"I'm Supposed To Stop And Walk Out Of The Room"

As I noted yesterday, Biden had a very stressful Tuesday, which led to stumbling, gaffes, and fabulation. This continued into yesterday, when according to Fox News

President Biden continued his bizarre habit of implying his handlers call the shots from behind the scenes on Wednesday when he concluded remarks in honor of labor unions by saying what he was "supposed" to do.

"I‘m supposed to stop and walk out of the room," Biden said after finishing prepared comments in the East Room of the White House.

Is this a symptom of cognitive decline? Again, I don't think so. I certainly agree it's bizarre and counterproductive, since it does entitle reasonable observers to conclude he's not in charge and is controlled by his handlers. Not only that, but as the story says, it's become a habit, which is also not good.

But I think the reason for it lies in the parallel I drew yesterday with the disastrously incompetent neurosurgeon Dr Christopher Dentsch. Dentsch exhbited two qualities, a grandiose opinion of his own abilities combined with telling stories of his own accomplishments at utter variance with the truth. Biden has exhibited both in recernt days. On Tuesday,

President Joe Biden grew defensive after residents yelled criticism at him during a visit to New Jersey.

As Biden toured destroyed homes in Manville, New Jersey, caused by flooding, two men were spotted standing in the yard of an area home where a Trump flag was flying.

The pair along with other residents off-camera shouted that Biden should “go home,” “resign,” and expressed their disgust with his lack of leadership in Afghanistan.

. . . But Biden claimed afterward that the protesters were upset about his position on climate change, despite the obvious criticism of his failure in Afghanistan.

“The people who stand on the other side of the fences who don’t live there, who are yelling that we’re talking about interfering with free enterprise by doing something about climate change — they don’t live there,” he said afterward during a speech in New York.

According to another account,

When he later visited Queens with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Joe Biden claimed that everyone had been thanking him where he was touring there. “None of them were shouting or complaining,” Biden said. “Every one of them were thanking me as if it was something special….that I was here.”

This is an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which incompetent people don't have the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. So let's put the remarks he makes about how he's "been instructed" not to take questions, or to call only on a specific list of reporters, in context.

I'm more and more convinced that he's saying this with a sneer. Although his handlers, probably including his wife, are mostly effective in telling him what not to do, he resents it, because in his own mind, given full rein over his options, he'd destroy those reporters with his witty rejoinders. For whatever reason, they won't let this happen. As a result, he gets back at them with those little zingers.

An example of this attitude is in his August 26 press conference:

"Ladies and gentlemen, they gave me a list here. The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O'Donnell from NBC," Biden kicked off the press conference.

. . . Biden then appeared to go off-script by calling on NPR correspondent Franco Ordoñez, RealClearNews reporter Philip Wegmann and he even sparred with Fox News' Peter Doocy.

He prefaced that off-script exchange by calling Doocy "the most interesting guy that I know in thr press", I think feeling he'd been killing it so far, and he'd dispose of Doocy as the cherry on the sundae. Instead, the result was the iconic cringe that may well serve as the defining image of his presidency. Probably his wife was the only one who could tell him, "We told you so," but since then, although he's kept putting out the zingers, he's stayed much more on script. That probably won't last.

On one hand, to have a US president as a case study for clinical incompetence is not a reassuring thing. On the other, there are many agenda items that the Democrats expected to get from his election, but it's looking more and more as if he won't be competent to accomplish them.