Biden’s fitness for a second term

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? So Biden made 3 mistakes after a 50 year career in the Senate. He misspoke, not a big deal. As everyone could see at the State of the Union, he is clear headed and knows exactly what he's doing.. Anyone who might be disoriented probably would not have been able to banter with the Republicans like President Biden did. No one who meets with President Biden has said he's confused or unable to do his job. Yesterday's hearing made it clear that Hur was not accurate in his report and clearly had a political motivation to write the falsehoods about Biden's memory

In just the last 2 months, President Trump has talked about running against Obama 8 different times. At times, Trump been confused about who is the current president. Trump is making multiple mistakes in every speech, slurring words, he is unable to pronounce words and incomprehensible at times. In comparison to rallies in 2020, Trump sounds a lot more muddled now. New and rapid deterioration to me sounds a lot more alarming than Biden making 3 mistakes over 4 years about running for the Senate.  President Biden for his entire career has made mistakes, said something in error, blundered etc. in part because of a speech disorder.  Not every error can be explained by his speech disorder, but it does explain some moments where he stumbles


www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2024/03/03/trump-confuses-biden-for-obama-again-here-are-the-other-times/?sh=62d7ecb7522c



www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/joe-biden-stutter-profile/602401/


www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2019/october/why-is-vice-president-biden-s-stutter-being-ignored-.html

A common misconception is that stuttering is obvious when it occurs. However, many instances of stuttering go unnoticed: Speech interruptions can be subtle and imperceptible to listeners, and may not look like “obvious” stuttering, especially to non-expert observers. Speakers who stutter may also try to minimize or avoid overt stuttering moments, due to a history of negative reactions from their listeners. Many people who stutter experience a lifetime of being laughed at, mimicked, and bullied.

In an attempt to head off these negative reactions, speakers may stop speaking before stuttering becomes noticeable, or they may change words or say “uh” or “um” if they know they are about to overtly stutter. All of these attempts to avoid or conceal stuttering—which can become an integral part of the moment of stuttering itself—come at a cost.

For example, during a recent Town Hall, Biden avoided saying President Obama’s name to prevent his stuttering from coming to the surface (i.e., he stuttered on “Obama,” stopped himself before it became noticeable, and said, “My boss” instead). What many perceived as Biden “forgetting” Obama’s name was actually Biden’s attempt to get through stuttering as quickly and comfortably as he could in that moment. Biden was subsequently mocked and ridiculed in the media.



www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-03-07/joe-biden-age-memory-alzheimers-cognition

As a geriatrician, I discuss the effects of aging with patients every day. I wish I had a chance to give my usual talk to everyone who chortles or tears their hair out about President Biden’s fitness for his job.

First, memory. I explain to patients that there are three components to consider. One is formation. Then storage. And, finally, recall. The most common issue among seniors is slow recall. This is the familiar “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, when a word seems to hide or a name won’t come to mind. You know the name, it’s in your bank of memories, it just can’t be accessed quickly. Given time, it usually arrives.

This problem, called age-associated memory impairment, often starts for people in their 30s and gradually progresses. It’s a nuisance but not disabling. If, like me, you find yourself using the term “whatchamacallit,” you probably have it. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, is a different story. Those affected lose the ability to store new memories. They can still access old memories in their memory bank and may recount events that occurred decades ago. But they can’t tell you what they had for breakfast because that never entered the memory bank. (I reassure my patients with age-associated memory impairment by asking whether they remember their breakfast. They do.)

Alzheimer’s is cognitively crippling. Losing the ability to form new memories freezes one in time. Those affected can’t make new friends or address new situations without fresh memories. Additionally, the disease progressively impairs other domains, including behavior and ultimately physical skills.

Fortunately, President Biden shows no signs of Alzheimer’s disease. At news conferences, he references new events and obviously creates new memories efficiently. He speaks slowly and pauses to find words like others with benign age-associated memory impairment. These issues are exacerbated by a chronic speech impediment. Biden has struggled with stuttering since childhood, and remnants of the condition have long been apparent in his speech.

Right. And the more important truth you’re not sharing is that the other guy is a wanna-be fascist.

But I suppose for you as a Vivek supporter, that’s a feature, not a bug.

This is long, but it really clearly illustrates the stark differences between the two candidates and what the future looks like with each of them. Anyone who continues to support Trump is either in really deep, not paying attention, in denial or accepts his authoritarian, fascist White Christian Nationalist tendencies.

heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-13-2024



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After yesterday’s primary contests, we appear headed toward a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. But this year’s election is an entirely different kettle of fish than that of 2020.

In 2020 there were plenty of red flags around Trump’s plans for a second term, but it was not until after it was clear he had lost the election that he gave up all pretense of normal presidential behavior. Beginning the night of the election, he tried to overturn that election and to install himself as president, ignoring the will of the voters, who had chosen Joe Biden. His attack on the fundamental principle of democracy ended the tradition of the peaceful transfer of power established in 1797 when our first president, George Washington, deliberately walked behind his successor, John Adams, after Adams was sworn into office.

Trump then refused to step aside for his successor as all of his predecessors had done, and has continued to push the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. His loyalists in the states have embraced that lie, undermining faith in our electoral system, although they have never produced any evidence for their claims of voter fraud. (Remember the Cyber Ninjas who handled the election “audit” in Arizona? The company went out of business in 2022.)

Then, a year after he left office, news broke that Trump had compromised the country’s national security by retaining highly classified documents and storing them in unsecured boxes at Mar-a-Lago. When the federal government tried to recover them, he hid them from officials. In June 2023 a grand jury in Miami indicted Trump on 37 felony counts related to that theft.

Trump is not the same as he was in 2020, and in the past three years he has transformed the Republican Party into a vehicle for Christian nationalism.

