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In the National Enquirer’s universe, Joe Biden is unhinged and demented

Back in the day I used to tell people that if they wanted to understand a particular segment of the working class they needed to read supermarket tabloids. Aside from the endless celebrity gossip, the tabs embraced a political view that I'd call not ideologically conservative, but "common sense" conservative. That is, it was stuff that ordinary, nonpolitical, small-townish folks mostly considered obvious common sense: Government is incompetent; poor people are lazy; America needs to teach people a lesson sometimes; wokeness is ridiculous. Etc.

That came to mind again when I saw the current issue of the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout today. Now, these days the Enquirer is more overtly political than it used to be, but tellingly, it still doesn't bother much with ideology or policy, since it knows that its working class readers don't care about that stuff. Rather, it focuses on gossipy pieces but featuring politicians instead of celebrities. This week the subject is Joe Biden's obvious mental decline.

The story inside is about what you'd expect: not even blind quotes, just assertions that "sources say" and "insiders dish" that Biden constantly loses his temper thanks to his "undiagnosed dementia."

This is politics as gossip, which is something the Enquirer used to have almost to itself. It's now only one of many, but it's still useful reading because its audience requires it to be blunt about things instead of just slyly insinuating them. As their motto says, they're "the only publication with the guts to tell it like it is."

And this is what its readers are being fed. Fox News may be the standard bearer for Republican agitprop, but there are other sources too. And not just the usual suspects.

41 thoughts on “In the National Enquirer’s universe, Joe Biden is unhinged and demented

    1. Austin

      Sadly, there are a lot of situations that people who rely solely or primarily on “common sense” haven’t dealt with in real life, cause if they had they’d quickly realize that real life situations can be more nuanced and complex than “common sense” solutions allow for.

      Unfortunately for the rest of us who supplement “common sense” with empirical data and knowledge, the “common sense only” crowd now has its own political party and a majority of states under its control.

    1. iamr4man

      I remember seeing those when they came out. I showed my wife in a grocery store once and we laughed about it. Then I thought about it for a while and it occurred to me that some portion of people buying that magazine believed it. I figured they were living on the same planet as I was, but in completely different worlds.

      I remember the first time I saw a National Enquirer when I was young. The headline was “I cut out her heart and stomped on it.”
      I always thought it was pretty weird and funny. I looked it up on the Internet a while back and it turns out it was a real murder and the details made the humor of what I thought was a fake story disappear.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonja_McCaskie

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        Thomas Lee Bean, an 18 year old high school student in 1963?

        How was this possible? There was no Grand Theft Auto nor Marilyn Manson... hell, Dylan hadn't even gone electric, Elvis was still fit, & John Lennon & Eric Clapton hadn't racially appropriated heroin from Black jazzbos.

  1. Dana Decker

    I have said for years that Fox News isn't journalism, it's tabloid. That's why it doesn't help much to point out its misstatements and lies all of the time. Better to shrug and say, "It's tabloid. Why bother with it."

    1. bethby30

      As Steve Bannon rightly said it’s the mainstream “liberal” media that does the real damage to Democrats. Back in the early 90s and early 2000s there were several really good media outlets that critiqued the mainstream media’s pushing right wing slanders and lies like Whitewater, Chinagate, WMD, etc. and enabling Republicans while hammering Democrats every chance they got. Salon.com and Media Matters were always holding the mainstream media’s feet to the fire.
      Unfortunately today Media Matters is too obsessed with Fox News to bother with the mainstream media except occasionally and salon does very little of that coverage too.
      This problem goes well before the 90s. David Corn’s new book “American Psychosis” traces the roots of Republican extremism and conspiracy mongering back to the fifties. Corn describes how the media slammed Carter as “mean” when he spoke about the well-documented examples of Reagan aligning himself with extremists and his racist dog-whistles. The media protected Reagan the movie star by helping him cover up all that evidence but they had no problem trashing Carter, the lowly peanut farmer hick.

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        Salon & MediaMatters being captured by & captive to, respectively, the Bernie rLOVEution doesn't help. Now, for them, the Democrat Neoliberal Center-Right is as much a problem as, if not moreso than, the GQP.

  2. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    Looks like Trump's guy David Pecker left a long tail at the Enquirer.

