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So I wanted to revisit a comment I made two years ago. Does anyone actually believe Biden is the president?
Well, with two years of hindsight, and with the kayfabe largely being over, we are finally getting the reporting we should have gotten all along. Via the Wallstreet Journal, How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge . Unfortunately it's paywalled, so you'll have to excuse me if I refer to secondary reporting.
The New York Post has also gotten involved.
So, looking back to my original comments circa two years ago, one criticism is that these claims were "too good to check". But now with the benefit of hindsight, it's not that they were too good to check. It's that nobody with any ability to do so was motivated to check. It turns out the 25th amendment is broken. Seems when you staff your cabinet with lazy incompetents, they actually enjoy having no boss while the world burns. It's a good gig if you can get, taking 6 months off as Secretary of Transportation while inflation is eating people alive and the supply chain is utterly fucked. Or utterly vanishing off the face of the earth to secretly get treated for Prostate Cancer while World War III is kicking off in the Middle East. Or just meekly apologizing for creating $15 Trillion in debt as a former Fed chair and current Treasury Secretary.
Is it too much to say the Democratic Party is a criminal enterprise at this point? That they executed one of the worst frauds against the American people in the history of nearly any nation? The more evidence that comes in, the more it seems undeniable that the last four years were a complete fraud. We didn't have a president, the country was utterly rudderless, we don't know who's need making decisions, and everyone lied about everything for as long as they could get away with it. In a sane country people would be executed for this treason.
a fact first disclosed after Biden’s debate flop against President-elect Donald Trump, when staff admitted the then-Democratic nominee had difficulty functioning outside a six-hour window that closed around 4 p.m. daily.
It depends, if he was cognizant enough to make decisions in those 6 hours then yes largely the day to day decisions were being made by the President. With age related cognitive decline and/or dementia, the decline is very rarely (in my experience working in adult social care) linear. Some people become unable to make certain decisions and not others, some are entirely lucid for large predictable periods of time (time of day related usually).
Biden is very stubborn and I am told that he was the one who was pushing for the death penalty commutations hard and had to be dissuaded from commuting them all as staffers felt the most publicity negative few should be excluded. Also there was apparently a lot of opposition to him wanting to pardon Hunter, so clearly he has some level of awareness and enough energy to still be pushing his own agenda at times. But that can't tell us how many things this applies to and indeed increased stubbornness could be a symptom of decline, becoming stuck in positions other people might reason their way out of.
Without a proper assessment on how much of what we see is cognitive vs physical/speech decline it is pretty difficult to know what level of input he is having. I knew geriatrics who struggled to speak coherently but were able to write and type and express their thoughts perfectly well. I also knew some who could speak about say trains or mathematics perfectly coherently but were entirely disconnected from the reality of what year it was, who was who and what was going on. For all except the worst cases you would generally need to spend some reasonable length of time, across different days and times in a back and forth conversation to really be able to diagnose a specific level of decline.
So, I would say the evidence suggests that Biden is for at least some periods of the day the President in more than just name. In reference to the criminal enterprise, I would suggest again that the article itself suggests that many people were kept in the dark by the inner circle and would have had meetings in that 6 hour window. I saw Biden speak for about 30 minutes not long prior to the debate and he seemed a little frail but with it. It is quite possible that limited exposure would mean you wouldn't see much more than that, especially with anyone allied being pre-disposed to rationalize away anything they did see, and to believe any excuses they were given.
Personally I think his inner circle (and himself potentially depending on his awareness) were in fact likely misleading the majority of the Democratic party as well. Because as soon as that fell apart, the internal pressure had him standing down as nominee pretty quickly. Some of that is political expediency of course, but I can't imagine there weren't some people who had they known would have realized the performance wasn't going to be able to kept up long enough, even if not for moral reasons but for pragmatic ones.
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