Biden Allowed to Cry ‘Oligarch’ with Impunity

P resident Joe Biden delivered a stinker of a farewell address Wednesday evening.

It was rambling and packed with enough clichés and eye-roll-inducing platitudes to choke a donkey. It was self-important, self-pitying, and poorly written (“Whether we lead by the example of our power or the power of our example”).

Worse, it was packed from front to back with falsehoods, outrageous political spin, and blatant hypocrisy — the kind that cries out to a higher power for rebuttal.

You’d hardly know this from following the corporate press’s coverage. The way their journalists told it, “Scranton Joe” had delivered another solid hit, a speech for the “history books,” as NBC’s Kristen Welker put it.

Herein lies one explanation for why we are days away from a second Trump presidency. If we had even a half-decent political press, Biden’s disastrous second crack at the White House would never have happened.

But we don’t have a half-decent press. We have a press that claimed Biden was “sharp and focused” and “energetic” and branded suggestions to the contrary as “cheap fakes,” “caustic and unfair,” and anti-Democratic political propaganda. We have a press that stay silent even as Biden accuses his enemies of his most pronounced vices.

Consider, for example, the laugh-out-loud prospect of Joe Biden, of all people, using his farewell address to warn about the rise of all-powerful oligarchs.

“Today,” Biden wheezed, “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

In a healthy society with network anchors worth at least a fraction of their bloated salaries, the president would not have been able to make such a comment without at least a handful of newsmen noting that just two weeks ago, Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to multibillionaire Democratic kingmaker George Soros, whose political activism has influenced everything from the White House to the New York district attorney’s office.

A half-decent political press wouldn’t have let Biden get away with his remarks about oligarchs — which were really just a swipe at Elon Musk, President-elect Donald Trump’s new best friend — without also noting that the Democratic Party, and Biden specifically, have benefitted handsomely from “dark money” and billionaire support. More billionaires and outside groups donated to Democratic presidential candidates in 2016, 2020, and 2024 than contributed to the GOP candidate. Billionaires have in recent years heavily favored Democratic candidates to Republicans. (Also, come on: The 2020 Democratic presidential primary featured not one, but two billionaires, both of whom spent more than three-quarters of a billion dollars on the race.)

A half-combative press would not have allowed the president to complain about oligarchs without highlighting the international influence-peddling operation led by the president’s son, Hunter. This operation involved trading on the family name for lucrative perks and kickbacks, including a $50,000-per-month Ukrainian energy job for which the president’s son had no qualifications or experience. A decent press would also have highlighted the irony of Biden’s criticism of tech savants, given that the Obama and Biden campaigns notoriously leveraged Facebook and social-media data for political gain.

But we don’t have a decent press. We have a multibillion-dollar industry filled with ideologues and activists who see protecting their political interests as their primary duty. Newsrooms such as the BBC, USA Today, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, NPR, and the Associated Press are eager to report on the president’s warnings regarding GOP-aligned oligarchs and “dark money” but loath to mention how the president and his party benefit handsomely in both categories.

This is why Biden talks the way he does, casually weaving self-serving inaccuracies and outright falsehoods into his basic speech patterns. Because he knows he can. The people charged with keeping him honest steadfastly refuse to do so. They will do quite literally anything else.

Or, as Erick Erickson remarked last week, “A doddering old fool spoke to the nation last night knowing the press whores would do his bidding.”

I wouldn’t put it quite thus, but yes. Biden and his capos lie and misbehave precisely because they know they can. Unfortunately for Democrats, it’s precisely this permissive behavior that landed the party in the position of having an incapacitated dotard at the top of the ticket, until they realized too late what was obvious to everyone outside their bubble.