UPDATE, July 12, 2024: I published this on August 30, 2021 but it is now more appropriate the ever. Because screw the politics of it with the election and the Democrat Party’s rapidly dwindling probability of beating Trump – even with their superb political machines in the swing states. The reality is this guy needs to be gone as President – right the fuck now. But the bottom line is that executing the 25th amendment to force a US President out is a hell of a lot tougher than it looks.

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Readers will know that I have a very low opinion of US Vice President Kamala Harris, the person who started in the Democrat nominations as the Female Barack Obama and ended as the Black Hillary Clinton.

Her inadequacies are extensive, as I noted in The unbearable lightness of Kamala Harris. She’s shallow, nasty, tin-eared, incompetent as both a politician and a manager, and utterly devoid of principles beyond her ambition to crawl to the top of the American political world. She was so awful that she dropped out of the Democrat race even before the first votes were cast in Iowa. The Biden team rescued her from the well-deserved obscurity of failure.

But right now she has one overwhelming thing going for her.

She has a functioning brain.

The current POTUS does not.

Biden has always been a dim-bulb gaffe-meister and a fabulist liar who lacked Clinton and Obama’s slickness but made up for it by being bald-faced and attacking people when they called him on his bullshit. Also he could get away with this as a Senator, although it caused him to fail in two runs for the Democrat Presidential nomination. But given how senile he has become in the last two years none of that history applies now. For months, on numerous issues, it has become quite clear that he’s simply following instructions written down for him in precise detail:

“Ladies and gentlemen, they gave me a list here. The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O’Donnell from NBC…”

It’s just more evidence that Biden is not actually running the show.

But the recent disaster in Afghanistan put him and his staff in a position they could not control as they had for the last eighteen months; calling “lids” (no outside contact) early on many days, and keeping him either in his basement as candidate or in the White House once he was President. He now had to front the Press and the American people often.

It has only made things worse. I make a point of not watching politicians or listening to them nowadays because I don’t want to be distracted by their voice or mannerisms. I recall Lefties going beserk about Bush 43’s “smirk”, Righties about Obama’s uplifted nose (caught so well by cartoonist Michael Ramirez), and now NZ Righties about Adern’s speaking manner and facial expressions. Much better to just read the transcript – and not some “journalist’s” paraphrasing of it either.

So it’s only been in the last couple of days that I’ve gone back to look at the pressers that Biden has held on the Afghanistan situation in the last two weeks.

They’re godawful. The first ones seemed strange enough with him just walking away and taking no questions: this after literally days of hiding while things unwound. Perhaps realising this wasn’t doing the trick they put him a one-on-one with ABC TV’s George Stephanopoulos, senior aide to Bill Clinton through his ’92 campaign and first term and a solid, partisan Democrat. About the friendliest interviewer Biden could have found.

It went okay until people (even CNN) began noticing the incredible number of facts that Biden got wrong and that contradicted what he’d said earlier, sometimes just days earlier, as well as the anger when Stephanopoulos gently challenged him. Once again he did not come across well. All such TV interviews are edited for time so there are always things left out. But when the full transcript was released people were stunned by this answer that did not make it to screen. For context, Stephanopoulos asked what Biden thought of Veterans wondering if it had all been a waste and why the US could not have “left with honour”:

That is not even coherent as spin. He simply lost the thread of the answer, as he has before. And while it’s one thing to forget the names of members of his cabinet, as he has done in pressers, it’s quite another to forget his son’s rank, which service he was in, and even where he was stationed, especially since he’s employed this shroud-waving deflection before.

But the last two pressers were the worst.

On August 24 he was five hours late, which was unprecedented enough to get the MSM talking. When he did show he looked awful, his eyes bloodshot and glazed over. At times you could not even see the whites of his eyes. The teleprompter presentation was cold, robotic and tone deaf as he started by yakking about his “Build Back Better” plan. No empathy. Then he once more turned his back and walked away again with his little-old-man pitter-patter gait, taking no questions, clearly unable to physically and mentally do so.

Then on the 26th, after the bombings, after hours had passed with no word from him, the presser showed him slurring so badly it was if he was drunk. One of the more bizarre moments occurred when he stopped talking and stared down at the podium while his right arm jerked spasmodically behind it, as if he was fishing for a stick of gum in his pocket. It got worse from there:

Near tears at one point, Biden was seen hunched over the podium, clutching his briefing binder with both hands, his face a sea of grief. 

My first thought was that he looked like a beaten man. 

My second thought was that beaten men make terrible presidents and disastrous commanders in chief. 

Barely had that passed when he had to meet the new Prime Minister of Israel. Watch.

To appease the fact-checkers, I’ll note that I can’t tell for sure that he’s asleep here. Perhaps he’s just resting his eyes? But certainly there is nothing normal about him hanging his head for more than 30 seconds in this way that we’ve all seen with elderly relatives, instead of having his attention locked on the head of state he’s there to speak with. At one point, the video zooms in and you can see that his eyes are closed.

