Editor’s Note: Say What? is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: Front and center, as 2022 heads into its second month, is the steep decline of the 46th president. Now into his second year in the Oval Office, he is already on the precipice of irrelevance after all he’s done to reverse the policies of Donald Trump and the reaction of the American people whose approval in recent polls has reached as low as a pitiable 33%. But beyond the disasters he’s created in Afghanistan and at the border, the urban crime wave that continues, more COVID deaths than under Trump, raging inflation, one defeat after another in court for his heavy-handed COVID-related mandates, and adversaries like Russia now beating the drums of war, it’s Joe Biden’s behavior that has people most concerned.
First, there was a speech that may well mark a turning point in his presidency. In Georgia, pushing for the lost cause of federalizing elections, essentially assuring permanent rule by his Democratic Party, this president — who made unity the central theme of both his campaign and his inaugural — ripped apart those who disagree in a speech so divisive and incendiary it likely would have made Donald Trump blush. And the next day, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he could hardly believe what he heard.
Joe Biden: Do you want to be on the side of Dr. [Martin Luther] King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
Mitch McConnell: Twelve months ago, this president said disagreement must not lead to disunion. Ah, but yesterday he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War, the Civil War!!! … to demonize Americans who disagree with him, he compared, listen to this, a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors … How profoundly unpresidential.
Tim: George Wallace and Bull Connor were infamous 20th-century racists in the South, and Jefferson Davis was president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Biden likely forgot, though, that all three of those men were, like him, members of the Democratic Party. Notice how Democrats run from their history while Republicans tend to embrace theirs?
Meanwhile, Biden spent months trying and failing to reverse the one or two votes necessary for Democrats to open the floodgates and pass not only that voting rights monstrosity but also a gigantic inflationary social welfare package, granting massive new powers to the central state. The fly in the ointment has been Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), along with Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), to hold the line against the party’s recklessness. Manchin over and over has refused Biden’s demand to overturn the long-standing filibuster that protects the minority party in the Senate. And one day in a hallway in the Capitol, the West Virginia senator put a final stop to it and explained why.
Reporter: Anything [Biden] can say to change your mind on filibuster procedure?
Joe Manchin (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Joe Manchin: The filibuster is what we have, our rules. The filibuster’s what makes the Senate hopefully work when it’s supposed to work. We need some good rules changes, and we can do that together. But you change the rules with two-thirds of the people that are present. So it’s Democrats and Republicans changing the rules to make the place work better. Getting rid of the filibuster does not make it work better.
Tim: And so that was that, Manchin standing as a lone bulwark against a massive expansion of federal power. But what to make of Joe Biden’s increasingly mean, incoherent, unhinged behavior and increasingly frequent fits of profanity, all of which widely respected Dr. Marc Siegel sees as entirely consistent with the classic symptoms of dementia.
Reporter: Why are you so confident he’ll [Vladimir Putin] change his behavior, Mr. President?
Joe Biden: Yeah, I’m not confident he’ll change his behavior. Where the hell … What do you do all the time?
Another reporter: Mr. President, can I ask you a quick question on Israel before you drive away since it’s so important?
Joe Biden: No, you can’t.
Peter Doocy, Fox News: Do you think inflation is a political liability now?
Joe Biden: That’s a great asset, more inflation. What a stupid son of a b–ch.
Dr. Marc Siegel: There have been erratic, emotional outbursts. There have been lapses. There have been memory losses. There’s also the issue of the surgical repairs of his brain aneurysms that he had in 1988. They opened the skull in ’88. And there’s a study that shows a 50% risk of long-term cognitive problems. Atrial fibrillation. He has an irregular heartbeat. Study out of Nature Cardiology in 2018 shows twice the risk of cognitive problems as a result. And one more thing, that wasn’t a hot mic moment with Peter Doocy. He was talking into the mic one minute and the next minute he’s calling him SOB into the same mic. Why would he think the mic was off? It was on a second before. So all of this is eyebrow-raising and needs investigation.
Tim: This, of course, is deeply disturbing enough, but it gets worse for Biden, if that’s possible, because this president has to know that as a Democrat, when you hear NBC’s Chuck Todd, one of his chief supporters as a typically Trump-deranged member of big corporate media, say this about you, you are, as we wrote recently on LibertyNation.com, teetering on the brink of relevance.
Chuck Todd: He’s lost his political identity that got him both the nomination and the presidency, right? What got him the nomination? He seemed electable. He seemed experienced. And he wasn’t as far left as Bernie Sanders. But he was seen as somebody who was pragmatic, who would do what’s possible, not what’s impossible. And a year in, he’s been focused on a lot of the impossible. What our poll shows and I think what the reality they’re facing is the guy that was successful in 2020 is the guy they need to get back in front of voters again in 2022 if they want to rescue the political side of this presidency.
Tim: The problem for Biden is that he won’t have a deadly pandemic to exploit anymore like when he was a candidate mercilessly blaming Trump for every COVID death. And the country is also now wise to the clever schemes of the Democrats employed to shoehorn this obviously enfeebled career politician into the Oval Office.
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