In 2016 the Republican Party was still dominated by leaders who promoted supply-side economics. They were determined to use the government to cut taxes and regulations to concentrate money and power among a few individuals, who would, theoretically, use that money and power to invest in the economy far more efficiently than they could if the government intervened. Before 2016 that Reaganesque party had stayed in office thanks to the votes of a base interested in advancing patriarchal, racist, and religious values.

But Trump flipped the power structure in the party, giving control to the reactionary base. In the years since 2020, the Republican Party has become openly opposed to democracy, embracing the Christian nationalism of leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who maintains that the tenets of democracy weaken a nation by giving immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women the same rights as heterosexual, native-born white men.

Rather than calling for a small federal government that stays out of the way of market forces, as Republicans have advocated since 1980, the new Trump Party calls for a strong government that enforces religious rules and bans abortion; books; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and so on. In 2022, thanks to the three extremists Trump put on the Supreme Court, the government ceased to recognize a constitutional right that Americans had enjoyed since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision: the right to abortion.

Last week, Trump formally took over the apparatus of the Republican Party, installing loyalists—including his daughter-in-law—at the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC) and purging the organization of all but his own people. Indicating its priorities, the RNC has hired Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, former correspondent at the right-wing media outlet One American News Network and promoter of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, as senior counsel for election integrity.

In Congress, far-right Trump supporters are paralyzing the House of Representatives. The Republicans took power after the midterm elections of 2022 and have run one of the least effective congresses in history. Far-right members have refused to agree to anything that didn’t meet their extremist positions, while first Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and then Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to reach out to Democrats to pass legislation except for must-pass laws like appropriations, when Democrats provide the majority of the votes that keep the government functioning.

The result has been a Congress that can get virtually nothing done and instead has focused on investigations of administration officials—including the president—which have failed spectacularly. Republican members who actually want to pass laws are either leaving or declining to run for reelection. The conference has become so toxic that fewer than 100 members agreed to attend their annual retreat that began today. "I'd rather sit down with Hannibal Lecter and eat my own liver," a Republican member of Congress told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios.

Meanwhile, Trump has promised that if he returns to office, he will purge the nonpartisan civil service we have had since 1883, replacing career employees with his own loyalists. He has called for weaponizing the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, and his advisors say he will round up and put into camps 10 million people currently living in the U.S., not just undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers but also those with birthright citizenship, tossing away a right that has been enshrined in the Constitution since 1868.

Internationally, he has aligned with dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and has threatened to abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security pact that has protected the U.S. and like-minded nations since 1949.

If Trump has descended into authoritarianism since 2020, Biden has also changed. For all his many decades of public service, it was unclear in 2020 what he could actually accomplish as president, especially since Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had weaponized the filibuster to stop Congress from passing anything on the Democrats’ wish list. But on January 5, 2021, in a special election, Georgia voters elected Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and the Democrats took control of the Senate as well as of the House.

In Biden’s first two years—with the help of then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who managed a squeaky-small House majority—Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic majority, and on occasion, a few Republicans set out to demonstrate that the government could work for ordinary Americans. They passed a series of laws that rivaled President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s.

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan rebuilt the economy after the worst of the coronavirus pandemic; the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) is rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges; the $280 billion Chips and Science Act invests in semiconductor manufacture and scientific research; the $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act enables the government to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and invests in programs to combat climate change. Projects funded by these measures are so popular that Republicans who voted against them are trying to claim credit.

Biden, Harris, and the Democrats have diversified the government service, defended abortion rights, reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, relieved debt by enforcing the terms of student loans, passed a gun safety law, and reinforced NATO.

They set out to overturn supply-side economics, restoring the system on which the nation had been based between 1933 and 1981, in which the government regulated business, maintained a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. The result was the strongest economic recovery from the pandemic of any country in the world.

“Now, the general election truly begins, and the contrast could not be clearer,” Harris wrote after Biden secured the nomination. “Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and our fundamental freedoms. He is proud of his role in overturning Roe, and has talked openly about plans for a nationwide abortion ban. He routinely praises authoritarian leaders and has himself vowed to be a dictator on Day One. Just this week, he said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare would be on the table if he receives a second term. Each of these stances ought to be considered disqualifying by itself; taken together, they reveal the former President to be an existential danger to our country.

“With his State of the Union speech last week, President Biden passionately presented our alternative vision. We will reduce costs for families, make housing more affordable, and raise the minimum wage. We will restore Roe, protect voting rights, and finally address our gun violence epidemic. The American people overwhelmingly support this agenda over Donald Trump’s extreme ideas, and that will propel our campaign in the months ahead.”

It appears that Biden and Trump will square off again in 2024 as they did in 2020, but the election is not a replay of four years ago. Both candidates are now known quantities, and they have clearly laid out very different plans for America’s future.

HAHA
I agree with you. I think we all know that both candidates are too old. HOWEVER, given that these two are the only choices we have, two old men who sometimes bumble their words, I will take Biden any day over a wannabee Fascist who cozies up to brutal dictators and talks about how much he admires them. And while we are talking about Biden mixing things up, I don't see how anyone who watched his SOTU can still talk about him being a bumbling fool who can't string a sentence together. Even my mom who has been a huge Trump supporter in the past texted me that night while she was watching the SOTU and was completely shocked by how he spoke.  

What is this new nonsense? Two days ago he claimed the videos of him shown in the hearing with Hur were AI and now, Clinton used some special kind of acid?

Still waiting for your sage advice. Let those superior ideas rise to the top, girl. Don’t be shy. You said you were hoping to be part of an exchange of ideas and yet you refuse to share your ideas with us!

Oooh, you really told me, didn’t you.

Still waiting for your contribution to the marketplace of ideas.