Joe Biden and the Stuttering Con

According to Jack Cashill it was a monumental con. During the 2020 election campaign the Democratic Party and its enablers in the media needed to explain away candidate Joe Biden’s obvious mental infirmities. 

They lit on the notion that Biden was tripping over his words and constructing incoherent and unintelligible sentences because he had a stutter.

I am not an expert in all matters Biden, but the man had been a public figure of some note for decades. You need but examine his past orations to conclude that he had nothing resembling a stutter.

In truth, the Republican Party could easily have debunked the con by running tapes of the past and present Biden. They did not.

Indeed, when the first honest account of this era is written, the historian will surely dedicate a chapter to the most daring and, unfortunately, most successful political confidence game ever run on the American people — the “stuttering” gambit. For more than two years, Democrats and their many friends in the media mesmerized millions of Americans into thinking that Biden’s obvious dementia was a speech defect. To give credit where it’s due, that was one hell of a con.

Of course, stuttering did not explain some of the behavior that spoke dementia. As pointed out on this blog, physician turned hedge fund operator, Michael Burry, a man with no known political ties, diagnosed Biden as suffering from senile dementia in a tweet. Burry added that the condition was know to deteriorate rapidly.

Cashill continued:

As 2019 neared its end, the con artists knew they had a serious problem on their hands. Their most marketable candidate for president had been showing increasing signs of cognitive decline. Headlines like, “Joe Biden nibbled on his wife’s finger in a bizarre campaign stop moment,” had them understandably concerned.

Biden’s gaffes became the stuff of legend, but the press, dreading the horror of four more years of the Antichrist, ignored them:

The problem had been building. Indeed, it was in 2017 that Biden told the world of his heroic showdown with gang leader “Corn Pop.” On that same day, Biden told a bewildered group of young black kids that, years earlier, kids just like them loved to rub his blond leg hairs. “I learned about kids jumping on my lap,” said Biden improbably at the conclusion of the hairy leg tale. “And I’ve loved kids jumping on my lap.”

None of these instances of contorted thinking, by a man who had had brain surgery, deterred his supporters in the media. They decided that they needed to step up their game:

By 2020, try as they might to “hide the decline,” his handlers were losing control. This is where the media came to the rescue. Writing in the January 2020 edition of The Atlantic, former Esquire editor John Hendrickson offered would-be Biden voters a way to deny the obvious. 

Yes, Biden’s first Democratic debate in July 2019 was a “disaster.” Yes, some of his answers had been “meandering and difficult to parse.” Yes, he seemed “confused and out of touch.” Yes, “His verbal stumbles have voters worried about his mental fitness.”

Hendrickson lit on the stutter con:

Being in on the con, wittingly or not, Henderickson threw Biden a lifeline — “Maybe they’d be more understanding,” he said of tentative Biden supporters, “if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter.” Yes, that was it, a “stutter.” Henderickson spoke with authority. He was a stutter survivor himself. Who dared contradict him? Sort of like FDR, thought the credulous reader, Biden had fought valiantly throughout his political career to overcome a physical handicap.

The media industrial complex jumped on the wagon:

Big Media played along. “Joe Biden: first president with a stammer,” shouted a BBC headline after the Atlantic article. “Biden opens up about stuttering and offers advice to young people who stutter,” said CNN. In an extended interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Biden shared what CNN called his “vulnerable story.”

Did they all know better? Cashill thinks so:

Of course, the more serious people in the media knew better. Stuttering could not explain why Biden bit his wife’s fingers on stage or told stories about his leg hairs. Democratic Party leaders were aware as well. Still, they calculated that Biden, although mentally unfit, was more sellable than the other losers left in the race, the prematurely socialist Bernie Sanders chief among them.

In February 2020, just before COVID changed everything, party leaders put their thumbs on the scale in favor of Biden. Certainly Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina did. As the Washington Post noted, “His emotional endorsement of Biden as Democrats’ proper antidote for the era of President Trump had earned him the title ‘kingmaker.’”

Naturally, the major media outlets were happy to embarrass themselves. They have, as the saying goes, no shame:

“Biden’s Stutter: How a Childhood Battle Shaped Him” — Frontline, PBS, September 2020.

“Joe Biden’s Stutter Is His Superpower” — New York Times, September 2020.

The Times op-ed is particularly revealing. It shows how the alchemists in the Democratic-media complex managed to transform Biden’s leaden brain into a golden opportunity. “Even if Biden freezes up and slow-chops his answers on Tuesday, or says something that gets labeled a gaffe, it won’t hurt him,” wrote Timothy Egan. “More likely, it’ll help him. In the choice between an authentic man grasping for words or a preening fraud, the first will usually win.”

One is impressed by these practitioners of the art of propaganda. The notion that Biden is an “authentic man grasping for words” defies reason.

But then, the Biden-led Afghanistan debacle ripped back the curtain. Worse yet, a Fox News morning host, by name of Rachel Campos-Duffy declared that Dr. Jill Biden was really to blame. How could she, a supposedly rational adult, allow her husband to put himself in a position that was well beyond his mental capacities?

Anyway, it was drowned out last week by the deaths of American servicemen and women in Afghanistan:

Last Saturday, Kathy McCollum showed just what she thought of the Times’ “authentic man” shtick. In one riveting phone call, the mother of slain 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum unraveled the whole cynical stuttering con. To those who voted for Biden, said McCollum, “You just killed my son with a dementia-ridden piece of crap who doesn’t even know he’s in the White House.” This time, no one dared say otherwise.

One understands that Biden’s performance as the bodies of the servicemembers were returned to Dover Air Force base was the coup de grace of the stutter con. Biden did not just look at his watch once. He glanced down at it several times. He did not want to be there. He could not afford the people who had died for his stupid policy the minimum of respect. Given his mental incapacities, he could not even fake it.