I understand the libbies hating trump, but.....
Irie
I-think4me
Lobo
Lobo
BEZARK
Lobo
Irie
Thanks for atleast addressing the question though, unlike the subsequent posters who just vomit their mantra, Trump sucks.
Irie
Irie
I-think4me
I-think4me
Lobo
A video of President Joe Biden peeling off from other Group of Seven world leaders Thursday drew widespread scrutiny, with Biden's critics arguing he looked aloof on the world stage, though a different cut of the video showed him walking away to talk to other individuals outside of the frame — as Biden's mental fitness has become a focal point of Republican attacks against the president during an election year.
AFP VIA GETTY IMAGESKEY FACTS
Video footage from a skydiving demonstration in G7 host country Italy shows Biden taking a few steps away from the other world leaders and giving a thumbs up to a nearby parachutist, as the rest of the group is focused on another parachutist.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni then taps Biden and directs him back to the group, where he slowly puts on his sunglasses and stands still.
Outlets like the New York Post and Trump’s allies have cast the video as the latest incident suggesting the 81-year-old president is slipping mentally.
The White House has hit back at the allegations, pointing out that the Post and some other critics shared clips that edit the parachutist Biden approached of the frame to make it look as if he wandered off from the group without explanation.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates accused “Murdoch outlets” of being so “desperate to distract from [Biden’s] record that they just lie,” in response to a Friday New York Post cover that dubbed Biden “Meander In Chief” and accused him of “embarrass[ing]” the United States with “confused wanderings.”
The Post cover, which includes an image of Biden walking away from the group but does not show what he is walking towards, uses “an artificially narrow frame,” Bates said.
Some other Biden critics, however, shared videos that did show the parachutist Biden was walking toward, still casting it as an awkward moment for the president, including the Republican National Committee, which tweeted “WHAT IS BIDEN DOING?,” and Fox News host Sean Hannity, whose staff wrote on his website that Biden “appeared to wander off.”
In the case of the edited video, it wouldn’t be the first time Biden’s adversaries have stretched reality to leverage concerns about his age—a video of the president hovering over a chair for a few seconds before he sat down at last week’s D-Day ceremony in France was cut just before Biden actually takes a seat, with right-wing critics falsely claiming he attempted to sit in a “nonexistent” chair.
Former President Donald Trump, who turned 78 on Friday, has also faced criticism for misstating facts and head-scratching asides in his speeches. Some CEOs who met with Trump Thursday at the powerful Business Roundtable lobbying group’s meeting in Washington, said he was “remarkably meandering…could not keep a straight thought” and “was all over the map,” New York Times financial columnist and co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Andrew Ross Sorkin said Friday on the network. Trump, perhaps aware he is just three years younger than Biden, has repeatedly said Biden isn’t too old to be president, but is “too incompetent.”
KEY BACKGROUNDBiden’s penchant for public gaffes has come under heightened scrutiny amid concerns he is too old to serve as president. The president has struggled with a stutter for years and has a habit of telling far-fetched stories and making seemingly well-intentioned but ill-fated remarks, dating back to his time in the U.S. Senate, but a recent string of unflattering accounts about his mental fitness have dogged his re-election campaign. Special Counsel Robert Hur in February described Biden as a “well-meaning man with a poor memory” after interviewing him in his probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents. Hur noted in his report detailing the investigation that Biden’s lawyers had to remind him of key dates, including when his son, Beau Biden, died, throughout the interview. Biden has pushed back on Hur’s account. The Wall Street Journal also reported earlier this month that lawmakers who have met with Biden on Capitol Hill recently said his physical and mental state appears to have deteriorated, citing times when he spoke so softly it was hard to hear him, repeated himself in meetings and moved noticeably slowly around the room as he greeted attendees. Most of the criticism came from Republicans who spoke to the Journal under condition of anonymity, however.
“Congressional Republicans, foreign leaders and nonpartisan national-security experts have made clear in their own words that President Biden is a savvy and effective leader who has a deep record of legislative accomplishment,” Bates told the Journal in response to the report. “Now, in 2024, House Republicans are making false claims as a political tactic that flatly contradict previous statements made by themselves and their colleagues.”
