Close. The Wall Street Journal comes so close to the correct question — and answer. But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and the WSJ seems oddly credulous where skepticism is not just warranted but downright required.
The news that Joe Biden has a late-stage and metastatic version of normally slow-developing prostate cancer stunned everyone this weekend — particularly doctors. Starting off with a Gleason score of nine usually only happens with men who refuse to have examinations for at least several years. Even apart from questioning the timing of the news, coming less than 48 hours after the release of the Hur tape, everyone also questioned how a president with constant access to the best medical care possible could not have been properly diagnosed.
The obvious conclusion is that it wasn’t missed. The Bidens hid the diagnosis, likely for the entirety of his presidency, as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel told Morning Joe viewers yesterday. However, the Wall Street Journal plays it straight today, not even broaching the possibility of a cover-up while attempting to find an answer elsewhere:
The news that the former president is battling an aggressive, stage-4 prostate cancer that has spread to the bone ignited a public debate about why a person with peerless access to medical care was diagnosed at such an advanced stage with a disease that is quite common in men his age.
Many prostate cancers in the U.S. are detected with a blood test that measures prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. The test is cheap and can help find potential cancer before symptoms appear. There are some particularly aggressive prostate cancers that don’t secrete enough PSA to be flagged on the test. But those are rare, doctors said.
Whether Biden, 82, had been getting regular PSA screening before his diagnosis isn’t publicly known, and prostate cancer screening for men in their 80s isn’t considered standard care. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government-backed volunteer panel of experts that makes preventive health recommendations, advises against PSA screening for men ages 70 and above, based on concerns about false positives and overtreating low-risk forms of the disease. Other groups advise older men to make the decision about whether to continue screening in consultation with their doctors.
“It’s in many ways unsettling that someone who has what is undoubtedly fantastic medical care could suddenly be diagnosed with aggressive, metastatic prostate cancer,” said Dr. Todd Morgan, co-director of the Weiser Center for Prostate Cancer at Michigan Medicine. “On the other hand, this is often how prostate cancer presents. We typically don’t do PSA screening beyond 75 or late 70s.”
If the cancer really did go undetected, it would be “unsettling” indeed. But that’s a very big if, considering the track record of deception and flat-out lies from the Bidens and their enablers over the past four years. After the June 27 debate blew the cover off the of cover-up of Biden’s senility, it’s astounding that any serious analysis would even start out with any benefit of the doubt about Biden’s honesty, let alone never account for the possibility of deception.
I repeat: there is not a single syllable in this analysis that relates to the possibility that the Bidens just lied their asses off about Biden’s physical health along with his cognitive health. And that’s just absurd at this stage.
How absurd is it? James Kirchick offers an overview of three new books about the Bidens and the campaign at Politico this morning, only one of which — the Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson Original Sin — directly addresses Biden’s cognitive incapacity and cover-up. Kirchick pointedly notes that none of them address the media’s complicity in the Biden “Sharp As A Tack®” propaganda operation and their clear motivation to kneecap Donald Trump by any means possible:
Revealingly, none of these books are interested in the essential role that the media played in the cover-up. Given how much the press valorizes itself for defending democracy, its dereliction of duty regarding Biden’s infirmities is a massive failure. To be sure, the Biden White House didn’t make things easy for reporters; it’s no coincidence that the two journalists granted the most access to Biden — Evan Osnos of the New Yorker and Franklin Foer of the Atlantic — overlooked the biggest story of his presidency. But lack of access is no excuse. When POLITICO’s Ben Schreckinger produced a deeply reported, unvarnished book about the Biden family’s half-century rise to power in 2021, the mainstream media ignored it. With the exception of Thompson, one of the handful of journalists who consistently reported on Biden’s fitness and who bears the scars of vicious White House attacks on his character to prove it, most of the media declined to investigate Biden’s disposition because it interfered with a higher priority: saving the country from Donald Trump.
Shouldn’t their highest priority be to report the truth? Bwa-hahahahaha, of course not! The Protection Racket Media’s highest priority is to act as propaganda ministers for the progressive elite, repackage incompetence and corruption as “Sharp” and then “Brat,” and take down the Left’s political opponents by any means necessary.
Shouldn’t the Wall Street Journal strive to do … better, anyway?
Addendum: I think we may have mentioned Schreckinger’s book more than Politico did.
