There’s been an awful lot of discussion, in the worlds of Left, Right and Centre, about Joe Biden’s declining mental capabilities (H/T to James Lileks for the title).
There was one the other day that was just painful, but to get a sense of how far he has fallen it pays to watch this infamous little video first, from 2017
I remember going over and convincing our team, others, to convince that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.
So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.
Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
Now that is classic Joe Biden: the bragging about his role, the casual tough guy persona, the bragging about his connections, and the triumphal win at the end. You can line it up with countless other stories he’s told about himself over the decades, whether it was being tough on crime in the 1990’s or dealing with “Corn Pop” when he was a swimming pool lifeguard. About the only thing missing this time was his usual defensiveness about being a bit of dim bulb.
By contrast here he is the other day reading a speech off a teleprompter during a visit to Pennsylvania, with no audience and facing no questions:
It looks even worse as a transcript:
“Covid has taken this year, just since the outbreak, has taken more than 100 year... Look here, the lives, it’s just… it’s a...you mean a think about it. More lives this year than any other year for the past hundred years.”
But at least he’s finally been let out of his basement to begin his campaign, although what happened last Friday in a “press conference” must have tempted his team to send him back down.
Biden literally read his remarks, including reading the instruction on the teleprompter that says “end of quote”, without even realising what he just said. Incredible that he just keeps repeating the same few points. He’s got all the answers on notes that he’s reading and this is still the best he can do. A few days ago he did the same thing, reading out the words “topline quote” as he answered interview “questions“.
It’s no wonder that on another day he told his staff to pick reporters to ask questions when he couldn’t find his “list”. List? Why would he need a list of reporters when candidates just pick them out from the media scrum? The answer is that you’d need it if it’s all pre-scripted and you can just read off your notes. And the questions themselves are softball jokes.
He’s like Ron Burgundy in Anchorman, he will read anything you put on the teleprompter and while that must be driving his staffers crazy, it’s perfect for the likes of Harris, Sanders, AOC and whoever else will staff or “advise” (read “direct”) him if he’s President.
But it’s probably a worry for his son, Hunter Biden, since that doesn’t look like the sort of man who can swing any more sweet deals like the ones he had in China and the Ukraine. Having said that, probably no negotiation at all is needed, just the name connection:
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.
Sweet. Perhaps he’ll buy a vineyard in California with Pelosi’s nephew, Governor Newsom. And none of this is technically corrupt. We’re not talking about envelopes of cash being dumped on a table. This is different and money is only part of it:
[The “Establishment” includes} Republicans and Democrats. Its operatives include the leadership and key employees throughout the federal government apparatus. They share a common culture of a world enclosed within The Washington Beltway that surrounds the District of Columbia. They are the residents that live within the castle keep at the center of power of the United States of America. They all know each other. Their children go to school together. They socialize with each other. And they have made lives and careers within the confines of the Capitol and its suburbs.
And it was this Old Guard within the Democrat Party side of the Beltway that rescued Joe Biden from defeat in the primaries, because the only alternative was Bernie Sanders and having a Socialist True Believer and outsider is terrifying to these people.
By contrast Joe is safe for them, and on the other side of the trade even a dementia patient like him can work that system, and has for fifty years.
No Minister 
You look at some of the bald transcripts of Trump’s speeches and they are also discursively chaotic, arguably bordering on incoherent at times. But as per the analysis of Scott Adams
https://www.businessinsider.com/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-explains-trumps-persuasion-style-2017-10?IR=T
…the difference is that Trump’s spoken communication is highly effective. Except, unsurprisingly, when he has to read word-for-word verbatim State or Health Department announcements, and he can’t “free wheel” like the rainmaker he is, and instead he sounds unbelievably deadpan and clunky, and his ignorance is revealed by embarrassing mispronunciations.
