June 8, 2024

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Biden: Slip Slidin’ Away.

President Biden “shows signs of slipping,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week. Journalists Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes—no conservatives—spoke to 45 people who have met with the president and noticed his mental and physical decline. They recount, in detail, several meetings over the past year where Biden has been forgetful, confused, and out of it. The president, Linskey and Hughes report, “appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.”

No kidding.

You don’t need the [Wall Street] Journal to tell you that Biden is diminished. You need only to open your eyes. Go over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report into Biden’s unauthorized removal of classified documents. Review Biden’s Oval Office meltdown after Hur released his findings. Watch Biden try to sit at a D-Day commemoration in France on Thursday.

Or read, if you dare, the transcript of Time magazine correspondent Massimo Calabresi and editor in chief Sam Jacobs’s recent interview of Biden. It appeared the same day as Linskey and Hughes’s story.

This is the interview where Biden says—twice—that Russia invaded Russia. Where, immediately after saying, “I’m not going to comment,” Biden says that “there is every reason” to believe Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war against Hamas for political gain. Then Biden says that the 19 percent increase in prices since he became president is due to “shrinkflation” and that he could “take” the Time reporter who asks about his advanced age.

The weirdest moment comes when the reporters ask Biden to describe his second-term agenda. That’s what we in the biz call a “softball question.” And here—excuse the long excerpt, but it is necessary to grasp the full absurdity and danger of having this man continue to serve as president—is Joe Biden’s response:

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In any other era, the White House, congressional Democrats, and the national Democratic Party would be in full-blown panic at the president’s physical, mental, and political condition. But because we live in the era of Trump, Biden’s allies have continued to deflect and downplay the deleterious effects of his age, his enduring unpopularity, and his haphazard, too-little, too-late, incompetent, and iatrogenic policymaking.

Culminating in this moment, featuring the leader of the free world attending the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France:

Of course, if you believe Politico, Biden was as vigorous on Thursday as the men who emerged from the landing craft in 1944: Time to Play ‘Biden Campaign Press Release or Politico Playbook Headline?’

As for the rest of us, Byron York adds: Biden’s losing battle with the age issue.

Addressing the Democratic defense, the political reporter Olivia Nuzzi wrote, “The problem with this, of course, is that the Joe Biden the world observes in his public appearances resembles more closely the Joe Biden described by the Wall Street Journal than by the Democrats who claim he is secretly sharp as a tack.”

That is the obvious truth. Just go to the videos. You don’t have to go back decades, to when Biden was in the Senate, or even 10 years ago, when he was vice president. Just look at Biden at the beginning of his presidency, just three years ago. There is substantial decline taking place. It is not reversible. It is part of life for many people who live past 80 years of age. Yes, it happens at different times to different people, but the point is, it is happening to Biden right now.

The timing of the Journal article preceding Biden’s appearance at Normandy makes that all the more obvious. And his writers cribbing from Reagan’s classic Normandy speech in 1984 just makes the side-by-side comparison between the two presidents’ deliveries that much more obvious and painful for Biden:

Or as the Toni Williams writes at the Victory Girls Website: Pointe Du Hoc — Biden’s Sad Echo.

Posted at 7:15 am by Ed Driscoll