So, now it’s time to get serious about Biden’s brain?
If the MSM ever does decide it’s finally “time” to get serious about Biden’s brain, it would be because (a) the fear that the public will reject Biden as obviously suffering from dementia has increased, and (b) the left has decided on his replacement and is satisfied with the prospects of that person.
At any rate, here’s the reasoning, as stated by a guy on the right:
…[T]he Iraq/Ukraine gaffes were not an isolated series of incidents. They are simply the latest in a string of bizarre, confused and mostly unintelligible statements from Biden in the much longer string of bizarre, confused and mostly unintelligible statements that have come to define the Biden presidency…
Yet, despite the press’s normal reflex to ask whether the president is up to the demands of the office, we in the media have responded to Biden’s bizarre presidency with little more than a bored shrug…
But if ever there was a time to snap back to attention, to engage on the issue of “presidential fitness,” this is it. There’s a presidential election just around the corner. The time to get serious about “fitness,” and to address it fairly and seriously, is now. Not for the sake of the media’s credibility, but for the sake of the public, which has every right to know whether the leading candidates for president are actually capable of carrying out their dutie
Good luck with that.
When Adams writes that Biden’s recent “gaffes” are “simply the latest in a string of bizarre, confused, and mostly unintelligible statements that have come to define the Biden presidency,” I beg to differ. They also defined his campaign. What’s more, they defined his vice presidency under Obama – and the MSM likewise ignored them, covered them up, and/or rationalized them even back then.
One example you might recall was his debate in 2008 with Sarah Palin. Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the matter, back in the days before he fell prey to Trump derangement syndrome:
But what about Biden? Overwhelmingly, the professional political class proclaimed that he blew her away on “specifics” and “knowledge” and “seriousness.” The New York Times said Biden avoided making any gaffes, “while showing a clear grasp of the big picture and the details.” The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib proclaimed on ABC’s “This Week” that Biden avoided any “verbal excesses or rhetorical flourishes.”
The Associated Press called Biden the “master senator … rattling off foreign policy details with ease.”
And that’s true in a sense. Biden was at ease; he easily rattled off a string of falsehoods and gasbaggeries.
According to the master senator, the U.S. and France “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon.” Afterward, according to Biden, “I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.’ ” Perhaps Biden meant to say the U.S. and France kicked Syria out of Lebanon. But even this is woefully glib. Syria never fully abandoned Lebanon. And there was no “vacuum” for Hezbollah to fill. The terrorist group was already firmly in control of southern Lebanon and part of the government. No one remembers Biden and Obama fighting for the stupidly impossible NATO move either.
That Lebanon claim of Biden’s was a serious “gaffe” (otherwise known as an error or a lie) – and recall that, at the time, Biden was widely billed by the MSM as some sort of foreign policy expert.
I remember this one:
The [incorrectly self-proclaimed] constitutional law professor [Biden] scornfully mocked Dick Cheney because the vice president “doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president. That’s the executive branch.” Wrong. Article I defines the Legislature, Article II the executive branch. Both define the role of the VP.
The article by Goldberg goes on for some time listing these errors, lies, gaffes, what have you. Towards the end, he writes this:
Biden has no excuse. He’s been in the majors for nearly 40 years, and yet he sounds like a bizarro-world Chauncey Gardner. The famous simpleton from Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There” (played by Peter Sellers in the film) offered terse aphorisms that were utterly devoid of specific content but nonetheless seemed to describe reality accurately. Biden is the reverse: He offers a logorrheic farrago of “specifics” that have no connection to our corner of the space-time continuum.
In short, he just makes stuff up. But he does it with passionate, self-important intensity. He’s like a politician in a movie with a perfect grasp of a world that doesn’t exist. He’s not an expert, he just plays one on TV.
No one seems to care. He convinced the focus groups he’s an expert. The media, with a few exceptions, let it all slide.
