"A Diminished Biden"
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Funny how we went from "Sharp as ever" to "Diminished" 6 months.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/biden-white-house-age-function-diminished-3906a839
How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge
Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.
During the 2020 presidential primary, Jill Biden campaigned so extensively across Iowa that she held events in more counties than her husband—a fact her press secretary at the time, Michael LaRosa, touted to a local reporter.
His superior in the Biden campaign quickly chided him. As the three rode in a minivan through the state’s cornfields, Anthony Bernal, then a deputy campaign manager and chief of staff to Jill Biden, pressed LaRosa to contact the reporter again and play down any comparison in campaign appearances between Joe Biden, then 77, and his wife, who is eight years his junior. Her energetic schedule only highlighted her husband’s more plodding pace, LaRosa recalls being told.
The message from Biden’s team was clear. “The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad,” LaRosa said.
The small correction foreshadowed how Biden’s closest aides and advisers would manage the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office.
To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.
Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.
"Senior advisers" doing the job that Biden was elected to do.
I'll post the whole thing if anyone wants - it's long.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in "A Diminished Biden":
Funny how we went from "Sharp as ever" to "Diminished" 6 months.
But to be honest, it would have been surprise if they have said he is failing? There is some "self preservation" among his staff. I would have been surprised if they announced he was failing.
I think that there are odds the president Trump will show signs over the next four years, and the word from the White House will be that "all is normal"
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@George-K said in "A Diminished Biden":
Funny how we went from "Sharp as ever" to "Diminished" 6 months.
Look on the bright side, the same thing will probably happen to all of us.
I met up with my brother recently, and his outspoken 11-year old daughter said out of the blue, 'Mum said you were looking old'.
I had been about to buy lunch for everybody.
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Funny how we went from "Sharp as ever" to "Diminished" 6 months.
Not to worry. Should resolve itself a half step above from any one of its constituent tones. I agree though 6 months is a long time to wait, after all in the Ring cycle, Wagner managed resolution after 15 hours.
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He was having "bad days" 6 months after taking office.
National Review continues:
For Four Years We Have Had a Ghost for a President, and We Were Lied to about It All Along
Jeffrey BleharDecember 19, 2024 4:14 PM
The Wall Street Journal is out today with a toweringly important story documenting how President Joe Biden’s close-knit circle of advisers sought to swindle the public, the press, and even Biden’s legislative allies and cabinet appointees about the rapidly deteriorating state of the president’s mental health. It’s a 3,800-word, deeply sourced blockbuster that takes the story from summer 2021 — keep that date in your back pocket for a moment — all the way to the last desperate month after Biden’s debate meltdown. It is the first in what I anticipate will be a series of deeply reported “what went wrong” stories on the Biden White House emerging from the mainstream media — “Now the real story can be told!” — since the race is over and Trump won. (Keep that thought in your back pocket as well, while we’re at it.)
Jim, Charlie, and Dan have already written about this — we more or less carved out our separate angles this morning, because it’s such a major story — but I want to emphasize one thing most of all, and I want to do it by quoting Kingsley Amis’s response to being proven right about Stalinist Russia: “We told you so, you f***ing fools.” It is important for me to point this out, and not because I am vain (though I am) or because I want to praise the incredible prescience and big brains of NR’s staff (though they are indeed beguilingly large), but rather for a far more sobering reason.
Before we get there, however, I advise you to read every word of the WSJ piece, because the enormity of it all should not be lost upon Americans: Even if you think you knew this story, you really didn’t know anything at all about the details until today. To excerpt it at length would be to do it an injustice; there are so many anecdotes, piling up chronologically in escalating despair as the lengthy exposé proceeds, that by the end you are left reeling with anger at the near-criminal irresponsibility of Biden and his staff. I will quote but one paragraph:
If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying.
I read this with a clenched fist. In spring 2021 — that is to say, only a month or two after Biden took office — our commander in chief was already having “good days” and “bad days.” I want to say that again: Already, at the beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden was showing visible signs of major mental decline. All of this was concealed from the world. And this man ran for reelection.
