Bizarre Comedy

Biden, appearing to admit defeat on ending the filibuster & nationalizing elections, randomly starts shouting: States’ voter reform laws are “about who gets to count the votes! Count the vote! Count the vote!” pic.twitter.com/66LpGL1ckQ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 13, 2022

For whatever reason, there's been little comment on President Biden's latest rant. At about 0:47 in the clip taken yesterday after his meeting with Senate leadership, he begins shouting "Count the vote! Count the vote!" in an incoherent break from earlier more measured remarks. This follows occasional observatioins that presidents haven't traditionally traveled to Capitol Hill to beg for votes before they're counted (or indeed, when a vote is counted and certain to go against them).

But this is the second time he's done this, and I noted in November what a bad and unpresidential strategy it was. But this week, he doubled down on it. Not for nothing did Sen McConnell call his Georgia speech Tuesday "profoundly unpresidential".

Yet again, I don't think this is a medical issue; it's a character issue. From the time he was in the Senate, he had a reputation as a "blowhard", sonmething that received too little attention in he 2020 election:

Gov. Ron DeSantis warned radio listeners on Monday that Democratic candidate Joe Biden doesn’t have the stamina to “stand up” to progressive politicians if elected.

Speaking on the conservative Mark Levin Show, DeSantis quipped that ‘progressive’ Democrats such as Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez will be “running the show.”

“I think the thing about Biden is he’s a career politician, kind of a blowhard Senator,” DeSantis told show host Mark Levin. “He’s malleable but he is not strong enough to stand up to the left. He will fold every single time.”

I think there are a couple of related issues here. One is that he's been in the habit of writing checks he can't honor througout his career. His answer to the problem keeps being to tell them to redeposit the check. He got away with it as senator because the amounts were much smaller, but as president, he's kept the old habit.

In addition, he's very similar to speaker Pelosi in his tendency to detour into incoherence in challenging situations:

Both Biden and the speaker retreat into shouting, non sequiturs, or impenetrable jargon like Pelosi's "bird bath oir privilege scrub" when the going gets difficult -- and in retrospect, the speaker in that situation was fully aware that her strategy for forcing the BBB through via reconciliation was doomed to failure. But if nobody understands what either is saying, neither can be held accountable for it. This isn't a medical issue.

The other factor is that both have had lifetimes to develop these habits. Nobody questions the speaker's bizarre annual facelifts. Nobody questioned Biden's hair sniffing, groping, or skinny dipping until, during a presidential campaign, they became too obvious to ignore. Nobody yet takes seriously the utterly unpresidential gaffes, insults, shouting, and incoherence.

In both cases, the problem is a lifetime of bad habits, fostered by entitlement and indulgence. My guess is that there will need to be behind-the-scenes interventions of one sort or another in both cases. The lizard people have their work cut out.