That was in 2008, fifteen years ago. Biden was 65 years old. The media was already “letting it all slide,” because Biden was Obama’s VP, and therefore he had to be defended and protected. But he was already – what? Stupid? Mendacious? Suffering from mild dementia? All of the above? Whatever it was, it should have been cause for alarm even on the left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) back then but of course it wasn’t. They protected him even better twelve years later, in 2020, and they will protect him now until it no longer serves the left to protect him. Then and only then will they abandon him.
All true. He’s been spewing whoppers and some nasty hate from the very beginning.
The Democrats have become the party of the lie. Clinton, Obama and Biden have totally shattered any pretense of honesty. Remember when the consensus of all the pundits was that Clinton was done if it turned out he’d bald-faced lied to the nation?
Politicians were known to make promises they had no intention of keeping. They would shade and slide and dance with the truth. But blatant, in your face, lying his ass off types of lies were considered too far over the line. After Clinton, Obama and Biden? Democrats have carte blanche to lie as egregiously as anyone could have ever imagined.
Wasn’t it Joe Biden who, right after he became the VP in 2009, blurted out where the secure location of a Vice President was? Which until then was supposed to be classified?
It isn’t just JoJo’s brain; there ‘s also the little problem called Kamala: “. . . as long as Harris remains as vice president, everything is on hold. Harris is her party’s worst nightmare. Remember, a Republican theme is that a vote for the aging Joe Biden is in fact a vote for President Kamala Harris. [emphasis in original] But if President Biden does not run, then as vice president she is presumed heir apparent. More importantly, suppose Biden is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.’ Harris would replace him and get a head start. The powers in the Democratic Party can no more gamble on Kamala than on Joe. If either is on the ticket, more than the White House is at stake.”
Most of the article at the link is about the “dark comedy of Biden’s mental decay/physical decline,” but it also speculates about Harris’ political future:
https://spectator.org/kamala-harris-goes-first/
“The problem of the West is that it is being run by small-minded people”
PA+Cat hits the nail right on the two bobbly heads. I just read the same article.
They (for all values of D ‘they’) cannot afford a Kamala the Great administration.
Biden’s a brain-addled mess but Kamala…On her best day she’s perhaps the least intelligent for starters & throw in her hubris & lack of self-awareness…
Hide & watch.
Yes, Joe Biden was “stupid,” “mendacious,” and “suffering from mild dementia” back when he was VP, but he had one extremely important qualification to become president: he knew all about the Russia hoax and all the rest of the despicable coup that the Obama administration used to hamstring Trump, so he would protect and defend the people involved. He would also essentially be run by a cabal of Obama administration personnel, so that he could be the instrument of Obama’s third term. None of this could have happened without the mainstream media; it also relied on Democrat operatives in the blue cities and states, and the oceans of foundation money that funded their various forms of voting fraud and deceit.
The question is whether we can come back from this. I live in Pennsylvania, so I am pessimistic.
No one ever took Joey Plugs seriously, just look at his first two miserably failed presidential runs. BTW, anyone remember the WP column by Alexandra Petri in 2015 “What are we going to do about Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?” Good luck finding it.
I have to wonder what the Democrat power-brokers were thinking when they allowed or encouraged Harris’s nomination. Did they just not know what an airhead she is?
Hi Bill Serra,
The Internet is forever….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/02/18/what-are-we-going-to-do-about-creepy-uncle-joe-biden/
I don’t think so but I have to admit to the possibility that the Democrat leadership is too stupid to realize that a Biden-Harris ticket in 2024 is a political nonstarter.
Operating on the assumption that they are smart enough to realize that, I think it most likely that Biden will be ‘persuaded’ not to run again and that Gavin Newsom will defeat Harris in the 2024 Democrat primary to become the Democrat’s pResidential nominee. Newsom will of course garner 85 million votes. It’s a done deal. Only the formalities left to play out.
facts not in evidence, that there is brain, he did possess a low cunning like when he exempted student loans from bankruptcy, not long before he went after bork and thomas, but as for any actual knowledge that was dubious for a long time
The Democrat leadership would LOVE rubbing our faces in our powerlessness by putting them back. It would take something strong enough for them to get over that to work.
