The release of the audio of Hur’s interrogation of Joe Biden
Now that the audio of the Hur interviews with Biden has been released, there’s a lot of talk about what it reveals. (see this, for example). Nothing on the recording should surprise anyone on the right. Biden’s state of mind is not the real scandal; the real scandal is the failure of the previous administration to release the audio, the smear campaign previously mounted by the left against Hur, and the extent and duration of the coverup of Biden’s cognitive failures in general and not just his failures with Hur.
Here’s the full audio; it’s long:
Here’s a short excerpt:
His condition is painful, although he’s clearly not totally out of it.
One of the many things I’ve thought about as a result Biden’s cognitive problems during his entire presidency, and especially the latter half of it, is that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is useless without an honest group of people to activate it. We didn’t have that in the Biden administration, to say the least. We had conspiracy and collusion to keep his deficits from the American people, and we had a press that was an active part of it.
It’s a reminder that no laws, no Constitution, can protect a country if its rulers and its press don’t have integrity.
So many questions…
First the trickle of oddities like the “autopen” pardons. Then we have stream of “We wuz bamboozled by the Bidens” books from the complicit media. Now the interview drop.
All I want to know is, “Who was really running the country?”
“is that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is useless without an honest group of people to activate it.”
Yes. I thought that often during the last administration. Maybe there need to be a few more options.
Yet, will the spineless GOP do anything? LOL.
One thing about implementing the 25th is that it would have put Harris in charge. I suspect Harris at her best was worse than Biden at his worst … and others may have realized that. Nevertheless, we’ve been screwed since the Kenyan Lightbringer was installed … which is an even deeper issue.
I never thought that invoking the 25th Amendment was a realistic possibility but this interview took place over a year before the 2024 election and it is still hard for me to believe that there were people who thought that Biden was the best choice to run. The odds of him having a disaster like the June 2024 debate performance were always high.
I know that after this interview there was a lot of worry, even among Democrats, about Biden’s mental state. His aggressive 2024 State of the Union speech seemed to have calmed a lot of Dems down but it really shouldn’t have. The SOS speech was only reassuring if you were grading Biden on a curve. There has been a lot of talk about Biden having good days and bad days but for the last couple of years he just had bad days and not as bad days. His speech was always somewhat slurred and he often ran his words together. Signs of cognitive decline were always present.
We have the Hur interview, his debate performance and his numerous other public gaffes and stumbles as evidence of his decline, but the people closest to him obviously saw far worse. And yet they kept pushing him forward. Jill Biden is one nasty piece of work.
the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is useless without an honest group of people to activate it
True but would not have helped. Biden would have deactivated it. He was not in a coma and all he would need to do is declare no incapacity–he was compos mentis enough for that. Then it goes to Congress where the bar, by design, is higher than for impeachment.
Otherwise would have been used on Trump in 2017 when the media was full of stories on his “dementia”:
“It’s a reminder that no laws, no Constitution, can protect a country if its rulers and its press don’t have integrity.”
In the aggregate, elected rulers reflect those who vote for them.
“It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.”
Those who voted for Obama, Biden and Harris are the blind, being led by the blind.
One thing wrong with Hur’s assessment of a old forgetful man. he isn’t talking about your dad or grandfather, it was the President who is supposed to be available 24/7 365 to make command decisions.
@Geoffrey Britain:Those who voted for Obama, Biden and Harris are the blind, being led by the blind.
On the contrary I think their eyes are wide open. They want the country run by unelected and unaccountable people who have the Right Opinions. It does not matter who the President is to them, because the President isn’t really running things and they are just fine with that.
I’ve commented in a number of threads that I don’t think a change to the 25th Amendment would help the situation. Take a look at what has happened to impeachment in the modern House. A 25th Amendment process with a similarly low bar to implementation would just be another stick for the opposition to use to beat on the President.
I suspect Niketas is right in thinking a lot of Democrats, or maybe the most vocal ones, had no problem with no effective Presidential oversight of the Deep State since it largely implemented their priorities. This situation isn’t going to be fixed until more voters decide the current crop of Democrat leadership is toxic and either change their party or remove it from power.
I support Trump, but would not claim he has integrity. At least his past doesn’t show much. Courage, creativity, pretty good judgement, great deal making skill. And so far excellent policies, including his minimal pro-life leave it up to the states position.
Most Presidents don’t have much—Carter had plenty, but with lousy policies and lousy ideas about what good govt should be doing. Integrity, and all personal virtues, are important, but not as important as good laws & policies with good outcomes.
The only times the 25th Amendment has been used has been when a President voluntarily declared himself incapable, usually because they were undergoing surgery or something.
The 25th Amendment, quite properly, allows the President to contest his involuntary removal. Not that long ago neo did a review here.
