Does Biden's Mind Have Four More Years?

June has been an excruciating few weeks as Biden does the rounds ahead of his campaign for re-election. Surely enough is enough.

Joe Biden thinks he’s running for re-election and the Democratic party are encouraging this madness. I along with the rest of the world have to watch in utter disbelief as a man so startlingly senile plays the role of president flanked by enablers who keep telling you four more years of this is sustainable. It’s like a retelling of the story “The Emperor Has No Clothes” except in this version it’s the emperor’s faculties that are missing. Notice and you’re agist, maybe ableist, maybe some other term constructed by the Berkeley set for the purposes of policing common sense but whatever you are you are not wrong and certainly not alone. For the good of America and by extension the rest of the world we cannot do another four years of this shameful pantomime.

Trump of course is a uniquely awful candidate whose electability was only down to him being slightly less repulsive than the rest of the political class. After four years of dumb craziness and endless screeching even those who had voted for him couldn’t handle the world when he was in charge. Despite that I sympathize with the embarrassment and shame the average Biden voter must feel. After all, you made a man with clear and obvious dementia the leader of the free world because the media his political party control told you the other guy was a white supremacist and agent of Russia on the verge of enacting a masterplan to destroy democracy as we know it. Never mind the fact that the buffoon  couldn’t even get a wall built, you’re supposed to believe he was literally moments away from totalitarian rule but now, thanks to the brave coffee shop resistance, he goes down in history as the only fascist to be ever voted out of office.

And so in his place America got its first pope, a decrepit figurehead puppeteered by a cabal of handlers that maneuver him from one function to the next, putting written instructions with the most basic of commands in front of him as he blunders through speeches that make little sense and accidentally makes proclamations that the White House has to then correct or recant. Maybe it’s fine with you that an American president can go off script due to brain fog and accidentally call for regime change in Russia or claims he is talking to force ghosts but, to quote Biden himself, that’s making me nervous man.

I wrote about the signs of Biden’s infirmity in 2019 and said that his clear lack of fitness for office would like be the margin by which a mostly reviled Trump would succeed. I underestimated just how much people wanted the world to go back to “normal.” However when you compare 2019’s Biden with the one running for re-election the frightening decline is apparent. Back then the name Sleepy Joe was apt. There’d be the occasional fumbles and impossible facts when it came to speeches and his campaign staff did a good job of using him as sparingly as possible as a result. Now almost every public appearance induces the gut churning cringe of time spent in the company of an elderly relative that is a confused shadow of who they once were. For additional context Reagan almost certainly had Alzheimers while in office and yet it is hard to remember a time when he was ever as incoherent as 2023 Biden.

That Biden isn’t well is so glaringly obvious it makes you wonder about the general lack of curiosity about his condition from the majority of the mainstream media. Not so long ago there was a time when the President’s health was a concern worthy of entire news cycles. Remember, the Trump years were a period of time where we lionised people willing to violate medical ethics in the form of the Goldwater Rule and the media pushed meaningless surveys that declared Trump to be “mentally ill.” The media made celebrities out of clinicians who abandoned the most basic components of their code such as Bandi X. Lee, platforming her and claiming her improper diagnosis was accurate before she was rightly fired from Yale for declaring all Trump supports as being in a “shared psychosis.”

Indeed, the mere act of drinking a slippery glass with two hands prompted not only debate about Trump’s fitness for office but also mockery at his inability to do it from the likes of the disgraced Chris Cuomo. Trump walking tentatively down a wet metal ramp “raised new health questions” in the New York Times and beyond. Trump’s presidential medical, which included the type of cognitive test Biden has refused to undergo, revealed that, unsurprisingly for an overweight man of 71, he had a mild form of heart disease. This was framed as “serious heart concerns” by the usual procession pf partisan experts. You’d be forgiven for getting tonal whiplash from this coverage because all through the 2016 campaign you were pointedly told it was wrong, maybe even sexist, to speculate about Hillary Clinton’s health after she collapsed at a public event and had to be thrown into a van like a side of beef. CNN went so far as to call it the new “birtherism.”

But let’s now assume that the media’s behaviour in the Trump years is the new normal. After all they pretty much uniformly had to be, that the adversarial stance between the fourth estate and government had to be reestablished even if it meant surrendering credibility to enact it.

Where then is all the coverage about Biden’s glaringly obvious health issues? If slowly walking down a wet ramp is cause to summon medical experts to weigh in, what about multiple public appearances resulting in falls? Oh, don’t worry, apparently that can just happen to anyone.

A single incident certainly wouldn’t be cause for concern. Anyone of any age can trip, anyone of sound mental health can misspeak or forget something. However when an elderly person continues to fall repeatedly and repeatedly misstates details about their own life and family members you are more than right to be concerned. These are all symptoms of at best age based decline that is the precursor to dotage or something far, far worse.

