You’re telling me that Trump supporters think Biden is demented?
He’s clearly saying that he expects the vaccine to get full FDA approval soon and that vaccination for young children will follow soon after.
I mean, they were saying that from well before the election with absolutely no irony.
I’m not here to defend Trump. He made me cringe every time he spoke.
Stop confusing me with a Trump supporter.
Then stop talking like one.
Yes, everyone who does not support Democrats must be a Trump supporter, right? And no one must ever disagree with every single criticism of Trump, right or wrong, or they are a Trump supporter. Is that it?
No, that’s not it. Please refer to the post immediately preceding yours.
The meme that Biden is incoherent has been a favourite of Trump supporters to describe the occasional misspeak by Biden, despite the fact that their own man has not been able to utter a single coherent thought in at least two decades. If you actually acknowledge that Trump was infinitely worse and indeed almost totally incoherent, it would seem rather disingenuous to be criticizing Biden for the occasional minor verbal slip-up. I mean, really, what point do you think you’re making?
…and elsewhere. People in the know have said that he did exhibit visible symptoms before he left office.
As for Trump or Biden, or any other public figure, I’ll leave that to people who know them, and have examined them, and are at liberty to inform the public of this information.
For what it’s worth, I supported Reagan in the 80s and still rank his Presidency well, but he was frequently perceived as not being terribly smart for most of his political career. Reagan became somewhat legendary, especially among Republicans as their first unabashedly “popular” President in ages, and due to his successes, but before the hagiography set in Reagan’s reputation wasn’t amazing. He was seen as kind of a belligerent and stupid figure in Republican politics in the late 60s and 70s, and was seen as being way out of his depth in terms of knowledge and intelligence in the primary against Bush. But he was also a much better communicator and better at actually appealing to the masses than any other Republican of his era, and in electoral politics these count far higher than intelligence and expertise.
Now, I’m not saying Reagan was an imbecile. I’m saying someone like H.W. Bush was above average intelligence, same for Carter and Nixon. Nixon was giving interviews in the final year of his life in the 1990s, discussing the fall of the Soviet Union, and he showed more depth of knowledge and intellectual depth than Reagan ever showed in any moment of his 50+ years in the public spotlight.
Reagan actually said and did a lot of dumb things as Governor of California, many of which fell under the national radar due to the more regionalized nature of news and politics of the time. For example in response to the People’s Park protests he commented he “didn’t care if it was a blood bath, it’s time to clear them out of there”, and in response to the Patty Hearst kidnapping in which the SLA demanded the distribution of food to the poor, he joked that there “might be an outbreak of botulism in the food.” These kind of remarks could be right out of the Trumpian playbook.
Reagan in the 80s was a not particularly bright guy who was experiencing the normal diminishment of age, but I do not believe he was suffering from dementia while President, and no evidence has conclusively ever shown that he was.
[Note, how do I still say I rank Reagan as a good President while thinking little of his intelligence? Because results as a leader aren’t always directly correlated with high intelligence, in fact some of the highly intelligent make bad leaders. Reagan wasn’t possessed of some sort of disability-level low IQ, he just wasn’t a big thinker or particularly bright, but he had normal intelligence and lack of interest in expertise and was in a job where those things get highlighted a lot–not always in a flattering way.]
Moderating:
Please don’t name call. Even in a heated discussion, refrain from doing this.
Just a note, not a warning.
For all we know, he has migraines. Many, many of us experience word retrieval problems or even transient aphasia just before/during a migraine.
My apologies, to you and to Roger_That.
I don’t recall “lots of people here” being sure Reagan had Alzheimer’s while serving as President. Maybe you could link to a bunch of examples. Or not.
Biden stumbles over stuff on occasion. You could string together embarrassing verbal moments from just about any Presidency, possibly excluding that of John Quincy Adams.
““I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.””
- Warren Harding
SHUT UP IT’S A STUTTER, PEOPLE, HE’S A STUTTERER, JUST STUTTERING. JFC the cognitive dissonance is almost as bad amongst those who support this ambulatory fossil as what’s going on inside his twaddled turnip.
, No…
So what you’re telling us is that the Australian version of FoxNews has run a series of focused hit pieces on Joe Biden. Got it.
Didn’t this question always come up about Trump? What is it with Americans and dementia accusations? Methinks you guys need to start electing younger politicians.
When seeing large lists of such things, I have a policy of “Sampling” them. If the first one or two I randomly click on turn out to be bullshit, I then assume the rest are equally bullshit until proven otherwise.
So, let’s look at this one in detail. There’s three main bits of video they present as evidence of Biden’s “gaffes” or “senility” or whatever.
First is the claim that he “can’t remember dates”, because he refers to first becoming a Senator “three and a half decades” ago. Okay, that seem like a fair assessment of the video, he does make that mistake. But is this evidence of senility? Literally every person I know over 30 has troubling remembering how long ago things happened. 10, 20, even at this point 30 years ago all kind of blend together. So not quite the “gotcha” they think it is.
The next two are complete bullshit, though.
In the second example, they characterize him as going off on a rant about the unvaccinated. What he actually does is make a calm statement about how the unvaccinated are now the ones responsible for prolonging the pandemic, which is simply factually true at this point. He also say that if you haven’t taken the vaccine, you’re “not as smart as I thought you were”, which while not necessarily being a factual statement, is one I, and a lot of other people, would actually agree with. And his tone of voice is reasonable and level. Just because you have to disagree with him for partisan political reasons doesn’t make this a “gaffe” or “embarrassment” or whatever bullshit you’re trying to claim.
The third is them taking an obvious joke (“I have to seek permission to leave”) and acting like that’s really what’s going on.
So, one questionable and two complete bullshit claims in just this one video. So, I’ll assume the rest are bullshit until proven otherwise.
To add to that, he actually was a Senator for three and a half decades (1973-2008). While speaking extemporaneously, he may conflated how long he served with how long it had been since he was first elected. Or on the fly miscalculated 45ish years as 35ish years. Or just miss-spoke. Those are common flubs.
There’s been a few bits of “evidence” in this thread so far very much like that. Taking a detailed transcript, including every pause, hesitation, and filler word, and treating those as unusual and signs of dementia, instead of being the way people actually speak extemporaneously in real life.
And the bits they choose are so often very short. In the video above, it’s about 56 seconds total of Biden talking. I’m not sure how long the press conference was, but I suspect it was significantly longer than 56 seconds. The propagandists behind this video say the press conference was filled with “gaffes”, and yet, the best they can come up with is 56 seconds, that they had to almost entirely mis-represent.
Not very convincing, guys. I can understand why they’d expect Trump supporters to fall for this crap, because they’ve self-selected for being the stupidest and most credulous people in the US, but what was the purpose of posting these videos here? Did they really think this crap would convince those of us who aren’t Trump ass kissers? Or do they truly believe that this weak sauce bullshit is compelling evidence? The mind boggles.