    I have to imagine, had DP been still installed there during the 2020 campaign, the Hunter Biden Laptop would have been splashed over a whole issue.

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        Could it be a worthy heir to Battlefield Earth, even if Robert Davi as joebiden seems more like John Travolta as Robert Kardashian?

  3. DFPaul

    Will be interesting to see if dementia-shaming really works for the National Enquirer's usual demographic. Next up: Depends are an AOC plot!

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      I actually am pretty sure Always On Camera's 2024 primary challenge of joebiden will prominently include her Jacobin/intercept/Chapo surrogates proliferating memes about the president's diapers.

  4. J. Frank Parnell

    The National Inquirer thinks Brandon is unhinged? Compared to TLAFG (the lard ass former guy) Biden isn't even on the spectrum.

  5. J. Frank Parnell

    The National Inquirer thinks Brandon is unhinged? Compared to TLAFG (the lard ass former guy) Biden isn't even on the spectrum.

  6. iamr4man

    For a long time people were saying Trump had dementia. That was why he took that test, you know, person woman man camera tv. He sure seemed pretty out of it on occasion and in some ways it seemed to mimic signs of dementia (my father died of Alzheimer’s so I have a little experience in the matter) But I also read that he would regularly stay up late hours and get little if any sleep. So I figured those occasions where he seemed disoriented might just be sleep depravation. And his slurred speech might be loose dentures.
    I haven’t heard anything lately about him possibly having dementia lately, and none of the “tell all” books about him seem to mention it.
    So saying Biden has dementia might just be Republicans “getting even”.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      At is last Nuremburg rally, El Jefe indicated he had Zuckerberg to the White House just last week to go over how very mean social media has been to POTUS45.

      The dude doesn't know what day, month, or year it is. But, no, MAGA, he won't be there for you.

      1. iamr4man

        He’s been doing shit like that for years. He’s definitely living in his own little world and seems to have the ability to pull others into that world. I haven’t read all (or even any) of the “tell all” books written about his administration, but none of the stuff I’ve read indicates even inner circle whispers that he has dementia. Apparently he’s pretty much always been the way he is. Maybe he has it and no one notices a difference.

  7. jvoe

    Yeah, nobody reads this any longer. I wonder if the Saudi's or Putin are paying to keep it running? Perhaps Martians?

    As said above, Fox News is now the National Enquirer.

  8. Justin

    There really is no hope of ever coming out of this. It’s only ever going to get worse. There is way too much money to be made by politicians, bloggers, substackers, news / social media companies, and just plan crooks.

    It’s fine. The world is descend into chaos via war and climate change anyway. By 2050 give or take, it will all be over. Good luck all! You’re gonna need it.

    1. Austin

      If the world is really ending and there is no hope, why are you wasting your time reading this blog and commenting on it practically every day? Seems there are thousands of activities you could be engaging in instead that would be more fun or less pointless for a person of such strong pessimistic/nihilistic belief than trolling a blog dedicated to discussing society’s problems and their potential solutions.

  9. Vog46

    First - everyone knows the national enquirer is a gossip rag

    The problem is that FOX NEWS the news itself isn't quite on par with other networks but they do try. It's the OTHER shows - Hannity, Ingraham, et al that are opinion shows but play THAT part of their shtick down to the general audiences.

    FOX purposely blends the two together to give the impression that their pundits are in fact telling their viewers news, as opposed to opinion.
    And we are way too lazy to fact check on our own. And when those fact checkers offer something other than what we are predisposed to believe we attack the fact checkers.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      Except, in court, they admitted Swanson the Ingrate is a carnivalbarking fabulist, & so obviously that that even his biggest fans should take his words in jest.

  10. jte21

    Trump's raging narcissism and pathological inability to say anything that he didn't believe was in his personal interest at that moment, combined with a galactic ignorance of, or indifference to, most basic facts about the world and his job, often mimicked the effects of neurological dementia.

    I dunno. Whether it's frontotemporal dysplasia or just a raging collection of undiagnosed personality disorders, does it matter? For all practical purposes, Trump had a kind of dementia. He was, and remains, a mean, doddering, bigoted old fool, regardless of the underlying pathology.

    1. Salamander

      Like +5 for mentioning that golden oldie!

