Get the Visine ready, because the eye rolls you'll do in reading this suddenly lengthy list of Joe Biden red flags will require medical attention before you get to the end. 

CNN did a deep dive earlier today on Democrats' effort to win a Captain Louis Renault award for being the Most Shocked, Shocked by Biden's cognitive decline. Why, they had no idea how poorly Biden performed of late until the debate! Clearly, Biden's White House snookered them and the media all along! 

Come on, man ...

Even as the oldest sitting president in history, at 81, Biden’s halting performance at CNN’s presidential debate last month came as a serious shock to most inside the White House and across the administration, including senior officials who have known the president for years and regularly have private conversations and meetings with him.

CNN talked to more than two dozen current and former Democratic officials, donors and longtime Biden allies, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid alienating Biden and discuss sensitive health matters verboten by the White House. While it’s clear the president had aged in the past year, none of them said they had seen the version of Biden, faltering and dazed, that showed up at last month’s debate.

In many of these conversations, sources blamed the president’s inner circle of advisers and family for what they said has become a painstakingly choreographed daily operation designed to prevent him from being in unscripted settings for extended periods of time.

And ... they all just noticed this now? Yasher Ali scoffed on Twitter over these claims:

This is maddening…

— For three years reporters have repeatedly called out this White House for the low level of press conferences and interviews. They were attacked and ridiculed by many of these same Democrats

— The evidence of the president’s decline has been evident in… https://t.co/pEfsI8z3ph

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) July 11, 2024

— The evidence of the president’s decline has been evident in video footage of him over the last two years. Were there some deceptive edits and fakes? Of course — that’s always going to be the case. But there was plenty of real evidence. 

— This is why everyone should work hard to not live in a bubble…but too many of you surround yourself with media that makes you feel cozy. 

Not one person should act surprised about any of this.

CNN's report is filled with Democratic strategists, office holders, and campaign officials denying having seen the obvious. To CNN's credit, it also has a long list of obvious red flags that did get noticed by Democrats, especially over the last year. Among those are:

• 'Whispers' at the George Clooney fundraiser last mont
• Overly staged Cabinet meetings, including questions supplied to Secretaries by the White House, and so infrequent that the last meeting was nine months ago
• Debate prep issues
• Biden's confusion, slurring of words at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus meeting in September 2023
• Repeated issues at the G-7 summit, including two full days of rest out of the five days in the trip

And let's not forget the biggest clue of all -- the Easter Bunny ordering Biden away from the media in April 2022:

EASTER BUNNY to Joe: This way... pic.twitter.com/joU3SmdORZ

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 18, 2022

All of these took place in full view, not just of Democrat officials but also the media. That includes CNN, which seems to be reporting on most of these red flags (and others) for the first time today. The rest of the mainstream media seems to also be playing catch-up this week, too. And why is that?

Meghan McArdle argues at the Washington Post that it wasn't a conspiracy as much as it is bias in every news room in favor of Democrats:

The media’s treatment of Biden wasn’t a conspiracy to protect a Democratic president, but it looks like one because that was its practical effect. None of our decisions were entirely driven by partisanship. But if we’re honest, many of them were unduly influenced by it.

Because there are 10 times as many Democrats as Republicans in mainstream newsrooms, journalists tended, with a few noble exceptions, to give a Democratic administration trust it didn’t deserve. The president’s invisibility was a giant red flag; they treated it as a restful break from having to monitor Trump’s ravings 24/7. As Biden’s decline grew more visible, people kept respectfully airing the administration’s insultingly implausible claims: that there was a secretly brilliant president flitting around the back corridors of the White House like Batman, while the videos of that same president acting befuddled on world stages were “cheap fakes.”

And when journalists did cover the issue, many outlets that had been pitilessly clear about Trump’s defects apparently couldn’t bring themselves to be quite so blunt about a president they liked — in part because that would make their friends mad, as well as the White House. ...

As a result, viewers of Fox News understood the president’s condition better than our audiences, which ought to be a huge wake-up call for us.

I'm gonna call shenanigans on that. The problem isn't that newsrooms just so happen to consist of 90% progressives, and it's not that editors and management share that philosophy. The problem is that media organizations deliberately organized themselves for that outcome. They have dumped reporting for "narrative journalism" that suits their own ideological agendas, and now openly scoff at the idea of objectivity in reporting. They deliberately ignored what was obvious to ordinary Americans simply through observation of Joe Biden, and worse yet, joined these very same Democrats in a three-year-plus gaslighting campaign.

This is exactly why we fight so hard to maintain ourselves as independent voices. It's not just the corruption in the media that we have to fight, but the attempts by the Left to censor our public arguments and punish advertisers who are courageous enough to still support us. That's why we have our VIP/VIP Gold membership plans -- so our readers can be part of preserving a true public square, where debate and dissent can still exist.

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Anyway, I'm feeling unusually generous tonight, even nigh unto Oprah Winfrey levels of generosity. And so I say to every Democrat and every media staffer who claims to have been blindsided by Biden's cognitive collapse -- You get a Captain Louis Renault Award! And you get an award! And you get an award! And you...

PS. Should I rename this the Easter Bunny Award?

Update: Reposted from earlier in the day.