Once a year, the US President gets a chance to play comedian and poke fun at the media behind the podium at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. This year, President Joe Biden was blessed with material coming from the recent events at Fox News.
Biden gladly took the chance to make fun of the network whose recent $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems was the end of a legal battle that was about knowingly spreading disinformation about his 2020 win for the presidency.
“Last year, your favorite Fox News reporters were able to attend because they were fully vaccinated and boosted,” Biden said. “This year, with that $787 million settlement, they’re here because they couldn’t say no to a free meal.”
“And hell, I’d call Fox honest, fair, and truthful,” he continued. “But then I could be sued for defamation.”
Biden also found the opportunity to jokingly address the issue of his advanced age, which has been hitting the headlines since he announced his bid for re-election last week. “It’s on everybody’s mind,” he said. “And by everyone, I mean The New York Times. Headline: ‘Biden’s Advanced Age a Big Issue; Trump’s, However, Is Not.’”
“You might think I don’t like Rupert Murdoch,” Biden, who’s 80, said of the 92-year-old Fox founder. “That’s simply not true. How can I dislike a guy who makes me look like Harry Styles?”
The president also made a jab at recently-fired CNN host Don Lemon.
“You call me old?” he continued. “I call it being seasoned. You say I’m ancient? I say I’m wise. You say I’m over the hill? Don Lemon would say that’s a man in his prime.”
Jokes aside, the US may really be showing its age.
Biden is currently the oldest president in the country’s history, and he would be 86 years old by the of his second term if he wins again in 2024. His leading opponent, former president Donald Trump, is 76 and would be 82 at the end of the next presidential term.
As Timothy Noah once wrote in 2019, “If the nation seems intolerant, reckless and more than a little cranky, perhaps that’s because the American republic is showing its age. Somewhere along the way, a once-new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal (not men and women; that came later) became a wheezy gerontocracy. Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are extremely old.”
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