While we focus on Joe Biden's undeniable cognitive decline, perhaps more attention should be directed to related problems that Nicolle Wallace might be experiencing.
The issue arises because on her Deadline White House show on MSNBC on Tuesday, Wallace seemed to confuse the electoral situation in the US with that in Gaza and the West Bank.
Said Wallace:
"Americans will have to face the fact that this is, in the words of a dear friend of this show, do-you-want-to-have-any-more-elections, election. Where voters are not just choosing between two candidates, but making critical decisions about the basic fundamentals of our democracy."
In other words, Wallace, more than suggesting, outright asserted as a "fact" that if Trump is elected, there will be no more elections in our country.
Perhaps Wallace, in her confusion, was thinking of the history of the end of elections among Palestinians.
In the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas was elected President of the Palestinian National Authority in January 2005 for a four-year term that ended on January 9, 2009. The last elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council were held on 25 January 2006. There have not been any elections either for president or for the legislature since those two elections.
In Gaza, Hamas won power in the election of 2006. Eighteen years later, there has never been another election.
But this was her cartoon of the campaign. There’s Biden, “who has an agenda that commands broad public support. Whose commitment to our democracy and our institutions has never been in doubt. But who's dogged by some lackluster polling that doesn't match up with support for his policies.”
And there’s Trump, “who also makes no bones about his specific and concrete plans to rule as an autocrat, a, quote, dictator, on day one if he's re-elected. And whose tenure in office was marked by an endless series of low points, not just for the presidency, but for the country. Each one more disgraceful than the one that preceded it.”
Concrete plans? That's "missing context," as the liberals like to say." In December, Fox host Sean Hannity asked Trump, "Under no circumstances — you are promising America tonight — you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Trump joked "Except for Day One...I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill." Hannity pushed for a firmer answer, and Trump said he wouldn't be a dictator, "no no, no, except for Day One."
Wallace failed to name her "dear friend" who made the ominous prediction, that Wallace described as "fact," of the end of elections if Trump is elected. But she did start the show in her traditional fashion by saying, "we begin with some of our favorite reporters and friends."
That's Wallace's way of assuring her viewers that their sensitive ears will be protected from any dissenting voices, and that only an Amen chorus of Republican/Trump-haters will be heard. Her punditocracy is an autocracy.
