The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that President Joe Biden is unfit to serve as president because of failing memory and cognitive decline.
The article doesn’t draw that conclusion, of course. Instead, it leads the reader to it with interviews from congressmen, including Democrats, who say that Biden’s elevator stops short of the top floor.
The report also reveals how concerned White House officials are that the truth slipped out — and from Democrat lips no less. They monitored the interviews, heard recordings, then ordered those Democrats to amend their comments.
Problem is, the piece didn’t detail some of the more compelling reasons to think Biden suffers from dementia.
“Not the Same Person”
GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) and his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, confirmed what everyone knows — that Biden isn’t always on Earth.
“In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy projects was just a study, according to six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened,” the newspaper reported:
Johnson worried the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.
Last year, when Biden was negotiating with House Republicans to lift the debt ceiling, his demeanor and command of the details seemed to shift from one day to the next, according to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and two others familiar with the talks. On some days, he had loose and spontaneous exchanges with Republicans, and on others he mumbled and appeared to rely on notes.
“I used to meet with him when he was vice president. I’d go to his house,” McCarthy said in an interview. “He’s not the same person.”
Naturally, White House underlings claimed “he remains a sharp and vigorous leader.” They claimed that Republicans are among those who say Biden “is a savvy and effective leader” but now contradict their “own words.”
Still, even Democrats confess that Biden is winding down.
This article is based on interviews with more than 45 people over several months. The interviews were with Republicans and Democrats who either participated in meetings with Biden or were briefed on them contemporaneously, including administration officials and other Democrats who found no fault in the president’s handling of the meetings. Most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges.
And those Democrats got word that confessing the truth was verboten.
After Democrats “shared with the White House either a recording of an interview or details about what was asked, some of those lawmakers spoke to the Journal a second time and once again emphasized Biden’s strengths,” the newspaper revealed:
“They just, you know, said that I should give you a call back,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, referring to the White House.
[Andrew] Bates, the White House spokesman, said: “We thought it was important that all perspectives be represented” to correct what he said were “false and politically motivated claims.”
Right.
“Public Slips”
The Journal also cited some of Biden’s gaffes.
“On May 20, during a Rose Garden event celebrating Jewish American Heritage month, Biden said one of the U.S. hostages held in Gaza was a guest at the White House event, before correcting himself,” the Journal continued:
One day earlier, at a campaign event in Detroit, he indicated that he was vice president during the Covid-19 pandemic, which started three years after he left that office. It was one of numerous flubs in the single speech that prompted the White House to make corrections to the official transcript.
Biden has confused Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Health and Human Services chief Xavier Becerra, and at a fundraiser in February, he claimed he spoke with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 2021 at a Group of Seven powwow; Kohl died in 2017. Likewise, at another fundraiser, he claimed he spoke to French President François Mitterrand at the same G-7 meeting. Mitterrand died in 1996.
The Journal also observed that special counsel Robert K. Hur, who probed Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, said Biden’s memory was “significantly limited.” Indeed, Hur didn’t prosecute Biden because the jury would see “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
At a meeting on Ukraine in January, Biden “moved so slowly around the Cabinet Room to greet the nearly two dozen congressional leaders that it took about 10 minutes for the meeting to begin,” the Journal reported.
As well, Biden read from notes “about the need to give money to Ukraine.” Yet the “lawmakers present already generally agreed that more funds were needed.”
Some of the participants couldn’t hear him, and he fobbed off questions to staffers.
“You couldn’t be there and not feel uncomfortable,” an attendee told the Journal. “I’ll just say that.”
While Democrats and White House aides defended Biden’s performance as strong and vibrant, GOP Idaho Senator James Risch offered a rather more jaundiced view. “What you see on TV is what you get,” he told the Journal. “These people who keep talking about what a dynamo he is behind closed doors—they need to get him out from behind closed doors, because I didn’t see it.”
Of course, the Journal offered Democrats and White House staffers a chance to repudiate claims that Biden is rowing around with only one oar, and it included the obligatory shot at GOP opponent Donald Trump’s “mental acuity” in probing his gaffes.
“Indeed, both candidates have been captured repeatedly on camera slipping up on facts or otherwise botching their public remarks, providing a steady stream of fodder for both Democrats and Republicans to attack the mental capacity of the opposing candidate,” the Journal claimed.
Difference is, Trump isn’t the president. And his missteps aren’t anything like those of Biden’s, the majority of which, again, the Journal omitted, including Biden’s recent claim that his World War II aviator uncle was eaten by cannibals.
The Journal did not recount the many times that Biden has claimed his son, Beau, who sadly died of brain cancer at Walter Reed hospital in Bethesda, died in Iraq. Nor did the report detail his other false memories or tyrannical tirades at staff members, both signs of advancing dementia.
H/T: Ace of Spades