There is no way that Joe Biden would not have contested his removal for incapacity, because he simply wasn’t that far gone. All it takes is a letter saying he is not unable to act as President. And if he declared he was not unable, two-thirds of both Houses of Congress would be required to remove him, which is harder than impeachment.
This was by design. The framers of the 25th Amendment didn’t want it abused, as it would have been with Trump back in 2017, to remove a President that wasn’t really incapacitated; the impeachment process already exists for that.
@Tom Grey:personal virtues, are important, but not as important as good laws & policies with good outcomes
“good laws & policies with good outcomes” require people with “personal virtues”, they don’t happen automatically, they must be made to happen by capable people acting in good faith.
I get what you’re saying, it’s not enough to elect “a good man”. It sure isn’t. The vast majority of the people in the government have to have a minimum level of goodness and competence or we get bad outcomes because they will pervert the laws and policies; that’s what we’re dealing with now.
It’s not one or two Presidential elections, it’s not winning midterms, none of those things are enough. The government, elected and unelected, has to be cleaned out and replaced with a critical mass of other people, hopefully better people.
The 25th Amendment is the product of an earlier American age, when, surprisingly, legislators were apparently not as venal and self-serving as Dems are today.
The 25th requires a declaration of POTUS’ inability to perform by his Cabinet members, whom the Prez appointed to their posts. The slopbuckets appointed by Biden owed him their high positions, a disgusting, revolting crowd who would never do that even for the good of the nation. The corrupt stick together.
Besides, the real problem is with the electorate, the mass of American (and other) folks who voted.
Congress sat on their hands for 47 years after Mr. Wilson’s administration, then sent to the states for ratification a scheme which would have been unworkable in the circumstances faced in 1919. NB, the 25th Amendment does permit Congress to provide by statute for a body apart from the cabinet to make this call, but they have never passed the necessary enabling legislation. IOW, the Amendment was enacted and Congress sat on its hands.
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A secondary problem has been that Democrats are just too dishonest to admit when one of their own manifests moral turpitude or dementia. Instead, the worst of them start playing DARVO cards.
Would Harris really have been in charge if Biden stepped down? It’s not like Biden was in charge when Biden was “in charge.” Maybe the reason Biden wasn’t forced out was more that Harris would have been a less convincing front person than Biden was. Or maybe it was that nobody was up to the effort of gearing up the whole lie-spreading machinery all over again for Harris. Or perhaps Harris being “in charge” would have meant a more chaotic and fraught atmosphere — more people quitting and leaking — than was the case under Biden?
“The 25th Amendment is the product of an earlier American age, when, surprisingly, legislators were apparently not as venal and self-serving as Dems are today.”– Cicero
Nope.
In the past as now, Congress contains decent people, sleazoids, and everything in between, and all of them are tangled up in a complicated web of deals, debts, favors, obligations, and political considerations.
The thing is that the Trump Administration is a threat to the established power structure in a way that no President has been since FDR deposed the previous established power structure, the one that had come together after the Civil War.
And the anger and hatred so generated was very similar in the case of both FDR and Trump. Whatever one thinks about the merits of FDR’s agenda, he was a change agent in the same sense Trump has been. In both cases, the people invested in the former status quo were Not Happy about the change (and that included people in both parties).
(It’s often forgotten now, but you were about as likely to hear the phrase “that damned Roosevelt” from a certain breed of Democrat as from a Republican in the late 40s and 50s.)
Today’s ruling class is the descendants, culturally and sometimes literally, of the new class that came in with FDR. Now it’s their turn to be disrupted and marginalized, and they hate it just as much as the former power structure did in the 1930s.
(FDR deposed an establishment that had controlled politics, more or less, since the middle 1800s.)
In the past as now, Congress contains decent people, sleazoids, and everything in between, and all of them are tangled up in a complicated web of deals, debts, favors, obligations, and political considerations.
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Actually, the level of mendacity in federal politics is stupefying in comparison with the situation 25 years ago, much less 60 years ago. It’s purveyors are not just politicians and their minions, either.
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Today’s ruling class is the descendants, culturally and sometimes literally, of the new class that came in with FDR. Now it’s their turn to be disrupted and marginalized, and they hate it just as much as the former power structure did in the 1930s.
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The ratio of federal expenditure to domestic product during the period running from 1933 to 1940 was one-third of what it is today. The share of late adolescent / young adult birth cohorts enrolled in post-secondary schooling was about 12% at that time. Post secondary institutions were not receiving federal subsidies at the time bar some funds under the Morrill Act.
