Joe Biden and the Politics of Dementia

Much more needs to said about this, especially by neurologists, but Victor Davis Hanson has a good go at the story of Joe Biden’s senile dementia. Surely, we have noted it in the past on this blog, but Hanson begins the arduous task of mining it, as a significant element in the upcoming presidential election.

How bad is Biden’s dementia? Rather bad indeed:

If Trump repeats vocabulary, Biden increasingly searches for words, any noun, whatever its irrelevance to the point he is making. Biden seems to suffer dyscognitive seizures, in which for moments he has no idea what he is doing or saying or where he is — a tragic, nearly epileptic condition. In scary episodes, the pale, scaly, and frozen visage of Biden appears almost reptilian, like a lizard freezing and remaining stationary as it struggles to process signals of perceived danger.

Inserting memorized answers into rehearsed questions, as if the entire con was spontaneous, only reveals how his once episodic dementia has become chronic as he loses his prompt and place. It was understandable that his handlers saw opportunity in secluding Biden during Trump’s tweeting, alongside the contagion, the lockdown, the recession, and the rioting that in voters’ minds had equated fear of chaos with the culpability of the current commander in chief.

And then, an interesting point. Keeping Biden isolated in his basement might cause the American people forget about his dementia, but it will aggravate his condition. 

One, seclusion, quiet, and the absence of intellectual stimuli often only enhance dementia, while travel, conversation, and new imagery and experiences tend to unclog for a bit the congested neuron pathways. The more Biden “rests up,” the more he seems to be non compos mentis in his rare staged interviews. His brain is like a flabby muscle, and restful disuse does not make it firmer.

But, the less we see Biden, the more stock we will grant to the instances when we do see him in action:

But by avoiding the campaign trail, Biden is only postponing the inevitable. He is compressing the campaign into an ever-shorter late-summer and autumn cycle. If he really agrees to three debates (he may not agree to any at all), and if he performs as he usually now acts and speaks, then he may end up reminding the American people in the eleventh hour of the campaign that they have a choice between a controversial president and a presidential candidate who simply cannot fulfill the office of presidency.

And if Biden is a no-show, Trump will probably debate an empty, Clint Eastwood–prop mute chair.

If the media and the medical profession had the least smidgeon of integrity they would hound Biden into taking a test that could demonstrate his cognitive abilities. Of course, the deranged psychiatrists who insisted that Donald Trump was suffering from some undefined narcissistic disorder-- an extremely dubious diagnosis-- have nothing to say about Biden’s neurological impairments:

We are not supposed to remember that Trump was hounded by progressive M.D.s, to the point that he took — and aced — the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, an examination that no one in his right mind would suggest Biden now take, given that the results would be no surprise.

Hanson suggests that Biden will merely be a stand-in for a radical vice presidential candidate. And that once he is elected he will be quickly removed from office to make way for a leftist replacement:

Translated, that means the Democratic donor class accepts that they cannot win while siding with the mobs on the street and their appeasers and apologists — and yet the latter leftists are needed to provide the missing 5 to 7 points for victory. With a wink and nod, the vice-presidential candidate will be seen as assuming the presidency and giving to the Left what they could not achieve through a presidential election — while old Joe Biden from Scranton stares at the TV screen a bit longer to prove he’s not a raving socialist.

So, Hanson predicts that our media intellectuals will insist that we not have debates:

Expect more calls to cancel the debates as corrupt, fluff, reality-TV pizzazz and utterly unnecessary. Anticipate that the virus lockdown will be prolonged nearly until Election Day and will de facto lead Democrats to call for a Zoom campaign: Biden talking to the camera with a teleprompted script behind the screen.

Worse yet, and as hard as it is to believe, blue state governors are likely to keep their states shut down, the better to cause the kind of economic collapse that might well discredit the Trump presidency. It takes a large quantity of cynicism to believe such a thing, but it is certainly thinkable:

Expect blue states to remain economically mired in quarantines, in hopes of aborting a recovery. Democratic leaders will never really crack down on what heretofore have been blue-state rioting and looting; the chronic chaos and recession will be kept alive and geared to the November election.

The solution is to force Biden out of his rabbit hole, to give the American people a clear choice in November:

In the chaos of July, Biden’s handlers have been acclaimed geniuses for anesthetizing him. But in the different season of October, he may finally be forced out from his lockdown, in the wild manner that soon-to-be looters and arsonists at last emerged from quarantine in June — pent-up, angry, incoherent, and self-destructive.