I was talking about the election with my mom yesterday and I was surprised at how un-excited she was about Biden’s win. She’s nothing like a Liberal as I am, but she’s not a Trumper either. From what I had gathered she really was disappointed in Trump and despite dad funneling her all his right wing news, she realized what the “election for the soul of the nation” really meant. But I guess not.
She said “I’m glad he won but he still lied.” I asked her what he lied about. She said there was “some phone call” between himself and a leader in some other country (just a leader, not the head of state) where he told the person that they would not get to speak to Obama unless the leader paid money and also resigned?
I told her I think you’re thinking of Hunter Biden’s laptop (then explained to her the whole nonsense behind that) and she said no this was involving Biden and Obama directly. And there is a tape recording of it, of Biden speaking and he is talking about Obama.
I tried to press her for details and implored her to get me the facts so we could discuss it. I mean this big thing is what she is basing her whole distrust of Biden on, and if it was that important I feel like I should have heard of it. And the GOP would have made a bigger deal out of it.
But I have no idea what she’s talking about. I’m still thinking it’s a misunderstanding of the Hunter Biden laptop thing but I am curious if there’s something else I’m missing.
Sadly I’ve come to find that both of my parents, now 69 and 70, are absolutely horrible at interpreting the news. Hearing them explain something they “heard somewhere” is like being the 15th person in line in a preschool Telephone Game.
I think your mom is referring to a snippet of an apparent phone call between Biden and the Ukrainian president which spread around right wing media claiming it was recorded proof Biden was pushing the president into a corner to fire the prosecutor in order to protect his son’s activities in Burisma. The prosecutor who got fired at the urge of Biden representing US policy was in accordance with the views of the EU officials, UK government, French government, IMF officials and anticorruption Ukrainian watchdogs for not being tough on rooting out corruption and who actually was corrupt himself.
Sadly, my mom is the same way. Attempts to have discussions with her about current events are difficult because her memory of specifics is slippery and the details that she fills in with don’t really make sense. I’m not sure what to do about it except respond with vagueness like “Oh, interesting”, when she starts to tell me about something that doesn’t make any sense.
I always assumed this was Trump’s most common strategy–accuse his enemy of doing what he himself had done (and was impeached for).
Pretty much all the anti-Biden stuff I see is stuff about things Trump actually did, or were Trump’s fault. Even down to which one of them is the Christian. (I’m still debating if I’m going to point out on Facebook that Biden went to church on Sunday, while Trump golfed.)
Good Grief. I just turned 69 (today!), and I feel quite capable of discerning truth from glurge. Although I occasionally have to talk by 67 yr old sister down off ledges. But she’s a hopeless victim of clickbait.
I think I’m going to start a thread about this. My parents are starting to alarm me with their dwindling mental capacity. My mom said she is getting kind of alarmed too.
Maybe their mental capacity is dwindling, but in this instance, I don’t think your mom was that bad. There was a basis for the claim, and with as much mud-slinging that was going on, it can be hard to keep all the specific details straight this long after the incident. Maybe see how she responds after you explain to her what really happened on that phone call. I mean, she remembered more about that incident than I did, even if she couldn’t keep the details in mind.
There are a couple of phone calls she could be referring to. One was the one @boycott was talking about, which touched on the Shokin firing. The other one was after Trump was elected, and had to do with the transition and some warnings from Biden to Poroshenko about Trump’s likely policies. It also included the phrase where Biden claimed to want to stay involved as a private citizen that got some folks worked up.
I should add that the leaked audio came from a known Russian agent in the Ukrainian parliament, if that has any bearing on your mother’s opinion of the story. It was heavily edited and released in bits and pieces over time.
FWIW my very aged MIL, despite being a lifelong D supporter, is also finding RW propaganda or at least RW JAQing more acceptable for lack of a better term as her short term memory declines. The simplicity of the story, the repetition of the punch line, and the absolutist tone tends to stick with her while all the details (if there even were any given) drift away like so much cigarette smoke in a typhoon.
She also is much more susceptible to “the sky is falling; the market’s about to crash!” snips on CNBC, FNN, & such than she was a couple years ago. Again the chosen narrative is simple, the conclusion is repeated and emotionally resonant, and the details are seemingly too arcane to actually matter, much less remember.
Kinda like dogs who don’t understand English, but do very well understand human tone of voice and emotional state, more and more the parts of the message that get through to at least my MIL do so by means other than a dry transcript of the facts.
Best of luck to you and your parents as the rest of their game plays out. We’ve been lucky so far that our drama has been limited. But I hear the waterfall in the distance and it’s getting louder.
Here is a thread I started on a similar topic from 3 years ago that may be of some value:
My grandmother was like this right before she died. I don’t remember her ever saying a word about politics my entire life until suddenly all she could talk about was how we’d all be sorry when Obama turned us all Muslim. She was Catholic but not religious; they were minimally observant when my mom was growing up and my grandmother stopped going to church pretty much as soon as the kids were grown. By the time I came along, there was nary a rosary to be found among the clutter. She was always in poor physical health, and she was probably undiagnosed bipolar, but didn’t display any (other) signs of mental decline in her old age. It was strange, but I gather, not unique.
and I assume anyone who reads my stuff here will confirm that I am compos mentis.
