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Notes -
I had a weird moment last night of, perhaps, perceiving my own bubble. So I have to ask to verify...
Does anyone actually believe Biden is the president? I don't mean in an election integrity sense. I mean, does anyone actually believe he is the one steering the federal government or making decisions? I could whole heartedly believe Obama was the Commander in Chief. I had zero doubt George W Bush was in command of the highest Executive Office. Sure, Trump seemed to be at war with his own staff half the time, but he ostensibly tried to exercise the power of his office.
Biden seems like he just gets wheeled out to mumble some words of a teleprompter about once a month. He gets 8/10 of them correct, adlibs something he shouldn't have, and then his handlers come out the next day and "correct" his statements. It just strains my imagination to think he is in charge of crafting policy or executive decisions at all.
Then again, I have heard commentary that he's a bit of a control freak, and wants to have final say in every decision, which is why his administration basically floundered for the first year and a half. He refused to delegate and was a major bottleneck. Supposedly reporters covering him over the years, on various campaign trails, have seen this sort of behavior first hand.
So I donno, am I operating somewhere out on the fringes with this notion? Is there anybody here who fully believes Biden is every bit the President in full possession of the authority of his office that Obama or George Bush (either) were? Can you tell me why?
The degree to which "Biden is not in control" satisfies the ingroup narrative criteria for "too good to check" is extreme.
However, consider the current White House webpage on Edith Wilson:
This is probably the best (and, today, most celebrated!) example of a president who was not the president. (I suspect, if the script were flipped in a possible world where we had a woman president today, a First Gentleman who stepped in to "functionally [run] the Executive branch" would not be regarded as a hero.) As other posters have noted, "the president is being controlled by others" is a common accusation from any given president's outgroup, but we do have historical examples of it happening, so it's insufficient to write such accusations off without examination.
I don't get the impression that Jill Biden is intellectually up to the task of handling the Executive, but she does seem to have her hands mostly full with handling Joe. Though his gaffe-prone career makes it a little difficult to say with total confidence, he really does seem to be in the early stages of a dementia-style decline. And I would bet that someday, when it no longer carries a political cost to do so, someone will write a book, or even a White House webpage, about the "heroes" who ran the government while Joe Biden was in decline.
(But maybe not--there is some indication, albeit disputed, that Ronald Reagan's final years were somewhat comparable to the current state of the Presidency, but I'm not aware of anything praising Nancy Reagan or George Bush for keeping things running smoothly. I also think that the media's prior enjoyment of accusing Trump of being mentally ill, while today carrying water for Biden, does represent clear bias, but that particular bias likely surprises no one.)
This looks to me like a rather cavalier dismissal of a substantial amount of evidence, some of which was provided in this thread.
they're not being dismissive. They're saying that "biden is not in control" is something they're highly biased in favor of, and therefore admitting they should be treating it with caution, and then proceeding to lay out some evidence that supports the conclusion.
I guess I got lost in the wording, then. It was not obvious to me that naraburns was speaking about himself.
Even so, I also don't see how the idea that "Biden is not in control" particularly reflects on Joe Biden. Certainly I have a low opinion of the man from years back, but he's not morally responsible for things outside his control. On this specific topic, I am particularly irritated with Jill Biden. She's the one who married the guy, and I do not believe that this charade is in Joe's best interests. Elder abuse is an ugly thing, and that's what this looks like to me.
If I say that Some Guy is actually braindead and is being piloted around by gnomes that live inside their brain, that doesn't reflect negatively on Guy (how could it? They're almost not a person!), and it doesn't really reflect badly on the gnomes either, so why does it seem like an attack?
I think because while it doesn't reflect badly in the world where it's right, it does reflect badly on Guy in the world where it's wrong. It's a paradoxical attack, that lands only if it misses.
I feel that this thought experiment elides more than it clarifies. There's "a guy". there's the things this guy does, and there's a theory for why he does it, and then there's a conclusion about how we should interact with him. The "why" can be a choice between normal brains or gnome control without impacting any of the other variables. whatever the internal details, there's still an entity, and how we're reacting to that entity, and hostility framed as compassionate care remains hostility.
Fair point.
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Gnomes in the brain is an obviously crazy argument, though, whereas dementia in an elderly person is not. That has a bearing on whether the argument is sincere, and therefore whether it's an attack on Guy at all.
I just used gnomes to make the actions of the person obviously not be in their control, for higher contrast.
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