On right-wing message boards, I see that there are many claims that Biden suffers from dementia. That he can only repeat what is provided to him on teleprompters, by other people; and that there are some sort of “handlers” who keep him to “the script.” Who those handlers are, or what “the script” is, remains unknown. But it has something to do with Obama, according to them.
Although I’m no medical professional, I don’t see any signs of dementia in Mr. Biden. My father suffered from dementia, and when I said, “Hi, Dad,” when I visited, he would respond with “Dad? What’s this ‘Dad’ crap? I don’t have any children.” Hurtful, yes; and Dad seemed to only remember events that occurred prior to 1938, long before he got married and had children. But it is an example of dementia, and one which Mr. Biden does not exhibit. That’s what I’ve seen, anyway.
So where do American right-wingers get the idea that Mr. Biden suffers from dementia?
Presumably from the same place they got the idea that he’s also a criminal mastermind running a worldwide multi-billion-dollar shakedown while also having time to run a Satanic sex-trafficking ring that transports hundreds of thousands of missing children in subterranean tunnels connected to pizzerias and donut shops to extract the elixir of youth from their brains for the benefit of movie stars and the King of England before shipping them to the slave colony on Mars.
It is something they need to believe, something they need to be true in order to feed into other beliefs, so they choose to believe it, or at least they claim to do so.
It doesn’t make any sense. Don’t try to make it make sense.
That’s what I understand. As I understand right-wingers’ thinking, Biden is either an extremely brainy Godfather, presiding over a crime family that rakes in billions a year from various rackets, but is himself untouchable (cf. Don Vito Corleone) because he never does anything himself, and has underlings do the acts (say, hits, frauds, etc.) for him.
Or he is utterly incompetent, babbling in his free time, but provided with a script on a teleprompter, he can make his way through and kinda-sorta say something that makes sense to somebody somewhere.
So which is it? Biden is an extremely capable crime boss directing a family; or a demented old fool, who, when asked what he wants on his oatmeal, responds “Tuesday”?
I don’t think it’s controversial to say Biden has slowed down in his twilight years. One need only compare his recent Presidential debate performances against Trump with his Vice Presidential debate performance against Paul Ryan to see that. The mistake right wingers make is to attribute that to dementia rather than just simple old age. I doubt they’d do the same if Biden was a Republican; Hell, they didn’t with Trump. But conversely, a lot of people on the left said Trump had dementia and I don’t believe that’s true either. In short, my answer to the question “Where do right-wingers get the idea that Biden has dementia?” is “From news sources that flatter their own political biases”, which seems to be where most people get most of their information about politics these days.
I’ve got a right-winger in my family who’s said Biden likely has some slightly less faculties now than before. She says that everybody experiences deficiencies of some kind, whether temporary or permanent. But she was saying that any decent president has family, staff and cabinet that can help a president deal with a condition of any kind. I can think of examples where a domestic or world leader hit a patch and the country was still okay e.g. Woodrow Wilson or Eisenhower’s strokes, Jefferson’s migraines, Kennedy’s back problems or when Mckinley’s wife had seizures or Lincoln’s wife had a mental condition. None of these conditions have an equal impact but every president has a problem they cope with. Man the campaigns’ nitpicking sure gets ugly about the candidates; it makes me dread the election a bit.
I remember hearing about some research that demonstrated that a person who believes in one conspiracy story has an above-average likelihood of believing any further conspiracy stories they are told, even if they significantly contradict the first. Like Princess Diana was murdered by an organised conspiracy that included everyone around her, and also the hospital staff who attended her injuries, but also, Princess Diana is still alive and secretly being held captive by reptilians or whatever.
People like to think they are smart and that they have information that isn’t known to ‘the mainstream’; this drives them to consume more counterfactual information, widening the gulf between their beliefs and reality, and reinforcing their perception that the whole world is wrong, not them.
Also, don’t forget “owning the libs,” which comes up when all their points are shown to be self-contradictory, illogical nonsense. A demented Biden, and suggestions thereof, are supposed to make Trump-haters like me lose our minds.
It’s both simultaneously, or rather either, depending on which corollary belief needs to be supported at that moment.
To be fair, the knee-jerk left engaged in basically the same kind of cognitive dissonance with respect to George Dubya Bush, regarding him as either a drooling yokel or a Machiavellian architect of the New World Order based on variable contexts.
Joe Biden does have a speech impediment / stutter (cite), and some people who are not aware that it is a lifelong issue have seen it as a sign of his decaying faculties.
I agree. If it makes the libs angry, they’ll embrace it. And it’s just simple tit-for-tat, and has been going on for ages. You say Reagan is a dottering old fool, we’ll say Clinton is corrupt and has political enemies killed. You say W is stoopid, we’ll say Obama is not an American. You say TFG is an evil fascist because of what he says and does, we’ll say Biden has dementia because he’s old. Neener-neener. And on and on it goes.
Agreed, but the thread title question is, after all, “Where do right-wingers get the idea,” not “Why do they embrace it so enthusiastically once they’ve gotten it?”
The part that’s not just tit-for-tat, IMO, is that the RWers have reached the tipping point where they deliberately embrace falsehoods because they’ve completely lost the thread of truth and falsehood mattering. They simply don’t care–or worse, are happy-- about spouting nonsense and lies.
The distinction is you could always get me to agree that Reagan sometimes said things that make sense (“deficits are bad,” or “immigrants help the U.S.”) even if he was pretty dotty much of the time, or begrudgingly to admit that he beat Carter and Mondale fair and square. These guys won’t concede a thing, and don’t care how crazy they sound.
I suspect that this is one big piece of right-wingers’ ammo. Unfortunately I think that most of the electorate has been trained over time to expect politicians/leaders to be perfect, flawless, charismatic performers, while forgetting that IRL, real people verbally stumble, repeat things etc. Not everybody will be a Great Orator but it’s bloody hard not to think of Obama’s speeches when one sees Biden repeat something; it’s truly unfair and unrealistic but I think that in these hyper-polarized times opponents (especially toxic ones) will grab at anything to illustrate weakness.
