The President is Senile

Special Counsel’s report finds Biden suffers from “significant limitations”.

By: Daniel Greenfield

One striking anecdote emerges from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s voluminous 300 plus page report on Biden’s misappropriation of classified documents.

In interviews with Biden, the Special Counsel found that the memory of the President of the United States had “significant limitations” and that he didn’t know “when his term ended”, “when his term began” and “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

If there are any two things that a man ought to remember, it’s when his son died and when he ascended to the vice presidency and when he became a private citizen again.

Now a man so far gone that he does not know either one has his finger on the nuclear button.

There have been many defenses of Biden’s state made in the past. We have been told that he misspeaks because he has a problem with stuttering or that he’s prone to making up stories, but neither one explains the sheer scale and persistence of the problem which extends well beyond confusing deceased former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and former chancellor Angela Merkel or former French president François Mitterrand and Emmanuel Macron, the sitting president, as he did this week, which might be understandable if that was all there was to it.

Biden is forgetting things that no normal person in their right state of mind loses track of.

The investigation which began when boxes of classified documents were found including “in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape” in Biden’s possession ends on a more troubling note than willful abuses. Instead the report paints a picture of a politician used to mishandling classified information whose decline is such that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Some of the documents at the heart of the case were, the report concludes, possibly taken to be used to compile Biden’s presidential campaign memoir, “Promise Me, Dad” which used his son, Beau Biden’s death, as a springboard.

The Special Counsel reviewed recordings with Mark Zwonitzer, Biden’s ghostwriter on the book, and noted that, “Mr. Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations-both at the time he spoke to Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office. Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”

This was Biden’s state 7 years ago. What is it like now?

“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting 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?’). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”

This is not a new problem. In public appearances, Biden claimed that Beau, “lost his life in Iraq” when he had actually died of cancer in Maryland. Then he said it again, “I’m thinking about Iraq because that’s where my son died.” While Biden has a long history of lying and making up stories, based on the Special Counsel’s interview, it would seem as if Biden really doesn’t know.

The report goes on to reject charges because, among other things, “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and it “would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

This is less an exoneration than an exemption on the grounds of senility. And it raises constitutional questions beyond Biden appropriating classified documents for his memoir.

If Joe Biden lacks the mens rea to be convicted of a crime, how can he have the intent or the state of mind to give orders that must be followed? Can a man who no longer knows when he was in office as vice president be qualified for the presidency? And can a man who has lost track of some of the most important dates in his life be able to make life and death decisions?

The impossible paradox is that Biden lacks the state of intent to be charged with a crime, but has enough intent to be able to run the entire country. And that obviously does not work.

It’s been difficult to pin down in the past whether Biden is lying or making a gaffe. This is after all the politician who claimed to have come out of the black church, to have marched for civil rights, and, among many other crazy lies, “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man.” It can be hard to tell whether a politician is a shameless liar or senile, but there is now an unbiased legal observer telling us that Biden really does not know, does not remember and cannot be held responsible.

Unlike the calls to bring in the 25th Amendment against Trump, this is a legitimate scenario, but no one in the Biden administration is likely to invoke the 25th because, apart from Kamala, they would all lose their jobs, and they would rather try to prop Biden up than to protect the country.

Some would say that in an election year, Biden’s fate is in the hands of the voters. The Founding Fathers did not introduce any such qualification test or removal protocol even though across the ocean, King George III, their original nemesis was losing his mental faculties.

In 1811, the British Parliament imposed its own version of the 25th Amendment through the Regency Act, sidelining George in favor of the Prince of Wales. While these events postdated the Constitutional Convention, the Founders were certainly aware of the possibility as there had been plenty of cases of madness among the inbred crowned heads of Europe, but they did not act likely because they knew that, as a counter-example, heads of state had been removed on false charges of madness and they wanted to avoid the possibility of a coup taking place.

Even the much later 25th Amendment had been more about streamlining the process of succession in the event of a presidential death than removing an unfit president. Congress had plenty of earlier opportunities to address presidential incapacity such as when President James Garfield had spent months slowly dying of medical malpractice after his assassination or after President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke which saw his wife running the country, but did nothing.

But one reason for the 25th Amendment was that there was a vast increase in presidential powers and in the instantaneous consequential decisions that may need to be made at any moment between the Constitutional Convention, the Garfield assassination, Wilson’s stroke and the JFK assassination. Having an incapacitated president was not the end of the world in 1881 or 1919, but by 1967, the president was the man who could destroy the world with a word.

And that is where we are now.

Joe Biden is being tasked with making major decisions while being mentally unfit. This is no longer a political smear or a late night comedian’s joke, it’s the observed reality in a Special Counsel’s report. The president is senile and a constitutional crisis is upon us.

(FrontPageMag.com)