So What Else Is New?

The overwhelming news this morning was Pennsylvania US Senate candidate John Fetterman's distressing performance in last night's debate with Dr Oz, starting with his opening statement, "Hi, goodnight everybody!" The conventional wisdom discussed his medical condition, although nobody has yet asked how a clearly robust 53-year-old man could suffer a stroke and what that might mean (I wouldn't rule out white powder). But leaving that aside, what we heard was word salad, whatever its cause. In his case, for instance,

My doctors, the real doctors that I believe, they all believe that I am ready to be served,

or,

I absolutely support fracking. . . . I do support fracking and — I don’t, I don’t, I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.

But how does this differ from Vice President Harris? For instance,

We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of community,

or,

Our world is more interconnected and interdependent. That is especially true when it comes to the climate crisis, which is why we will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements, that we will convene to work together on to galvanize global action. With that I thank you all. This is a matter of urgent priority for all of us and I know we will work on this together.

Nobody so far has suggested the vice president has a medical condition. President Brandon, it's been suggested, has cognitive issues, but the question I have is how his version of word salad differs in any significant way from those of either Mr Fetterman or Ms Harris. For instance,

“The pandemic is over,” President Joe Biden declared in a Sunday interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, eliciting enthusiastic head nods from some experts—and panic from others fighting to keep precautions at the forefront of American minds.

The quick quip made headlines. But Biden’s full quote wasn’t so simple, or straightforward.

“The pandemic is over, we still have a problem with COVID, we’re still doing a lot of work on it,” he told CBS’s Scott Pelley with nary a pause, while walking the floor of the Detroit Auto Show—the first in three years because of pandemic precautions.

“But the pandemic is over,” Biden continued. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everyone seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing, and I think this is a perfect example of it."

or,

President Joe Biden fumbled his words during a Wednesday speech, appearing to say he commuted on Amtrak for 36 years as vice president.

His latest word salad came as Biden delivered an address in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

"I commuted [on Amtrak] every single day for 36 years as vice president of the United States after my wife and daughter were killed, I went home to see my family, never stopped," Biden said.

Or for that matter, Speaker Pelosi:

We saved the planet. We're saving the planet with record $360 Billion to save the planet.

The most credible theory for Speaker Pelosi is that she's usually drunk, and I would tend to agree. But whatever the theoretical causes, the practical results are the same in every case -- these people are all the creatures of their handlers, and they can't even read a straight text from a teleprompter. No matter how carefully they try to brief and cosset their subjects, the handlers must inevitably do after-action cleanup.

It reminds me of the remark by a UK commentator during the Liz Truss debacle: she compared the situation with Truss, Biden, and other world leaders to the chairs around a hotel swimming pool -- the chairs are empty, but people have left their sunglasses and towels on them to show they're taken and at some point, they mean to return. Fetterman, Harris, Biden, and Pelosi are all stand-ins, place holders for the people who actually occupy the chairs.

So far, I haven't seen another commentator who's pointed this out, especially about US figures. Whether the latest instance of a word salad politician causes anyone else to see the light is an open question.