Don’t let Joe Biden’s cancer news distract from media, Democrats’ obscene cover-up

We’ll offer prayers for Joe Biden — but still view the cancer news in the context of the preceding years of lies about the then-president’s health.

The announcement puzzles doctors left and right who don’t get how it could possibly come as a surprise, when any halfway-competent MD would’ve spotted it years ago.

Joe is a private citizen now, with no need or duty to keep the public informed on these things, yet his family decided to announce his dire condition two days after the Robert Hur tapes finally leaked, and as “Original Sin” — a deep dive into the coverup of Biden’s mental decline — got released.

That sure looks like an effort to render discussions of that cover-up “more muted,” as David Axelrod urged.

Yet it shouldn’t in the least, because settling accounts and learning lessons from this sad tale isn’t directly about Joe Biden at all.

It’s about 1) his inner circle, who strove to keep his decline as secret as possible even within the White House, and kinda-sorta got away with it because 2) the entire leadership of the Democratic Party, in office and out, played along — as did most of the media.

That is, a huge chunk of the nation’s supposed elite convinced themselves that lying to each other about the president’s incapacity was the way to go.

Even though the public as a whole, on the basis of what it could see, had grown convinced he was too old for the job by the end of 2021.

Follow the latest on Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis:

• Ex-Biden aides suspect another cover-up after former president’s prostate cancer diagnosis
• Trump accuses Biden allies of ‘not telling the facts’ after cancer diagnosis: ‘Dangerous for our country’
• It’s highly unlikely Biden didn’t already know he had cancer: doctor
• Biden’s 2022 cancer ‘slip-up’ that was downplayed by White House resurfaces after ex-president’s surprise diagnosis
• Doctor who worked with Biden says he had cancer ‘while he was president’: ‘He did not develop it in the last 100 to 200 days’

Look: In April 2022, Karol Markowicz was calling out the emperor’s lack of clothes in these pages, with lines like, “He seems fully out of it, and we’re all watching quietly” and “Who is really running the show at the White House?”

Our online headline for that column: “Biden’s decline is obvious to everyone but the press.”

It was a year and a half later that special counsel Robert Hur interviewed Biden and concluded that, while Joe had flagrantly broken the law, no jury was likely to convict him because he’d come off as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

And the tapes show Hur was being extremely kind — even though Dems ripped him at the time as a liar conducting a partisan hit.

The denial kept up in full gear through the “deep fakes” absurdities all the way until that first debate made it impossible to keep pretending — though the Bidens tried to for weeks.

This week “Original Sin” was set to rip the mask off the entire sordid tale — if even co-author Jake Tapper was long a prime enabler of the lies, and is revealing it all to personal profit and prestige only now, when there’s no point left to defending Biden.

At some point, Congress needs to take a nonpartisan look at the failure to invoke the 25th Amendment, while Democrats must consider how their leaders’ clumsy efforts to deceive the American people all but guaranteed a second Trump term.

Our colleagues in the press, however, have to own up to being either knaves or fools when they betrayed their fundamental journalistic duties by not just missing the story, but slamming those of us who kept telling it straight.