That's Not A Bug -- It's A Feature!

One of the frequentlly cited illustrations of Joe's cognitive decline is this story from Speaker Mike Johnson:

An addled Biden insisted to the Louisiana lawmaker that he never issued the order to freeze new liquid natural gas export permits — even though he signed off on it less than a month earlier.

Johnson told the Free Press’ Bari Weiss he didn’t believe Biden was lying, but was left to believe the then-81-year-old leader “genuinely didn’t know what he had signed.”

The troubling encounter happened in the Oval Office in early 2024, when the two met to discuss the latest aid package for Ukraine.

Afterwards, Johnson asked Biden why he had inked an executive order pausing new permits for American liquid natural gas export to European allies — a crucial issue for his constituents in the Bayou State, which in 2023, handled 61% of the nation’s LNG exports, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

“Why would you do that? Cause you understand we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you are fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine, because they gotta get their gas from him,” Johnson said he told Biden.

Biden was stunned, Johnson said.

“I didn’t do that,” the president said, according to Johnson.

“Sir, you paused it, I know. I have the export terminals in my state. I talked to those people in my state, I’ve talked to those people this morning, this is doing massive damage to our economy, national security,” Johnson said he told the commander-in-chief.

Biden continued to deny that he froze the exports — and then remembered he signed the executive order, which he said was simply to study the effects of the fuel.

“I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We are in serious trouble—who is running the country?’” Johnson said.

“Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know,” he said.

Trump himself has also advanced the theory that Joe didn't know what he was signing:

In a rare, if backhanded, defense of his predecessor Tuesday night, Trump posted on Truth Social that Biden was never a true advocate for “open borders” before entering the White House, and implied that others around him must have pushed the agenda.

Trump also repeated a theory, without offering evidence, that Biden’s inner circle were aware he was “cognitively impaired” while in office and used that to “take over the autopen,” a device that replicates a person’s signature, allowing presidents to sign off on multiple bills and pieces of legislation.

. . . “The Joe Biden that everybody knew would never allow drug dealers, gang members, and the mentally insane to come into our Country totally unchecked and unvetted. All anyone has to do is look up his record. Something very severe should happen to these Treasonous Thugs that wanted to destroy our Country, but couldn’t, because I came along.”

Whether Joe's brain was actually fried in these cases is beside the point: his opponents are trying to hold him to account for what might be characterized as prevarications or inconsistences, and he's dodging them. I went looking for similar cases from Bill Clinton. a master of the political dodge:

Clinton faces a new challenge when the Wall Street Journal claims that during the Vietnam War, Clinton manipulated the system to avoid the draft. Clinton says that he did not dodge the draft and did nothing wrong. The next week on "Nightline" Ted Koppel reads to the nation a letter written by Bill Clinton to Colonel Eugene Holmes, director of the University of Arkansas ROTC program in 1969. In the letter Clinton thanks the colonel for saving him from the draft and outlines his beliefs about the war.

. . . News breaks that President Clinton may have had a sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. On PBS's "NewsHour" program, Clinton tells Jim Lehrer, "There is not a sexual relationship." The media wonders whether the president was using verb tense to be evasive. In a press conference on January 26th, Clinton makes a comment that will be repeated for the rest of his presidency. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

. . . Bill Clinton testifies to the grand jury in the White House. Later this same day, he makes a televised address to the nation in which he admits having had an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

. . . At the White House prayer breakfast, an apologetic Clinton tells the audience, "I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned." That afternoon, the report of the Independent Counsel, commonly referred to as the Starr Report, is released to the public. On September 21, videotape of Clinton's grand jury testimony is released.

The difference between Clinton and Biden is mostly in style, not in intent. Caught in prevarications and inconsistencies, Clinton became Saturday night Bill-Sunday morning William, full of overdramatized, lip-biting repentance. Caught in the same thing, Biden's reaction is to plead senility, something Special Counsel Robert Hur recognized when he said Joe would come off to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. But this isn't a new strategy:

Dubbed "The Oddfather" and "The Enigma in the Bathrobe" by the media, [Mafia boss Vincent] Gigante often wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself. He was indicted on federal racketeering charges in 1990, but was determined to be mentally unfit to stand trial. In 1997, he was tried and convicted of racketeering and conspiracy, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Facing obstruction of justice charges in 2003, he pleaded guilty and admitted that his supposed insanity was an elaborate effort to avoid prosecution, as he was sentenced to an additional three years in prison.

This defense has been used in other high-profile trials, such as those of Robert Durst, the New York real estate heir accused of several murders, who used cancer diagnoses and mental health issues to delay and confuse his trials, or Joseph James DeAngelo, the so-called East Area Rapist, who allegedly feigned frailty and senility during investigation and trial for at least 13 murders, 51 rapes, and 120 burglaries across California between 1974 and 1986.

In Biden's case, confronted with any number of prevarications or inconsistencies, he's been able to avoid any direct accountability by potentially feigning cognitive decline. "I didn't sign that, I don't remember that." If you're Bill Clinton, that won't wash, you're too young and visibly alert. If you're Joe, you're in cognitive decline, you've just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, it will sorta-kinda work.

This strikes me as the dilemma the Pelosi Democrats face. Speaker Emerita Pelosi rose to become the most powerful Democrat through a strategy of appeasing the party's far left and convincing the centrists to go along. Joe Biden was the culmination of this srategy. He wanted above all to be president, policy was a distant second, although he'd acquired a reputation as a moderate, which the party was able to exploit in the 2020 election. But whatever the impression, he was going to appease the far left in concert with Nancy Pelosi, and if he was called on it, the easiest dodge would be he'd gone soft in the head.

The problem is that this is a terminal strategy. As a criminal defense, if it works at all, it works because the defendant is visibly old and feeble enough to convince judges and juries that it's true, which means you probably don't have much time left, in prison or out of it. As a political defense, it didn't work in Biden's case; age, frailty, and illness might gain sympathy from a jury, but the electorate was going to vote him out.

The problem for the Democrats is that Joe was the last unifying figure who could draw a beard of respectability over the party's appeasement of the far left. His technique was to feign senility, or at least to know enough to fall back on actual senility when it was convenient. But whichever it was, the originator of the strategy was Biden himself.

Trying to hold the Biden inner circle accountable is going to miss the point. The usual suspects, Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Bob Bauer, Anthony Bernal, Tom Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Hunter, and Dr Jill, were all beneficiaries of Joe's reflected glory, and they were all doing what they were told.

The investigations of the Biden inner circle won't tell us much, not least because these people are neither smart nor competent at what they do. The problem for Biden is that the frailty-and-illness defense has a built-in expiration date, which looks like it's quickly approaching.