Many books state the bleeding obvious, but, by the sound of it, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson takes pride of place.
The book documents Biden’s descent into senility and frailty, rendering him what the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution calls “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”.
When that becomes the case, says the Amendment, and the president acknowledges so in writing, the vice president becomes acting president. Yes, but what if a president is so far gone that he is unable to acknowledge his own incapacity, nor even to recognise his close friends and to tell his wife from his sister (leading the likes of me to crack salacious jokes about the intimatemost aspects of Biden’s family life)?
I’m sure the Constitution must have provisions for such a situation, but in Biden’s case they were never invoked because both his family and his party covered up his condition. Moreover, they tried to force him to stand for re-election when he was already completely away with the fairies. (Americans run for elective offices, while Britons stand for them. What other proof does one need for the more dynamic nature of US politics?)
That, says Michael Deacon’s review of the book, “sounds downright cruel”. Yes, it does. But more important is that it sounds downright criminal.
The Constitution is the scriptural foundation of the American republic, and public officials in the US take a vow to protect and defend that sainted document. Violating the Constitution is regarded as a heinous crime in America, and rightly so.
Falsely claiming competence to act as president and then covering up the physical and mental incompetence to do so is thus a crime against the very foundations of American statehood. And crimes must be prosecuted and punished.
Since poor Joe was made to issue wholesale pardons for the entire phone directory of the DC Beltway, no prosecutions will ensue. That’s most regrettable.
Biden isn’t the first president to suffer such collapse. Mrs Wilson was de facto president during her husband Woodrow’s second term, while James Baker performed the same role at the same stage in Reagan’s tenure. Both Wilson and Reagan became demented after winning their second terms, and their condition was also covered up by their entourage.
Yet Biden is unique because he was the only president who started out that way. This was obvious to any outside observer, including such faraway ones as me. Poor Joe slurred his words, couldn’t tell different members of his family apart, kept falling down, couldn’t stay on any subject even for a short spell and in general showed every sign of a man ready for pasture.
And that was even before he won his campaign and a four-year term in the White House. This means he, his family and his party deliberately deceived the voters into believing they elected a president, whereas in fact they put into that office a cardboard cutout, a puppet whose strings were pulled by people lacking an electoral mandate. This strikes me as criminal conspiracy, not just cruelty.
The penny dropped when Biden’s friend of long standing, George Clooney, you know, the chap who wants us to give the Elgin Marbles “back to the Pantheon”, realised Biden didn’t recognise him any longer. He then withdrew his support, and Kamala was off and running.
What is it about current American politicians that makes them conspire to make a mockery of the highest offices in the land? I’d suggest that the cover-up of Biden’s dementia constitutes a worse abuse of the presidency than Trump’s Qatari plane or even Nixon’s Watergate.
The issue cuts deeper than the shabby personalities drawn into politics, in America and elsewhere. Surely, if Biden’s condition was obvious even to casual observers on this side of the Atlantic, it was no secret to American voters either? If we read the odd article and saw a short video or two, they must have been saturated with stories and images.
And yet over 81 million of them voted for Biden, more than for any other presidential candidate in US history. Even assuming, as MAGA people continue to do quite vociferously, that there was some legerdemain involved, this ought to bring into focus the very validity of one-man-one-vote democracy.
It has been known since at least Plato and Aristotle that democracy becomes a travesty in the absence of a responsible and informed electorate. That sine qua non doesn’t exist in the US, nor in any other democracy I’m aware of.
One hears MAGA chaps boasting that their idol was elected by the American People (always implicitly capitalised). True. Yet four years earlier the same populace had voted in droves for a man conspicuously half a step removed from a nursing home.
Moreover, had Biden’s people managed to keep him out of the public eye for another few months, those same implicitly capitalised People might have put him into the White House again. Whatever this says about universal franchise, it’s not something one should repeat in front of children.
Voters no longer cast their ballots for rational reasons, sound or misguided. They respond to the echoes of a propaganda din not dissimilar to commercial advertising.
Ads no longer sell products. They sell some vague values that buying their product would confer on the purchaser. By buying this toothpaste, they communicate, you show that you [have sex appeal, care for your health and appearance, protect the environment, save ‘our planet’, whatever]. Any claim, no matter how inane, will work, provided the advertisers have the means of shouting it long enough and loudly enough.
If anything, a buyer of political messages is even easier to dupe. He pays good money for his toothpaste and he works by the sweat of his brow to earn it. Politics, on the other hand, is removed from his quotidian concerns. If paying his hard-earned for a product is real life, politics is make-believe.
He is asked to vote for someone he doesn’t know and whose message he doesn’t really believe or, in most cases, understand. The voter casts his ballot not for something a candidate says to him but for what he thinks voting that way would say about him. He buys not into a political philosophy but into the zeitgeist, into goodness as he has been brainwashed to define it.
That’s why every few years voters everywhere are faced with the choice of what I like to call the evil of two lessers. They listen to the zeitgeist and, if it tells him that today’s goodness means wokery, they’ll vote for the appropriate candidate. If the message is hard-nosed common sense, they’ll vote that way. When their choice predictably messes up, next time they’ll opt for his opposite. And so it goes, round and round.
Alas, poor Joe. He got caught up in that merry-go-round and wouldn’t have been able to get off even had he wanted to. But he didn’t.
Biden was programmed to seek office, and he knew that even when he no longer knew who his friend George Clooney was. At least Joe didn’t think he was married to George.