Biden’s Brain Is Swiss Cheese And It’s Creepy That
We’re Not Talking About It
By Caitlin Johnstone
September 20, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -I
didn’t watch the last Democratic presidential
primary debates because I
figured that
without Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in there shaking things
up it would be a boring, vapid parade of
insubstantial verbal foam, and I love myself too
much to go through such a horrible ordeal. By all
accounts my prediction was correct, but I did miss
one thing that’s been making the rounds in video
clips for the last couple of days which I find
absolutely bizarre.
Most of you have
probably heard about Biden’s infamous “record
player” comment by
now, but for those of you who missed it, Biden was
asked by debate moderator Linsey Davis to defend
some comments he made about America’s problems with
racism in the 1970s, and he responded by essentially
saying that black people don’t know how to raise
their kids so they need to be taught how by social
workers. Biden has been receiving mainstream
criticism for his racist and paternalistic position,
along with plenty of mockery for saying that parents
need to be told to “make sure you have the record
player on at night” so that kids hear enough words
in early childhood.
It is pretty clear that
Biden was trying to communicate an idea
that is premised on a deeply racist and
condescending worldview, so it’s to be expected that
people would want to talk about that. It’s also to
be expected that people would be making jokes about
how the cute old man said “record player” like a
grandpa. But what isn’t being discussed nearly
enough is the fact that what Biden said was also a
barely coherent, garbled word salad stumbling out of
a brain that is clearly being eaten alive by a very
serious neurological disease.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
I’ve typed out a
transcript of what Biden actually said, verbatim.
There are no typos. I’ve also noted where Biden
closes his eyes, probably to concentrate, which he
does whenever he seems to be struggling especially
hard to string words together. Try to read through
it slowly, word-for-word, resisting the instinct to
mentally re-frame it into something more coherent:
“Well they have to
deal with the — Look, there is institutional
segregation in this country. And from the time I
got involved I started dealing with that.
Redlining. Banks. Making sure that we’re in a
position where — Look, talk about education. I
propose that what we take is those very poor
schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount
of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year.
Give every single teacher a raise that equal [closes
eyes] raise to getting out — the
60-thousand dollar level.
“Number two: make
sure that we bring into the help the — [closes
eyes] the student, the, the teachers deal
with the problems that come from home. The
problems that come from home. We need — We have
one school psychologist for every 1500 kids in
America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are reca
— Now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased
wife is a teacher. They have every problem
coming to them. [Closes eyes briefly]
We have make sure that every single child does
in fact have 3-, 4- and 5- year-olds go to
school — school, not daycare. School. We bring
social workers into homes of parents to help
them deal with how to raise their children. It’s
not that they don’t wanna help, they don’t want
— they don’t know quite what to do. Play the
radio, make sure the television, [closes
eyes tightly] the — ‘scuse me, make sure
you have the record player on at night,
the-the-the-the phone, make sure the kids hear
words. A kid coming from a very poor school, [closes
eyes] a very poor background, will hear 4
million words fewer spoken by the time they get
there.”
Notice how it gets more
garbled the longer he speaks. The response I
transcribed was about 80 seconds in length. That was
just one small part of a debate in which the former
vice president performed no better and forgot
three of his fellow candidates’ names.
Compare this befuddled,
incoherent mess with footage of a younger Biden,
like his
famous quip about
how Rudy Giuliani only ever mentions “a noun and a
verb and 9/11” in a sentence, or this
clip where
he said if Israel didn’t exist America would have to
invent it to protect its interests in the Middle
East. Biden has always been notoriously
gaffe-prone,
but he was also sharp, alert and articulate enough
to deliver a punchline. As journalist Michael
Tracey has
been pointing out,
what we’re
consistently seeing over and over again from the
former vice president now are not “gaffes,” but
clear signs of cognitive decline. Contrast the
difference between Biden’s younger footage and what
was seen at the last debate with footage
of Bernie Sanders throughout the decades,
who has remained virtually identical save for
appearance and hoarseness. Age does not account for
this difference. Biden’s brain is dying.
