The very idea of changing candidates at this late date displays either an amazing amount of wishful thinking or a bizarre denial of reality, perhaps some combination of the two, but whatever they may think, the inevitable will occur and the topic will quickly change to how he can remain in office under these circumstances, as it should.
Yet another crucially important point, frequently lost in the shuffle of President Biden’s post debate political crisis, is that politics is only a part – and potentially a very small one at that – of the overall implications of what we are witnessing unfolding in real time for the first time in history. The Democrats and the mainstream media have, so far, been characterizing the realization that the Commander in Chief has suffered a steep mental decline as an electoral challenge, questioning whether he should remain in the race or let a potentially more energetic candidate step forward, but the real question is how he can possibly remain in office. Contrary to what passes for conventional wisdom these days, one thought directly leads directly to the other. If President Biden is not mentally fit to run, how is he mentally fit to serve for another six months, a potential eternity in international relations? To put what can happen in this short time period in perspective, Teddy Roosevelt successfully stopped a potential war in South America between Germany and Venezuela, which would have required the United States to assert the Monroe Doctrine and directly engage a major European power, between January 7 and May 7, 1903, saving countless lives. President Woodrow Wilson was not able to do the same between June 28 and July 28, 1914 when World War I officially broke out. Four months later, somewhere over a million people were dead and an entire continent was in flames. Considering we are over two years into a war between Russia and Ukraine, where US military equipment and funding are currently being used to attack Russian interests, and nine months into a war between Israel and Hamas, one undoubtedly started and funded by Iran which many consider a genocide, it’s not as is if the world is at peace and there is no risk of something even more destructive breaking out. If that’s the case and at a minimum, we can expect to be tested by one of our adversaries at some point, who’s in charge in the United States and who has both the foresight and the fortitude for the sort of Rooseveltian leadership that either prevents crises in the first place, or as he did in the Russian Japanese War, brings ongoing crises to an end? The only thing we can be sure of at this point: That person is most certainly not President Biden, but you do not have to take the word of his detractors like myself on that point, listen to his backers and members of his own party.
Earlier this week, actor George Clooney, of all people, shocked the political world with an op-ed in The New York Times. After hosting a lavish fundraiser for President Biden last month, he declared, “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” He continued, “The George Stephanopoulos interview [last Friday] only reinforced what we saw the week before. As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, who we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.” Mr. Clooney is certainly not alone in his assessment either. Earlier, legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN that the President has suffered somewhere between 15 and 20 mental breakdowns over the past 18 months, what he described as “marked incidents of cognitive decline and physical infirmity.” Further, he disputed the notion that the debate performance, and the President’s obvious mental freezes were some kind of “one off.” “These are people very close to President Biden, who love him, have supported him and among them are some people who have raised a lot of money for him and they are adamant that what we saw the other night is not a one off.” As they described it, “there have been 15, 20, occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed…What’s so significant is the people that this is coming from and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents including some reporters incidentally who have witnessed some of them.” Mr. Bernstein concluded, “These people who have supported him, loved him, campaigned for him, see him often. [They] say that in the last six months particularly there have been marked incidents of cognitive decline and physical infirmity.” New York Mag’s Olivia Nuzzi, who described the suppression of these facts as a “conspiracy of silence,” claimed that journalists covering the President do not believe he’s running the country right now. “Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden.”