As is also Ardern when she is ooozing “kindness” and glossing over substance (“I’ll get back to you on that one, Mike” 😳😂), even though supporters of both would quickly disavow any ideological comparison in their speech content and “tone”. I’m being kind to both, as they are both policy airheads, or at least “teeth and tits” headline salespeople who have no aptitude for detail. Instead, they delegate that to others, as too arguably did Obama and Bush II, which is a fair enough strategy in political and business leadership. I digress…
Indeed, you may hate Trump’s trolling content, and loathe that grubby tone (or maybe not, because whatever else he is a fighter and not a “compete fairly and lose honourably” milquetoast like McCain or Romney), but even though he is often rambling, it is nonetheless hypnotically convincing. Unless you’ve got your critical faculties focused, or you are just against him no matter what he says. Not that Trump bothers with either of those groups because he knows they are not the ones to whom he must appeal.
But Biden?! I mean, yeah, sure he has the persona of likability and projects it well, even now. In comparison to Trump, who, as a person is a toxic grandiose narcissist (and Biden may be too. He’s a politician after all!).
But all the political and media and PR and Hollywood celebrity gaslighting can’t hide the obvious from the American electorate. Biden is no longer sufficiently competent. You wouldn’t ask him to help you with any complex role, yet he’s a genuine contender for POTUS?!
Trump will rip him apart. Trump trolls will love it, while ordinary decent people who give it any serious thought will hate what Trump has had to do…but as with rejecting Hilary Clinton in 2016, they will still decide that Trump is the least bad of two awful candidates.
Funnily enough I rarely listen to any politician. I recall Lefties raging about GW’s “smirk”, Righties snarling about Obama’s lofty, sniffy style of condescension , and now Trump and Adern’s critics.
Having said that, obviously I do listen sometimes – and Trump’s style has me rolling my eyes. The thing is that this is what he’s learned from thirty or more years in the media spotlight and especially reality TV. You go back and see interviews he did with the likes of Oprah and Letterman and he sounds and talks the same way, whirling around in great, elliptical clouds of words – but always sticking to the main point he wants to make. It’s effective for our age, much as I hate to admit it. And it’s the same with his combative answers to reporters questions, where again, nothing has changed.
But Biden? He’d been much the same for decades, as that 2017 clip shows. I always figured that he’d learned to overcome his stutter by getting rolling and then talking, talking, talking, with his brain scrambling to make a point, which it would eventually do. His fellow Senators used to chuckle about it, even the ones that liked him. In fact I think it was Obama who, in the Senate just a few weeks, found himself enduring a Biden speech there and handing a note to his staffer, saying Kill Me Now. That’s the Biden we’d seen for years.
But that’s not the Biden we’re seeing now. That Biden is an old, enfeebled gentleman who needs a cup of tea and a lie down. He still tries to talk and talk but his brain can no longer keep up. We’ve all seen these signs in elderly relatives. I had wondered a few months ago if it was just a really good game of lowering expectations for the debates, but it’s too far gone to be a real tactic, and in any case, I’ve long thought that debates don’t count for much.
And on a side note about how things have changed, I can’t imagine Oprah & company indulging him with interviews now. Hell, late night host Jimmy Kimmel got crucified for fluffing Trump’s hair and thereby “humanising” him.
More detailed analysis of Trump’s seemingly flawed but nonetheless highly persuasive speaking
Here…
https://qz.com/965004/rhetoric-scholars-pinpoint-why-trumps-inarticulate-speaking-style-is-so-persuasive/
Interesting article, marred as usual by the slashes about demagogues: cough, cough, we’re not on his side, please continue reading. Please.
Really? You don’t think Trump falls into the category of populist demagogue?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue
Ok, it may be a pejorative albeit a mild one compared to nonsense that doesn’t apply like “fascist”, “dictator” and “authoritarian”, but seems like an accurate description of what Trump says, why he is hated, and why he is loved. Arguably previous POTUS such as Andrew Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon fell into the same “populist demagogue” category to varying degrees. And in the NZ context RJ Seddon, Bob Semple, Rob Muldoon and Winston Peters.
