Is It Dementia?…Joe Biden, for sure, has some pressing issues that he is going to have to deal with: in his latest imbroglio, he seemed to have ‘fudged’ the truth regarding an Obama-era ceremony at which he ‘pinned’ a Congressional Medal of Honor on a soldier. I won’t go into specific details, but Mr. Biden either unintentionally exaggerated his part in that event, indicative of a faulty memory, or he deliberately lied to enhance his role in the proceedings.
One thing is clear: the facts of the event as described by Mr. Biden didn’t square up with what actually occurred. What’s particularly troubling for the former vice president is the fumbling over the truth: The former vice president has grappled with exaggeration and misrepresentation before – so naturally one is compelled to ask: is he just another phony politician puffing out his chest, or is it something much more serious, say, his mental acumen?
The media, of course, has jumped all over Mr. Biden, bringing up his earlier missteps; the criticism and analysis have been quite harsh. The subtext hinted at by the media is that perhaps Joe Biden is damaged goods, not fit at his age [74], to fulfill the immense responsibilities as a President, if elected.
If Mr. Biden has a couple more of these incidents in which his truthfulness and his corpus mentis are called into question, he’s a goner, I believe. Biden support will collapse very quickly among Democrat primary voters – they’ve endured for two-and-a-half years of a thoroughly incapacitated President, thank you, and absolutely will not stand for another one. Biden loyalties will quickly shift to another more ‘stable’ candidate.
There’s a much bigger issue on the table than Mr. Biden’s proclivity, on occasion, of altering reality, and the attendant suggestion that he’s no longer working with a full deck, as the saying goes.
Almost lost in the Biden saga is the far larger question of President Trump’s mental capacities. By a factor of 1,000, the Trump issues overwhelm the Biden troubles; his dementia symptoms are absolutely too numerous to ignore. Yet, in that odd, time-honored fashion that the national press must protect the hallowed office of the Presidency at all times, there’s been minimal attention drawn to the strong possibility that Mr. Trump is suffering from some form of dementia.
In my family, in the case of both parents, I’ve observed dementia, and the destructive path of the disease, very closely: regarding my father, one day he was practicing medicine at a very skilled level, and six months later, was unable to even dress himself. An amateur boxing career as a young man very likely caused the dementia 50 years later [mercifully he suffered for only a couple of years, before his death]. Mr. Trump exhibits a lot of the same behaviors that my dad had displayed: incoherence, pervasive memory loss, some sort of focus disorder, confusion, rage, excessive obstinacy, a refusal to take counsel, megalomania, a distorted self-regard, and restlessness.
And Mr. Trump’s particular symptoms -- his rage and incoherence, for instance – appear much more evident now than just a couple of years ago. To this observer, it’s no longer whether he has Alzheimer’s – it sure looks like he in the throes of the disease.
Whether the President indeed suffers from increasing dementia, or not, as some Gripes readers may certainly believe, it could be a very grave problem going forward [especially if he wins a second term]. The country as a whole is going to have to come to grips with the existential issue of a President’s continuing mental decline, and ultimately even a decision on a forced removal from office.
Cognizant of the country’s present political paralysis, I’m not optimistic that we’ll be up to the challenge. Regardless, our democracy may hang in the balance.
Impeachment and Removal? Not So Fast…How about we cool our jets just for a little bit, OK? Donald Trump’s going nowhere. Yes, he may indeed be impeached eventually, but so what? All an impeachment means is that the show moves over to the Senate, which ultimately holds all the cards as far as his removal goes. Besides, with a significant Republican majority in place in the Senate, and the fact that it takes a formidable 67 votes to convict, President Trump will be staying put for a long while.
The Republicans are going to stonewall, that’s a certainty. Their game plan is the same as they implemented in the Mueller investigation: deflect, attack, make a lot of noise, sling mud on everyone, create chaos, and delay, delay, delay. And they’re very good at this. Look at the forthcoming issue of subpoenas: they’ll be issued by the House Democrats, and the Republicans will simply ignore them, asserting the committees are illegitimate and therefore the subpoenas are null and void. And, if a Judge asserts a subpoena is valid, and its target is in contempt of court, who’s going to enforce any penalty? Guess who? None other than the Department of Justice, whose boss, William Barr, is a stone-cold patsy for Mr. Trump. Consequently, there’ll be no enforcement at all, making the threat of a subpoena essentially toothless. No one will be going to jail for contempt.
It looks like only a ‘smoking gun’ will depose Mr. Trump. And that means an ‘implicit’ quid pro quo will not be enough – just like Watergate, evidence to convict the President will have to be quite tangible and substantial – a taped conversation or something in writing would appear to be the most viable and feasible means to actually convict President Trump and throw him out of office. Could that happen? Sure, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The Republicans are masters at this game.
Quid pro quo! – Mr. Gripes took years of Latin in school, a waste of time I realized later on. Better to have learned to speak, say, French than agonize over the interminable, insufferable orations of Cicero.
There was one aspect, though, of that dead-as-a-doornail language that I did appreciate: those expressions ‘copied’ straight out of Latin and interjected into the English lexicon.
And, lo and behold, currently there’s one recognized by any semi-literate American: ‘Quid pro quo’ , the ‘go-to’ phrase for anyone cognizant of the ongoing impeachment process. I love how it rolls off the lips, and its realpolitik essence. To translate, in American vernacular, it means ‘I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine.’ Whether in good faith or bad, it’s a deal between two parties.
Donald Trump, I surmise, has spent his whole life doing nothing but quid pro quo’s and not necessarily fairly. [Example: vendors work erecting and furnishing his properties [the quid]; he screws them by stiffing them on payments [no quo.] Mr. Trump has lived a transactional life – I would wager he’s done nothing in his life that wasn’t part of a deal.
[I digress for a moment: Here’s one ‘deal’ that I have often pondered: how did he ever graduate from a rigorous academic institution like the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he hardly ever opened a book there; his time at school was probably nothing but a series of transactions: term papers were purchased; surrogates attended and were noted as ‘present’ during classes; exam questions were somehow furnished to him beforehand; or, perhaps the largest transaction: a large ‘donation’ to the university from Dad around the time of graduation.]
Politics, as practiced forever, is all about quid pro quo. Any politician who’s successful utilizes the principle….every one of them, even the saintly Barack Obama, who must have been very good at it indeed, winning two Presidential elections. Politics on any level doesn’t work without quid pro quo.
So, as I read that President Trump asserted, when he broached the subject of investigating Joe Biden with the Ukrainian President, dangling the piñata prize of military assistance to that country, he was only making a suggestion, not a quid pro quo demand, I knew he was lying through his teeth. Yes, he didn’t explicitly threaten to withhold that aid, but just look at the outcome: there was no investigation of the Bidens, and ergo the military aid was not forthcoming [until Mr. Trump was forced to relent later.] No Quid, no Quo.
One last point: the nasty quid pro quo’s are non-partisan – both parties roll around in muck like this all the time. Hunter Biden, son of Joe, is paid $50,000 salary ‘working’ for a natural gas conglomerate in Ukraine, and is on the company’s board as well. Could access to Vice President Joe Biden have anything to do with these jobs? Of course. I doubt Hunter knows one damn thing about the gas business, except, maybe, how to use a pump to fill up. Hunter’s largesse was simply an attempt to get close to Daddy Joe’s ear.
Mr. Gripes
By Jim Israel
October 21, 2019
