"I've Got This!"

If nothing else, I'm finding it therapeutic at least to try to analyze what's happening with President Biden. As I've said, I'm less and less convinced thst loss of cognitive function is at the root of the problem, but I don't think simple incompetence is a good answer, either. There are probably several factors involved, but observable behavior is at least one pathway to parsing out what's going on.

The big thing I noticed when he began speaking at yesterday's press conference was how much slower he spoke than usual, and as he did, how much less he slurred or stumbled over his words. The first thing that came to mind was the common standup routine about being pulled over for DUI: the experienced drunk knows that to avoid slurred speech, you talk slowly: "Goood . . . ev-en-ing. . . of-fi-cer!" I couldn't shake this impression.

The next thing that struck me was the awfulness of the speech he gave. He had to have drafted it himself, in front of a computer, cutting and pasting one cliche from column A, another from column B, and so forth. From the transcript, first, the obligatory weepy reference to his son Beau:

Being the father of an Army major who served for a year in Iraq and, before that, was in Kosovo as a U.S. attorney for the better part of six months in the middle of a war — when he came home after a year in Iraq, he was diagnosed, like many, many coming home, with an aggressive and lethal cancer of the brain — who we lost.

Next, the obligatory brave words:

We will not be deterred by terrorists. We will not let them stop our mission. We will continue the evacuation.

I’ve also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership, and facilities. We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose, and the moment of our choosing.

And next, the lugubrious reference to scripture:

Those who have served through the ages have drawn inspiration from the Book of Isaiah, when the Lord says, “Whom shall I send. . . who shall go for us?” And the American military has been answering for a long time: “Here am I, Lord. Send me.” “Here I am. Send me.”

Finally, the moment of silence:

And I ask that you join me now in a moment of silence for all those in uniform and out uniform — military and civilian, who have given the last full measure of devotion.

(A moment of silence is taken.)

I've got to think that even a sophomore communications major, even one from the Ivy League, could have done better than this. Either that, or his handlers are completely incompetent.

Well, in any case, the third thing I noticed was that yet again, they let him go out with a suit that didn't fit. He must have a closet almost full of them; over the past week, I've seen only one, a blue one, that fits. Is he too cheap to update his wardrobe?

The YouTube psychologist Dr Todd Grande is sometimes insightful, sometimes not. He generally accused Trump of narcissism, delusion, and whatever else. I was hesitant to watch his take on Biden in recent days, but I went ahead and tried it out:

At about 2:45, he says, "He believes nobody has the right to question his superior leadership qualities." This is exactly what I've been saying. At about 3:05, he says, "It appears that he tragically overestimated his own abilities. . . . He's like the Bond movie villain who puts a complex contraption into operation and doesn't check to see if James Bond was actually killed." Again, this is exactly what I've been saying.

Even the uber-establishment Atlantic is echoing this theme:

“Biden is a stubborn guy,” one former Obama-administration foreign-policy official told me, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more freely. “Sometimes he does not want to hear what he knows he doesn’t like … If the problem here was mostly not hearing what he didn’t want to hear and telling everyone to shut up and go away when they told him things he didn’t want to hear, that’s not the intelligence community’s fault.”

But this doesn't explain the observed behavior, especially the slurring, stumbling, and slow speech to avoid the first two. Here's a post on drunken speech at the Dialect Blog:

the researchers found that the most striking impact of alchohol on speech was an increase in ‘nonfluencies.’ That is, people stammer, stutter, and trip on their words a whole heck of a lot more when they’ve had a few too many. Just how much does this intensify? The researchers found that in the severely intoxicated, the rate of these ‘speech errors’ nearly triples.

. . . Something that isn’t mentioned in the study is what I find to be the most salient feature of ‘drunken speech:’ hypercorrection. Drunk people, aware of their intoxicated state, often overcompensate by overenunciating evvvveerrry ccconnnsonnantttt and vowel. Perhaps this relates to the higher rate of stuttering and stammering: when you put such pressure on yourself to pronounce everything perfectly, you’re bound to trip up!

I saw this throughout Biden's press conference. Maybe it was just me. But I also think certain remarks, like "Ladies and gentlemen, they gave me a list here. The first person I was instructed to call on . . " weren't serious, they were drunken sarcasm that fell completely flat. Indeed, I can't be completely sure that the pose at the top of this post isn't in fact a form of drunken histrionics.

It's dangerous enough when someone like that is just driving a car.