And I’m having to put disclaimers in regularly as a prophylactic for Adolf’s tribal inability to balance complexity and nuance, so I wouldn’t go pointing fingers around here! 😳😂
A populist for sure. But a demagogue? Oh I know people say that he’s one but in terms of actions he’s shown a damned sight more respect for the constitutional limits on his power than at least Bush and Obama. And that’s due to the American system of government. Drop Trump in a PM-type situation or heading a military coup then sure, I could see his instincts being unleashed in a Just-Do-It-Solve-The-Problem manner.
But again, I’m one of those who look at actions rather than words, especially for politicians, having long ago tired of golden-tongued orators.
I wouldn’t bother about the exclaimers. Waste of time; you’d be better off just correcting someone when they do that. Makes it more readable too.
It is a sad indictment on our nation that these two are the best we can come up with. We really do need to tear down the system and build a better one. I do have hope that the Democratic Party can revive itself with youth and vigor, and there are green shoots there. But the Republicans are retreating further behind their walls.
I believe we over venerate the military, it is almost our national religion. But Biden would be the first President since Eisenhower to know the feelings of a father farewelling a son to a foreign war.
No Trump in America has ever served in the military; this spans 5 generations and every branch of the family tree. In fact, the reason his grandfather immigrated to America was to avoid military service.
In any other candidate, Trump’s disdain for the military would be a fatal wound, but this man’s continued hold over the GOP shows that they have sold their last few principles to cling to their sinecures.
a href=”https://www.elephantjournal.com/2020/09/80-things-our-president-has-said-or-done-with-sources-against-our-own-military/”>Those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our Country are “Suckers” and “Losers.” ~ President Trump
Other than the first para, a good post, or at least one with some useful stuff to discuss
Is strange the hold this guy has on people, as evidenced by this weird thread where no matter what the evidence against him, some will “believe” in Trump no matter what:
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2020/09/fox_news_confirms_that_trump_called_war_dead_losers.html
Other than the John Bolton denial (and he has little reason to defend Trump, indeed a really good motive to confirm the alleged statements)
…they sure accord with Trump’s known values of selfish entitlement and disdain for others, and his previous statements and implications about McCain’s POW incarceration in Vietnam.
But anyway, Biden…
Have you noticed all the people making these allegations are anonymous while those denying them are named? Funny that!
You’re taking the bait Adolf. This post is about Biden. What condition is he really in? What would he be like as President? How long would he last? What would Harris be like as President? Could Biden be dumped for Harris now? And so forth.
Lots of other places to focus on Trump so I’m not going to let the usual suspects hijack this thread and turn it into what they always want: their topic (Trump) and their debate framing (using the Slam Of The Day).
>This post is about Biden. What condition is he really in?
You want a medical opinion, ask a doctor, not the knock-kneed street walker from Hicksville, WA.
What would he be like as President?
Better than the incumbent, more likely to seek expert advice, and would focus on the job, not TwitGolf.
How long would he last?
How long will any of us last? How long is a piece of string? (Any length you like up to 255 characters. Old computer joke.)
What would Harris be like as President?
Who knows, but it would be fun to find out. Certainly, she wouldn’t be afraid of the opposite sex, unlike the current VP who has to ask “Mother’s” permission. America could do worse.
Could Biden be dumped for Harris now?
Highly unlikely, but we can dream … Her presence on the ticket will help with the progressives, the women, the POC, etc. She will be great for our tired, our poor, our huddled masses yearning to breathe free. A breath of fresh air to replace the fetid swamp smell over Washington.
In light of the criticisms made of Harris’s career as a prosecutor and Senator by the US Left in California and elewhere such a comment can only be made if:
OR
@ Adolf
You mean there is no reasonable possibility, as per the standard dissembling of any leaker, that they couldn’t be one and the same?!
And as when someone does go on the record quoting Trump unfavourably, his apologists have an overwhelming history of acknowledging and accepting the veracity of the criticism in a reasonable, indeed magnanimous fashion…oh, no, hold on.
No one on the Left is unaware of Harris’s past, but it is what it is. As I said in my first comment, we need to burn the system to the ground and build a new one, one that works for the people, not the Oligarchs.
