A lot more, in fact. I tried to figure out how to stitch all this together, but I’m resorting to bullet points:
- Jonathan Turley issued an excellent blog post explaining why the 25th Amendment is highly unlikely to be successfully employed to send our declining President into retirement. Do read it, but the short version is that if a President is sufficiently compos mentis to object to his removal for being incapacitated (or has staff acting on his behalf to do it), the 25th Amendment’s elaborate procedures all but guarantee that the effort will fail because going forward would require a 2/3 majority in both Houses of Congress. The amendment contains significant safeguards against the 25th Amendment coup scenario that “the resistance” and Democrats were pushing when Trump was President.(I should have made this point back when Ethics Alarms was analyzing the dishonesty of 25th Amendment arguments by the Trump-Deranged during his term.) One particularly significant statement by Turley: “The various experts and pundits who called for Trump’s removal under the 25th Amendment are notably silent this week, even after [Biden’s] own Justice Department cited his diminished faculties as a reason for not charging him.”
- Professor Alan Dershowitz, a progressive legal expert relegated to Fox News and other conservative platforms because he refuses to warp his analyses to “get” Trump, harshly criticized Special Counsel Hur’s report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents as “unfair to both sides” yesterday. I believe his analysis is correct. He said in part,
“I think this report is going to really cause us to think hard about the role of special counsel. He was wrong in everything he possibly could have done…..He was wrong about not charging Biden. Biden should have been charged, or Trump should have his case dismissed, and he was wrong for going into a kind of medical diagnosis that will have a political impact on the case.”
Dershowitz also said Hur’s speculation regarding how Biden would strike jurors was beyond his proper purview, and that he had given the Trump campaign “a great gift.” He also pointed out that Biden’s memory now is irrelevant to any case against him, if there is one. What matters, Dershowitz said, is whether Biden knew what he was doing when he took and stored the classified documents as Vice-President. He is presumed to know the law.
- Dr. Charen Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, was recuited by the New York Times to spin Hur’s remarks about Biden’s cognitive problems in an op-ed, “I’m a Neuroscientist. We’re Thinking About Biden’s Memory and Age in the Wrong Way.” It’s a misleading and rationalization-filled defense. His point is that older people often have difficulty remembering immediately things they once knew easily because of memory storage and retrieval issues, which do not usually indicate actual mental decline. He writes,
It is normal to be more forgetful as you get older. Broadly speaking, memory functions begin to decline in our 30s and continue to fade into old age. However, age in and of itself doesn’t indicate the presence of memory deficits that would affect an individual’s ability to perform in a demanding leadership role. And an apparent memory lapse may or may not be consequential depending on the reasons it occurred.
There is forgetting and there is Forgetting. If you’re over the age of 40, you’ve most likely experienced the frustration of trying to grasp hold of that slippery word hovering on the tip of your tongue. Colloquially, this might be described as ‘forgetting,’ but most memory scientists would call this “retrieval failure,” meaning that the memory is there, but we just can’t pull it up when we need it. On the other hand, Forgetting (with a capital F) is when a memory is seemingly lost or gone altogether. Inattentively conflating the names of the leaders of two countries would fall in the first category, whereas being unable to remember that you had ever met the president of Egypt would fall into the latter. Over the course of typical aging, we see changes in the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a brain area that plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures. These changes mean that, as we get older, we tend to be more distractible and often struggle to pull up the word or name we’re looking for. Remembering events takes longer and it requires more effort, and we can’t catch errors as quickly as we used to. This translates to a lot more forgetting, and a little more Forgetting…
Spin. The fact is that the older one is, the more memory tends to malfunction. That means that for complex and challenging jobs, some optimum balance of experience and peak mental performance is crucial. The Presidency is the epitome of such a job. Wherever the line should be drawn, Biden is clearly past it at 81. He displays many of the typical infirmities of advanced age, so he cannot be ruled an exception. It must also be remembered that Biden at his peak was never the sharpest pencil in the box, and nobody ever claimed he was. Bill James made the point once that all baseball players decline physically beginning at about 30, but that the greatest players can last much longer as valuable members of the team because they have farther to fall from their peaks before they become useless or a detriment. Joe Biden was the equivalent of a journeyman infielder at his peak. He was clearly unqualified for the Presidency 20 years ago, and has declined precipitously in recent years. The nation needs a President at or at least near the top of his abilities. The public knows that.
The spinning gets really active when the doctor stoops to “some of these concerns are rooted in cultural stereotypes and fears around aging” and cites Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney, Martin Scorsese, and Jane Fonda as evidence that there’s no reason to be sure that an 80-year-old has declined in his or her capabilities. That’s an actor, a musician, a director, and an actress. None of them could be President. All of them have declined: when was Paul’s last great song? Did you see the draggy “Killers of the Flower Moon” or “The Irishman”? Like aging Hall of Fame-level sluggers, McCartney and Scorcese are well past their peaks, but still competent enough to equal their less talented peers. At their peaks, they were both historically brilliant artists, but Biden was never brilliant. Using them as analogies to Joe Biden is more than misleading. It’s ridiculous.