Something is badly wrong with this president, not just mentally but now physically and there’s no way it can be ignored anymore. Moreover, more people are noticing what the rest of us have seen for two years but which was dismissed as nothing more than partisan attacks. Biden is a man in steep physical and mental decline. Further, that decline is affecting his emotional health as well, with angry outbursts becoming more common.

It’s so bad that even the NeverTrumpers at Ye Olde Staid Right-Wing magazine, National Review, finally noticed with an article, Something Is Wrong with the President:

Somewhere along the way of the last few years, Biden transitioned from “young old” to “old.” Veteran reporters describe the transition in code. “He’s lost a step or two.” Or: “he’s lost something off his fastball.”

You’re not supposed to talk about it. If you do, and you’re a Democrat, you’re scolded for aiding and abetting the enemy. If you do, and you’re a Republican or (God forbid) a MAGA voter, you’re a horrible hate-mongerer, trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election (and you probably watch Fox News to boot).

The problem is that it’s there for all to see. Pretending not to see it is untenable.

Great. Those clowns pretended up to this point and snarked at other Right-Wingers pointing to the lack of Emperor’s clothes. But now they’ve been given permission to discuss this by the Respectable Idiots of D.C.’s laptop classes that they soiree with every day.

There’s no way Biden can lead the USA any longer, something that’s become abundantly clear over the last two weeks, and if the people running this guy had any shame, they’d get him to resign. The thing is that they’re not the only ones with a say in this, and as Tucker Carlson noted, The Knives May Be Out For Biden:

Some of Biden’s most senior appointees are contradicting him in public. If you cover politics, it is shocking to see that. It’s a violation of the first and most ruthlessly enforced rule in any White House, which is don’t diminish the boss.

But suddenly, they’re doing just that and they’re doing it openly.

Or it could just be the same general incompetence shown in other areas, this time in message control.

Assuming a forced resignation won’t happen what are the other alternatives for getting Biden out? There are only two it seems: Impeachment and the 25th Amendment. The former is a non-starter while the Democrats control the Senate and House, even with the barest majorities.

The latter is not well known because it was only passed in 1967 following the assassination of President Kennedy. But ironically enough it has been discussed a lot in recent years – specifically by Democrats during the Presidency of Donald Trump with his “erratic governing style” (heh, good times, good times…). But it’s not so simple as the movies have portrayed, as this detailed article in 2018 explained:

The amendment’s less-interesting inability provision, Section 3, has been used three times by presidents about to go under sedation. Simple and straightforward, Section 3 allows the president to declare himself disabled and pass power temporarily to the vice president. Then, whenever the president declares himself recovered, he retakes power.

So section 4 has to be used. The thing is that it has never been used, it’s multi-layered, each layer has complexities and more importantly…

It was designed to ensure that there is a conscious, communicative person in charge of the government, not to stop unfit or even unbalanced presidents (as today’s Section 4 advocates view Trump) from doing bad things.
…
[It was not designed to] remove inept presidents who are doing a disastrously bad job. Section 4’s language is broad enough, arguably, to apply in such situations. But its design ensures that it can cover such situations only in the rarest of cases.

The history of Presidents being replaced due to death pre-25th is interesting, especially in the case of Garfield, who lingered for two months after being shot in 1885, and of course Woodrow Wilson with his strokes in 1919. In both cases the VP’s were reluctant to take over in case the Presidents recovered, so effectively the nation didn’t have a President. It was Eisenhower, spurred by the age of nuclear deterrence, who pushed for it, and Kennedy’s shocking death swung the argument since Kennedy might also have lingered in a coma had his wounds been a little less lethal.

You can read all the detail and history in that article as it’s fascinating stuff, but the synopsis as follows.

Advocates would have to convince a majority of the cabinet and a supermajority of the Congress (2/3s as with Impeachment) that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” – not politically, but as a matter of medical fact. That isn’t going to happen here since Biden (or more precisely his staff) has the power under the amendment to counter “that no inability exists,” and would not go along with it. Kamala Harris, who would have everything to lose if she failed in the attempt, has never shown she takes such risks. And Congress, which would be called upon to follow through in the unlikely event the cabinet pulled the trigger, is not going to vote for it, even if the GOP holds the Senate and House after the 2022 elections.

In short, it’s not a replacement for impeachment, which is specifically designed to remove and replace a President.

For the GOP this is actually good news, since it means the Democrats are tied to these sinking ships into the 2022 and 2024 elections: an increasingly brain-dead President and a VP of cackling, obnoxious, incompetence, both of whom are sinking in the polls for many reasons. If Biden becomes comatose or suffers a stroke (he’s suffered two brain aneurysms) then it’s a different ballgame as he would be incapable of objecting. But there’s a big difference between those physical states and even advanced senile dementia.

But it’s not good news for the USA and the rest of the world. Terrible as she is, Kamala needs to take over as President.