We have become what Maddison warned us about, a nation divided into two parties, marching lockstep to our own demise.
Yeah, yeah. Marxist wank that has always produced giant, Year Zero fuckups. Fortunately the modern clown show Marxists and Anarchists are useless for anything more substantive than breaking windows and burning shit.
More marxist cant. What a surprise. The reason things have got this way is that government has become gigantic and centred out of Washington. And Big Government loves Big Business.
And who else loves Big Government? The Left, with their dreams of centralised command and control. And spare your anarchist day dreams on that score. Your lot have no better idea about how to build such a society nowadays than you did a 150 years ago. All you clowns get is CHAZ.
Well done on sticking to the topic.
The system has been corrupted, it cannot be reformed from within. It needs root and branch reform. I guess we know where you would have stood when proud men and women decided that enough was enough and a new way had to be forged. I imagine you still have your great-great grandfather’s Red Coat.
No Democrat has lost the popular vote but gained the Presidency. But it seems to work out OK for Republicans.
The electoral college has passed its use by date, even a majority of Republican voters want a change to direct election of the President.
Giving such power, to such a minority, overturns the first principle of free elections.
Now, back to your beat up on Biden as a distraction from whatever brain fart Trump has had today …
The system has been corrupted, it cannot be reformed from within, it needs root and branch reform…I imagine you still have your great-great grandfather’s Red Coat
Neither the American War of Independence, nor the English Commonwealth under Cromwell for that matter, were revolutions in the radical utopian root-and-branch/tear it all down and purge the ideological heretics as per the pattern of France in 1789, Russia in October 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1958 or Cambodia in 1975. Instead, like the Reformation, they were built on existing or lost civil political antecedents, a healthy acknowledgement of flawed human nature, with careful and deliberate constitutional checks and balances on the centralised concentration and abuse of power.
Oh do piss off. You are the one that has expressed the desire to burn it all down, twice in this thread. Perhaps I should not have risen to that off-topic bait either, especially since this seems more like your knee-jerk desire.
But it does raise a couple of interesting points, not least because for millions of Trump voters that is exactly what they also wanted. If you’re interested you can go hunt down an article from 2015 by one Clive Crook, a long-time observer of the political scene who accurately described the class warfare at play in the USA, something of which he was vividly aware, being a Northern England boy who’d got to Oxford in 1970. He assured his readers that the snobbery he observed directed from the denizens of D.C. to much of the rest of the US population far exceeded what he had encountered in England. As he put it, the latter chose Trump as a Molotov cocktail hurled through the windows of those who despised them.
And you are part of that latter group, which I find deeply ironic.
And of course if I did take you at your word about how concerned you are about just two things, the “Swamp” of D.C. and Black men in prison you would have to acknowledge two things:
1) Trump is a creature of the New York City corruption, something very different to the D.C. version, to which he has been a stranger – unlike Biden.
2) Between them, Harris and Biden have either crafted or enforced legislation that has put away more Black men for non-violent offences than Trump has, especially given the legislation that Trump saw enacted that seen such people released from prison where they were placed by the Biden legislation of the 1990’s.
So if you actually cared about even those two things, let alone decisions of war and peace, you’d be inclined to vote for Trump, not Biden.
You won’t of course, because none of those things really matter to you. You just want to burn shit down and start again. To that end it is irrelevant to you whether Trump or Biden is elected.
What have Biden and Trump in common. Both never served in the military. Trump received deferments and was eventually classified as unsuitable for service because of bone spurs. Likewise Biden received deferments before he too was classified as unsuitable because of claimed asthma attacks.
Dodger bone spurs vs dodger asthma. Spot the difference … I can’t.
Should military service be a prerequisite for election? As I wrote above, we over venerate our military.
Objectively looking at the history of their youth, about 90% of their contemporaries avoided military service. Are to choose solely from the survivors among the 10%?
A recent poll showed serving military personal, many of whom will rely on postal ballots, support Biden over Trump.
