Remember Plan E? That was the designation on the Ethics Alarms list of resistance, Democrat and news media impeachment or removal plots for the 25th Amendment theory, which was that President Trump was mentally disabled and thus should be declared incompetent. The catalysts for this intellectually dishonest effort were Trump-hating hack author Michael Wolf and now-fired Yale psychology instructor Bandy Lee, but many in the “Get Trump!” mob quickly embraced their nonsense, as Ethics Alarms discussed here. I wrote, “Ethics Dunce is too mild a name here. We have the mainstream news media proclaiming to the world that the President of the United States is mentally deficient based on tweets, gossip, leaks, unethical diagnoses by discredited professionals, an author who has admitted making things up and lying to the White House to get access, and Steve Bannon.” Prominent among the 25th Amendment-pushing journalists, if you can call him that, was CNN’s fake media ethics watchdog, Brian Stelter. Of course, my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends were also convinced that Trump had dementia.
Last week, as he ended his remarks at a “gun safety summit” in Connecticut, President Biden said, for no apparent reason, “God save the Queen, man!” The video was instantly all over social media.
There was no conceivable reason for Biden to say “God save the Queen.” Great Britain no longer has a queen, and the President was in Connecticut, which doesn’t have a queen either. This is another screaming, neon-throbbing, “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden,” or IIPTDXTTNMIAFB for short. I suppose it is somewhat lower on the signature significance ranking of things a President could say that raise questions about his mental state than, say, “I am the Lizard King!” or “I am Marie of Rumania,” but not that much lower.
Every single journalist, doctor, pundit, politician or Trump critic who cited the 25th Amendment as being triggered when Trump tweeted a typo or issued one of his trademark hyperboles who does not now raise the question of whether Joe’s never-all-that-fit brain has finally sunk into a “Time for the rest home!” state is a hypocrite, and should never be taken seriously again.
That’s one useful test created by the episode. Here’s another: how flagrantly are White House flacks willing to lie to the public?
“He couldn’t do the full ropeline due to weather, and was commenting to someone in the crowd,” principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton told reporters in an email. The video shows no sign that Biden was talking to anyone in the crowd, but to be fair, I know I always say ““God save the Queen” when the weather disrupts my plans.
Axios and other shameless media enablers quickly resorted to a misuse of the Julie Principle. “There are legitimate questions about Biden’s age and stamina as he runs for a second term — but his off-beat proverbs are just Biden being Biden,” it says, unconvincingly. “Biden being Biden” has long meant that he says stupid things, makes up stories, and gets confused easily. If the Julie Principle now means that Biden is likely to start speaking in tongues or singing random lyrics from old Rudy Vallee songs, attention should be paid. The spin strategy is clearly to characterize “God save the Queen” as something it is not; after all, “It isn’t what it is” could be the official motto of Biden’s administration. In addition to “proverb,” Axios calls Biden’s declaration of fealty to a dead queen an “aphorism.”
It is neither. His bizarre outburst is another sign that that he, and the country, are in real trouble.
Ethics Alarms 
Yeah, well, he said he is gonna build a bridge from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.
jvb
Re removing Trump or Biden on the basis of mental incompetence: ¿Porque no los dos?
If I had to respond (and I wish I knew Spanish well enough to reply Porque el hombre anaranjado puede…, but as you can see, I really start struggling at that point), I would say it is because the orange man is demonstrably intellectually sharp. It is his compulsive, childish behavior that is the problem. Trump could be fit for office if he chose, but it seems that Biden has no choice about his competency due to mental decline.
I agree with you completely.
Biden is too old and is failing in every respect, which should keep him out of the race regardless of his politics. (Not to mention the ever looming prospect of his VP becoming President.
Trump does not and never will have a socially acceptable demeanor. Neither does he have a molecule of the grace and style we have come to expect in our Presidents.
So it’s no go on both fronts. And, can we ever expect their respective parties begin to understand this??
The claim is that he was jokingly speaking to a Brit in the audience. Could be. But what explains his misstep in describing Xi as a dictator (even if it is true) just after his Secretary of State has spent considerable time and effort trying to get the relationship with China on a smoother plane?
I wish I could tell what this administration’s China policy is. They sometimes recognize the Chinese government as a totalitarian menace and sometimes they don’t. When people expressed concern that, once again, we didn’t know who was elected yet the day after Election Day, Talking Points began racing across the social media that listed all the countries in the world where people always know who has been elected….and China was on the list…as an obvious attempt to compare such a phenomenon to dictatorships – despite the fact that, more often than not for the past century, we have known who the winner was the next day.
We’re not allowed to criticize the Chinese government about its handling of the COVID-19 virus (lest some jerk here in the U.S. take it out on innocent Asian-Americans). Questions about the virus’ spread are censored in the mass and social media. We are expected to stifle our economic growth based on unreliable Climate Change models while being aspirational for air and water-polluting China which most certainly won’t do the same to its economy.
It’s a bipolar relationship. I can’t figure out if the U.S. is secretly in hock to the Chinese or if one or all of the Bidens are being blackmailed.
