River News: Our View

Much of America panicked last week as reports spread of terrifying flocks of beheaded poultry stampeding America from coast-to-coast.

Yes, frightened Americans were suddenly reporting chickens with their heads cut off running about everywhere. The chickens took over pubs, they rampaged through streets, they cackled in front yards and back yards, they commandeered TV studios and ran in circles as a bewildered nation ran to their basements.

There hasn’t been such a commotion since Orson Welles convinced America that Martians had invaded the Earth.

As it turns out, thankfully, there were no Martians then and there are no headless chickens now. After a brief investigation launched by the FBI because they thought it might be a vast right-wing conspiracy, the agency confirmed that the congregations of crazed and cock-eyed birds were merely desperate Democrats who had watched last week’s presidential debate.

So there’s no need to stock up on chicken feed — headless chickens can’t eat anyway — though the cackling has yet to stop.

And by cackling we mean heavy-weight cackling. Seriously, after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, much of the Democratic Party-controlled media has called for his head (no chicken pun intended), bluntly demanding that he step aside as the Democratic Party’s standard bearer.

The squawking New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution — all called for the president to step aside, while The Washington Post didn’t know what to do, so it called for some soul searching and aroma therapy.

This after years of gaslighting by all those media outlets, not to mention the rest of the corporate press running cover for a man in serious cognitive decline. We could all see it with our own eyes — the blank stares, the nonsensical sentences he couldn’t finish, the inability to find his way off a stage, his strange absence from evening gatherings of international leaders, his wandering away right in the middle of photo ops and interviews, gosh, it goes on and on — but we were told there was nothing to see there, that everything was fine.

Anybody who said otherwise was a right-wing traitor spreading disinformation.

We were all being gaslighted.

What’s odd about all these Democratic calls for Biden to end his campaign is that they are not accompanied by a call for the president to resign. If they are admitting that Biden is not competent to serve another term or to continue his campaign — and they are, explicitly — they are also admitting that he is not fit to be running the country right now. 

To be sure, we have an incapacitated president who must step down or be removed. Every second he remains in office continues to transform a ludicrous notion (the idea that Joe Biden can serve anywhere near another term) into an ever more dangerous crisis. 

It’s dangerous and it’s a crisis because foreign adversaries most often strike in vulnerable times, when governments are engulfed in distraction and turmoil. As Walter Russell Mead, writing in The Wall Street Journal this week, observed, Vladimir Putin attacked Georgia in 2008 while George W. Bush’s administration was handcuffed by the financial crisis: 

“In 2024, Mr. Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could choose this moment of American political disarray to make a dramatic move,” Mead wrote. “Two or more of them could coordinate actions, presenting a distracted and weakened Biden administration with the most dangerous and complex international challenge since the 1940s.”

Even more worrying is that Biden’s cognitive decline has accelerated. He’s not only not the same man he was a year ago, he’s not the same man he was three months ago. In recent weeks, he has had to be led by hand from a stage by Barack Obama; he had to be helped down the debate stage last week by Jill Biden, who held his arm; hours later, there was the president clutching his wife’s arm as they departed their plane for a fundraiser.

He now has to have a teleprompter even at small fundraisers populated by friendly crowds, and often enough he can’t even read the teleprompter without a gaffe. All he really knows these days is that he “beat Medicare,” whatever that means. 

The truth is, the man has exhausted his mental and physical capacity — debilitated by disease — and foreign adversaries must know that the time to strike is ripe, especially as a mentally spent and vacuous president tries to hold on.

Equally important, no one knows who is running the country and so there is no accountability for any action taken, even and especially if an international crisis were to emerge. Is Barack Obama running the country? Or is it Jill and Hunter Biden, along with a few close friends and advisors? That would be scary. Is it the Democratic National Committee? 

Who is making the critical decisions that define a presidency and shape a nation’s future?

Decision-making in secret and without transparency never serves the public well, and it could be catastrophic because unaccountability encourages recklessness. If you can’t be blamed, why not go for the gold and the bold? Only thing is, when small contrived clusters of inexperienced hacks are making those decisions, the decisions are often spectacularly stupid.

One could argue that a President Kamala Harris would be not better, but that is not true. One, she would be a caretaker. Two, she might be incompetent and controlled pretty much by the same people who are running the country now, but she would have inherited the mantle of public accountability, a standard the shell of Joe Biden can no longer be held to.

Actually having someone in charge — even Kamala Harris — would likely cause adversaries to give pause. She may be a caretaker, but we would at least have a president who can understand one thing: the world is on her shoulders. She can still understand the consequences of catastrophic failure, both for the nation and for her personally. 

Sadly, that is something Joe Biden can no longer grasp. The bright lights of public opinion have a way of tethering presidents to reality, at least when they are cognitively capable. But right now Biden is hostage to the inner circle without the benefit of any awareness of public scrutiny or any ability to look out upon the nation and understand what the country needs and thinks.

For anyone who thinks a Kamala Harris caretaker presidency for a few months would be a nightmare — to be sure it wouldn’t be a walk in the park — it’s better than having a seriously cognitively impaired president given to fits of anger and hubris and to spells of incoherence and delusion.

That’s the very definition of a national security crisis. We can’t think of a more unstable or dangerous situation.

A presidential resignation is not without precedent. A weakened Richard Nixon, sure to be impeached and then removed from office, resigned the presidency in 1974, handing the country over to Gerald Ford, a politician with his own reputation for weakness.

He came across as bumbling and not very smart — a Kamala Harris without the cackle. He was a caretaker president, too, just waiting for the next president to come along, and, sure enough, he was defeated in the next election. 

The thing is, he was a president who was at least sufficiently aware of his surroundings. He could communicate with foreign leaders, and without wandering off the farm. He gave the nation a public face of accountability with which to deter potential foreign aggressors who were tempted to take advantage of the distractions Nixon was dealing with.

Joe Biden, whom his own staff says can function for no more than six hours a day (and at what level of awareness we can only guess), can do none of those things. He is obviously not running the country. Others are making critical decisions while Joe is in the Oval office having a conversation with French President Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.

The stakes are high. The president must step aside from the campaign, and he must step aside from the office now, for the good of the nation.