Finally, this spin job ends with the foggy,
“I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focusing on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job.”
But the age of the candidate for any job is a legitimate factor to consider in evaluating their capabilities. The older one gets, the less energy one has to rely on; the more physical ailments become a distraction and handicap; the less able to process new ideas and technological developments most of us become. In Biden’s case, the effects of advanced age aren’t based on stereotypes: we can see it. It is impossible to miss. For President, U.S. citizens want, and have a right to expect, an outstanding leader, not one who is fading fast but “good enough.”
- Res ipsa loquitur: President Biden will not take a cognitive test as part of his upcoming physical exam, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed yesterday. As with Biden’s turning down the traditional Super Bowl Sunday “60 Minutes” interview—in an election year, at a time when the public needs reassurances that his is mentally fit—there is no conceivable explanation for this other than Biden and his handlers trying to hide his true condition. Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, we are told, does not believe a cognitive test is necessary. The President’s paid liar said O’Connor believes Biden proves his cognitive ability “every day [in] how he operates and how he thinks.” As usual, she was insulting the intelligence of everyone who heard her. This gets back to the New York Times editors’ risible exhortation to Biden this week to “do more” to show the public he’s still mentally alert and able to do his job. He can’t. He’s not still able to do his job: if he were, he’d prove it by acing a tough interview (not that a “60 Minutes” pro-Biden hack would ever subject him to one) and a cognitive examination with the results being made public.
Ethics Alarms 
To be fair to Dr. Ranganath, I’ve seen a fair amount of commentary that all sums up to the following pithy statements: ”Normal forgetfulness is not remembering where you put your keys. Dementia is forgetting that you even have a car.” So he’s definitely speaking of a known and established distinction in the field of neuroscience. The real question is whether he is properly applying this distinction to Biden.
Does standard forgetfulness as you age explain the wandering off at events? Does it explain the sudden angry outbursts? Does it explain the decent into unintelligible mumbling? Does it explain shaking hands with no one present? The problem with Biden is not simply the times he forgets something or momentarily conflates two events. It is the systemic pattern of behavior that is (at least for those of us who watched loved ones decline due to dementia) very concerning and very telling. His handlers seem to be doing their absolute best to make sure he is tip-top whenever letting him into public view, but the extent he can endure is diminishing.
(One brief aside: I don’t think I could stay awake at a UN meeting, no matter how much coffee, Mountain Dew, Jolt, Rock Stars, or crack cocaine you mainlined into my system. So I’m supportive of Biden on that account.)
I watched my grandmother descend into dementia. She hid it well when she was at home, but she was mostly at home alone with her cat. If everything was familiar, she could get around, accomplish simple tasks, and interact. But phone conversations slowly became one-sided, her responses increasingly vague. She started leaving doors open and burners on on the stove. She couldn’t clean or maintain her home. It started to reach the point where her environment was hazardous to her, so my father moved her to a nursing home in Casper, so he could be close by.
That proved a devastating blow. Out of her familiar environment. she descended swiftly. She had no recognizable bearings to work with, and no means by which to really get her bearings. Her descent continued to the point she could not recognize the people speaking with her. She addressed my father at one time as her husband, another time her father, and another time as her brother (and she never had any brothers).
Now, Biden is not that far gone. But the job of President is stressful. It demands a great deal of attention, and decisions have far reaching consequences. And handling all the graft is intense. I can only imagine that his handlers are burning him up by medications and other methods to keep him focused. But I think it is telling that he gets through the event on which he is hyper-focused, and then he cannot figure out anything else, such as where to go or who to interact with, and that many of his physical gestures are trained motions to which he’s lost connection to their meaning.
So yes, a number of Biden’s statements on which conservatives pounce like cats on laser-pointer dots are easily attributable to normal forgetfulness that happens to all of us. But that doesn’t explain the overall package, the emerging pattern that suggests that Biden is not going to endure much longer.
I give him three years, tops, at this point. If he remains in the White House, then maybe the full three years. If he loses to Trump, I’ll bet he barely makes a year past the election.
His memory has become a talking point. The country is not in a good place and leadership is needed. With his leadership ability in question, 2 wars taking place, a bad economy, a border disaster, and an election coming up, it would be nice to put some worries to rest. All his predecessors took cognitive tests and his main opponent brags about his cognitive tests. Biden has a physical coming up anyway and the cognitive test only takes a little time. Even if you were SURE you didn’t need one, wouldn’t you take one just to answer your critics and reassure the nation and the world? In addition, wouldn’t you do this as publicly as possible to rebuke your critics? I mean, they aren’t asking him to donate a kidney, just answer a few simple questions.
