"Biden - A Marionette?"

Writing this essay was not easy and took longer than most I have written. The subject is a sensitive one, but nonetheless important, and I have tried to be fair. But if my speculation is correct, it reflects a cynicism unique to our politics.

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Biden – A Marionette?”

May 5, 2021

 

“It is possible to be a puppet on a string without fully realizing it.”

                                                                                                                                Life is a Cocktail, 2017

Steven Redhead

                                                                                                                                Founder Life Coaching Systems

 

In February 2017, less than a month after he had taken office, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), in a floor speech, questioned Mr. Trump’s mental health. He was joined by Senator Al Franken (D-MN) and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA). According to an article in The Hill on February 17, 2017, thirty-five psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers signed a letter to the New York Times that stated, “the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions make him incapable of serving safely as president.” The American Psychiatric Association has long held that to render a professional opinion on a public figure one has not examined is unethical. However, that didn’t stop the thirty-five, none of whom had met with Mr. Trump. We now have a new President. While no gaggle of psychiatrists has weighed in on Mr. Biden, one wonders: Are the President’s cognitive abilities declining, as some have suggested? The truth is, we don’t know; but some, including me, are suspicious that age has taken its toll on the man.   

 

President Biden has been a stutterer since childhood. According to the National Stuttering Association, stuttering is a “neurological disorder that interferes with the production of speech.” It does not indicate a psychological disorder or mental deficiency. It does not suggest dementia, but neither does it preclude it. Dementia is a catch-all word to describe various symptoms of cognitive decline. Early manifestations would include forgetfulness and limits to social skills and reasoning. In 1988, Mr. Biden suffered two brain aneurysms, but there is no reason to believe they would lead to any form of dementia.

Like those eminent psychiatrists and psychologists who passed judgement on President Trump, my opinion regarding President Biden is empirical, not analytical, so accept my words with caution – a warning the Times did not offer. Yet, to publicly question Mr. Biden’s fitness for office is apparently off limits. In 2017, Republicans like Mike Simpson (R-ID) agreed that Mr. Trump exaggerated and made false statements, and that it is always fair to question any President’s judgements. Yet, there is a deafening silence from both sides of the aisle when it comes to questioning the mental well-being of President Biden. Why?

 

Why do I feel as I do? Mr. Biden spent thirty-six years in the nation’s most deliberative body – the U.S. Senate. He could be mean-spirited, as Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas came to learn, but he could also be a consensus builder. He campaigned as a moderate and unifier, yet he has governed by Executive Order, signing over sixty EOs in his first hundred days as President, more than double what Mr. Trump did and more than triple what Mr. Obama signed in his first hundred days.

 

During the campaign, Mr. Biden’s handlers kept a tight rein on him. Like 19^th Century Presidential candidates who campaigned from their front porches, Mr. Biden communicated to the electorate from the basement of his home outside Wilmington, Delaware. In contrast with Mr. Trump who enjoys dueling with a Press that despises him, Mr. Biden, as President, has shunned the media that adores him, as they ask about his favorite ice cream or photograph him picking dandelions for his wife. In his first message to Congress, Mr. Biden spoke for an hour with no hint of senescence. Of course, he was speaking from a place he has called home for forty-four years, and he read from a teleprompter, as have all Presidents since President Eisenhower first used one sixty-seven years ago. While he stumbled rarely, his stance was wooden, without the relaxed appearance of a man who knows what he is saying. He lacked graciousness toward his political opponents, inconsistent with a message of unity.  There seems, to this observer, a disconnect between the words he now utters and those of a man who has been in Washington since 1973.

 

President Biden has been accused of many indiscretions: from plagiarizing to lying about his college record, from financial relations in Ukraine and China to behaving inappropriately with women. He can be impulsive. When a popular black radio host, Charlemagne the God, asked him how to respond to someone struggling to decide whether to support him or President Trump, Mr. Biden shot back: “If you have a problem figuring out whether to support me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” In 2018, when asked to comment on one of President Trump’s crude comments, he said he wished they were in high school, so he could take him out behind the gym and “beat the hell out of him.” But Mr. Biden was not a left-wing radical. The New York Times, on October 18, 2020, called him “a seventy-seven-year-old moderate.” Yet, as President, he has proposed a radical, left-wing agenda. On April 29, 2021, the New York Times, changing their tune, described Biden as seeking “a fundamental reorientation of the role of government not seen since the days of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal.” But is his radical agenda rational when the most states are in Republican control, when the Senate is split 50-50, and when Democrats’ majority in the House is the smallest since World War II? Has Mr. Biden undergone a transformation, or is something more insidious at work?

 

It makes one wonder: Who is in charge? The voters in November chose a candidate whom they thought was a moderate and who was not Donald Trump. They wanted the normality his campaign promised. So, I ask: Is he being manipulated to implement policies the voters did not choose? Has Mr. Biden become a marionette, acting on behalf of unknown handlers? I don’t propose to have an answer, but I believe it is a possibility we cannot overlook, and an issue that should concern us all. Adam Smith wrote that there is a “great deal of ruin in a nation,” by which he meant it takes a lot of bungling by political leaders to bring down a powerful and prosperous nation, but all free countries are vulnerable, as democracy is fragile and not all men and women are angels.

 

Peggy Noonan, in a column in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, wrote that President Biden, unlike his three predecessors, is not “hated.” That seems true; but has the radical left taken advantage of a cognitively impaired President to advance an agenda rejected in last year’s Primaries? If this speculation has any merit, then we have experienced one of the most undemocratic, dastardly tricks ever played on our democracy, with mainstream media fully complicit.