After reading through the Journal’s report twice I have provisionally concluded that, despite all the various financial scandals, crony corruption, authoritarian overreach, and third-rate burglaries in American politics, this is the biggest scandal the presidency has ever seen, because it runs to the core of what the presidency is supposed to be. For practically his entire term, Joe Biden has been, if not non compos mentis — on a rare “good day” — then at least severely mentally diminished or periodically incapacitated. At no point during his time in office has he been fit for the presidency.
The only other American scandal this elemental — one that risks the entire premise of executive government, that the president and not some shadowy cabal is the sole elected decision-maker — is the eeriest historical parallel of them all: Edith Wilson’s concealment from the public of her husband Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 stroke. She acted as de facto president for the rest of his term, and her imperious incompetence destroyed the effort to ratify Versailles in the Senate, ensuring the failure of Wilson’s internationalist legacy. Much the same could be said about the historically disastrous economic, immigration, and international policy drift of the Biden Era — as might well be expected from a president who began his term already asleep at the wheel.
I will have more to say about this later on tonight — I asked you hold those thoughts at the top of this piece in your back pocket for a reason. For now, however, there is no getting around the revolting fact that we have been subjected to four years of a farcical semi-presidency, one whose drift is now so easily explained by the simple fact that Biden was little better than a front for an unelected committee of “top men” who sent us careening from one international and domestic disaster to another. We now discover that Biden was all along a mere shell of a president, a babbling Lear whose shameful dotage was kept in more carefully guarded secrecy.
And the most shameful aspect of it all was Biden’s acquiescence to this: Detached and unable to remember details, unaware of what his administration was doing, unable to speak without minders to anyone for more than a few minutes, he allowed his staff to run the world and weave a cynical campaign of deception as he sought another four years in office. Don’t feel an ounce of pity for Joe Biden in his advanced senescence as he fades into disgrace; he made love to this employment. He is not near my conscience, nor should he be yours.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in "A Diminished Biden":
@Axtremus said in "A Diminished Biden":
Biden still makes better decisions than Trump as it is.
If you believe the WSJ and National Review, it's questionable whether POTATUS makes any decisions at all.
Even Biden’s “no decision” is better than Trump’s decisions.
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Milley: "Highly inappropriate" to take about Biden's mental health.
Link to videoYeah, the guy who made an off-the-books call to China. That guy.
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@Axtremus said in "A Diminished Biden":
@George-K said in "A Diminished Biden":
@Axtremus said in "A Diminished Biden":
Biden still makes better decisions than Trump as it is.
If you believe the WSJ and National Review, it's questionable whether POTATUS makes any decisions at all.
Even Biden’s “no decision” is better than Trump’s decisions.
That's just silly booger stuff. Do better.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in "A Diminished Biden":
@Axtremus said in "A Diminished Biden":
Even Biden’s “no decision” is better than Trump’s decisions.
However, decisions were made. Who made them? Doctor Jill?
Even if it’s Dr. Jill or Kamala Harris or other White House staff or Biden’s advisors, the decisions are still better than Trump’s decisions.
Biden attracts good, competent people; Trump repels them and attracts sycophants instead.
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I do think that while Presdient Biden is mentally unfit, there were handlers who kept him in the lane. I am not sure that handlers for President Trump will/would keep him in the lanes.
On another note, are you looking for a president (or an administration) who will implement the policies you want, or are looking for a personality.
For example, lets assume President Biden was incompetent and his handlers were making the decisions. But, if the decisions were basically the same regardless, does it really matter?
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@taiwan_girl said in "A Diminished Biden":
there were handlers who kept him in the lane
You forgot the word "unelected".
if the decisions were basically the same regardless, does it really matter?
Yes. Hell yes. How do you know they were basically the same? You're going to trust them?
Oh my giddy aunt.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in "A Diminished Biden":
How do you know they were basically the same? You're going to trust them?
I realize it was a hypothetic.
Can you predict how President Trump will act? 55555