And yet, unlike Presidents who did not serve in Vietnam such Bush II and Clinton, this guy has not started any wars into which American soldiers have been fed.
Perhaps he just really does not like wars for anybody, not just himself?
Yeah, but – and getting this discussion back onto Biden – in the case of “hawk” Dems like Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, Obama and likely Biden, you could argue it is people like you, Tom, always alleging they are fellow travellers of the Pinkos who lost China and everything else important since, that makes them the war mongers that they are.
Because the “we were never in favour” that a Bobby Kennedy, John Kerry or Hilary Clinton do when Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq later inevitably turn to shit, and especially if there is a GOP POTUS like Nixon or W steering the cutter is just temporary posturing.
So here’s one issue where the solid right wing DO arguably set the agenda. 😳😂
Yes, you could, but you’d have to ignore their innate anti-communist thoughts of the time. Most Democrats through to at least the end of the 60’s were fairly hard-assed Cold Warriors themselves. Hell, Bobby Kennedy worked as a lawyer for Joe McCarthy.
And even in the post-Cold War world that argument would not explain Biden voting against the Desert Storm operation in 1991 (because Vietnam) – and then voting for the Iraq invasion a decade later (because Desert Storm turned out to be not-Vietnam).
Then there’s the Balkans interventions under Clinton in the late 90’s. The US Right-wing certainly did not set the agenda there: International Liberalism and all that.
When it comes to Hillary, Biden etc, it’s fair to say that their war/not-war decisions have simply moved with whatever wind their political noses detected at the time.
===============================================
@Anne Tiffa
I have a post coming up on Trump and the US military to which that last comment is appropriate, even if it is filled with the usual red herring crap that’s been debunked or irrelevant. I probably made a mistake rising to the bait of your Trump comment in the first place.
Discuss Biden – and in more than just Not-Trump terms – or meet Mr Spam Queue.
To be a better president than Trump all Biden has to do is enter the white house, lock the door behind him and not come out for four years, To demonise Biden instead of trying to promote your candidate Trump, is an election strategy too far.
Highlighting the suspect mental faculties of a candidate (let me introduce you to the Democrat campaigns against Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, George W Bush and…Donald Trump!), especially when in Biden’s case there are obvious reasons why, is “an election strategy too far”?!
Has Wayne Mapp changed his login name?! 🤣
Well that’s just the Not Trump argument – again – which is boring and also failed Hillary Clinton four years ago. And she was a hell of a lot better candidate than Biden is now.
It is in fact the exact strategy you then go on to complain about. The Democrats have done nothing but demonise Trump for five years. I can recall nothing like it in my lifetime, not even the BushHitler stuff was this crazy, and it has failed to date.
Meantime, every Presidential campaign is about:
1) The candidates themselves.
2) Their policies (for what they’re worth)
3) The bigger issues and events swirling around, which in many ways are more important depending on the age.
But sure. At some stage I’ll put up the arguments as to why I’d vote for Trump over Biden. And of course the thing that’s often missed about this is that people seem to demand that the debate be on their terms; that it be around whatever the Hate Trump Slam is today and if disagreement is found that must mean that one “loves Trump”.
Meantime there are things about Trump that I don’t like or agree with, but that his opposition rarely, if ever, raise. So the shit fights in the MSM and online are, as usual, centred on what the TDS sufferers demand be the point of attention.
AT et al … just pointing out that if Trump and Biden are the best America has on offer then the land of the free is well and truly f****d. Since when has the lesser of two incompetents been the criteria against which you made the choice? Sad for America, sad for the world.
Which is exactly what I said in my first comment.
Which senile old misogynist is worse than the other senile old misogynist? That has to be the most stupid and annoying discussion topic for a long time. Trump and Johnson are live, real-time demonstrations of how fucked their respective countries are, so a more interesting topic would be whether there’s any coming back from this for either country.
Tom, can you show anything, anything at all, where Trump is as capable as this of keeping on message? No jazz hands. No rambling. No self aggrandisement?
Biden is surely not the best America has to offer, but he far exceeds the Nazi Cheeto.