No matter what happens from here, February 8, 2024, is a day the left will not soon forget. There is no sugar-coating the results of Thursday's report on Joe Biden's retention of classified documents by special counsel Robert Hur. Hired by Biden's own Department of Justice, Hur delivered an undeniably chilling description of the mental condition of the sitting president of the United States.
It was so damning that chatter was circulating around Washington that Biden might pull out of the presidential race after the White House scurried to put together an address to the nation on Thursday evening. But when Biden appeared, he ran in the opposite direction, displaying open defiance, angrily denying the totality of the narrative about his mental fitness. The report and Biden's response were so catastrophic that a conventional mainstream reporter asked the president whether he would step down. Another asked rhetorically if he still believes he is the most qualified Democrat to take on Donald Trump. The president's assurances of his mental acuity were overshadowed by yet another episode of confusion where he mixed up Mexico and Egypt.
Exoneration More Damning Than Indictment?
The irony of it all is that the special counsel somehow made his quasi-exoneration of Biden far more damning than if he had recommended an indictment for his willful retention of classified documents - explaining that the only reason he is not making such a referral is that Biden would likely not be convicted by a jury due to being a "well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory." Citing Biden's "diminished faculties in advancing age," Hur backs up his assertion by reporting that Biden could not even remember when he was vice president or when his beloved son Beau passed away "even within several years." Forgetting the particulars of the investigation, it is difficult to conceive of any report that could be more disastrous for a president running for re-election.
Skeptics have long believed Biden is not even calling his own shots, and this report will kick that narrative into overdrive. But as balkanized a political environment as we find ourselves in these days, Biden's mental fitness is no longer amusing - if it ever was. It has become an issue beyond politics. Average Americans reading just the headlines in pro-Biden media will surely be alarmed at the specter of a man with diminished mental faculties controlling the nuclear football. And it comes in the wake of Biden referring to a long-dead French president, François Mitterrand, in the present tense and describing recent conversations with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who passed in 2017.
Evidence of how serious a crisis this is for the White House comes from no less than the grandaddy of the left, The New York Times, which headlined the Hur report "Legal Exoneration, Political Nightmare." Washington's most famous newspaper says the report "paints scathing picture of president's memory." CNN ran a huge banner referring to it - together with a skeptical Supreme Court sending signals that it appears ready to overrule Colorado's removal of Trump from the state's primary ballot - as "a seismic day in politics."
An Unpalatable Biden Ballot?
While this is a political crisis for Democrats, it could evolve into a constitutional crisis of the left's own making if Biden continues to demonstrate the type of mental decline described in the report – the kind requiring consideration of the 25th Amendment, famously cited by the left as a way to remove Donald Trump from office. Democrats and their Amen chorus in the media are now reaping what they have sown.
They forced other candidates out of the primary in order to drag a doddering old man over the finish line. He bowed to their demands to select a vice president based on race and gender who is now widely viewed as unelectable. They ignored or denied his transparent cognitive decline. They buried the laptop from hell, changed election laws in midstream, and poured hundreds of millions of private funding from the hard left into county election boards - all in a full-court press to get Joe Biden elected.
And now, we are supposed to accept that they did not know or believe Joe Biden was cognitively compromised all along. Good luck selling that to an American electorate utterly fed up with the ruling establishment elite.
