Let’s Talk About Joe Biden

Many of us had assumed Biden was a (literally) braindead puppet and other people were in practice running things. That was in a way an opitmistic view, a less bad option. If that turns out not to be the case and that the dementia patient is actually in charge, that explains a lot and is utterly insane. What circle of morons are allowing this guy to stay into the driver seat?

A fitting end for the ‘Democratic’ Party. Reminder one billion that we could have had Sanders. They pulled out all the stops to undermine him for…this.

Biden and Harris were chosen in the same corrupt process by the same recklessly irresponsible Party and have in common manifest unfitness for Office. Biden was showing clear signs of dementia when he ran in 2019-20. The only primary Kamala Harris won in 2020 was in Hamptons fundraising and it is widely thought that she’s a drunk. Like Spiro Agnew, she may have looked like life insurance on the hoof to those surrounding her Principal.

Alan Lichtman, touted as the Professor who predicted X previous Presidential elections, makes a strong, semi-quantitative, semi-objective case that dropping Biden at this late stage makes Trump’s election — assuming he stays alive and out-of-jail — a near certainty. With that frame of analysis, you have to suspend all consideration that voters consider the merits of the person on offer, but is that such an unrealistic view? In other circumstances, I have taken the view that the vast majority of individual voters essentially vote at random in response to a mix of false beliefs and fundamental misunderstanding of politics. And, a lot of political operatives go to lunch on the creation and maintenance of that chaotic mix, many of them eating their own dog food and enjoying it. People who could believe in Russiagate and still do can believe that Biden just needs a nap and a multivitamin.

It would be lovely to think Biden’s performance in the debate was a wake-up call that no one can ignore, but his senility has been obvious for years and was ignored successfully. I cannot reject the hypothesis that he was set up to fail — setting an early debate, the intense preparation that left him tired and hoarse. It does not have to have been deliberately intentional by any one person or group in the Presidential cabal. But, I lean in the same direction that Ian does — that despite the incapacity at the center, the Biden Administration has continued to be centered on the President is a weird kind of emergent self-organization that didn’t know it was emergent self-organization. There’s plenty of other evidence in policy, foreign and domestic, that there’s no rational, reflective deliberation going on. Look at how automatic has been the Administration’s steering toward World War III or abject failure or both, in Ukraine, Gaza and Taiwan. This has long been a zombie administration and it may well continue in that mode.

Take Biden out of the equation, and the emergent self-organization that made the Administration seemingly stable may well collapse into chaos with unforeseeable consequences.

For me, a suitable metric for thinking about Biden is to consider whether you would hire him for a position of trust.
Would you hire him as a stock broker? Lawyer? Contractor? Consulting physician to opine if surgery is necessary? A baby sitter for your children?
He should resign now. If not, then his cabinet needs to remove him by employing the 25th amendment.

@david lamy Oh, come on. This is American politics we’re talking about–forget Biden and Trump, I can’t see hiring ANY upper level American politico for any of those roles. The core reason they were so desperate to stop Bernie is precisely that he’s NOT the kind of grifter I’d immediately judge unhirable for a position of trust.

Dem establishment 2016: Let’s go with Hillary Clinton
Result: Trump presidency 2016-2020
Dem establishment 2020: Let’s go with Biden
Result: Trump presidency 2024-2028

Which would be worse, the Dem establishment is incompetent or they are getting exactly what they want?

It’s rather amazing that no one is copping to the fact that it doesn’t matter what suit is in the presidential office as long as he or she is compliant with the powers that be.

@mago Well it does somewhat matter. So, I think we can agree that the wealthy elites (which I’m finding harder and harder not to call the “bourgeoisie” even though Communist cant is so cringe) really really want to stop in its tracks any politics that might entail even a little bit of redistribution from the rich to everyone else, whether it’s social democracy, socialism, or just a return to the once-mainstream welfare state. This is partly out of basic shortsighted greed, partly out of fear that if they give an inch and we realize taking their stuff makes things better, we’ll take a mile; plus, some of them seem to actively prefer a situation where the little people are impoverished serfs even when it doesn’t actually make their situation any better.

