The Reckoning

February 8, 2024, was a black day for Biden & Co.

Angry old man: President Biden meets the press on February 8

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Since 2020, Democrats and progressives have ignored the reality of Joe Biden. After yesterday’s events, they no longer have that option.

The truth about the man currently posing as president has been out there for a long time now: He’s an old fool, descending into senility, who’s simply incapable of living up to the oath of office he took on January 20, 2021. If special counsel Robert Hur’s report on the classified documents investigation isn’t proof enough of that, Biden’s disastrous press conference last evening confirmed it.

Robert Hur, the special counsel, found that Biden’s mishandling of classified documents was much along the lines of Donald Trump’s malfeasance—for which the former president has been indicted. Obviously, however, the Justice Department was not at all desirous of announcing its intention to prosecute the President once he leaves office. But on what grounds could he be let off the hook? Well, Biden himself supplied it by giving ample evidence of his cognitive decline during his interview with Hur and his team.

In his final report Hur stated that though his investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” he concluded that prosecution would be unlikely to establish the President’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—one major reason being the decayed state of Biden’s memory. Hur also opined that a jury would be likely to adopt a sympathetic attitude toward a man in his eighties with serious cognitive issues.

So now Democrats and progressives—but I repeat myself—are furious with Hur, who in their telling is a MAGA stooge beholden to the Ogre Trump. (Left unexplained is how Attorney General Merrick Garland happened to appoint such a monster of evil to investigate the matter.) And no doubt their outlook is further soured by the thought that the similar case against Trump has been neutralized. Why he but not Biden should be prosecuted is a good question whose answer seems to be that the latter is too gaga to stand trial. And here’s an even better question: Why should that alarming fact be kept from the public? If the President of the United States is non compos mentis, shouldn’t we know about it?

Incidentally, the people who invented lawfare have some nerve complaining about Robert Hur. But that’s the Left for you: double standards are standard.

But to return to Biden: I well recall the moment when I first realized that aside from being a fool, a liar, and a bad man in general, President Biden was mentally unfit for the presidency. It was at the height of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, otherwise known as The Greatest Airlift in History. Having engineered that disgraceful skedaddle, Biden betrayed every sign of a man adrift at the policy level. All too obviously, he had no idea what to do. And the American people noticed. Biden’s slide in the polls dates from the Afghanistan debacle, and the President’s all-too-evident confusion and incapacity had a lot to do with it.

Since then, Biden has only gotten worse. We’re now at a point where his handlers—that’s the honest word for them—never let the guy appear in public without the most elaborate precautions and safeguards. The armed forces of the United States are engaged in a shooting war with Mideast terrorists, and the Commander-in-Chief has not taken to the airwaves to address the American people. Think about that. What does it tell you? It tells me that his handlers want to minimize Biden’s exposure to public scrutiny. With good reason, they fear what he might do or say.

Old age is a shipwreck, as Charles de Gaulle observed of Marshal Pétain, the octogenarian soldier who engineered France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany and led its collaborationist government, the so-called Vichy regime. The passage of time takes its toll on us all, and whatever one thinks of Joe Biden as a man and a politician, he is not to be blamed for his physical and mental decline. Nor would it matter, except to friends and family, if he were anyone other than President of the United States.

The American presidency is pitiless in its magnification of every human flaw and fault. Richard Nixon was an intelligent man, well qualified in many respects to serve as president. But the office was ruthless in its exposure of his obsessions and character deficiencies, and that was his undoing. Late in his second term it was noticed that Ronald Reagan had lost a step or two and there were concerns expressed that he was in the early stages of cognitive decline. And this was probably the case, for he was later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And the presidency transformed Barack Obama, the Lightbringer, into that irritating guy who was president of our high school senior class.

Now the same thing is happening to Joe Biden—who, incidentally, entered office at the same age as Reagan when he left office. There’s no denying his decline, which is obvious, and is surely being accelerated by the stress and pressure inseparable from the office he holds. If, God forbid, he should be reelected this year, the country will be stuck with a puppet in the Oval Office, his strings pulled by a cabal of aides and, no doubt, his wife. But I no longer think that he will be reelected. There’s a good chance, indeed, that he’ll be persuaded or pressured to drop out of the running. There must plenty of Democrats who whatever they say in public are telling themselves that a befuddled old man who talks to dead people has no business being in the same room with the nuclear football.