David Samuels
The fireworks in America this Fourth of July will be fuelled by the country’s imminent election, in which a convicted felon faces off against a doddering old man who is too senile to know that he isn’t really the President. The country’s elite would be glad if this were hyperbole; unfortunately for them, it is not. But Joe Biden’s fitness for office is no longer the big question that the American press is afraid to ask. After three years of near-total silence, they suddenly can’t stop asking it.
There may have indeed been members of America’s political and media elites who were shocked by Biden’s debate performance. Crediting the sincerity of their reactions doesn’t say much for their powers of observation, though. Biden’s shuffling gait, frozen facial expressions, babbling fabulist arabesques and inability to perform simple physical tasks without falling down have all been on public display since the first year of his Presidency — an office he won mostly in absentia while hiding out in the basement of his home in Delaware.
It is certainly possible that the American elite stuck its fingers in its ears and covered its eyes in order to block out Biden’s resemblance to late-period Leonid Brezhnev. Perhaps by repeating the ideas that Biden was not only sharp as a tack but also a geopolitical genius and probably even the greatest American President of any of our lifetimes, they came to believe that some version of these things were true, and had to be true — because everyone said so.
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