Of course, this is precisely why the President finds himself facing a full scale political insurrection, with major media outlets and members of Congress insisting he withdraw from the race. Almost immediately after his disastrous debate performance, The New York Times was among the first to declare him unfit to run, opining that “As it stands, the president is engaged in a reckless gamble. There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden. It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.” They concluded, “the United States needs a stronger opponent to the presumptive Republican nominee. To make a call for a new Democratic nominee this late in a campaign is a decision not taken lightly, but it reflects the scale and seriousness of Mr. Trump’s challenge to the values and institutions of this country and the inadequacy of Mr. Biden to confront him.” Since then, the Times has declared that the President is “embarrassing himself,” noting that “when he has cast aside his teleprompter, most notably during a 22-minute interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday, he has continued to appear as a man in decline.” Other outlets and politicians have said much the same. On Thursday, for example, Vermont Democrat Senator Peter Welch claimed that “we cannot unsee President Biden’s disastrous debate performance. We cannot ignore or dismiss the valid questions raised since that night…For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race.” While he insisted this news was delivered with “with sadness,” “the national conversation is focused on President Biden’s age and capacity. Only he can change it.” To my knowledge, however, none of these media outlets or Democrat politicians has followed this thought to its inevitable conclusion. If it’s a “reckless gamble” for President Biden to remain in the race because of his “inadequacy,” “age and infirmity that [we] see with [our] own eyes,” how reckless is it for him to remain in office? How big a bet that an adversary will not take advantage of his obvious weakness?
Putting this another way, campaigning for President is the (relatively) easy part. It takes energy, desire, and political skill, but holding rallies, giving interviews, participating in debates, and managing a campaign staff pales in comparison to actually running the country and dealing with malign actors around the world who loathe America and seek our destruction. If he cannot take on former President Donald Trump in a head-to-head debate with friendly moderators, in a forum that was designed by his own staff, how can he possibly face Russian President Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jingping without coming up completely inadequate? The Federal Government is a sprawling behemoth, with three million employees and an annual budget of $6.5 trillion. Some say it is unmanageable at all, and yet we’re supposed to believe a man who suffers from various infirmities and is actively embarrassing himself can possibly lead it? The President also has a broader role as the so-called “leader of the free world.” How can a position of this importance possibly be entrusted for another six months to a man plagued with “valid questions” about his “age and capacity”? Self evidently, it cannot. In fact, the 25th Amendment exists for this very purpose, which addresses what happens when the “President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and almost certainly applies when a person cannot discharge the lesser powers and duties of the campaign. Ironically, the 25th Amendment was all the rage when President Trump was in the White House and his detractors deemed him unfit. So extreme was the danger posed by an unfit president in their view, many insisted he should have been removed from office with less than two weeks in his term after the regrettable riots of January 6th. As Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declared at the time, “The quickest and most effective way — it can be done today — to remove this president from office would be for the vice president to immediately invoke the 25th Amendment. If the vice president and the Cabinet refuse to stand up, Congress should reconvene to impeach the president.” His counterpart in the House of Representatives, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed, calling the President a “dangerous man who should not continue in office…This is urgent. This is [an] emergency of the highest magnitude.” Even some Republicans agreed, with Trump-critic Adam Kinzinger claiming the President had become “unmoored from reality.” Indeed, the House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats at the time, actually passed a resolution calling on Vice President Mike Pence to remove President Trump from office, the “RESOLUTION calling on Vice President Michael R. Pence to convene and mobilize the principal officers of the executive departments of the Cabinet to activate section 4 of the 25th Amendment to declare President Donald J. Trump incapable of executing the duties of his office and to immediately exercise powers as acting President.”
Needless to say, many of these same voices are silent now, though “unmoored” and “incapable” definitely apply and six months is much, much longer than two weeks, but if what they said was true less than four years ago, they certainly shouldn’t be by any rational standard. Whatever they may insist or even like to believe, President Biden’s mental infirmity is not simply a political matter that ends with his departure from the race, as if the country can simply move on from there like nothing has happened, saying, gee, there’s the same President, but a new candidate, that makes total sense, let’s just go about our business. No, the very idea of changing candidates at this late date because one is mentally incompetent for the first time in history, displays either an amazing amount of wishful thinking or a bizarre denial of reality, perhaps some combination of the two. Indeed, whatever they may think, the inevitable will occur and the topic will quickly change to how he can remain in office under these circumstances, as it should. The question will be asked, every Democrat including the new candidate will be forced to go on record with their opinion, and there is only one answer. If he’s not in the race, he can’t be in the office. It’s impossible to argue otherwise given the stakes. Sadly, a part of me believes they know this, but once again they are putting political concerns ahead of the very future of the country they claim to serve.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 