Now that word has finally made it to Joe Biden’s backers in the media that the president is decrepit and unnervingly off balance, how long do we have to wait before they also realize his entire term in office has been a horrifying, top to bottom pile-up?
It’s truly remarkable that even The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who up until now could practically find a silver lining in contracting HIV if it meant defending Biden, is admitting there’s something wrong. In a Monday column, Krugman confessed he’s “deeply troubled about our nation’s future” following the distressing display at the White House last week wherein Biden offered a frail rebuttal to the special counsel report, which repeatedly characterized him as a feeble, “elderly” person with an impaired memory.
“Yes, it’s true that Biden is old, and will be even older if he wins re-election and serves out a second term,” wrote Krugman. “I wish that Democrats had been able to settle on a consensus successor a year or two ago and that Biden had been able to step aside in that successor’s favor without setting off an intraparty free-for-all.”
Just as the White House has instructed its outside allies to do, Krugman then claimed to have personal, secret knowledge that Biden, when not in public, is actually a brilliant conversationalist with a rapier wit.
“As anyone who has recently spent time with Biden (and I have) can tell you, he is in full possession of his faculties — completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail,” he wrote. “[Y]es, he speaks quietly and a bit slowly, although this is in part because of his lifetime struggle with stuttering. He also, by the way, has a sense of humor, which I think is important.”
FOLKS! If you only got to see Biden in private like Krugman and every other Democrat, you’d think nothing of it!
To paraphrase Jon Stewart in his return to Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” on Monday, why isn’t the version of Biden that Krugman et al. are so lucky to experience ever on camera for the rest of us?
Incidentally, it’s the exact opposite scenario of what happened in Donald Trump’s first term. The president perpetually on camera during those years was always the same— strident, wickedly funny, and unreserved in talking with reporters. But then Michael Wolff told us that, according to his own covert knowledge, Trump in private was borderline comatose. Boy, oh boy, did the media buy into that story! The 25th Amendment was suddenly all the rage.
Admittedly, an official government report from the Justice Department describing the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “significant limitations” on his mental recollections doesn’t carry quite the gravity of a book written by an author preoccupied with Rupert Murdoch’s sex life. But surely it counts for something.
The alarm grew too loud for Paul Krugman to ignore. That must count for something, too.
