Last Thursday’s debate appearance by President Joe Biden finally brought reality home to millions of Democrats, from the Editorial Board at The New York Times to that of The Washington Post to private citizens everywhere. It seems that they were shocked, shocked! by the images of a President who appeared to be sinking into some stage of dementia.^[1]The thoroughly consumed by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, seeing the Times’ editorial title of “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave … Continue reading

This was no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention, but either the American left had not been paying attention, or were refusing to believe the evidence of their own eyes because they did not want to believe the evidence of their eyes. From The Wall Street Journal:

The World Saw Biden Deteriorating. Democrats Ignored the Warnings.

European officials expressed worries about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate

By Annie Linskey, Laurence Norman, and Drew Hinshaw | Friday, June 28, 2024 | 6:30 PM EDT

The loudest public alarm about Joe Biden’s mental acuity came in February with the release of special counsel Robert Hur’s report, a document he produced after spending five hours interviewing the president that revealed Biden displayed significant memory problems.

Democrats worried. Then most of them followed the president’s lead and dismissed it as partisan hackery. Biden’s closest advisers defiantly beat back suggestions that the 81-year-old president showed signs of decline.

The “loudest public alarm” came in February, but that’s when Mr Hur’s report was released. The actual interviews, five hours over two days, came in October of 2023, when, if the Democrats were going to do anything about a President sinking into senility, they actually had time to do it. Yes, Mr Biden was already running for re-election by then, but the first caucuses and primaries were still in the future, and the time for a replacement candidate to organize and run for the nomination existed.

The President of the United States meets with people every day, and they can’t have failed to notice that Mr Biden was having mental issues. As we previously noted, Axios has reported that his staff noted he was “dependably engaged” between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM, but, “outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued.”

Minutes into Thursday night’s presidential debate, the concerns began gushing into the open.

Yet they had already become increasingly apparent in Washington’s corridors of power and across the world for months. In interviews, top officials abroad and Democrats said they have witnessed other moments when Biden’s behavior concerned them. Some were quickly relieved when Biden appeared to regain his footing. Others were left shaken by the experiences.

European officials had already been expressing worries in private about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate, with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer. There were real doubts about how Biden could successfully manage a second term, but one senior European diplomat said U.S. administration officials in private discussions denied there was any problem.

Conservatives and we evil, reich-wing Republicans have been posting video evidence of Mr Biden’s “verbal miscues” and apparent loss of concentration for months, and real people who don’t dislike the President noticed, but everything was denied by “administration officials” and campaign aides, people whose highly coveted positions of power depended upon Mr Biden staying in office, and everyone seemed to go along with it.

The Democrats were happily riding that sinking raft on the river in Egypt! They had willingly denied the evidence of their own eyes and ears, based on the assurances of people who had something personal to gain by making those assurances.

Who were those people? First of all has to come the First Lady, Jill Biden. She lived with him, every day, and had to have seen the slow decline of her husband. Wives give their husbands all sorts of benefits of the doubt, but a woman proudly noting that she is a Doctor of Education (EdD) surely could have seen what was happening; that’s what she has been trained to do! But is life as First Lady really so dear to her that she’d willingly submit her husband to the rigors of a presidential campaign while in his condition?

The New York Times reported that it was the President’s son, Hunter Biden, a drug addict in whom the President places much faith, who was most strongly engaged in urging his father to stay in the race.

And, of course, there all of the presidential staff. With their résumés, they can all be confident of getting new positions, perhaps not in government, but decent, ‘elite’ jobs.

These are the people who betrayed President Biden. No, I do not like his policies in the slightest, which I believe have been harmful to the United States and the world, but if the people around him, if he personally, could have accepted that he is simply no longer up to the job, he could have retired after one term, or even resigned early, and done so with his dignity and reputation intact. Instead, he going to be forced from office, either by the voters this November, or a forced resignation after re-election, when his dementia gets even worse.