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Please note New Deal regulatory schemes were most troublesome to (1) farmers and (2) those operating in the energy sector, and (3) those operating in the transportation sector, and (4) executives in industry generally. The most salient element in the new power structure was not ‘new class types’ but union bosses.
seriously
https://x.com/Oilfield_Rando/status/1924306958984597764
it took generations for an honest appraisal of wilson, not for his worship of the state, but because of his race fixation, and probably because of his protestantism
now more than 50 years after the coup that displaced nixon, and there is no honest way to depict watergate as anything but that, the only argument is whether it was warranted, because he was ‘such a monster’ unlike say the beast from san marcos state, and the sainted jfk, of course the counter is the madame chennault convo which is less than meets the eye, one could have arguments whether nixons concessions to statism, see EPA and price controls, for example, were warranted as well as the approach to China, which has been depicted like Perry’s black ships
arriving in Meiji Japan, but that metaphor has sailed,
of course the background to the accession of the previous occupant of the Oval Office, complete with a fake ‘insurrection, the attempted proscription of much of the political opposition, by the apparat, the calamities that came upon us, mostly abroad, which I won’t revisit, the hardships at home,
@CICERO:The 25th requires a declaration of POTUS’ inability to perform by his Cabinet members, whom the Prez appointed to their posts.
That is not enough. It also requires a President who won’t contest that declaration. Whatever shape Joe Biden was in, was not so bad he would have taken it lying down. All he had to do was sign a letter to reassume his powers.
For a President in a coma, kidnapped, under anesthesia, the 25th Amendment works just fine. For a President who has lucid days, surrounded by a staff determined to keep up their power by covering for him, no it’s not enough. Or they would have done it to Trump. We were all alive in 2017 when they started talking about using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump and they kept that talk right up until November 2024. Trust me, you do not want the 25th Amendment easier to execute against a President who can at least sign a letter.
The person you’re quoting is “Dr. Lance Dodes, a supervising analyst emeritus of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and retired Harvard Medical School professor”. IOW, a high class quack.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/oil-spill-monday-may-19-2025-c-and
@Art Deco:The person you’re quoting is “Dr. Lance Dodes… a high class quack.
Sure. I’m not quoting him because I agree with him, if you have that impression. People lamenting the difficulty of using the 25th Amendment to remove Biden should be aware of folks like Dr Dodes and the use that will be made of such people.
Niketas Choniates on May 18, 2025 at 12:22 am said:
On the contrary I think their eyes are wide open. They want the country run by unelected and unaccountable people who have the Right Opinions. It does not matter who the President is to them, because the President isn’t really running things and they are just fine with that.
I agree.
Tom Grey on May 18, 2025 at 8:03 am said:
I support Trump, but would not claim he has integrity. At least his past doesn’t show much. Courage, creativity, pretty good judgement, great deal making skill. And so far excellent policies, including his minimal pro-life leave it up to the states position.
Most Presidents don’t have much—Carter had plenty, but with lousy policies and lousy ideas about what good govt should be doing. Integrity, and all personal virtues, are important, but not as important as good laws & policies with good outcomes.
I don’t agree on Carter having integrity. I think that was fake and media driven. One example: his election monitoring in Venezuela was about enabling Hugo Chavez. He came back and declared in an honest election, something he wouldn’t know.
@ miguel > thanks for the coffeeandcovid link (I generally click on those even without a heads-up in re content).
I think it’s the best exposition on the Democrats’ duplicitous dilemma to date.
You’re welcome, this limited hangout, just doesn’t make sense, they would either have been ignorant or malicious, in the former, the most prestigious medical care that one could imagine, did not detect this, on the latter, well they sought to maximize the utility of his office for their purposes, not ours,
What has been making the rounds is the Occam’s-Razor-driven observation that since the Democrats have been, for entirely partisan purposes, lying about (or half-lying about) and/or misrepresenting EVERYTHING, then it is only reasonable to conclude that they are doing the same WRT to “Biden’”s diagnosis.
And should one be therefore very skeptical about the Democratic Party’s gambit in this case, one can expect that the Democrats will be fast and furious—and entirely unhinged—in their PRE-PLANNED, UNIFORM, HOW-DARE-YOU? “moral”-sounding reaction, blasting accusations against anyone who doesn’t accept their tendentious, artificial “reality”…which is, after all, their ugly and odious MO.
“Please note New Deal regulatory schemes were most troublesome to (1) farmers and (2) those operating in the energy sector, and (3) those operating in the transportation sector, and (4) executives in industry generally. The most salient element in the new power structure was not ‘new class types’ but union bosses.” — Art Deco
True. And in those days, the union bosses were a different breed than today.
But the new establishment that was born in the New Deal changed with time. In the 1970s, the ‘new class’ emerged, and the center of gravity in the Democratic Party shifted away from the old manufacturing/transport/etc. union labor to the new ‘managerial class’ types. They more or less inherited the mantle of the establishment.
But the old union labor Democrats were broadly in step with the general public, or large swaths of it. Their inheritors are not.
Just curious, where was Dr. Bandy Lee over the last four years?