Joe Goes To New York

Joe had several enagements in New York over the past week, all of which tend to confirm the estimates I've made here of his character all along. Let's just start with the episode where he walked off a stage where he'd appeared with Brazil's President Lula at the UN:

Joe Biden has seemingly wandered off the UN stage without shaking hands with Brazil's Lula at the end of a joint speech.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 77, looked visibly irritated after the two leaders shared a stage to speak about their initiative to improve workers' rights in each country.

Throughout the presentation by Joe, Lula, and the Director of the International Labor Organization, Joe seemed to be fidgety and impatient. By the end, his gestures and body language indicated that whether or not all the ceremonial niceties had been fully observed, Joe was done. He gave a flippant farewell salute to the audience -- and not to either of his fellow speakers on the stage -- turned, and purposefully walked off. Unlike the Daily Mail in the link, I wouldn't characterize it as "wandering" -- he saw the exit and went straight for it.

I put this directly in the context of the September 5 episode, which I covered in this post, when Joe walked straight out of a ceremony in which he awarded the Medal of Honor to a Viet Nam War helicopter pilot. He placed the medal around the recipient's neck and then, without standing on formality, simply walked out of the room. As I said in that post,

I don't think this was a result of Joe being unaware of his surroundings or even the requirements of ceremonial decorum. I think he was either drunk or under the influence of prescription drugs used to excess, he felt like walking out, and he could, because Joe is Caesar.

I think it's fairly plain that Joe generally feels he can get away with offending other heads of state, as he is reported to have done on July 18:

President Joe Biden seemingly fell asleep today while sputtering gibberish during a high-level meeting with the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog.

I noted at the time,

[I]t's indisputable that Herzog was there as a supplicant, and Biden's delivery and overall demeanor brutally reinforced this. Biden, after all, is the most powerful man in the world, he's fully aware of it, and dealing with supplicants, especially an Isreali supplicant, is an annoyance. His handlers have already made all the policy decisions, he's already signed whatever they've told him to sign, and his presence in the Oval Office is entirely pro forma. Get it over with, it's a big waste of time.

I think the same attitude is clear in the episode with Lula at the UN, this is a big waste of my time, it's gone on too long already, I'm done. But troubling as the meeting with Herzog was in July, his encounter with Prime Minister Netanyahu this past Wednesday goes farther:

At the start, Joe refers to talks about the possibility of negotiating with the Saudis and says, "I think we look at each other and kinda, 'Who's been drinking what?'"

Netanyahu replies, "Good Irish whiskey!"

Joe, somewhat nonplussed, responds, "Good Irish whiskey -- that's the reason I've never had a drink!"

As I've said here, I think the legend that Joe's never had a drink is up there with all the other lies he routinely tells about himself, that he drove an 18-wheeler, that he was arrested during the Civil Rights movement, that he went to the Naval Academy, or that he taught political theory at Penn. The evidence we have, which was amply on display at various speeches he gave in New York, is that his speech patterns are often (though tellingly, not always) indicative of intoxication.

Although both Netanyahu and Biden spoke of their friendship in the clip above, there's been tension in their relationship:

At the end of March, President Joe Biden landed a verbal body blow against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden gave a forthright and unequivocal “no” to a question whether he would be hosting Netanyahu at the White House. “Not in the near term,” the president declared.

It has become almost a norm that newly elected Israeli prime ministers visit Washington during the first months of their tenure. That no date had been announced for Netanyahu was already raising eyebrows, alluding to problems in the relationship. But a very public uninvitation is quite another matter, a unique diplomatic occurrence among friends and allies.

Was this just Biden being Biden? Was he shooting from the hip without the requisite consideration?

My sense of the "good Irish whiskey" exchange was a dig back from Netanyahu, which I would read as an indication that the Mossad is fully aware that Joe is usually drunk, and Bibi is letting Joe know it. Joe replies with a nervous laugh; moments later, as Bibi speaks of friendship, Joe crosses himself, which I take in context to mean that Joe doesn't agree, and indeed, he means it as a sub rosa anti-Semitic gesture, much as he's used "God save the Queen" in other contexts to imply "balderdash".

Joe does all this stuff, the walking out, the fidgets, the appearance of falling asleep, the offensively cryptic gestures and remarks, because he can. He's Caesar, he can get away with this stuff, which includes acting like a sophomoric entitled frat boy as he chooses, which is most of the time.

What interests me most, though, is that he can turn some of this off. This is what I noted about his July 10 presser in Hanoi:

[T]he one feature that was missing in Hanoi was the markers of intoxicated speech, stammering, stuttering, tripping over words, sudden extra care in enunciation, sudden slowing, and slurring. His enunciation was clear, and his pace, if slow, was consistent, without stuttering or hypercorrection. He was clearly tired, which led some observers to question whether he was up to the job, but he wasn't talking as though his BAC was somewhere north of the legal limit.

My sense of things for Joe in New York was that unlike in Hanoi, Joe didn't think anything he had to do in New York was so important that he had to stay sober. Because when he really needs to stay sober, as in his 2020 debates with Trump. he can. In New York, he didn't. But his problem isn't senility. His problem is he's Caesar.