Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden waves before a Democratic presidential primary debate Thursday, Dec. 19, 2019, in Los Angeles, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)
A little earlier today, my colleague Bonchie posted on Joe Biden losing his sh** at an autoworker. Calculated anger is something that most candidates for president have engaged in at one time or another. But with Biden, this incident is simply the latest example in a rapidly expanding catalog of statements and behaviors that have only one unifying explanation: his actual, medical dementia is rather obviously in full bloom. It has not gone unnoticed.
Via Politico:
President Donald Trump stood before about 500 of the Republican Party’s biggest patrons at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Friday and raised a topic few in the audience expected: Joe Biden’s mental capacity.
Trump walked the donors through a list of Biden’s recent verbal stumbles, such as his recent declaration that he was running for Senate and his assertion that 150 million Americans had been killed by gun violence since 2007. Trump questioned whether the former vice president had the mental stamina to sustain the rigors of a general election campaign.
Then, the president appeared to give donors permission to leak his remarks about Biden to the media.
With Biden emerging as the likely Democratic nominee, Trump has launched a concerted, near-daily campaign to raise doubts about the 77-year-old’s mental acuity. The president has been bolstered by a conservative echo chamber flooding social media with video clips highlighting Biden’s gaffes.
Some major Sanders allies have made the same observation:
Biden's brain is the new Hillary's health on Russian TV and Sanders Twitter pic.twitter.com/WSE6ObQGdt
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 8, 2020
While the Politico article goes on to give Trump credit for his ability to identify an opponent’s weaknesses and reduce them to terms that stick in the public imagination…and, naturally, they blame the ‘right wing echo chamber’ for this…what they omit is the degree to which many of Biden’s former opponents in the Democrat primary also noticed that Biden’s mental acuity was not terribly acute. And the media who now are trying to tell us that baby sh** is butterscotch…
Part of the “cognitive decline” campaign being spread by MAGA/Sanders twitter is to deny any coordination. The idea is that everyone is just now noticing that Biden misspeaks all the time and they’re suddenly alarmed by it. He’s been like this for decades! pic.twitter.com/2hEaD5VcPh
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) March 8, 2020
…were pretty much down with it. Glenn Greenwald at the far-left The Intercept has the complete rundown… with documentary evidence.
Meanwhile, Politico and CNN reporter Ryan Lizza, more devoted to defending Biden than even DNC functionaries, spent all weekend conspiratorially insinuating that journalists who were raising concerns over Biden’s cognitive fitness were part of a joint “coordinated” attack from the Sanders and Trump campaigns. Lizza and others like him promoted various outraged articles from Democratic Party-loyal sites expressing all kinds of indignation — after four years of open season of musing casually about Trump’s dementia — that anyone would even dare discuss Biden’s cognitive fitness to occupy the most powerful political position in the world. They all insisted that this was some sort of very recent invention on the part of the Sanders and Trump world to stop the Biden juggernaut: a last-minute act of desperation from the Far Right and the Far Left as Biden ascends to his rightful place in the Oval Office.
The problem with all of this? Aside from the fact that Biden’s cognitive decline is visible to the naked eye and it is incredibly reckless and repressive to demand that it be supressed, these concerns were first raised not by Trump operatives nor by Sanders supporters, nor were they first raised within the last several weeks. Quite the opposite is true: they were raised repeatedly over the last year principally by Democratic Party officials and their most loyal allies in the media.
Here’s Andrea Mitchell:
It's not just the other candidates who think Biden's age/fitness are fair game. Here's MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell wondering if Biden is in possession of his full mental acuity. "How sharp is he?" pic.twitter.com/C5IYNXAZ6U
— Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) June 28, 2019
Here’s the mentally acute and fiercely heterosexual Cory Booker:
Julian Castro:
Lmao. Watch the video. Listen to the hoots from the audience. Then meditate upon how much less charitable and kind Mr. Trump is compared to Mr. Castro and tell me that isn’t a HUGE liability. pic.twitter.com/CRKJ4zdF6b
— Wet-Bigfoots🎏🐡🐠🐟 Flying-Bigfoot🦜 (@platzmania) March 8, 2020
Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan:
https://twitter.com/CANCEL_SAM/status/1236421497801105408
Various cable news talking heads:
https://twitter.com/CANCEL_SAM/status/1236760401918005249
https://twitter.com/CANCEL_SAM/status/1236704879390986241
Greenwald continues:
The list of prominent political and media figures raising these concerns throughout 2019 is long and diverse. That this is some recently manufactured script — “coordinated” by the Sanders and Trump campaigns to smear Biden — is so laughably and provably false that pro-Biden reporters should be ashamed to show their faces as they claim it. But centrists — as they’ve proven since Trump’s presidency began — casually arrogate unto themselves the right to disseminate the most unhinged conspiracies without the need for any evidence and without the slightest regard for whether they are true.
Joe Biden has no business running for office. Any office. He was never terribly capable on his best day and that was a couple of decades ago. What has happened is simple. Virtually no one took a Joe Biden candidacy seriously. I know I didn’t. I fully expected him to be out after Super Tuesday. Because he was a non-player and the Democrat media were invested in pimping the flavor du jour, they candidly reported on what was obvious to anyone. Biden’s mind is failing at a remarkable rate. The strength of Sanders has forced a consolidation in the field behind Biden in order to prevent Sanders from getting the nomination. Now the media are trying to gaslight us into believing the stupid and inappropriate things Biden says and does are compensation for a childhood stutter and not signs of Alzheimer’s taking its toll. They are trying to put even the discussion of this obvious phenomenon off-limits by labeling it as a ‘conspiracy’ or as untrue.
The idea of Joe Biden as president is something the nation has rejected before. It is something that should be rejected, emphatically, this time around. He is not as incapable as Woodrow Wilson during his second term…yet…but if he is elected we will have also elected a Constitutional crisis as he will have to be removed for cause via the 25th Amendment before he finishes his term.
Before Joe Biden jumped in the race, Barack Obama told him “you really don’t have to do this.”
After months of watching Joe on the campaign trail, everyone can see why.
Cory Booker put it best: “You listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder.” pic.twitter.com/qLosBxWM2f
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 & get the APP (@TrumpWarRoom) March 4, 2020
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