trip to a U.S. military cemetery in France because it was raining, and in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron mixed up the Baltic states with the Balkans.
However, this Veterans Day, the GOP presidential frontrunner did acknowledge Veterans Day in a post on his Truth Social platform on Saturday:
“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs who live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Trump repeated the term “vermin” in a campaign speech Saturday night in New Hampshire.
The Washington Post quoted Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, as saying in an email that “calling people 'vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”
But a Google search did not find any reference to Trump using the term “vermin” on Fox News or in the New York Post. Instead, both Fox and the NYP were aghast over Biden needing help from the Arlington honor guard on where to stand at the wreath-laying ceremony.
So let’s take a closer look at the New York Post story headlined: “Disoriented Biden needs help from Arlington honor guard during solemn wreath-laying ceremony.” Here is the opening paragraph:
President Biden needed stage directions from a military member during the solemn wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier during Veterans Day observances at Arlington National Cemetery Saturday.
The story gives an account of what can be seen in the video of the wreath-laying ceremony, but then veers off track and turns into a hit piece. The writers threw in a gratuitous negative comment about Vice President Kamala Harris, suggesting that she’s eagerly waiting to take over from Biden.
Harris and Denis McDonough, Biden’s Secretary for Veterans Affairs, both appeared to be suppressing grins as the president dithered.
And then the writers really pile on with reactions from GOP politicians making the point that Biden is too old for the presidency.
Republicans expressed dismay at Biden’s obvious confusion.
“God help us,” New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew told The Post.
“We have a president that doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.”
“Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it does,” said Rep. Darrell Issa of California.
It’s sad to see President Biden’s cognitive impairment over and over again,” said Staten Island’s Rep. Nicole Malliotakis.
“How is he running for re-election?”
The NYP story did mention Trump’s rally at the high school gym in New Hampshire, saying that Trump mocked Biden for his “regular bouts of directional confusion.”
And the story even quoted Trump as saying: “We have a guy in the White House who can’t put two sentences together, who couldn’t find his way off this stage.” The article prompted laughter from the crowd. ”And this is the guy we have negotiating with Putin and with President Xi of China.
Finally the NYP story did mention that Biden gave a 14-minute speech at Arlington, mentioning that he invoked the memory of his late son, Beau. But the writers got in one last lick about a Biden gaffe, saying that the president stumbled and mumbled over the acronym “LGBTQ+.”
I mention this NYP story only because it is such a prime example of the propaganda by the Murdoch media empire that is determined to end our democracy. Such unfair and unbalanced reporting—and how this propaganda works—needs to be exposed.
Here’s Biden’s Veterans Day speech at Arlington: