There are lively debates among historians regarding who was the best First Lady (I view it as a dead heat between Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt), but the contest for the Worst First Lady Ever is settled. It’s Jill Biden, easy. Edith Wilson hid her husband’s stroke from the nation but at least she wasn’t complicit in letting an unfit and mentally declining man run in the first place. Woodrow was a terrible human being, but until his stroke he wasn’t an incompetent one. Michelle Obama was and is loathsome, but she didn’t do much substantive damage while she was in the White House. She left that to her husband.
I’m going to give you a gift link to the New York Times’s notably uncritical report on Jill’s new spin on her husband’s crack-up during that fateful debate with Donald Trump, when the mentally declining President descended into authentic frontier gibberish. The Times:
“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.” In a 30-second snippet of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full this weekend, she said that she had never seen her husband have a meltdown like the one she saw when he took the debate stage in Atlanta. Next week, she is releasing ‘View From the East Wing,’ a memoir of her time as first lady.”
I call bullshit, and so should everyone else. There is so much wrong with that fake narrative if boggles the mind:
1. She’s lying. Everyone had seen Biden freeze, become disoriented, mumble and get confused repeatedly for nearly four years. Months before, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report on President Biden’s retention of classified material. In opting not to bring charges, Hur said that Biden would appear to the jury too befuddled to find guilty of the requisite intent. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Sure sounds like a man every American should feel secure having his finger on the nuclear button! Yet the Axis chorus of partisan hacks continued to tell the public that Joe was “as sharp as a tack.”
2. After Biden’s embarrassment in the debate, Jill went into full cover-up mode. “You answered every question!” she exclaimed, treating the President of the United States like a second-grader. His gibberish was bad enough that she thought he had a stroke, she says now, but not bad enough to have him checked out. Biden had refused to have a cognition test: after this episode, wouldn’t a caring wife be obligated to insist on a medical examination? Of course she would, except that the reality was that Biden’s debate performance was not out of character at that point. His staff and family were thinking, “Oh no. I was afraid this would happen.” Their response after the debate, joining in the agreed upon narrative that “he had a cold…he was tired….he just had a bad night…it could have happened to anyone…he’s always had a stammer…Trump rambled too!” proves that there was no new concern for Biden’s well-being, only concern that the jig was up.
3. In February of 2020, I wrote in part…
Ethics Alarms 
Having him run again was elder abuse, pure and simple. They hoped, I’m sure, to get him and Kamala back in office, and a few months in, have him resign. The democrats want to claim the first female POTUS that they can taste it, and will do anything to get it.
It was announced right after they left the White House that Joe has Stage IV prostate cancer, as I’m sure you’re aware. That doesn’t come up overnight; his PSA values must have been high for quite some time. They risked his life to get him over the finish line for a second term. I’m no Biden fan, but, boy it makes me angry! Jill and Hunter are a pair…
Maybe, I think they ideally wanted him to go two more years before resigning, in the hopes of getting a full ten years out of Kamala (we dodged that bullet, thankfully). However, having him resign in a few months was probably their fallback position if he just couldn’t keep going or they couldn’t cover it up anymore.
The fact is that Jill was a Wallis Simpson type pretty much from the get-go. She left her first husband to grab the coattails (and something else) of Biden’s because he could take her places, just like Wallis thought it was great that Edward VIII could open the best suites in the finest hotels, get airplanes stopped, and trains held. She spent years and years demanding unearned respect until she could strut to the White House in that coat that probably cost more than most of us spend on clothes in two or three years. She was on top of the world, she was going to stay there as long as she was allowed to, and woe to anyone else that got in her way, including her declining husband.
Unfortunately for her, she couldn’t disguise what happened on that stage where her husband made a fool of himself, she couldn’t buck the big donors, who said they were going to pull their support unless her husband left the ticket, and she couldn’t buck the party leadership who agreed. Now she’s trying to sell us on the dutiful, supportive wife bit?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jill Biden represents everything that’s bad about the wives of powerful men, and maybe about women generally. I’m not saying women are evil, or even that the spouses of the powerful are evil. History is full of the Elizabeths of Hungary, the Marie Curies, the Clara Bartons, the Sandra Day O’Connors, the Margaret Thatchers. However, there’s something particularly distasteful about women who attach themselves to powerful or rich men simply so they can become powerful or rich themselves without really earning it. That goes double for those who gloss over real issues with these men like Hilary Clinton or Silda Spitzer, or who frankly ignore their husbands like Wallis Simpson, who complained about how hard it is to live a great love story while sleeping with the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop or, arguably, Jill here, who had started to treat her husband like nothing more than a meal ticket. Those who marry old rich men in the hopes they will die like Anna Nicole are in a separate category. It makes a mockery out of what marriage is supposed to be all about.
I really enjoy the youtube channel “Soft White Underbelly” It is a channel where the vlogger does long form interviews of people at the “bottom” of society and those that interact with them. Prostitutes, child abuse victims, drug addicts, etc… along with social workers, nurses, doctors, police officers and so on that deal with that segment of society.
This weekend the channel dropped an interview with Hunter Biden. I’m shocked Hunter is on it, you’d think he’d want his issues to be buried, not revealed. No plans on watching it, as he is vile and I’m sure the level of revisionism is off the charts.
“As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”
And then you do nothing, being his wife and a doctor? Stroke victims need immediate assistance to prevent irreversible damage.
There are lively debates among historians regarding who was the best First Lady (I view it as a dead heat between Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt)….
I would love to see a ranking; I suspect that Dolley Madison should also be high on the list. I can almost picture her running out of a burning White House with George Washington’s picture in her hands.
She insisted on being called Dr., but she was a doctor of education, not medicine. Nonetheless, if she really thought he was having a stroke she should have taken action.
Here’s the most recent version that I could find quickly. It’s a historian’s poll. I don’t think much of it. Jackie and Hillary are near the top; I’d put both in the bottom third. Ranking Mrs. Pierce in the bottom is just cruel: the woman had a breakdown after seeing her son crushed to death before her eyes. Florence Harding can’t be blamed for Harding letting himself be maneuvered into the Presidency…and besides, he was completely healthy and no one has shown that she had any influence over him at all. And, because historians are among the most left-leaning partisan of academics, there is an obvious pro-Democrat bias.
You sent me to the dictionary (Google, actually) with SCRIMY
Great word & appropriately applied…I can hardly wait to play it in SCRABBLE…
PWS
Both of my parents used “scrimy” frequently. You’re right: it doesn’t turn up often. This story made it light up in my head, and it had been so long since I used it I had to look it up myself. If EA were Ann Althouse’s blog, I would have then written 300 words about the word itself.
The Edith Wilson comparison is apt I think..: concealing incapacity is bad, but actively enabling a candidacy while knowing better is a whole different level of culpability
“She treated him like a second-grader” post-debate . . . My thought when I heard the reports of her immediate post-debate remarks to her husband was that Mrs. Biden was treating the hubby as if he were a kindergartener. Barely tolerable (if annoying) from a caregiver to a nursing home patient, but so “puppet mistress” when addressing someone who’s theoretically in charge of the country.