I think the Democrats may have a problem on their hands in this upcoming election. My leftwing millennial friends and acquaintances have taken to randomly bursting into rants over Biden’s obvious mental deficiencies, and are looking around for any alternative candidate they can find. I recently had to inform a group of them that there were not going to be any democrat primary debates. They were not pleased to discover they wouldn’t get to evaluate how RFK stacked up against Biden in a debate.
Anecdotal evidence, but it’s a new thing I’ve observed. People aren’t keeping quiet out of partisan loyalties anymore.
I think Biden’s ‘God save the Queen’ is one of those sayings he’s used for a long time in an ironic way, and it’s the equivalent of ‘holy shit’ or ‘WTF’, or ‘God help us all’, as in someone concluding a post with the comment, ‘Here’s Johnny said Biden was doing a good job. WTF?’
There is plenty to dislike about Biden, and there’s enough evidence of his mental decline (is using old, ironic sayings a piece of that evidence?), that we don’t have to strain at gnats.
I used to get pissed off at the bogus attacks on Obama when there was plenty in his policies to argue against.
Did you not read the essay? 1) the issue is hypocrisy and double standards. 2) Even the White House didn’t try the “he says this all the time” excuse. If it was valid, don’t you think they would have made it? Apparently Biden has said that once before, but 1) when there was still a queen and 2) when it was clear what he meant. That’s a material difference. I”ve said, “Hey, look at that dog!” before, but when there was a dog to see. If I exclaim “Look at that dog!” to end an ethics seminar, I think it’s time for a mental exam. No? 3). Is God Save the Queen per se evidence of metal decline? No. It it evidence in consideration of many other episodes and utterances, in a context where it makes no sense? Sure.
And this is not an “old ironic saying,” any more than it is an “adage.” It’s a total non sequitur, and—this was the thrust of the piece—the same people who are shrugging it off wanted to use the 25th Amendment on Trump because he typed “Covfefe” or some other non-offense.
Well, you’re right, as always. I should have looked up the video. Hadn’t seen it since I’m not all over social media which, apparently, is where the video was. Nor was I especially attuned to the aspect of media hypocrisy which is so prevalent that I accept it as a given. A pol spokesperson spinning? I’ve been a government spokesman. I understand positive spin.
But, my main point, the issues are what really matter, more than the people, I’ll stick with that. If Biden resigns tomorrow out of embarrassment over saying queen instead of king, we’ll still be stuck with his (the left wing controlling authorities) policies. And those policies, that’s where the focus should be.
Hey, I wouldn’t call for the 25th over that gaffe. My only point was that it was more alarming than what Trump was routinely called “disabled ” over.
My, wasn’t QE2 a looker in her day!
“Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl,
But she doesn’t have a lot to say.”
Boomp, boomp, boomp, boomp.
Surprised he didn’t lean into the mic and whisper it…?
That was not the most idiotic thing he did or said during that speech. Apparently, the ATF passed their law retroactively making pistol-braced pistols illegal NFA items retroactively until at least 2014 because when you put a pistol brace instead of a stock on an AR or AK-style pistol, it makes the bullets coming out of the firearm BIGGER! It actually adds diameter and mass to the bullets. Many other idiotic things were said and the media nodded their heads in agreement. Why would they have a problem with “God Save the Queen’? You may think this is nitpicking, but it illustrates the bigger problem. When you have a large chunk of the population that is so indoctrinated that they believe anything stated to justify or explain the policies they have been told are “on the right side of history”, they don’t think. They are incapable of thinking. They take any explanation they are given from any person they are told to believe and they believe it. The White House could have stated that Queen Elizabeth II was ‘top of mind’ that morning and that is why he said that and 40% of the population would violently argue with you if you thought this indicated senility in Biden.
In other news, a federal judge declared that t-shirts saying ‘There are only 2 genders’ do not constitute free speech and can be restricted. As for my belief that all slippery slope arguments about leftist policies come true, a 13 year old child was reprimanded and disciplined because she refused to go along with a classmate who believes she is a cat. I believe these incidents are related to the paragraph above.
Thanks for reminding me about the t-shirt. I need to write about it a little. Remember, school speech can’t disrupt the school or target teachers and students, so that decision wasn’t a surprise. “Islam is a violent religion” would also be legitimately prohibited on a t-shirt.
The same logic should apply to all PRIDE paraphernalia, then. How can anyone of religious faith or cognizant of basic biology get an education in an environment where catgender and the other 78 genders are being proselytized? Sounds disruptive and targeted at religious faith to me.
But it does. Positive messages don’t, or shouldn’t, be seen as hostile to anyone. If Pride propaganda implied that something was wrong with non-members of the LGPTQ club, then the same principle would apply. “Black is Beautiful” is fine; “Black Lives Matter” is not. “Anal Sex Rocks”, I think, would cross the line.
Why are biological facts seen as harmful to anyone?
If positive messages are not a problem, why is praying banned in schools? How is a school led prayer harmful to non-believers? Why can’t a teacher plaster the room in Jesus Loves You posters?
Biden is so demented (studio audience: “how demented is he?”) that, considering Anthony Blinken as a candidate for chief of staff, he saw “A. Blinken” on the resume and thought he was getting Abe Lincoln.