Joe Biden is too old to be president.
Watching Biden blow joke after joke — crafted by a team of comedy writers — at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was just more proof. The jokes were on a teleprompter, and Biden had no doubt run through them a bunch of times, so how do you mess that up?
But Biden’s clear decline and lack of mental acuity are of no concern to one New York Times columnist, who says we don’t even need a president.
“Strange as it may sound, the American government can function without a healthy president,” David Leonhardt wrote in a newsletter last week.
Leonhardt said Biden, 80, is much like former President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. But like so much of the reporting in the Times, that’s wrong. FDR was sharp as a tack mentally throughout his tenure in the White House, and, for the record, he was 20 years younger than Biden.
The writer also compared Biden to former President Ronald Reagan, who — years after leaving the White House — announced he had Alzheimer’s Disease.
“In each case, White House aides, Cabinet secretaries and military leaders performed well despite the lack of a fully engaged leader,” Leonhardt wrote. Uh, FDR wasn’t engaged? Nor Reagan?
Now, let’s be clear: We’ve never had a president so out of it in the history of America. We could list a thousand examples, but just one is needed — the most recent.
Biden popped by a gathering of parents and children on Take Your Children to Work Day. One child at the White House event asked the president, “What was the last country you traveled to?”
Now, you likely know that just a couple of weeks ago, Biden went to Ireland, where he told a bunch of made up stories about his Irish heritage. But here’s what he told that child.
“The last country I’ve traveled — I’m trying to think the last one I was in — I, I’ve been to 89 — I’ve met with 89 heads of state so far, so, uh — I’m trying to think. What was the last — Where was the last place I was? It’s hard to keep track. Um, I was — ” Biden said.
“Ireland!” another child yelled in reply.
“Yeah, you’re right, Ireland,” Biden said. “That’s where it was. How’d you know that?”
Because that child’s got a working brain, Mr. President.
But Leonhardt doesn’t see scenes like that as problematic, either. He said Biden’s habit of using the wrong word is “not new.” He blamed that on his supposed stutter, writing that it “can make it seem as if he can’t remember words when in fact he is struggling to enunciate them.”
Um, he couldn’t remember the last country he traveled to — but a little kid who didn’t go there could.
Even Leonhardt, though, had to acknowledge that Biden hides from the media. “Of course, there would be a simple way for Biden to address the concerns: He could spend more time speaking in public now and demonstrate his vigor. Instead, he and his aides have chosen the opposite approach,” he wrote.
But that he blamed on the president’s staff.
“Biden’s strategy of minimizing unscripted public appearances suggests that his staff believes the risk often isn’t worth the reward,” he wrote.
One Republican presidential candidate thinks that Biden running for re-election is tantamount to elder abuse — and claims that Biden isn’t really running the show, anyway.
“It’s a myth that Joe Biden is actually running for president. He’s not,” entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said last week on Fox News. “It’s just the managerial class using Joe Biden as a front to advance its own agenda. To them Biden’s cognitive impairment isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.”
“This is how the managerial class crushes everyday citizens – not with a bang, but with a whimper,” he said.
Ramaswamy was harsh, calling Biden a “hollowed-out husk.”
“The administrative state more effectively controls its puppets when they are hollowed-out husks of themselves. The fact that it’s elder abuse is just a cost of doing business for Biden’s handlers. It’s revealing that the DNC [Democratic National Committee] refuses to host primary debates this year; they’re spitting in the face of their grassroots base.”
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.