Now, the normal default approach to this involves using the media, “think tanks”, influence on universities and various other forms of PR to create an almost tacit hegemony for the idea that the status quo of high inequality is normal and unchallengeable, that it’s an inevitable part of other things that are “natural” and the best possible way of doing things, like “free markets” and “meritocracy” and so forth. This worked fairly well for a long time, and groups like the US Democrats are all about this approach.

But as the wealthy get more and more power, their siphoning of wealth gets stronger and stronger, and everyone else’s life starts to suck more and more. People get pissed off. And as unrest rises, some of the elites start to think that the normal approach isn’t working, and there’s a fear of democracy breaking out. More of the elite start signing on to an option that never really went away, but which under normal circumstances has fairly few really rich supporters: The strong hand. Fascism. A politics of fear, anger and misdirection, which instead of pretending everything is just great, tells you everything is terrible and it’s all the fault of (anyone convenient who is different and not part of the bourgeois club). And anyone who disagrees can have a nice prison cell or execution to disagree in. And horrible things will happen to the scapegoats of the day.

There are significant differences between these two ways of holding down the proles. For anyone part of the unrest side of the equation, the question is, which is harder to resist and how much damage will be done in the process of resisting? And while I admit that sanctimonious neoliberals may be in many ways more insidious, and there’s a reason why that quieter more respectable kind of deception is the normal rule, still, people can underestimate the effectiveness and danger of brute force and demagoguery. And then there’s the scapegoats, who will suffer pretty horribly, and are likely to include not just racialized groups and gays and trans and such, but also people like trade unionists and leftist intellectuals.

In the present day United States, the bottom line seems to be that a lot of billionaires are throwing their weight behind the fascist option precisely because the Democratic party, once a reliable smotherer of all populist impulses, is increasingly showing cracks as progressives besiege it, trying to get into policy formation. That makes me think it’s worth trying to preserve those shitheads . . . because their approach to keeping us down may be starting to fail. Fascism, on the other hand, is often pretty unstable, but there’s generally a lot of pain before it’s brought down, and the US is just at the beginning of it.

Unless the vote is one hell of a lot more interestingly distributed than I think it is (tends as I recall to over-index in Dem strongholds) no one *needs* 1.1% of the population.

Thanks Ian.

Beyond “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”, I wonder how that would work in practice? I assume federal cops and lawyers would pick the president over the court, but it would still be interesting to watch.

Supposedly Biden is staying in. We’ll see what happens I suppose. If he gets out there and tears it up on the campaign trail (which I doubt will happen, but who knows) he can probably fix at least some of the damage from the debate. But any more displays of cognitive issues are really going to cost, and the previous excuses (“He was just tired!” “It’s just a stutter!”) aren’t going to fly anymore.

If it’s not Biden, it pretty much has to be Harris if she wants to run. Passing her over for someone else would fracture the Democratic party too much to have any chance of winning. I think objectively Gretchen Whitmer would probably be the best candidate, and she’s actually pretty good on some issues (very pro-labor as one example). I’d much rather have Whitmer than Harris, but there’s probably no chance of that unfortunately.

Anyway, Biden seems to still be in for now.

Oh, and it’s funny how the media never talks about Trump’s incoherence, isn’t it? Every time he gives a speech it sounds like he’s having multiple mini-strokes. He’s probably not far behind Biden on the dementia train.

@purple library guy
I do not see your reply as a rebuttal as my scope was limited by the the post’s subject.
However my earlier reply was influenced not by a sense of taste as in, “I would not let her near my children!”, but rather by capacity.
How can anyone truly believe that Biden has the capacity to perform any exercise of trust?
That man is head of state. He must be replaced.

@NR

‘The media is generous to Trump’ is a wild take. In fact Trump is consistently coherent, he just lies endlessly. Whereas Biden can’t even do that properly (in context ‘we beat Medicare’ was probably supposed to be ‘we beat covid’, a statement that is no less stupid and is also a brazen lie).