FURTHER READINGBiden Flips The Script On Age Concerns By Highlighting Trump’s Gaffes (Forbes)
No, Biden Didn’t Try To Sit On Nonexistent ‘Invisible Chair’ While Onstage (Forbes)
Lobo
More Americans may think President Joe Biden tried to sit on a nonexistent chair the other day than know the boring truth that there was, in fact, a chair.
The chair-that-was-there was just one of many quick video clips the conservative media ecosystem willed into virality over the past two weeks, leaving fact-checkers and Biden’s team with little chance to catch up.
The Republican National Committee, major conservative media outlets and right-wing influencers have succeeded in blasting out videos that they claim show “proof” of Biden’s wandering off, freezing up or even filling his pants with a substance commonly represented by a brown swirl emoji.
Independent fact-checkers and the Biden campaign have pointed out that the videos, while they are un-doctored by artificial intelligence, tend to crumble under even basic scrutiny, such as when the moments are viewed in context or from wider camera angles.
“Fresh off being fact checked by at least 6 mainstream outlets for lying about President Biden with cheap fakes, Rupert Murdoch’s sad little super PAC, the New York Post, is back to disrespecting its readers and itself once again,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement in reference to a video of Biden at a fundraiser with former President Barack Obama over the weekend that landed on the cover of the Post, a conservative tabloid.
While "deepfakes" are misleading audio, video or images that are created or edited with artificial intelligence technology, a "cheap fake," according to researchers Britt Paris and Joan Donovan, is a "manipulation created with cheaper, more accessible software (or, none at all). Cheap fakes can be rendered through Photoshop, lookalikes, re-contextualizing footage, speeding, or slowing."
Still, even if they are deceptive, the videos nonetheless play into voters’ existing concerns about Biden’s age and are tailor-made for internet virality, meaning busy voters may be more likely to encounter the brief incendiary clips than the more rigorous fact-checks that chase them.
“The lie is sprinting the 100-meter dash and the fact-check is taking a stroll on the beach. So it’s never going to catch up. And it’s never going to have the same reach,” said Eric Schultz, a Democratic strategist and Obama spokesperson who on Sunday publicly called out the Post’s characterization of the fundraiser as false.
Last week, Republicans pushed a video of Biden in Europe attending the Group of Seven summit in which he allegedly “wandered off” in a confused haze before Italy’s prime minister pulled him back. Uncut video and shots from wider angles showed Biden was greeting a parachutist who had just landed as part of the ceremony.
The controversy generated by the video grew so large that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was asked to give his eyewitness account of the moment.
“They had all landed, and he was being very polite. And he just went over to kind of talk to all of them individually,” Sunak told reporters.
Before that, the RNC’s opposition research account suggested Biden was having a medical incident because he was not dancing at a Juneteenth event, though Biden has long said he is not much of a dancer and barely danced at his inaugural ball in 2021.
At the fundraiser in Los Angeles, Biden and Obama were waving to supporters after having received a standing ovation when Biden stared into the audience for a moment before the more punctual Obama signaled it was time to leave the stage. Several people at the event said they did not recognize the New York Post’s interpretation that Biden appeared to "freeze up."
'A pattern of behavior'Republicans are unapologetic about the individual videos — despite the fact-checks from mainstream media they distrust.
“It’s a pattern of behavior. It’s not like it’s one instance,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in an interview. “It’s not like we’re making these videos. This is Joe Biden in real time. We’re just putting it out there for the world to see.”
Asked about the clipped video that Republicans said showed Biden trying to sit in a chair that did not exist (in fact, it was just hidden from view by the camera angle), Leavitt said, “The videos speak for themselves.”
“It’s outrageous that the words ‘cheap fake’ [are] even being used," she said. "There’s nothing cheap or fake about these videos. They are real clips of Joe Biden acting bizarrely.
“The Biden campaign’s entire strategy is to convince people not to believe their own eyes,” she added.
The spread of the videos underscores what academics say could be a particularly tumultuous election cycle. Many major social media platforms have rolled back the few checks and balances on the spread of false or misleading information under pressure from Republicans. Meanwhile, the power and reach of just a handful of accounts on X can spread talking points to millions of people that is then picked up by more mainstream conservative media.