I have to wonder what the Democrat power-brokers were thinking when they allowed or encouraged Harris’s nomination. Did they just not know what an airhead she is?
Kate:
Me, I don’t think they did. She was sponsored by Willie Brown, she seemed to do OK in San Francisco, then California. She flamed out in the 2020 debates, but that happens.
She was still the right color and gender and how hard is it to be Veep anyway? Well…
In 2020 the Dem shot callers had enough problems on their hands because it looked like Bernie Sanders was going to win and they had to act fast.
Biden wasn’t ideal either, nor, later, Harris, but that Odd Couple were enough to win (with a little help from their fraudsters). Democrats would have to deal with the Biden/Harris problem later.
If a candidate says something untrue, and nobody calls it a gaffe or an error, it’s not a gaffe or an error. It’s just a lie. Biden got away with that Lebanon comment because reporters either didn’t know or were covering for him.
VP Biden and Sen. Biden were stupid and mendacious, but there weren’t the long pauses, and there weren’t as many misreadings and mispronunciations. Above all, there wasn’t the stumbing and the shuffling gate. Candidate Biden could still run up the steps to his plane, at least well enough to get it on video and use it in an ad.
Since Biden isn’t really running things, I’m not that scared of Kamala. The staff will still be deciding everything. They’ll keep Harris out of the decision-making process. She’ll be rolled out every now and then — as infrequently as possible to say as little as possible. Eventually she’ll lose the election.
That’s what the Democrats are worried about. How are they going to get her to drop out? For Newsom, beating the first Black Asian Woman President isn’t going to be a resume enhancement.
Aside: in the latest Fox News poll Vivek is at 5% which I believe puts him on the stage at the first primary debate.
It’s curious. The Dems don’t lack for prominent leaders doing, saying or being stupid.
Yet Kamala Harris seems to be the only one truly wounded by stupidity.
I wonder why.
I don’t think the answer is racism or sexism.
To answer my question with a guess — I believe this reflects internal politics between Harris’s team and the rest of the Dem forces.
It’s not how stupid Harris sounds in appearances, it’s how stupid she is as a general leading her pro-Kamala faction. There is no good news coming out of the Kamala camp.
Say what you will about Obama, but he really was the “I got this” guy in Dem politics of his time.
Maybe he still is.
I figure they thought that she’s playing a roll, she’s an actress, and a lot of them are airheads so she can do this. They had to just set up the situation and she just had to recite her lines they gave her. Kind of like how when Obama did that interview at Google they had a plant ask him that computer science 102 question about sorting and he was given the joke about bubble sort. (There is no way he came up with that on the fly, somebody wrote that bit and gave Obama his lines.) Anyway unfortunately she’s too much of an airhead to even be an actress.
huxley:
Harris isn’t wounded by her stupidity. She’s wounded by the combination of stupidity and unlikeability, and it’s the latter that matters most. I wrote about this in August of 2019; see this.
I agree with Abraxas (8:10 pm). Biden has always been a liar, and he was never terribly bright, but he used to be able to speak in complete sentences. The dementia is new, and is progressing rapidly.
yes kamalas staff, has to chose whether to stab themselves with a pen, or continue working for her, funny thing she still gets applications, like scylla and charybdis,
Joe is a distraction from the machinations of the real powers that be. They want us to focus on him.
https://twitter.com/paulsperry_/status/1675921254816030734
“But he was already – what? Stupid? Mendacious? Suffering from mild dementia? All of the above?”
All of the above.
My theory on Harris is that after the George Floyd riots Dems felt they had to put not just a woman but a black woman on the ticket. Without that I think they would have picked Amy Klobuchar who is no Winston Churchill either but at least did better in the primaries and made more sense from an EC standpoint, the Midwest being more of a battleground than CA which was in the bag.