Oh, my god! We’re all in trouble. Here we are, facing a presidential election, caught in a catch-22 situation, the choice between a president clearly showing incipient symptoms of mental decline, and an ex-President promising revenge and demagoguery. Biden’s lapses have been widely reported in the press for some time: tumbling on aircraft steps, lingering pauses in speech delivery, mix-up in identifying political leaders, befuddled recall of events.
Now comes the President’s frantically called press gathering, just 23 minutes warning in the aftermath of special prosecutor Robert Hur’s devastating findings on Biden’s alleged national security lapses: storage of top secret files in his Delaware home and sharing of classified information with the ghostwriter of his memoirs, Mark Zwonitzer.
Hur’s office considered charging Zwoniker, who has been cooperative, but the ghostwriter had previously destroyed the interview tapes with Biden when he learned of the special counsel probe, resulting in the improbability of a conviction for lack of evidence.
Hur found the president’s recall of how the classified documents ended-up in his basement as “hazy.” He had said he found them in his then rented house in Virginia.
What really instigated Biden’s frenetic press appearance was probably Hur’s reporting the President’s inability to recall when his son Beau died of brain cancer: “I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” the President angrily retorted.-
Biden couldn’t even recall the dates he’d been vice-president.
The reality is that his combative press conference only seems to lend credence to Hur’s allegations of a President of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
About to leave the room, Biden returned to the lectern to respond to a reporter’s belated question on the Gaza crisis. Committing yet another gaffe of mistaken identity, piling up in recent days to the chagrin of his staff, Biden confused Egyptian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico.”
Several days earlier in Nevada, he confused deceased French president Francois Mitterand with current French president Emmanuel Macron. Mitterand died in 2015.
This past Wednesday, Biden said he had interviewed Germany’s chancellor Helmut Kohl in 2021. Kohl died in 2017.
I think of Ronald Reagan in his second term, then America’s oldest president, falling asleep in cabinet meetings. A few years later, 1994, Reagan announced his Alzheimer diagnosis. The signs, however, of its progression had already been evident while in office.
I wish our President well, but I fear the fallout of mental facility in a nuclear age, the challenge of climate warming, the looming threat of a Russia-China-Iran alliance, and still more, to nightmare my sleep.
Hiding presidential infirmity has a long history, embracing Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. We’ve mustered through so far, but why take the risk?
Faulting Republican Robert Hur constitutes its own partisanship.
As Democratic strategist James Carville candidly put it, “I don’t know how you get out of this.”
–rj
Brimmings: up from the well 