Let’s go over the recent weeks and try and imagine the hysteria if this was happening with Trump. Biden ended a speech at National Safer Communities Summit in Connecticut by saying “God save the queen” which his aides said was actually not his closer but something he was saying to someone in the crowd. The coverage in the media was that this was just “Biden being Biden.” At that same meeting he stated that adding a stabilising brace to a pistol “turns it into a gun” and can make it so a “higher calibre bullet” can come out of that gun.

Of course this is insane gibberish in line with claiming that if you add a spoiler to a car it only then becomes a car and the spoiler changes the horsepower of the engine. No fact checkers around for that one I guess. He claimed to have been friends with a 17 year old Eva Longoria when he was 40 years old, which is a problem for a number of reasons but mostly because in actuality when he was 40 she would have been only 7. He would then go on to touch her inappropriately on stage and have to have his hand removed by the actress. This only “raised eyebrows” and unlike Miss Longoria wasn’t touched at all by many of the mainstream publications.

He repeated the claim that his son Beau Biden, who died of a brain tumour in 2015, died in Iraq, a claim it is now impossible to tell is cynical manipulation used when in the presence of the military or a genuine memory lapse. The facts are that his son served one year in Iraq as a member of the national guard between 2008 and 2009. Biden’s claim has always been that it was exposure to burn pits that had prompted the cancer but this belies that the practice of burn pits, while not banned, had been severely cut down by the time Beau Biden served and there is yet to be a medical link established between burn pit exposure and brain cancer. You will note his comments don’t qualify as science denial or medical misinformation. In the same speech he also claimed to have ran for president while serving as Vice President but in fact did not do this. The media claim that by pointing out the irrefutable fact that his son did not die in Iraq, a claim that is tantamount to stolen valor, you are “ignoring the whole story.

Speaking to the League of Conservative Voters in Washington Biden stated that “We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean” which would be a fantastical feat of engineering. He’d repeat the claim again when visiting the UK. This was largely ignored as just a flub with the usual slew of “Republicans pounce” headlines. His visits to Europe and the UK saw him roaming around like someone on acid at a music festival again to little response. Biden even broke UK royal protocol by walking in front of the newly crowned king, something for which the media lambasted Trump with headlines such as “President Trump Committed a Royal Faux Pas During His Visit With the Queen.”

Biden said Putin was losing the war in Iraq not once but twice. He shouted in a journalists face when asked a routine question about the ongoing pay-to-play scandal involving his son. It was again revealed he has to use notes in BIG PRINT and basic English that explain what his responses to questions need to be. During a meeting with the Indian Prime Minister he referred to him as the Prime Minister of China on two occasions and then placed his hand on his heart during the Indian national anthem before lowering it once the recognition had kicked in.

An Axios report revealed that Biden is in fact a tetchy man incapable of controlling his temper, who routinely abuses the staffers that are there to keep him on guardrails. The conclusion? He does it because he loves them. Try to ignore the language of the domestic abuser if you can.

During his recent visit to Finland he confused Iceland with Ireland then later literally nibbled on a small child as if he was Pacman. In a softball interview on MSNBC he seemed to forget how television works and instead of waiting for the anchor to throw to break he wandered off while she was mid sentence. And of course he fell over, again, this time tripping over a very easy to see sandbag while attending a military graduation ceremony.

MSNBC promptly ran a segment blaming his aides for putting him in positions where he falls adding that it’s irresponsible because his age “will be a factor” in the coming election.

We did get some coverage about health concerns as it related to Biden. He made a public appearance with grooves clearly from an oxygen mask present on his face, something that led to the White House saying the president was using a CPAP machine to trait sleep apnea. Nothing wrong there beyond it being an absent detail from his last publicly released medical in February this year, a medical that still doesn’t include a cognitive test and explains his “stiffened gait” on arthritis. While it’s unusual for the White House to admit anything other than the president being a superman, it’s worth noting that the talk about his sleep apnea served as a welcome distraction from talking about his brain.

That conversation cannot be delayed much longer. If you’re still not convinced that something is wrong, consider the fact that this was just June, a single month and it’s not an exhaustive list. It doesn’t even have to be a partisan issue. Compare this to Bernie Sanders who is a year older than Biden and ask yourself if this man should be running for re-relection. There’s simply no good argument for it and the prospect of a Biden victory should terrify you because it’s only going to get worse and with the way global tensions have ramped up, a demented US president is not a piece you want on the geopolitical board. Or maybe you’re the mythical individual CNN talked about in their Biden interview where they claimed people around the world have watched Biden and been impressed.

In reality people can see that president Biden is “not OK” and the longer the DNC pretend he is the longer they risk failing to present a viable solution to voters. Biden’s decline also means the next election comes with the caveat you might just be voting for President Harris who is polling at just 39% favourable. Elsewhere Trump rockets into a lead in Republican polling despite his campaign being the political equivalent of the movie Death Wish. A June poll showed 48% of independents believe that “Age” severely limits Biden. He is the ultimate test of “vote blue no matter who” thinking. It’s time to acknowledge this emperor really does have no clothes.