October 27, 2022 at 11:38 a.m.
The real elephant in the room
The real elephant in the room
In other words, Fetterman's competency is on everybody's mind, even if it makes everybody uncomfortable when they bring it up because of the personal nature of the affliction.
If only Fetterman's elephant was the only one lurking in the national house. As it turns out, there's another huge elephant in American politics, and that is President Joe Biden's rapidly deteriorating state of mind and even his physical abilities.
It may be uncomfortable to talk about because dementia is so intensely personal for the family involved, but the time has come to address the mental and physical capacity of the president, and the potential dangers his condition poses.
Some who have known Joe Biden have talked about how Biden is simply not the same person they knew as recently as 2017. Then he was witty if somewhat creepy. Now he's just creepy and angry.
There are the garbled sentences, the verbal gaffes, the changes in his gait and arm motions while he walks, which is really a kind of shuffling. Those who see this change point out that Biden has had two intracerebral bleeds and a 1988 surgery for brain aneurysms that could have finally taken their toll.
In any case, the cognitive decline is increasing in frequency and severity.
The seriousness was first noticed about a month ago when, speaking at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition & Health, Biden looked for a dead congresswoman, Jackie Walorski, in the audience, even though he had publicly mourned her death just weeks before.
"Jackie, are you here? Where's Jackie? She must not be here," Biden said.
From there things have only gotten worse.
Biden actually brought his elephant together with Fetterman's elephant - two elephants in a room, so crowded! - on a trip week before last to Pennsylvania to attend an event with Fetterman and his wife Giselle.
Biden began his remarks by promising to keep them short so Fetterman could get some rest - not the best thing to say for a candidate who is trying to reassure voters that he is robust in recovery - but then did the unthinkable by turning to Fetterman's wife and saying, "And Gisele, you're going to be a great, great lady in the Senate."
Ouch!
That could have been a Republican punch line, but instead it made Joe Biden the punch line one more time.
But Biden wasn't through. In an interview posted October 23, Biden forgot completely how his student loan forgiveness program came to be. Biden was speaking in a forum sponsored by the media company NowThis.
Asked about the high cost of education, Biden naturally talked about his student loan forgiveness plan but inexplicably said he got the plan passed as legislation in Congress. That never happened: Biden signed it as an executive order, his authority to do so being the basis of multiple lawsuits.
"What we've provided for is, if you went to school, if you qualified for a Pell Grant ... you qualify for $20,000 in debt forgiveness," Biden said. "Secondly, if you don't have one of those loans, you just get $10,000 written off. It's passed. I got it passed by a vote or two. And it's in effect. And already a total of, I think it's now 13 million people have applied for that service."
A college student then corrected him: "Your administration moved to cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt through an executive action."
It's called taking the president to school, though unfortunately it seems he needs another kind of facility.
The topper came in an interview with MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart. After Biden intoned that it was his intention to run again, Capehart asked if his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, was for it.
At that point, there was an extended pause and silence as the president's head nodded toward the floor. It was obvious the president had checked out of the interview - either a doze or black-out - so obvious that Capehart had to snap the president back into the conversation.
"Mr. President?" he asked.
The camera switched back to Biden's face, which was saturated with a look of confusion. His eyes were but slits, barely open, as he struggled to answer the question.
"Dr. Biden thinks that uh, my wife thinks that uh, that I uh, that, that we're, that we're doing something very important," Biden said.
It's much worse when you watch the video online than when it is described, and so we urge our readers to do so.
Now it's quite obvious that Joe Biden is in no condition to run the country, and it is just as obvious that he is in fact not running the country. That means only one thing: The bureaucrats and "policy experts" clustered around Biden are in charge, and that is a very, very dangerous thing.
Many people sometimes laugh off a president's incompetence because, after all, they do have experts all around them. But left to their own devices, those experts and bureaucrats are an existential threat.
It's dangerous because, as we saw during the pandemic, bureaucrats and experts live in a very delusional, isolated world, far apart from the real world with real people and real experience. They have only theories and lab experiments, which always produce the same results in a controlled environment. That's why those theories very seldom work well in the uncontrolled environment of the real world.
Nor are these experts and bureaucrats accountable to voters. They are not accountable to anybody, really, except to each other.
And so they keep telling each other what they all like to hear, and policy becomes spun from groupthink, where dissenting voices are weeded out and conformists prevail. That is the very essence of bureaucratic survival: conformity to the narrative. Worst case scenarios - any other scenarios at all - are not tolerated.
We have written before about this brute collective power housed in the federal government through its maze of executive agencies. And yet, as powerful as this bureaucratic power is, it has always been delimited and curtailed by the presence of an elected executive, a nominal boss known as the president of the United States.
Nominal though that office may increasingly be, the president nonetheless provides safeguards against the most extreme impulses of bureaucratic groupthink. For one thing, a president is not constrained by the limits of the thought prison. An executive who has not lived an entire career inside the walls of the bureaucracy is most certainly going to have ideas that depart from the groupthink line.
For another, and related to the first, the president's constituency - the American people - have their own thoughts about issues, and this too empowers and compels presidents to push back against the worst instincts of the bureaucratic state tumors.
True, over time this power has waned. But it is still formidable against bureaucracy's worst excesses, and this is true not only of Republican presidents like Donald Trump but of Democratic ones, such as Barack Obama, who from time to time confronted his own bureaucracies in an attempt to streamline agencies from a 20th century to a 21st century model.
The problem now is, the pushback - or resistance or safeguards, whatever you want to call it - from the elected side of the administration has vanished because of a president who can no longer function cognitively.
That means the bureaucracy and groupthink are running wild in the White House, and that is why we are careening from one policy disaster to another. And it's not as if the bureaucracy can make a course correction: Bureaucratic groupthink knows only one route, and that is a circular one, round and round with itself, repeating the same formulas, all the while convinced their utopian designs will actually work in the real work, despite repeated failures.
This is also why we have edged closer to nuclear war that at any time since the Cuban missile crisis. Neoconservative experts and bureaucrats have long believed that a tactical nuclear war is possible without all-out World War III, and they have long considered it an acceptable risk in an European war with Russia for regime change.
Of course, this kind of insane thinking has stayed suppressed inside the bowels of the bureaucracies precisely because our elected leaders, armed with their own real world experiences, and expressing the sentiments of a sane population, know that risking nuclear war is unacceptable in any situation outside of a war simulation room somewhere inside the deep state.
Now, with essentially no elected president at the helm, these ideas have escaped from the basement, and the war room simulation is on the table as a real possibility.
It's hard to know what to do, for these are serious issues. The cabinet will not remove Biden via the 25th Amendment for political reasons, and it might not be necessary should the Republicans win back control of Congress on November 8.
That by itself will halt the worst of the administration's efforts. Lawsuits, too, can successfully tie up most of the outrageous executive dictats this president issues.
There remains the dangers of nuclear war, but a Republican-led Congress can turn the temperature down there, too, by refusing to fund new aid to the Ukrainian government and by using U.S. leverage to forge a diplomatic resolution.
Unfortunately, most Republicans in Congress have been as pro-war on this issue as the Democrats. They should use this time to reassess. They know we have a cognitively disabled president. They should know we are thus led by a war-obsessed delusional mob of bureaucrats and experts who live in ivory towns and in think-tank rulebooks.
They should quickly know what the outcome can be, and act accordingly.
And the administration, after the midterms, should be candid with the Americans people about Joe Biden's elephant in the room. It's time to talk about what to do with the elephant, before the elephant utterly destroys the room.
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