Sleepy Joe or Senile Joe?

By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 7/05/2020

Joe Biden is clearly not well.
 
Republican commentators everywhere are perhaps too decent to come out and state the obvious; that it looks as though Joe has dementia. President Trump is putting the case too kindly when he refers to the former Vice President as “Sleepy Joe.”

Joe’s interviews are almost too painful to behold – he stammers and squints into camera, then when he does get on a roll he can’t articulate a coherent sentence and often makes remarks that just don’t make any sense. He literally and frequently speaks nonsense that is beyond the pale of the normal nonsense Dems like to trot out, it’s gibberish consistent with cognitive degeneration.

Considering Democrats like to sermonise that their candidate must be the voice of civility and reason in order to counteract President Trump’s “combative tone,” Biden remains a very odd choice to uphold those particular virtues.

“You’re a lying, dog-faced, pony soldier!” he fumed at a female questioner in a meet and greet on the campaign trail during the primaries. 

To a man who challenged him on his son Hunter’s corrupt dealings with gas company Burisma in Ukraine, Biden spat, “Get your words straight Jack,” and challenged the guy to a push-up contest. As the questioner said when he sat down, “I’m not voting for you,” Biden responded with, “I knew you’re weren’t man, you think I thought you’d vote for me? You’re too old to vote for me.”  The man appeared to be around 65 years old. Biden is 77.

Yet another questioner, a union auto worker, in response to a genuine query about gun control received this reply from Biden: “You’re full of shit! Let’s take this outside.”

Confusing Vermont with New Hampshire, telling folks he’s running for the senate instead of the presidency, encouraging families to, “play the radio, make sure the television… excuse me, the record player is on at night,” talking about “choosing truth over facts,” confusing Angela Merkel with the late Margaret Thatcher, and in one of the oddest yarns a statesman could indulge in during a 2017 speech at a public pool in Delaware, which had been renamed in his honour, Biden ranted:

“I’ve got hairy legs that turn that.. that.. that..that turn.. that turn blonde in the sun and the kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down so it was straight and then watch the hair come back up again, and look at it.  So I learned about roaches, I learned about kids jumping on my lap and I’ve loved kids jumping on my lap.”

During Super Tuesday when Biden was addressing the large crowd, he grabbed his wife’s hand and announced: “By the way, this is my little sister, Valerie.”

Biden cannot be trusted to speak to a camera without handlers, such as his wife Jill, sitting beside him in the role of a helicopter parent. When he is allowed near a microphone on his own, disaster follows – as in his recent attempt to quote the most fundamental, beautiful and defining words of America’s foundational document, the Declaration of Independence: 

We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…

Joes’s butchered version? 
 
“We hold these truths to be self a..evident, that all men and women created… by the… go… you know the thing!”

No wonder Bernie Sanders is still holding on to his delegates before the Democratic National Convention. It must be galling for him to know that once again he has been sidelined – first to make way for the mendacious loser Hillary Clinton in 2016, and now to a man two years his junior exhibiting the symptoms of dementia. 

Is this really the best that Democrats can do?

Sadly for them, yes it is. The Democratic primaries yielded the largest field of contenders ever seen and they all lost to an under-performing Biden. Now more than ever, whoever is chosen to be Biden’s running mate for Veep is of great importance, since that person will be a strategic choice to replace Biden as President in the unlikely event that he should win come November.
 
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke tradition and ran for a third and then fourth presidential term – the only president to ever serve more than two terms in office, his fourth election of 1944 saw Harry S Truman become VP. With his health in significant decline, many knew that FDR would be unlikely to survive the duration of a fourth term. He was, for the last time, inaugurated in Jan 1945 and was dead by April. Truman became President. 

Right now, Democrats scheme and plot the future election knowing full well that Biden’s mental elevator is no longer reaching his top floor. The disgraceful thing about this deceitful debacle is that they act as if Americans cannot see what is going on with Biden. They always seem to fall prey to the assumption that the average citizen is more foolish than they are. 

With Senile Joe now facing allegations of a crude sexual assault upon the private parts of one Tara Reade, he is taking quite a different line toward his accuser than he took when Brett Kavanaugh had to face charges from Christine Blasey Ford during the appointment hearings to make it onto the Supreme Court in September of 2018. Without any corroborating facts for Blasey Ford’s claims, Biden’s position was that Blasey Ford “should be believed.”

Biden now conveniently thinks that facts matter and need to be corroborated. Tara Reade claims that she filed a report about her sexual assault and that report will be stored with his senate files in the national archives, or possibly at the University of Delaware which holds some 1800 boxes of files on Biden’s senatorial career. 

On MSNBC, a network which has constantly led a charge of armchair psychologising over President Trump’s mental unfitness to run the country, Mika Brzezinski respectfully interviewed Biden for five minutes about the Tara Reade sexual assault claims. That five minutes of trying to sound coherent about something this important was clearly a challenge for Biden:

Mika:
Are you absolutely certain.. are you absolutely positive there is no record of any complaint by Tara Reade against you?

Biden:
I am absolutely positive that no one that I’m aware of ever was been made aware of any complaint a formal complaint made by or a complaint made by Tara Reade at the time that it allegedly happened 27 years ago or until, the… I announced for pres…  or well I’m guessing was April or May of this year… I know of no-one who was aware that any complaint was made.

Mika:
Do you agree with the reporting that those records [University of Delaware’s] were supposed to be revealed to the public and then they were resealed for a longer period of time until after you leave public life – and if you agree that that’s what happened, why did that happen? 

Biden responded that they were sealed because they contained private conversations between himself and other heads of state in other countries while he was serving as VP to Barack Obama. He said they did not want those conversations to be used as fodder against him on the campaign trail while he runs for president. 

I have no idea whether Tara Reade’s claims are true or not, sexual assault charges are sadly now just par for the course of any man’s journey into high office. But I do believe that if the assault did happen, Biden’s failure to recall the event is probably truthful, not because he’s necessarily telling the truth, but because his brain seems to be full of dark, spacious holes.
 
Observe that former president Mr. Obama only came out to endorse Biden for president three weeks ago when President Trump goaded him to do so after he wondered out loud in front of the press pool why Obama had not yet given Joe his blessing, “He knows something that you don’t know… I think I know, but you don’t know.”

Within a few days Mr. Obama endorsed his former VP’s run, offering up these words about Biden’s leadership qualities:

“The kind of leadership that’s guided by knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy and grace — that kind of leadership doesn’t just belong in our state capitols and mayors offices. It belongs in the White House.” 

The former president still excels at spinning pretentious poppycock, but what held him back from endorsing Biden before President Trump’s public and timely goading?
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I think most of us know the answer to that: it’s Biden’s slide into senility.