Joe Biden is experiencing clear mental decline. Even in the past few months, it has become increasingly obvious that Biden is struggling. He routinely appears confused while speaking, forgets his location, or becomes distracted by various irrelevant tangents.
The Democrats and the mainstream media are using a two-pronged strategy to deflect or dismiss legitimate concerns over Biden’s mental fitness. The first is to simply deny the obvious by ignoring the frequency of instances demonstrating Biden’s decline by pointing to medical reports which describe Biden as physically “healthy” and “vigorous.”
The Left recently cheered with delight as Biden was seen riding a bicycle in public, despite the fact that primates can be trained to ride bicycles and aren’t considered appropriate candidates for high office.
Joe Biden rides a bike to prove his mental capacity.
Monkeys can ride bikes. pic.twitter.com/cvwUaGcbAI
— Ian G Haworth (@ighaworth) August 9, 2020
The intentional conflation of physical health with mental health is a lazy strategy which should be easy to derail. However, the Democrat’s second strategy is more resilient as it sidesteps reality and exists entirely in their favorite realm of emotion.
The goal is not to argue whether or not Biden is mentally fit, but to argue that such arguments themselves are entirely inappropriate, with blissfully unaware characters like Brian Stelter calling the very act of questioning Biden’s mental health “offensive and otherworldly.”
The question we must ask is, simply, why? Making accusations of mental instability is one of the Left’s preferred attacks against any conservative.
The same Brian Stelter who argued that questioning Biden’s mental health is “offensive” saw no problem when he stated that we can’t “tiptoe around” the issue of Trump’s “mental instability.” John McCain and his wife were targets of accusations of mental instability during his presidential campaigns. In 2004, Justin A. Frank wrote a book – described by one UCLA psychiatrist as a “psychoanalytic hatchet job” – titled “Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President,” concluding that Bush was mentally ill.
Unsurprisingly, the Left apply the caveat of “one rule for thee, another for me” to the subject of mental fitness. For them, it’s fair game to question the mental capacities of their opponents, presumably justified solely by their view that conservatism is akin to a mental illness, but it’s also deeply uncouth to criticize someone on the Left in the same fashion.
While some become embroiled in arguments of “whataboutism,” aiming to dismiss the validity of some criticism by references elsewhere, we should agree that the mental stability and capability of the most powerful man or woman in the world is one of the most important — if not the most important — characteristics voters should take into account when casting their vote.
When the President of the United States has the power to command the armed forces, with their finger literally on the “red button,” shouldn’t we be able to ask about the health of the brain which commands that finger?
The reality is that our system of judgment when it comes to political figures is utterly warped. Since Barack Obama ushered in the “celebritization” of politics, and therefore the politicization of celebrity and culture, the metrics we use to choose our “leaders” is both counter-intuitive and ultimately self-destructive. We dedicate our full attention to the cult of personality which encircles either candidate, while dismissing the necessity of qualities more important when it comes to stable leadership.
Regardless of your personal ideology, we must acknowledge that mental health matters. If the mainstream media want to maintain the slightest shred of intellectual honesty and integrity, they should demand more than the demonstration of a physical act which can be performed by monkeys before declaring that their favored candidate is mentally fit, with their opponent being mentally unfit by default. News consumers should do the same.