Another interview, another worrying moment in which America wonders whether its president is able to endure a normal conversation without glitching, making a strange whirring noise and shutting down.
And yet watch the media cover for him. “Biden says he intends to run again in 2024, and has the first lady’s support,” The Washington Post announced with its headline.
This was how the capital’s newspaper of record described Joe Biden’s awkward moment during an interview that MSNBC aired Friday: “When asked if the first lady supports a 2024 run, Biden nodded and paused before providing a full answer. ‘My wife thinks that we’re doing something very important and that I shouldn’t walk away from it,’ he said.
“Nodded and paused” is an exceptionally charitable way to describe the dumpster-conflagration moment in which Biden insisted he was going to run again:
Does this look like a 79-year-old man currently occupying one of the most energy-intensive jobs on planet Earth who is capable of the equally exigent process of campaigning two years from now — to secure the job for another four years?
He doesn’t even seem adequate to the task now.
This isn’t just idle, partisan speculation, according to GOP Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York. Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, Tenney told Maria Bartiromo that evidence of Biden’s mental decline is “serious,” warning that the president is “not competent” enough to stand up to America’s enemies.
Tenney, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, had a damning reaction to Biden’s latest gaffe-tastic outing.
Is President Biden mentally unfit to be in the White House?
“This is really sad, but he reminds me of a Madame Tussauds wax figure,” she said.
“He comes out, and they turn him on, and he delivers talking points that are presented to him by his shadow government, the staff behind him,” the congresswoman said.
According to Tenney, the interview was more evidence “that he’s not competent to do this most important job in our nation.”
“I joined on a letter with Congressman Ronnie Jackson about making him subject to a cognitive test,” she said. “This is serious stuff.”
Tenney was referring to demands by Texas GOP Rep. Ronnie Jackson that Biden complete a cognitive exam. Jackson, who was the White House doctor during the Obama and Trump administrations, has said he thinks “something changed” mentally with Biden since his time as vice president, potentially “a cognitive issue that’s related to his age.”
As Tenney noted, the prospect ought to worry us all, particularly considering the situation in Ukraine and our fractious relationship with China.
“We’ve got enemies around the world,” the congresswoman told Bartiromo. “You’ve been interviewing tremendous people about China, about what’s happening in the war in Europe, which is unprecedented.
“We’ve got to start looking into whether Joe Biden is actually capable of being the president. I think he’s not. I think we should consider all of these avenues.”
Tenney went on to say that in a Republican-controlled Congress, neither impeachment nor removing Biden via the 25th Amendment would be off the table; in terms of impeachable offenses, she said, “this man is not only corrupt, he’s incompetent, and his family has been enriching themselves at the expense of the taxpayers for decades.”
It’s impossible to undertake a full summation of Biden’s gaffes during his presidency and the 2020 election cycle without a 100,000-word book to do it in — and, absent an advance for the tome, I’ll merely sum it up with two words spoken by the president at a September event: “Where’s Jackie?“
“Jackie, where’s Jackie?,” Joe Biden says about Rep. Jackie Walorski who died in a car accident a few months ago. pic.twitter.com/khdiesmEsx
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 28, 2022
GOP Rep. Jackie Walorski died a month before this in a car crash. In fact, a tribute video was set to play for her at the event where Biden said this.
Forgetting that prominent Washington politicians have died is one thing, but glitching out in the midst of an interview is a separate issue, right? No worries, there’s ample evidence the mental pause button gets hit not infrequently inside whatever remains of Joe Biden’s gray matter:
Why does it look like someone hit the pause button on Biden?
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 17, 2022
These gaffes aren’t happening in isolation. They’re not happening with any less frequency than they were during the 2020 campaign; in fact, they’ve only amped up since Biden became president. They’re not the result of a “childhood stutter” or whatever tepid excuse his supporters might proffer for him. And our adversaries have taken notice.
We have a wax figure president, one so shorn of energy and animation that it’s clear he should have never occupied the office. He can’t even make it through telling a softball interviewer that he intends to run for another term.
If he can barely stay awake while telling the country why he’s running to be in office until January 2029, it’s self-evident why he shouldn’t be there now.
