The Enabler

This is all Jill Biden’s fault

As someone whose mother had dementia, I cannot fathom why Jill Biden isn’t pulling the plug on her husband’s presidency. What kind of loving wife subjects her husband to this level of emotional and psychological trauma?

I’ve been asking this since Joe Biden first decided to run for president a third time. It isn’t as if we weren’t aware back then that Grandpa was a few chips shy of a bag. His brain was suffering from shrinkflation long before he formally announced his run in April 2019.

Jill Biden is the Lady Macbeth of American politics, pushing her husband to pursue the presidency despite his incompetence and cognitive decline all so she could become the blond Michelle Obama.

A loving wife would have quietly discouraged her vainglorious, brain-addled husband from running for president. But not Jill Biden. Nope. Jill pushed him to run because she was just as power-hungry and vainglorious as Joe.

Now, three years into this shitshow, 86% of voters think Joe Biden is far too old to serve another term and the special counsel who investigated Biden’s mishandling of classified documents said the quiet part out loud: Grandpa’s memory is slipping.

And the response from Jill and the rest of the idiots in the White House is to tell us not to believe our lying eyes. Just trust them. Behind closed doors, when none of us are looking, Joe Biden is sharp, focused, and oh so on top of things.

Sure, we never see it. Instead, we see Joe recounting conversations he had in 2021 with world leaders who are long dead. We see Joe mumble into his chest while reading from note cards instructing him on when to sit, where to sit, and when to speak. We see him shaking hands with invisible people, getting lost on his way off stage, and getting led away from reporters by a staffer dressed as the Easter Bunny.

When I read the Executive Summary of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report, nothing he said about the president’s failing memory was surprising. Truthfully, the only surprising thing is that Hur dared to point it out in the first place.

In Washington, one does not speak of Joe Biden’s unraveling mind. You have to pretend everything is tickety-boo and even young staffers can’t keep up with a powerhouse like Joe.

This paragraph from Hur’s jumped out at me because it is something I’ve been saying about Joe Biden for years:

The classified documents and other materials recovered in this case spanned Mr. Biden's career in national public life. During that career, Mr. Biden has long seen himself as a historic figure. Elected to the Senate at age twenty-nine, he considered running for president as early as 1980 and did so in 1988, 2008, and 2020. He believed his record during decades in the Senate made him worthy of the presidency, and he collected papers and artifacts related to significant issues and events in his career. He used these materials to write memoirs published in 2007 and 2017, to document his legacy, and to cite as evidence that he was a man of presidential timber. [Emphasis Dianny’s]

Hur’s description rings true to anyone who has paid even passing attention to Joe Biden over the last half-century.

It’s why he indulges in fictional, over-the-top flights of fancy in which he is the hero executing acts of derring do.

It’s why Joe donated nearly two thousand boxes of documents from his time in the Senate to the University of Delaware. Biden has convinced himself that his every utterance, note, and margin doodle is worthy of memorializing.

It’s why Joe thought nothing of holding onto classified documents long after he became a private citizen and had no legal right to them. The rules do not apply to heroic and historic figures such as him.

And it is why, just months shy of his 77th birthday, Joe insisted on launching a third attempt at the White House despite the gears of his brain slipping off their tracks.

Given Joe’s inflated sense of self-importance, I’m guessing that Hur’s description of him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” infuriated him.

People in Washington, from elected officials to White House staff to the press, are supposed to pretend that all is well between Biden’s ears. Then Robert Hur breaks ranks and acknowledges that during the president’s interview, “Biden's memory was significantly limited.”

From Hur’s report:

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden's memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ("if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?"), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ("in 2009, am I still Vice President?"). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he "had a real difference" of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Eiden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama. [Emphasis Dianny’s]

During his ill-advised press conference last Thursday evening, Biden was particularly livid over what Hur wrote about Joe forgetting when Beau died.

Beau Biden returned from Iraq in 2009 and died at Walter Reed in Bethesda, Maryland six years later. Yet how many times in just the three years Joe Biden has been president has he claimed that Beau died in Iraq? Five? Ten? A baker’s dozen?

I have no trouble believing that during his interview with Hur, Biden again forgot when Beau died. After all these years of committing the Gold Star Family version of stolen valor by claiming that his son gave his life in Iraq, it isn’t surprising that in his dementia, Joe confuses the facts with the fiction he created around Beau’s death.

Hur’s reference to Biden forgetting the details around Beau’s death also angered Jill Biden, who, without an ounce of self-reflection, said she couldn’t “imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points.”

I howled laughing when I read that.

Has Doctor Lady Macbeth even met her husband?

Joe Biden has used Beau’s death to score political points ever since Beau died. He can’t get through a speech about a tragic event without mentioning Beau’s death “in Iraq.” Whenever I see a tweet or headline reporting that Biden would be meeting with the survivors of a shooting or the families of fallen soldiers, I think to myself, “What’s the over/under on how long it takes Joe to bring up his dead son?”

If using Beau Biden to score political points is contemptible, then Joe and Jill should hang their heads in shame.

The all-hands-on-deck defense of Biden’s alleged sharpness and stamina is so absurd that even liberal comedian Jon Stewart called it out in a monologue on “The Daily Show” last night. Even if you hate “The Daily Show,” watch that clip. I haven’t laughed that hard during a Daily Show monologue in years.

The White House could assuage voter concerns about Biden’s mental capacity simply by instructing the Justice Department to release the transcript or recording from his interview with the special counsel. Let us decide if Hur’s description was an attempt “to score political points” or an accurate depiction of a man whose mind and memory are slipping.

They won’t release it. Instead, they’ll continue to tell us that behind closed doors, when none of us is looking, Joe is sharp, focused, and totally in charge.

It’s like that old Warner Brothers cartoon about the frog that can sing and dance. Remember that one?

You’ll forgive me if I don’t just take Jill Biden’s word for it — or anyone else’s for that matter.

Jill has a vested interest in voters believing that her husband isn’t one step away from dribbling Farina down his front while a home care nurse changes his nappy.

Jill spent the last four years lying about Joe’s declining physical and cognitive health, seemingly indifferent to every stumble down the stairs and verbal implosion that has happened along the way.

This election is going to be a miserable affair. There’s no getting around that.

Ron DeSantis could’ve been the Republican nominee.

But no. Heaven forbid Republicans nominate someone whose very presence would highlight Joe’s advancing age and feeble incompetence.

Instead, we’re stuck with a Nursing Home Showdown between two bellowing oldsters well past their sell-by date. That’s not exactly a recipe for voter enthusiasm.