OPINION:
I’m sorry — but these are the left’s rules, and because they set them, I’m going to play them.
President Biden is not in good mental health. Just this week he forgot the name of the Defense Department and its leader Secretary Lloyd Austin.
“And I want to thank the sec — the, the ah former general. I keep calling him general, but my, my — the guy who runs the outfit over there,” Mr. Biden said during a White House event on Monday announcing the nomination of two female generals to lead U.S. military combatant commands.
It’s not the first time Mr. Biden has forgotten the names of those in his Cabinet. In December, he mispronounced the name of his nominee for the Department of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra. At the time — like pretty much every time we publicly see Mr. Biden — he was reading off a teleprompter.
The closest thing Mr. Biden has delivered in terms of a press briefing is answering off-hand comments by the media, such as this:
Reporter: “What did you learn about your immigration briefing?”
Mr. Biden: “A lot.”
Mr. Biden has still not been to the Southern border — likely because he’s too weak to travel and has refused to give a full-scale press briefing — likely because he’s too feeble and mentally confused to give reliable, White House-approved answers.
In December, then President-elect Biden bizarrely broke his foot — by tripping on a rug after a shower as he chased after his dog Major. I guess he pulled the dog’s tail like a 4-year-old. The entire story made no sense.
Yet, our press corps seems entirely uninterested in the mental health of Mr. Biden. When he trips up his speech, they make excuses for him. They glamorize his early bedtime and video game playing as a return to normalcy.
They weren’t so kind to former President Donald Trump.
USA Today declared: “Trump is mentally unfit to be president,” writing “Since Donald Trump’s election, mental health professionals have come forth in historically unprecedented ways to warn against entrusting the U.S. presidency to someone exhibiting dangerous mental impairments.”
The New York Times wrote countless stories and columns questioning the mental health of the former president, conceding in a 2017 article titled: “Who decides whether Trump is unfit to govern?” and that “the mental health of Donald Trump has been under scrutiny since he began running for president.”
There was incessant speculation about whether the 25th Amendment should be invoked to remove Mr. Trump based on his alleged mental fitness. The House of Representatives even introduced a bill to empower Congress to establish a commission of at least eight doctors including four psychiatrists to evaluate whether Mr. Trump was fit to govern.
If Mr. Trump slipped up — let’s say by using two hands to drink a glass of water or had trouble walking down a slippery ramp at West Point — the press was there in a millisecond to cast doubt on his physical acuity.
“Even if it’s baseless and unfair, few things stick to a modern president like images of physical frailty,” Politico wrote of the two instances, noting “just how damaging such a picture of weakness can be, and that it often comes with a “political cost.”
OK. So those are the standards. The press set them in the previous administration. So where are there critiques of Mr. Biden? I dare you to find one by the mainstream media.
The press is so in bed with the Biden administration that they willfully ignored Mr. Biden’s cognitive decline on the campaign trail (not knowing which state he was in, referring to his campaign as the Harris-Biden ticket, saying that 150 million Americans lost their lives to gun violence and another 120 million died of COVID-19) and instead chose to write stories about how the Trump campaign’s targeting of Mr. Biden in this area would backfire on them.
Now they’re working overtime to cover for his misstatements (“typical Biden gaffes”) and fragility (from Snopes on his Pentagon flub: “It’s unclear whether Biden literally ‘forgot’ his defense secretary’s name at that moment, or whether, for example, he got stuck doing an extended ‘folksy’ ad-lib after initially tripping over his words).”
Give me a break.
It’s time to seriously question Mr. Biden’s fitness for the job. His lack of availability to the press, his verbal stumbles when giving teleprompter remarks, his obvious confusion when visiting offsite locations — all should set off alarm bells of cognitive decline.
It may not be nice, but it’s necessary. The American people deserve to know who is really running their government.
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