by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Collapsing empires may often flail about in strange fashion before they go into the darkness. Recent developments in American political life brought those thoughts to my mind.
With an American presidential election just three months away, we have seen a series of remarkable, sometimes unprecedented developments impacting who will spend the next four years sitting in the Oval Office and controlling our government policy.
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Four years ago President Joseph Biden replaced Donald Trump in the White House, and a month ago they held the first public debate of their rematch for the presidency. Many believed it demonstrated the total mental enfeeblement of our current chief executive, leading to widespread calls by leading Democratic Party financial donors and media pundits that Biden abandon the race at this very late stage.
In fairness I finally watched the full ninety-minute debate a couple of days ago and it entirely confirmed those claims of his serious mental impairment. Although Trump hardly seemed a brilliant policy expert, being just as blustery, boastful, and sometimes mistaken as always, he was as fully alert as he had been in 2020 or even 2016. But Biden came across as elderly and mentally befuddled, more like a nursing home patient than the plausible chief executive of the world’s global superpower. Many of his remarks recalled his repeated claims to have seen explicit photographic evidence of the 40 Israeli babies beheaded by Hamas militants, although that alleged incident was merely a ridiculous propaganda-hoax. Biden’s severe impairment also helps to explain why he had carefully avoided any direct conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Despite the obvious evidence of Biden’s incapacity to govern, his aides and close political allies strongly resisted the growing demand that he exit the race, noting that he had already won a long series of primaries and captured nearly all the Democratic delegates. However, these widespread public demands from the media suggested that they and our political elites had been concealing these facts from the public for some time and also raised natural questions about who exactly had been running our government over the last several years.
During the presidential debates of 1984, the hostile liberal media had claimed that President Ronald Reagan showed similar signs of elderly befuddlement and should therefore be rejected by the voters. But although there may have been a brief example or two of that, Reagan’s mental status seemed absolutely nothing like Biden’s, hardly surprising since the former was still in his early 70s while Biden is now 81.
Indeed, I think a much better analogy for Biden came with three of the last leaders of the decaying Soviet Empire of the 1980s, who nominally led that superpower even while senile or even comatose. In an article last summer I’d described that troubling analogy:
