A President in Mental Decline

For my regular readers, I have been silent for a while to enjoy the holiday season and quite frankly in the hope that the many issues that have divided our community would resolve themselves in the spirit of the season of joy and forgiveness.  My hopes have been dashed.

We continue to struggle with crises in the Middle East, Ukraine, higher education’s support for Hamas, no federal budget and a potential shut down of the government, and global warning. We also have crises over Taiwan, affordable housing and whether the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce relationship is a plot to seize control of the federal government…ok enough.

More recently, we had a big week when the House of Representatives was going to decide whether to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the first cabinet officer to be impeached since 1876. (They didn’t and then they did).  Then there were the oral arguments before the Supreme Court whether Colorado could throw Trump off of the Presidential ballot, and the Senate’s released of its long-awaited compromise to fix the border. (It didn’t)  In the midst of our great anticipation of the resolution of these issues, Special Counsel, Robert Hur, popped up, throwing a curve (baseball reference with spring training afoot) by issuing his Special Counsel report into the political melee on whether President Biden had violated the law with his handling of classified information and what he, the Special Counsel, was going to do about it.

For those of you who get your news from any other source than the Home and Garden Network, the facts of the matter have been widely reported. In the wake of the pounding of Donald Trump over his having classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, it came out that Biden also had classified documents at his Penn Biden Center office and in his garage in Wilmington.  A Special Counsel was appointed to “investigate” the matter as a show of impartiality, rule of law, you know. Well, Special Counsel Robert Hur investigated away and for some reason chose that particularly busy time period to release his report.  Perhaps he thought that he could slip it in and with all the other hubbub surrounding the current crises, it would go relatively unnoticed.  If so, he was wrong.

Hur concluded that, yes indeedy, contrary to the assertions of our President, Biden was in possession of classified documents from his time as Vice President as well as his time as Senator, that he knew that he had them at least as of 2017, and that he had disclosed the contents of them to his ghost writer, Mark Zwonitzer, the author of Biden’s autobiography from which Biden says he earned in excess of $10 million.

Side note…One would think that if you wrote your “autobiography” representing yourself as the author of the book, there would be no need to show classified documents to anyone else in order to write ta book yourself, but, hey, I guess Biden has bigger problems right now than claiming he was the author of another guy’s work.

Anyway…back to the classified documents and the rule of law, as the Special Counsel concluded that Biden willfully and wrongfully had classified documents and willfully and wrongfully disclosed them to a person who was not entitled to see them, Hur established all of the elements of the same crime for which Trump was currently being persecuted, er … I mean, prosecuted.

Some have claimed that Trump’s case is different because Trump attempted to tell other people to destroy information that would have made him look more guilty. The problem for Biden and his allies is that in Biden’s case his “ghost writer”, Zwonitzer “expunged” (that means deleted) audio files that the Special Counsel determined had “significant evidentiary value” and that he, Zwonitzer, “was aware that there was an investigation at the time he scrubbed (that means deleted) the material”.  Zwonitzer explained as a defense “I’m not going to say how much of the percentage it was my motivation” which for some strange reason was good enough to get him off the hook.

Now, he problem for Special Counsel Hur was after establishing unmistakable evidence that Biden violated the terms of the classified documents statute, what was he, Hur, going to do about it? How to preserve the illusion of judicial neutrality while getting old Joe out of the dock?

So, what he did “as a matter of prosecutorial discretion”, was to not bring charges against Biden because Hur did not believe that he could secure a conviction because “Biden would present himself as a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”, i.e. the jury would feel sorry for the old guy and set him free. To support his elderly man with a poor memory conclusion, Special Counsel Hur related how Biden couldn’t even remember when he was Vice President or within three years of when his son died and had trouble responding in a normal conversational manner during the interview.  While this explanation, however lame, may have gotten Biden off from being prosecuted, it ignited a political fire storm.

By all accounts, when Biden found out, he was angry, and he wanted to have a press conference to make a statement and take questions to show everyone how he really was mentally “with it”.  To show his anger at the purported unfairness of the Special Counsel, he complained bitterly that he was even asked about his son. Further side note. Recent reporting from NBC has revealed that Biden was not asked about his son’s death at all, but that Biden brought it up himself.  Requests to have access to the tape to determine who is correct are currently being rebuffed by the White House.

Back to the press conference…  As is his wont, Biden slurred the words of his prepared statement that he read from the teleprompter and stumbled on off script comments. When talking about his son, Biden went to his shirt sleeve and removed a rosary that was around his wrist angrily stating, “Let me tell you something. Some of you have commented, I wear since the day he died the rosary that he got from Our lady of …”.  His eyes went blank, he paused, never to be able to finish his sentence. Later in the same press conference in an additional attempt to bolster his mental competence, he claimed to have secured humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza by talking to Egyptian President El-Sisi, referring to him as the President of Mexico. If it sounds bad seeing this in print, you should have seen it live.

Now gaffes or misstatements are nothing new for him.  In the past few weeks, Biden had claimed that he had been recently talking to French President Mitterrand who had died in 1996 and German President Helmet Kohl who had died in 2017.  He has fallen three times on the stairs of Air Force One, and another time after coming off the stage at the Air Force Academy graduation and again fell off his bike in front of reporters in Rehoboth Delaware. He has wandered away after public remarks, trying to shake hands with people who are not there and was shown being given directions by a costumed Easter Bunny as to where to go at an Easter event.

The issue of Biden’s mental and physical decline has been apparent for some time.  But I would suggest that the Special Counsel’s report with Biden’s subsequent performance on national tv is a turning point in the direction of this country and its leader because it was so bad and so sad. If it wasn’t apparent before, it was apparent now for all to see that Biden has lost it.

In a poll taken shortly after the event, 86% of Americans agreed that Joe Biden is too old to be President including 73% of Democrats. Look, in a 2021 survey, 83% of participants believed that the earth revolved around the sun. In our diverse and free country, if 86% of the people agree on anything, it’s practically unanimous.

We have been seeing Biden’s mental decline publicly on television for some time.  For friends and foes alike, we all have been subjected to the debate of what to do with poor old Joe.  People forget names all the time, we are told.  Old people fall, we are told. We just have to be more careful. It is claimed by his political allies that his mind is sharp as a tack.  It is not. Many of us have had to face the problem of what to do with loved ones suffering from dementia.  We know when it’s time. Now, we know it’s time for our President.  As a country, we have come to a collective decision that we need to take away his car keys.

Now living in the White House, we don’t actually have to take his car keys away because he is not allowed to drive anyway.  We don’t have to worry about him leaving the stove on and starting a fire because other people cook for him, and he has a physician 24 hours a day.  He is for all practical purposes in assisted living now.  We can take him out and take better care that he doesn’t fall and doesn’t get lost when he goes off of a stage, but the problem is that he is the President of the United States of America.

If you have an individual in your workforce who is nearing mandatory retirement and is not with it anymore, you can probably hang on for 6 months to let him retire gracefully with dignity. But what do you do in this situation, where Biden, the President of the United States and in decline, not only can’t be edged out of the workplace gracefully, but is actively seeking to extend his employment for another 4 years?

But then another issue raises its ugly head. Despite the fact that 86% of the people believe that Joe Biden is too old to be President, Trump, his presumptive rival in the November election leads Biden in the Real Clear Politics Average poll by a mere 1%.  This means that a substantial number of our fellow citizens would rather have a man who they believe is too old and incompetent to become President rather than Trump. Think about that for a while. As we go into the November elections this year, the country is in real trouble.