Taking liberties with video editing — or simply misrepresenting what is happening in a video — is nothing new. But former President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has pushed the party further across the hazy divide between spin and mendacity, while technology has allowed for clips to be cut and broadcast constantly.
Reaching voters who do not consume much political news is a challenge in the best of cases, and it is made even harder when organizations try to reach the same voters a second time to try to change their views about a stray piece of political content they previously encountered.
Conservative media outlets disseminating such clips include not only famously ideological ones, like Fox News, but also the vast network of local TV news stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, dozens of which re-packaged identical versions of the same headline about Biden’s appearing to freeze.
Few in conservative media have offered any resistance to the onslaught of videos. Howard Kurtz, a Fox News host and media journalist, is one of the few notable outliers, having called out the New York Post and fellow host Sean Hannity for their coverage of the G7 video.
And internet platforms’ algorithms and their users’ organic behavior tend to reward the surprising and controversial while ignoring the mundane.
'We can't stop them from doing this'Democrats’ strategy for dealing with the videos is twofold, according to multiple people familiar with the thinking of the Biden campaign, the White House and allied outside groups.
First, they will try to contain them to the conservative media ecosystem and extremely online spaces of political discourse like X, hoping to prevent them from breaking through into the mainstream as much as possible.
By being aggressive in fact-checking, quickly posting fuller video clips with appropriate context and calling out media outlets that report on them, the White House and the Biden campaign hope to stop them from spreading too far.
“We can’t stop them from doing this. What we can do is fight like hell to get fact-checks and to spread those fact-checks,” said a Biden campaign official who requested anonymity to speak candidly about strategy. “Does it potentially permeate out to independent voters? Yes, and that’s what we’re guarding against and fighting against.”
Second, Democrats are stepping up their own attacks on Trump online, aggressively posting their own made-to-go-viral videos of Trump’s verbal cul-de-sacs, curious tangents and awkward actions.
They include highlighting what they say are Trump’s senior moments, such as one at a rally Saturday night when he said Biden “should have to take a cognitive test” — only to moments later flub the name of the doctor who administered a similar test to him.
Much of it has come from Biden HQ, an account the Biden campaign’s research and rapid-response teams use to blast Trump. For instance, in one clip from the same event, Trump promised to take questions after his speech — “This is different than Joe Biden. He doesn’t take any questions” — but instead left the stage without taking any questions.
Schultz said: “Both candidates are old, but one is coherent and has cogent thoughts. So to the extent that that breaks through, then I think we’ll be OK come November.”
Trump’s campaign has also complained about the Biden campaign’s deceptively portraying videos of its own in the past. That included when Trump told autoworkers there would be a “bloodbath” if he is not elected. Trump’s campaign said that the term specifically referred to the auto industry and that Democrats intentionally mischaracterized it by making it appear that Trump was inciting violence.
Still, Democrats up to and including Biden himself — hardly a digital native — seem to understand the challenge of suppressing viral videos that many Americans want to believe.
“The truth is that the way in which we communicate with people these days, there’s very little — there’s so much opportunity to just lie,” Biden said at the fundraiser in Los Angeles. "So much of it on the internet is absolutely a flat-out lie.”
First lady Jill Biden took on the issue of Biden’s age head-on Saturday at an event for seniors in Phoenix: "Joe and the other guy are essentially the same age, so let’s not be fooled."
According to polls, voters so far do not agree with her. And some Democrats seem to be constantly bracing for some major, unedited moment when Biden shows his age.
NBC News’ national poll in late January found three-quarters of voters, including many Democrats, saying they had major or minor concerns about Biden’s physical and mental health.
Irie
With Joe "engaging" the parachutist (who doesn't even make eye contact) before Joe was steered back on task.
Susiejoe
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ImStillMags Mags
plainolamerican
Irie
Lobo
Oy vey.....>>
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Lobo
Irie
https://nypost.com/2024/05/29/us-news/biden-twice-says-he-was-involved-deeply-in-civil-rights-movement-despite-admitting-in-past-he-wasnt/