Hey Genocide Joe, Gaza's not in Mexico
When I was just a small tyke, as far away from senility as one can be, I committed the gaffe of calling one of my home room teachers “Mom”. I corrected myself immediately and thankfully my only audience, Mrs. Kramer, proved generously willing to overlook my faux pas.
Maybe it’s for that reason that I am inclined to dismiss the various slip ups that both Biden and Trump have been making. The stuff that amounts to a slip of the tongue or a momentary brain fart—mixing up the leaders of Egypt and Mexico, for example—does not concern me. But there is a second category of mistake here that is far more serious. In 2022 George Will noticed something in the Washington Post:
“Meeting recently with some progressive activists, Biden said his $426 billion student loan forgiveness was accomplished by ‘a law’ that he had ‘just signed’: ‘I got it passed by a vote or two.’ No. He. Did. Not.”
When I read Will’s account I thought to myself “Huh. That’s a little concerning.” Mixing up a law passed by Congress with an executive order is one thing but what really bothered me was the strange specificity: “I got it passed by a vote or two.” As Will put it:
“Biden was not merely again embellishing his achievements. This is not just another of his verbal fender benders. There is no less-than-dismaying explanation for his complete confusion. What vote? Who voted?”
Now the Hur report arrives. The Democrats are understandably circling the wagons (around a turnip, as one wag on Twitter put it). But while they are more than willing to decry Hur as politically biased there is a strange refusal to actually refute his charges, and those charges are far closer to what Will noticed than confusing Angela Merkel with her predecessor.
“[Biden forgot] on the first day of the interview when his term ended ('if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?'), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ('in 2009, am I still Vice President?')."
To be clear I couldn’t care less about whether Biden can remember when his son died. I certainly have no idea. But I was pretty sure that I remembered when Obama was elected. Reading Biden’s response filled me with a strange and uncomfortable sensation of uncertainty, to the point that I had to run out to Google to actually double check. For the record he served from 2009 to 2017, meaning that Biden was asking whether or not he was still in office for his first year after winning the 2008 elections.
If you are gullible like me (or as I prefer to put it, “open minded”) and you have spent any time with people in the grips of senility or other mental illness you may be familiar with a certain feeling of unreality when people describe, with absolute certainty, events that never actually occurred. Those events may not even be outlandish or fantastic. They can be as mundane as a bill making its way through Congress to narrowly become a law, “by a vote or two”. What’s always bothered me, perhaps the most, is the wealth of supplied detail surrounding these imaginary events (“Karen visited yesterday and she told me…” when Karen lives thousands of miles away).
I am getting that vibe now with Biden. I suspect millions of Americans, who have had to struggle with the question of when to take the car keys away from Grandpa, are picking up on the same things. And I doubt that attacking the messenger is going to distract them.
Some final thoughts:
Hur is catching a lot of flak for including gratuitous detail in his report, but put yourself in his shoes. If you knew that the guy with his finger on the nuclear football was having problems remembering when he was Vice President do you have any duty to inform your fellow Americans?
It’s unfortunate that an Asian American like Hur allowed himself to become the instrument of white supremacy.
Republicans and Trump supporters are the population least likely to be impressed by the new information, other than to the extent of being able to claim “I told you so”. The people most likely to be upset by charges of senility on Biden’s part are the “Genocide Joe” crowd. It certainly puts a new light on 30,000 dead civilians in Gaza.