Thursday, August 19, 2021

What is wrong with Joe Biden?

Tiana Lowe 8 hrs ago

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Anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 American lives are now held hostage by resurging Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has gone into hiding.

Last Friday, as the Taliban took four more capital cities and advanced upon Kabul, the president headed to Camp David on vacation. In the week that followed, Biden emerged only to give 20 minutes of petulant remarks on Monday and then to sit with George Stephanopoulos — the former Clinton communications director-turned-ABC News anchor — for a solo interview.

Next, Biden flies out to his family home in Wilmington with no plan to return to the White House until Sunday night.

In the best of times, a president spending ten days refusing to take a single question from his press pool would posit cause for concern. Couple with that the fact that he has been hiding throughout the biggest crisis of his presidency, and the public has a right to know — what the hell is wrong? Is Biden ill? Is he still capable of doing his job?

Instead of kissing babies, visiting COVID vaccination sites, or doing any number of the innocuous photo-ops that endear politicians (especially Democrats!) to the press, the president has simply gone missing. Either he's choosing radio silence in hopes that the media will simply move on from his Afghanistan catastrophe, or he's refusing to face the public because he cannot face the public.

I'm not a doctor and I don't pretent to be one, but Biden's cognitive decline has been hard to miss. Compared to the Biden of the Obama years, the Biden of the Stephanopoulos interview seemed a shell of a human being. Even the Biden of 2019 and 2020 seemed markedly more astute than whatever that distinctly-spray tanned old fogey was on Wednesday.

The White House could clear up all of this by having Biden hold a normal event with regular press pool access. Maybe Biden really did fumble and stammer through his responses to Stephanopoulos because he was outraged or short of sleep rather than senile.

That they continue to keep the president hidden only increases the cause for concern that something is very, very wrong with our commander-in-chief.

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