mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
Jake Tapper’s belated, faux-adversarial Biden aging book tour is peak Tapper smarm
After ignoring the story—and parroting the government’s line on Gaza genocide for 20 months—Tapper is bloviating about Speaking Truth to Power.
therealnews.com
What is the Biden aging story evidence of? Tapper never really says beyond bromides about “power corrupting.” As with Watergate, Biden’s inner circle covering up Biden’s rapid mental decline probably doesn’t crack top five most offensive things Biden did, chief among them wholeheartedly supporting a genocide in Gaza for 15 months. And this is what makes it the perfect Jake Tapper story.
As I laid out in a Citations Needed podcast episode about Tapper’s schtick back in 2018, the platonic Jake Tapper story is one where he can look adversarial and play the role of Handsome Newsman Speaking Truth To Power while harping on a story that, when it’s all said and done, offends no traditional centers of power, namely corporate interests or the military state (and its attendant pro-Israel lobby).
This is Tapper’s wheelhouse. But this time, he’s not attacking Democrats from the right. He’s attacking Democrats from an even better place—nowhere—in what amounts to a post-ideological process criticism. Yes, Biden World lying about the President’s declining mental state had disastrous consequences for Democrats, but it’s a years-old story, and involves nothing systemic except for broader concerns over gerontocracy (which, despite their occasional merits, also neatly avoid any discussion of class conflict). And Tapper is effectively taking on a man nearing the end of his life, long after he’s out of power.
This is consistent with Tapper’s usual sweet spot of attacking Democrats from the right for being insufficiently pro-empire or pro-austerity. Tapper rose the ranks of Salon, ABC News, and eventually CNN by hounding the Obama White House, and Democrats in general, over a wholly fabricated “debt crisis.” He then proceeded to repeatedly attack the Squad in bad faith as a matter of course and spent weeks mugging over Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021, removing the fourth wall altogether and producing a two hour prime time special promoting a Stabbed in the Back myth for the Biden White House.
Meanwhile, as I detailed in part for The Nation last year, in over 15 months of co-hosting the influential Sunday news show State of the Union during the Gaza genocide under Biden, Tapper never once platformed a single Palestinian guest, while giving ample platform to a revolving door of Biden officials, Israeli spokespeople, and two softball interviews with Israeli Prime Minister—and fugitive from international justice—Benjamin Netanyahu.
Consistent with his yawning through the genocide under Biden, Tapper mostly ignores it under Trump and only chimes in to frame the latest Israeli war crime in terms favorable to Israel. Even worse than never bothering to interview a single Palestinian, his Sunday news show, since Israel recommenced its genocide on March 18, hasn’t brought up Gaza as a topic once. In nine episodes, nine hours of “agenda-setting” Washington programming, Tapper and co-anchor Dana Bash have not broached the subject of Gaza at all, despite the fact that the United States is directly involved in the killing over of 1,309 children and injuring 3,738 more, and arming and funding a deliberate hunger campaign that Human Rights Watch, and over 760 other human rights groups, call “the deliberate starvation of a civilian population as a method of warfare.”
And when Gaza is mentioned on Tapper’s other program—his afternoon show, The Lead—Tapper dutifully parrots the Israeli line, including prefacing any story about Israel bombing hospitals and schools with the baseless conspiracy theory that “Hamas regularly takes shelter in hospitals and schools.” As I noted last month, Tapper led the media charge last September fabricating an “antisemitism” scandal out of whole cloth to smear Rep. Rashida Tlaib (which he sheepishly walked back but never apologized for), while letting Tlaib’s Republican colleagues repeatedly smear her as a “terrorist” without an ounce of pushback. Indeed, Tapper has long run down the list of insipid pro-Israel talking points without any meaningful criticism of its apartheid system or its recent, openly genocidal policies beyond the safe and ponderous noncriticism of “are you killing too many civilians?” handwringing.
So Tapper has found the great scandal of the Biden years, and it is, of course, not one that upsets anyone at the Pentagon, the US Chamber of Commerce, the editorial boards of the New York Times or the Atlantic or AIPAC. The Biden aging story is the perfect pseudo-scandal for corporate media, and thus the perfect Jake Tapper story: vaguely true, but ultimately of peripheral importance, scapegoating a handful of Biden flunkies and, most important of all, it allows Tapper to polish his Speaking Truth to Power brand without speaking truth to anyone in a position of actual power.
