God forbid that we allow our eyes to see what they see when it comes to the Meanderer in Chief’s bizarre behavior.
Rather than be accused of peddling disinformation, best to make no comment about the latest video of Joe Biden freezing up like a zombie and having to be shepherded off stage by Barack Obama Saturday night at the president’s celebrity-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles.
Some things are so obvious they need no commentary.
But Republicans should not fall into the trap of emphasizing Biden’s increasing befuddlement, as viral as such moments are to a world astonished that America now resembles the end stages of Soviet decrepitude.
The strategy risks engendering sympathy for a man who deserves none and lets him off the hook for all the damage he has wrought on this country.
It also plays into Biden’s superpower: being underestimated.
He might act like a doddering incompetent, look like a wax effigy and walk like a robot, but the president has the uncanny ability to exceed all expectations when it counts, politically.
We’re told he plans to hole up at Camp David for the best part of a week before the upcoming presidential debate.
Whatever magic tricks are involved in his debate prep, you know it will be a different Joe Biden at the podium June 27 than the one we’ve seen wandering around Europe like a defective Roomba.
Low expectations
He keeps passing the tests set for him by doubters in his party who are worried that most voters think he’s too old — a polite euphemism for his cognitive fitness more than a judgment on his numerical age of 81, which is not much more than Donald Trump, who just turned 78, but has seemingly boundless energy.
For instance, Biden’s weird performance at the State of the Union in March after another extended recharge at Camp David was effusively praised by his media boosters as “feisty,” “energetic,” and “passionate.”
“Biden projects a vision of strength” was typical from CNN. “He projected vigor and forcefulness. His voice . . . was sonorant. He was quick off the mark . . . a trenchant master of the chamber.”
One particularly barf-worthy line hailed the comeback of the “scrappy, twinkle-eyed, blue-collar street politician.”
These media accounts were at odds with what any normal person saw of Biden’s shouty, angry, oddly high-octane performance. But Biden benefited from low expectations, which had plummeted deeper into the basement after Special Counsel Robert Hur decided not to charge him with mishandling classified documents because he is cognitively unfit to stand trial or, as Hur diplomatically put it, he is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
All Biden had to do for applause at the debate was not fall off the stage.
Online censorship expert Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department cyber official, likens Biden’s episodes of strategic sharpness to a computer being woken up from low-power mode.
“If you were to put him in a debate, he would be able to summon the power to be somewhat formidable. But he gets that by being effectively in sleep mode for the other 98% of the debate.”
Fluky victories
Biden is used to being written off as a dud because of his history of preposterous boasting, plagiarism, dishonesty, and chip-on-the-shoulder combativeness.
No serious man behaves like that. Yet, every now and then, when his opponents are lulled into complacency, he pulls off a political masterstroke.
Benz points to the 2012 vice-presidential debate when everyone had written off Biden as “slow and prone to gaffes [and he] absolutely spanked Paul Ryan and turned around the Obama campaign.”
It was the same at the presidential debates of 2020. Derided as a befuddled basement-dweller, Biden fluked it again, managing to land a few jabs on Trump and neutralizing his attacks with the help of 51 liars and a posse of partisan moderators.
The June 27 debate is the next make-or-break moment for Biden, which Democrats will watch with their hearts in their hands, as party strategist James Carville admitted on his “Politics War Room” podcast last week.
“You know how they monitor the number of heart attacks during the Super Bowl?” said Carville. “Democrats are going to have a nervous breakdown for 90 minutes, scared that Biden is going to draw a blank . . . My advice if you [have] heart disease — don’t look. I’ll probably go get a physical on June the 26th to see if I can watch it.”
The real point is not that Biden is old and out of it, because his handlers will minimize opportunities to scrutinize him in the wild and his Hollywood spinmeisters will rig things to make him appear normal.
Biden is a deep-fake even without the help of AI. Look beyond the curtain at what he does.
That’s what counts. That tells you who he is and who he always has been.
Deadly consequences
For instance, while Biden was having a “great time catching up with a few good friends,” a k a George Clooney, Jimmy Kimmel, and a cast of out-of-touch Hollywood elites, authorities in Maryland announced they had charged one of his illegal migrant monsters with the savage rape and murder of mother-of-five Rachel Morin.
Victor Martinez-Hernandez, 23, illegally crossed the border in February last year from El Salvador, where he was being sought for the vicious murder of another young woman. He roamed free for 16 months despite being the subject of an Interpol “Red Notice” for his immediate arrest. His DNA was allegedly found at the scene of a home invasion in which a 9-year-old girl and her mother were assaulted in LA last year.
“We are 1,800 miles away from the southern border here in Harford County and the American citizens are not safe because of failed immigration policy,” said Maryland sheriff Jeffrey Gahler. He is talking, of course, about Biden’s deliberate open border policy, which has ushered in at least 8 million illegals, including the eight suspected ISIS terrorists arrested last week in New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Now Biden reportedly wants to double down with a mass amnesty scheme.
“Victor Hernandez did not come here to make a better life for himself or for his family. He came here to escape with crimes committed in El Salvador,” Gahler said. “He came here and murdered Rachel and, God willing, no one else. But that should have never been allowed to happen.”
This is Biden’s fault. It doesn’t matter if he is in sleep mode 90% of the time or 10%.
He should be held accountable at the ballot box and beyond.
