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'All the President’s Mental Lapses'
'Democracy dies in deception.'

<https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/all-the-presidents-mental-lapses/>

'There were two presidential campaigns in 2024: one between Donald Trump
and Joe Biden, and then one between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The
first began to end, and the second began to take shape, during the
Trump-Biden debate held on June 27. The story of that debate was
President Biden, who looked and sounded dreadful. His performance
confirmed Democrats’ worst fears and Republicans’ best argument: Joe
Biden, born 11 months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was too old and
cognitively diminished to discharge his presidential duties now, much
less over the course of a second term that would last beyond his 86th
birthday.

The debate triggered a panic attack among Democratic politicians and
supportive journalists. The next day, The New York Times ran an
editorial beseeching Biden to withdraw from the race. The New Yorker,
another publication that had supported Biden’s presidency, published a
similar plea the following day. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor,
wrote that Biden “went to pieces on CNN, in front of tens of millions of
his compatriots,” who witnessed “the spectacle of a man of eighty-one,
struggling terribly with memory, syntax, nerves, and fragility, his
visage slack with the dawning sense that his mind was letting him down.”

By the time Jill Biden helped her husband down the steps at the
conclusion of the 90-minute debate, Biden’s presidential campaign was in
crisis. It took 24 days of public and behind-the-scenes pressure before
he abandoned his quest for a second term. There is much yet to be
learned about how a proud, stubborn man was ultimately induced to give
up the office he began seeking in the 1980s. The story may never be
known in full. But the simplest explanation is that Biden finally
accepted that continuing to run for a second term would make Donald
Trump’s return to the White House likely, perhaps even certain. Since
the beginning of his campaign in 2019, Biden had spent five years
calling Trump a grave threat to the American experiment. Yet if he
refused to stand down, Biden would be remembered as the vain, heedless
politician who had instead guaranteed that Trumpism would revive,
stronger this time than before Biden took office in 2021. In an Oval
Office address on July 24, three days after he abandoned his re-election
campaign by posting a message on social media, Biden came as close as he
ever has to explaining his decision: “I believe my record as president,
my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a
second term, but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our
democracy, and that includes personal ambition.”

Cover-Up and Scandal

The first reactions to Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris
indicate that if Biden’s motive in ending his candidacy was to avoid
blame for elevating Trump, he might as well have kept his own name on
the ballot all the way through November. The case against Biden is that
he stayed in the race too long and left it too late. Had he never run at
all, either Harris would have conducted a better campaign than the one
she began 107 days before the election, or the Democrats would have had
truly contested primaries and selected a better nominee.

Some of the criticism is scalding. “He shouldn’t have run,” an aide to
the late Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Politico. “He
and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”
The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner was equally caustic. The “blame for
Trump’s victory overwhelmingly lies with one person: Joe Biden,” he
wrote. “Biden’s arrogance remains astonishing to behold: well before
2024, he was quite simply too old to ask people, in good faith, to keep
him in office through 2028.” The Washington Post editorial page was no
less harsh. “It’s now acknowledged almost universally that Mr. Biden
should not have sought a second term,” the paper wrote on November 8,
“but the Democratic establishment denied the obvious and propped him up
politically, even as evidence of his decline mounted.”

These severe assessments are true, but not the whole truth. It wasn’t
just members of the Democratic establishment who denied the obvious
facts about Joe Biden’s diminished capacities and ignored or dissembled
about the mounting evidence of his decline. It was also the “mainstream”
or “legacy” media. Biden’s disastrous performance at the June debate
caused a shock, and also a meta-shock. It was astonishing that he was in
such bad shape, and then it was astonishing that supposedly
knowledgeable, reliable journalists, in the middle of an octogenarian’s
fourth year in the presidency, either were stunned or acted stunned at
what they saw of Biden that night.

Interviewed on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in October, veteran journalist
Mark Halperin called the “cover-up” of Biden’s decline the worst scandal
in the history of American journalism. Americans naïvely assumed,
Halperin said, that the days were over when journalists would, rather
than exert themselves to uncover it, be complicit in concealing
information the public deserved to know. The press’s coziness with those
in power made it possible to keep secrets about Woodrow Wilson’s and
Franklin Roosevelt’s deteriorating health, or John Kennedy’s reckless
philandering. Such corruption was supposed to be a disgrace to avoid,
not a model for today’s journalists to emulate. Reporters failed in
their professional obligations, according to Halperin, due to “some
affection for Biden, the bullying of his staff, but primarily because of
the desire to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t win.” Journalists covering
the White House were, he said, fully aware that Biden’s “acuity decline
was substantial.” But to say so in print, on the air, or even in their
newsrooms was “impermissible.”

His and Hur’s

In the “hippy dippy weatherman” bit that launched his comedy career,
George Carlin said, “I imagine some of you were a little surprised at
the weather over the weekend. Especially if you watched my show Friday
night.” In the same way, one of the reasons the “Democratic
establishment denied the obvious” regarding Joe Biden’s decline, to
quote the Post’s editorial again, was that it would not have been
obvious to anyone whose sole source of political information was The
Washington Post.

In its editorial after the election, for example, the Post spoke warmly
of special counsel Robert Hur and the report he issued in February 2024,
which recommended that the Justice Department not pursue a criminal case
against Biden for mishandling classified material after he finished his
term as vice president in 2017 (and became a private citizen for the
first time since 1972). Hur’s report took the position that the statute
against the improper use of classified documents required prosecutors to
prove beyond a reasonable doubt a defendant’s willful intent: mistakenly
packing a classified file in a box of personal memorabilia was not a
crime. For that reason, Hur felt it necessary to state in his report
that, based on five hours of interviews with the president, a jury was
likely to view Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a
poor memory.” Any prosecution of such a defendant would be futile,
pointless, and therefore even cruel.

Hur’s brief comments about Biden’s age and memory elicited Democrats’
accusations that the special counsel had made a political attack on
Biden for reasons unconnected to his duties in the case. According to
the Post’s November 8 editorial, however, “Hur has been repeatedly
vindicated during the intervening nine months. The interview
transcripts, when they came out, bolstered his conclusions. If anything,
the truth was worse than what Mr. Hur described.”

But that wasn’t how the paper reacted when the report was issued. A
February 9 editorial titled “The Special Counsel Says the President Is
Old. Nothing New About That” said that “critics are right that Mr. Hur
did not need to lay it on quite so thick,” especially since “Republicans
[are] milking the moment for all it is worth.” After all, “there is
nothing new about Mr. Biden’s memory lapses, malapropisms, and rambling,
sometimes embroidered anecdotes. This has been an aspect of his
political persona since he was a much younger man. And it has plainly
not improved with age.”

And did the transcripts of prosecutors’ interviews with Biden, released
in March, really bolster Hur’s conclusions, as the Post said in
November? Was the truth even worse than what Hur described? Not
according to the paper’s news pages at the time. A March 12 story titled
“Full Transcript of Biden’s Special Counsel Interview Paints Nuanced
Portrait” stated, “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded
as Hur has made him out to be.” According to the November 8 editorial,
Biden displayed “frequent forgetfulness and hazy answers” when
interviewed by Hur. The assessment offered in the earlier news article,
however, was that the interview was characterized by digressions and
banter. “Biden frequently joked with prosecutors in a setting that
seemed more chummy than antagonistic.”

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Subject	Author
All the President's Mental Lapses- The Biden Summary	John Smyth
Re: All the President's Mental Lapses- The Biden Summary	pothead

Your depth of comprehension may tend to make you lax in worldly ways.

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