Naked Capitalism had a recent piece that was a tedious deep dive into one of his speeches now, versus in 2016, and he’s as cogent now as he was then (and yes, he was quite coherent then. Mostly talked about jobs. It’s why he was elected. The closest Liberals can ever get to acknowledging this is to make fun of how he says ‘China’. Sure, but why was he talking about China so much? That’s the part they’ll never truly engage with).

I had discounted your “Biden is senile” remarks, Ian, because:

a) Trump reminds me of a close relative that developed Alzheimer’s (early stages), both because of his risks factors (bad diet, no exercise, no mental stimulation, depriving himself of sleep, etc) but also episodes of ‘spittle rage’ is very common in the early stages. It’s not Joe Biden up at 3 am posting angry remarks on Truth Social now, it is?).

Joe Biden, OTH, reminds me of a close friend’s dad with normal age-related decline. He’d tell you a story that he had told you oodles of times before, and he mumbled a lot, and we all joked about it, but functionally he was OK. He eventually died of a heart attack in his workshed, doing something he loved, carpentry. Not saying that he should be president, but mumbling a lot and forgetting you told someone something before is normal.

b) There had been no real leaks from the Biden White House about this, and private remarks even by opponents (Kevin McCarthy) were positive about Biden still be sharp for his age.

However, now there’s been this disclosure, that Biden is sharp only between 10 am to 4 pm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eedkhVuusrQ&t=128s

Soredemos:

Is Trump consistently coherent though? Is he really?

“We have become a drug-infested, crime-ridden nation, which is incapable of solving even the ‘solllest’… smallest problem. The simplest of problems we can no longer solve. We can’t do anything. We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”

To be clear, I absolutely do not want Newsom and Michelle in the WH. Both are part of the problem(s). Merely suggesting they could win.

@NR

Nah, compared to ‘we beat Medicare’, it’s absolutely coherent. Trump fundamentally still has his brain (such as it is); Biden does not.

Soredemos:

Compared to Biden is a pretty low bar at this point. I’m just talking generally, compared to how most healthy people think and talk.

So who’s the replacement? Somebody MAGAs really hate, like maybe Newsom, who can keep his head and fire back with devastation every time Trump lies? Or do they always have to be Democratic Party swing donor approved?

The “so is Trump [addled, incoherent]” comeback feels like a third-grader tossing playground insults.

I feel like George W Bush made the case against the Republican program of financial deregulation and deindustrialization at home and aggressive war abroad as well as any Party in power could — by a thorough object lesson in policy failure, corruption and catastrophe. And, instead of reversing America’s course, the Democrats embarked on a neoliberal program of reckless corruption of their own, featuring all the same elements of incompetence and malevolence, masked with gaslighting and denial and fronted by a superannuated cast of politicians from a previous era.

Democrats have been gaslighting so long about so much that they have lost track of reality entirely. Biden, never “a nice guy” in reality, was showing signs of dementia in 2019 and had a policy record as the author so much bad and cruel policy that it should have disqualified him from any consideration for further office. But, no, we were told he was the most progressive since FDR. And, here we are, open borders, war with Russia, genocide in Gaza, conflict looming with China, skyrocketing national debt spent to no purpose, private equity strip-mining the domestic economy, a pandemic that never ends, and the hottest Summer once again scorching the earth.

The big theme at that CNN debate touted by the Democrats was that everything Trump says is a lie. Well, I listened to some of it and recognized much of what Biden charged Trump with was deceptive. Repeating the Charlottesville story was a lie, to take one gratuitous example.

Calling Trump a convicted felon was technically true, but I do not take any part of that case seriously, except the fantastic political recklessness of bringing the prosecution in the first case.

There is no alternative to Biden because the Democratic Party has been working very hard to prevent one. Even now they are pulling out all the stops to keep RFK, Jr off the ballot. I don’t personally like RFK, Jr as a candidate particularly but he is an alternative if he’s allowed to run. And, he is committed to reversing course on some important issues. Biden with or without a brain is not changing course on much of anything.

Biden’s dementia is of a piece with the recklessness with which the country is being governed and the denial of reality which is embraced by so many self-described liberals and progressives, whose political rhetoric is mostly aghastitude and projection of their own authoritarian impulses.