Again, What's Biden's Problem?

My family lived, for a time, in the Washington, DC area, where my mother worked for the Republican National Committee. (She's pictured on the left in the photo with then-President Nixon and a co-worker). One of her jobs was to, escort visiting Republican constituents through the Capitol to greet their elected representatives.

According to my mother, one problem issue was Sen Everett Dirksen, at the time the Republican Minority Leader. Dirksen had a permanent mint julep in his hand. She was told to explain to the constituents at every meet-and-greet that the glass was in fact iced tea. President Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, not long after Dirksen's death in 1969. A senator with a drink in his hand all day would have been part of the culture then, if it's not in fact still like that.

This bit of information popped into my head as I thought again about my principal theory of Biden's bumbling, which I outlined on August 27, that his patterns of speech are consistent with alcohol impairment. The problem is that some drunks, like perhaps Sen Dirksen, are capable of functioning at higher levels than others, like perhaps President Biden.

But this isn't my only theory of why Biden is the way he is. A true crime fan, the other night I watched a show about Dr Christopher Duntsch,.

Unfortunately, of the 38 surgeries that Duntsch performed over the course of two years, he botched all but three. He left his patients in excruciating pain and with multiple health conditions. Two surgeries even led to the deaths of Floella Brown and Kelli Martin.

What I noticed in clips of his interrogations and various other vignettes were both his extreme self-confidence and his blithe fabrications. Confronted with a patient whom he'd left half paralyzed, in pain, and permanently disabled after tearing his spinal cord, Duntsch insisted to his interrogator that the man had recovered 95% of his function, had returned to work, and anyhow, the risk was covered in his consent statement.

This echoed the sorts of things Biden routinely says, and something in this seems to be part of Biden's nature. The program interviewed Michelle Shughart, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Duntsch, who clearly struggled with the question of whether Duntsch was more than just disastrously incompetent, but whether he actually meant to inflict harm. Looking at the decisions made in the Afghanistan withdrawal, which seem to have been consistently the worst possible out of many alternatives in case after case, it's hard to avoid this problem with Biden as well.

Considering the range of problems he now confronts, his handlers have clearly increased his schedule. In this short week alone, he's visited New Jersey to find hecklers and wander off teleprompter to say they don't call tornadoes that any more. Today, he delivers remarks about labor and receives a COVID briefing. Tomorrow he outlines his new six-pronged COVID strategy, and Friday he campaigns for Newsom in California.

In fact, yesterday's schedule looks like one of his busiest ever. I count 20 separate arrivals, departures, tours, and remarks between 9:50 AM and 7:15 PM. People who work for a living, of course, normally get days like this, but he's had nothing equivalent, I would imagine, for much of his life. Clearly his handlers see the need for greater visible activity.

Add to this the increasing challenges to his competence, some of them coming from previously friendly sources. The opinions I've seen from time to time suggest he's not so far out of it that he does't hear this, and given his nature, it rankles.

So he's going to be doing more, under greater stress. His handlers are doing all they can to put him in situations that can be tightly scripted, but even among his staff, there's an increasing fear that a script isn't always an effective solution. According to Politico -- and keep in mind,. this is a friendly source:

Joe Biden often thinks he’s his own best messenger. Many people in his own White House don’t always agree.

When Biden gives public remarks, some White House staffers will either mute him or turn off his remarks, according to White House officials.

. . . To this day, Biden seems almost delighted by the prospect of tussling with the reporters that often gather in front of him, such as when he challenged Fox News’ Peter Doocy to contemplate alternative drawdown scenarios for Afghanistan.

So we're looking at sublime self-confidence in his abilities, combined with what I think is habitual consumption of alcohol that impairs his speech and judgment, in circumstances that now increase his stress and fatigue. We'll have to see how this plays out.