Monday, May 19, 2025

REPUBLICAN GHOULS WANT TO TURN JOE BIDEN'S CANCER DIAGNOSIS INTO A MASSIVE SCANDAL (updated)

Former president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. I wish him a speedy recovery, but he's fighting long odds -- the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body is 37%. But Biden's a tough guy. He really might hang on for a while.

President Trump surprised many of us by not going on the attack. His message at Truth Social: "Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery." Donald Trump Jr. was similarly restrained ... for a few hours. At 4:34 Eastern yesterday, he posted this:


A little more than three hours later, he decided he'd checked the "decent human being" box and could say what he really wanted to say:


This is now his pinned tweet.

Junior is stupid, but I don't think he's so stupid that he fails to comprehend the nature of the former First Lady's doctorate, which was in education, not science or medicine. Dinesh D'Souza, who used to be a semi-serious right-wing pundit before he became a conspiratorial hack, posted a similar tweet:


They know the nature of her doctorate. They also know that most of their followers don't know what they know. No modern Republican ever missed an opportunity to exploit the ignorance of the electorate.

But these ghouls don't just want to use Joe Biden's cancer as the subject of their latest Two-Minutes' Hate. They want to turn the announcement of the diagnosis into a scandal that changes the course of our politics. In this they're getting an assist, unwitting or otherwise, from Rahm Emanuel's oncologist brother. Here's a tweet D'Souza retweeted:


D'Souza and his ideological soulmates want to send this message: Biden knew he was dying of prostate cancer when he was president and there was a massive cover-up. Here's a D'Souza ally (and top Trump adviser) on that subject:


But as The Independent reports, there's no smoking-gun evidence of a cover-up:
PSA blood testing, a method used to test for prostate-specific antigen, can sometimes have abnormal results, prompting false-positive or false-negative results, according to the American Cancer Society.

Some prostate cancers grow so slowly that they would never cause any problems during a person’s lifetime.

Even if screening detects prostate cancer, at times, medical professionals can’t tell if the cancer is truly dangerous and requires treatment.

Dr. Daniel Petrylak, a prostate cancer specialist at Yale Cancer Center, told WTNH in Connecticut that despite his surprise that the president’s condition wasn’t established earlier, if Biden’s PSA levels didn’t spike during previous screenings, the alarm would not have been raised.

“One thing that may be a wrinkle in this case is the fact that PSA levels with a high-grade tumor may be lower than you expect. Because the high-grade tumors make less PSA per cancer cell than the low-grade tumors,” Petrylak said.
Even a Republican congressman who's a doctor doesn't think this story should be exploited politically.
North Carolina Congressman Greg Murphy, M.D., a surgeon, said, “While [I] definitely agree that Biden’s declining mental acuity was covered up, it is medically reckless to assume his prostate cancer was as well.

“I have treated prostate cancer patients for 30+ years. Let’s get the politics out of medicine,” he stated on X Sunday night.
Republicans are pointing to this moment from 2022:
President Joe Biden’s speech at a former coal-fired power plant in Massachusetts led to widespread claims on social media that he made a significant announcement not about climate change, but about his health....

At one point during his speech, he discussed the impact of environmental pollution from oil refineries near his hometown, sharing an anecdote about his childhood.

“And guess what? The first frost, you knew what was happening. You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window,” Biden said, according to a White House transcript of his remarks. “That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up (with) have cancer and why can — for the longest time, Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.” ...

But Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, confirmed on Twitter that Biden was referring to the publicly disclosed fact that he had skin cancer removed before he became president.

But right-wingers don't merely want to argue that Team Biden covered up a cancer diagnosis in a way that's scandalous. They're asserting an overall health cover-up and calling for legal consequences.


This letter was released after reports emerged of a neurologist's visit to the White House. D'Souza is tweeting this now because he wants all the questions about Biden's mental acuity and questions about Biden's cancer diagnosis to be scrambled in his followers' minds.

And the same is true for Jack Posobiec:


It's no surprise that this scumbag wants to argue that the entire Biden presidency was a sham and should be wiped off the books because (as he suggests) Biden was a brain-dead dementia case and an autopen was used to simulate his judgment. Again, Posobiec knows this is bullshit, but he knows his audience doesn't know that. But why is he tweeting this now, and why is D'Souza retweeting it now? Because they want questions about a possible cancer cover-up to be mixed up in their readers' minds with questions -- thanks, Jake Tapper! -- about Biden's mental health.

We just found out about Biden's cancer and this is what these low-lifes are doing. Remember this the next time there's a mass shooting and the same ideological thugs tell us that it's "too soon" to talk about gun control. And remember all this the next time you're told that Democrats are elitist bullies who treat Trump voters with contempt. This is the media diet of Trump voters. They hate us, and this is why.

*****

UPDATE: I see it isn't just online right-wing influencers who are trying to conflate Biden's prostate health and his mental acuity. Here's the vice president of the United States:

JD Vance's reaction to Biden's cancer diagnosis: "Whether the right time to have this conversation is now or some time in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 19, 2025 at 10:24 AM

Always be demonizing.

Posted by Steve M. at 11:15 AM

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