      Meanwhile, I suspect a lot of the Biden-hate nonsense is (as always) projection of Qpublican failings onto Democrats. I mean, who's clearly showing signs of diminished capacity? Lack of a functioning hinge? Definitely the former guy! He even had himself tested with the Alzheimer scoring test -- and bragged about it.

      (Wonder which ones he got wrong.)

      1. rokeeffeDC

        Your tribe should be (and is) so happy that 45 won't go away quietly. On my end, for all the good things he did in office (he was FAR from perfect, but pretty darn good see, e.g., the Abraham Accords and cheap energy), Trump should just retire and enjoy being rich. As Tony Soprano once said (or was it Little Carmine), he's an albacore around my neck.

        1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

          When the ( ( ( Abraham ) ) ) Accords is all* your Base Q party has to hang its hat on for four years of Jefismo, is there even any point? Should the Tiki Torch Elephant Line of Charlottesville** just douse itself in gasoline & immolate?

          *Not all, considering the Supremes finally ended Neoliberal Eugenecist@ Infanticide with the Dobbs decision, but given that even White Power Leftist$ Thomas Frank's Kansas voted down criminalizing all abortion, it's a bit of a Pyrrhic victory.

          **If Old Dominion University follows up its victory over Virginia Tech with a win over UVA, I want the marching band & cheerleaders for the Monarchs to lead a chorus of "Hoos will not replace us".

          @Pay no mind to the Tennessee GQP candidate promoting death panels for slutz soliciting abortions for alleged nonviable/medically-dangerous pregnancies.

          $For all parties involved in the #rLOVEution (2008-12, Ronpaulite; 2015-present, Berniesandersian), the first principle is that America is a white-centered idea, but as the years have progressed from the tumult of the 1960s racial cold war (with occasional flareups, as in Watts 65, Detroit 67, or the anomalies response to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., 68) & the dignity of the well-groomed Councils of Conservative Citizens in opposition to it, the obvious devolution of the white race, especially since Reagan fully welcomed the slovenly megachurch parishioners into the Q Party fold, has made supremacy an inoperative expression, so instead the white establishment must fall back on mere power as the driver of the American Restoration Movement.

  11. JonF311

    Sigh. The Enquirer was always happy to print scurrilous stuff about politicians. George W Bush was forever falling off the wagon and getting sozzled on their pages. Bill Clinton was the gift that kept giving for them. But sometime during Obama's years the Enquirer gained a partisan bent: bash Democrats while raking nary a much about (most) Reoublicans.

    1. rokeeffeDC

      I forget who said it, but I think it's true that any institution not explicitly and strongly committed to conservatism will eventually succumb to progressivism along with it's evil much more dangerous cousin: utopianism.

  12. rokeeffeDC

    The man is a high-functioning demented old man who should not be President. He was never very smart and has always had only sporadic commerce with thee truth. But he is now just a husk of the mediocre man that he once was. Exhibit A (see below), a normal adult with full mental faculties and cognitive function, running for President of the United States, does not nibble on his wife's fingers while appearing at a campaign rally. However, we're stuck with him for a while yet, and just have to hope for the best. Heaven help us.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-bites-wifes-finger-in-bizarre-campaign-stop-moment-2019-11

    But Trump had to hold a water glass with two hands!!! And he had to walk down a ramp gingerly!!! Yeah, well, I am done with 45 and wish he would just retire and enjoy being rich. As it is, he's the Democrats best hope to avoid electoral disaster.

    1. Gilgit

      Oh no! We've lost the "complete kook, I believe everything I'm told, it must be true because Republicans/Fox News/talk radio is saying it and they have my best interest at heart" crowd. How will we ever recover.

  13. Martin Stett

    I had a friend who read it every week. For her it was the Onion before the Onion, laughable garbage.
    As for the ones who take it seriously, no one picks that up and suddenly gets a revelation that Biden has dementia; they want more confirmation for their own biases.
    You know, morons.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      The Enquirer has been dining out on getting the scoop on John Edwards's Lovechild for the past 14 years. It's a bit like Project Veritas remaining part of the journalistic family off unearned gravitas from the ACORN taekdown. No one in the lamestream media is willing to admit that a blind, lecherous, borderline intelligent squirrel can find a nut... sometimes. (The rest of the time, it's prolly just off somewhere defecating uncontrollably. Also, James O'Queef.)

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