The only reason NOT to take a cognitive test, on video in real time, is if you were positive it would show severe impairment.
Dr. Ranganath either has not seen a film with Bruce Willis produced in the past five years, or excluded Bruce from the list of actors specifically because _any one of those films was seen and it world have completely destroyed his argument_.
Biden’s doctor refusal to administer a cognitive exam is below the standard of care. Everyone on Medicare, that is 99+% of us, must submit to a cognitive exam annually.
Did no one else have flashes of Catch 22 when reading what Jack summarized about Turley’s writing?
“…the short version is that if a President is sufficiently compos mentis to object to his removal for being incapacitated (or has staff acting on his behalf to do it), the 25th Amendment’s elaborate procedures all but guarantee that the effort will fail…”
If the president has suffered significant cognitive decline, he should be removed from office. However, if he’s willing to be removed from office, this demonstrates sufficient cognitive ability that he’s not far gone enough to warrant removal from office.
Eh, close enough.
I have also watched relatives descend into dementia. It starts with little things like mixing up the names of grandchildren or being able to remember poems you committed to memory 20 years ago but not being able to remember conversations you had 20 minutes ago. When you start leaving your keys in the refrigerator or forgetting your wallet in the pocket of your jacket when you hang it up at the restaurant or sending out texts that make no sense and not being able to remember you sent them, that’s when questions start to arise.
When you start wandering off or not being able to remember which way to go to get where you need to get or staring vacantly into the air and so on, that’s when you need help. I am definitely afraid that my uncle, 84 and in the declining stages of dementia is going to one day just wander down the road and be found standing by the stop sign in his pajamas or he’s going to try to cook and forget to shut off the burner. However, he insists he can keep going, and as long as he is able to carry on a conversation, no one is going to tell him otherwise.
The fact is that even at his height, Biden was not a masterful politician. A big part of how he kept going was being able to talk nonsense until people would give up. I said that he was once 1/3 fading grandfather who would tell you the same story this weekend that he told you last weekend because he simply doesn’t remember telling it to you, 1/3 punch drunk boxer past his prime who still thinks he can take on anyone else in the bar, but who everyone else ignores because there is no value in beating up an old man, and 1/3 creepy uncle who gives long hello kisses to your attractive cousin and tugs on your niece’s shorts and then claims it was all in good fun, knowing that no one will beat the tobacco juice out of him because they don’t want there to be issues at the holidays. At this point he is more like the stroke victim who can’t even find his way home.
the Democratic party has painted itself into a corner this time out. They can’t push Biden out, because he doesn’t want to be pushed out and he’s the incumbent. Even if they could push him out, the next person in line, Harris, is not up to the job and is very unpopular. But they can’t push her out either, because then they would be pushing a woman of color out and their woke base would revolt. Their best hope at this point is that some kind of conviction sticks to Trump and no one will vote for someone who’s been convicted. However, that is looking less and less likely as time passes. Not only that, but now his Secretary of Homeland security is being hold before Congress to face impeachment. He probably won’t be convicted, but this is going to suck up a lot of the spotlights for a while, that they would rather was focused on Trump. It’s hard to concentrate on destroying someone when you have to take action to prevent your person from being destroyed.
frankly, this should be the beginning of the end for the Democratic party. A political party which nominates a candidate who is clearly not up to the job and then has him essentially decide not to enforce the law and at the same time appoints mostly incompetent hacks should be being looked at as a potential danger to this country. I think the Democratic party is a danger to this country because all it is interested in doing is getting power keeping power increasing power and making is oligarchs rich and then richer. The party does not have this country’s best interests in mind.
Unfortunately, this is the United States and it is not Germany or Austria or Russia where certain political parties are outlawed because of the damage they’ve done. If the American people are allowed to express their true feelings in the upcoming election and Trump is returned to power, I really think we should look into the possibility of passing a law that might change that and might enable us to force the dissolution of political parties that are considered not in this nation’s best interests. In an era when the way to defeat your political opponent is to coordinate the justice system against him, I don’t see why we shouldn’t take this additional step and start making it impossible for parties inimical to this country to run.
Are people, any people, really unaware of this? We’re talking about a lot more than simple “forgetting” and natural, unremarkable aging.
I knew Biden was failing. This wasn’t a question in my mind, nor was it an issue for me to say the man is not functionally capable to be President. However, this video needs to be FAR more widely disseminated. It shocked me, how big of change we really are seeing, and I was already a believer. This side by side comparison is stark, and should be Donald Trump’s (or anyone else, please?) number two campaign ad. Number one should be the picture you use of Biden declaring half of the country enemies.