Weird Silence
It is certainly
understandable that people are concerned about the
presidential frontrunner having a racist worldview.
But what’s really weird and creepy is how few people
are discussing the obvious fact that the
presidential forerunner is also clearly suffering
from the early stages of some kind of dementia. The
brain that spouted the gibberish transcribed above
would probably score poorly on a basic test for the
early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, yet discussion
of his inability to complete a coherent sentence is
relegated to the margins of political discourse.
This is someone who is campaigning to have access to
the nuclear codes, yet we’re only talking about how
he’s kind of racist and not about the fact that his
brain is turning into Swiss cheese right before our
eyes. It’s freaky.
It’s freaky, but it
kind of makes sense. One common difficulty in
getting early treatment for people with Alzheimer’s
disease is that those suffering from it often go
to great lengths to hide their impairments,
and another difficulty is that their families are often
deeply in denial about
their loved one’s mental decline. According
to the Mayo Clinic,
“Some people hide their symptoms, or family members
cover for them. That’s easy to understand, because
Alzheimer’s dementia is associated with loss, such
as loss of independence, loss of a driving
privileges and loss of self.”
I think we’re seeing
precisely this happening, both with Biden, and with
his supporters. Biden himself is clearly doing
everything he can to feign mental competency, and as
a powerful politician aiming to accomplish a
lifelong ambition to
become the U.S. president he’d certainly have a lot
of ego invested in doing so. His supporters seem to
be doing all kinds of denial mental gymnastics
around his cognitive decline as well; just check out
the responses to this Washington
Post tweet for
its article about Biden’s “record player” response.
Biden: "Make sure the record player is on at night" so kids hear more words
https://t.co/szcq0vjVPP
“Don’t pretend you didn’t understand what he
was saying.”
“Actually, I recently saw a turntable for
sale at Best Buys & vinyl records are back on
the market. Try to keep up, WaPo.”
“My 22 year old son and all his friends play
records on record players these days. If you’re
insinuating that Joe is out of touch, you’re out
of touch.”
“Actually currently, there are some people
playing record players because they find the
vinyl record has better sound quality. I think
you are just picking and choosing who to go
after.”
“He was saying they not hearing enough
words. We did. We were read to. We listened to
children’s albums. We had conversations. He was
trying to get at the importance of those things.
He didn’t do a great job on communicating it but
he was right.”
“Twitter snark aside, there are studies to
back up that claim.”
“He got 80% of the way through the debate
without an embarrassing gaffe that highlights
his age. Of course, Trump couldn’t get halfway
through a debate without threatening his
opponent with imprisonment.”
“Honestly…so what. I got the sentiment.”
“Not sure why people are being so
condescending. Vinyl outsold CD last year, so,
you know, record players are everywhere these
days. You could say he’s stuck in the past or
you could say he’s trending. Be kind.”
We saw this same impulse to protect and compensate
for Biden’s mental decline from audience members
during the debate, who gasped
out loud when Julian Castro suggested
that Biden had forgotten what he’d said two minutes
ago. Many rank-and-file Democrats are so desperate
for an end to an administration that is making
them increasingly anxious and neurotic
that they find it cognitively easier to
compartmentalize away from the obvious fact that
Biden is in a state of mental decline than to turn
and face that reality. So they make excuses and
pretend that his demented word salads are perfectly
rational, hip references to the resurging popularity
of vinyl records.
The only people who are absolutely acutely aware of
Biden’s cognitive decline and yet still want him to
become president are his handlers. There is no way
his consistent pattern of verbal unintelligibility
has gone unnoticed by those who are responsible for
facilitating his election, and indeed The
Hill reports that his “allies” have
been floating the idea of scaling back his campaign
appearances and scheduling them for earlier in the
day when he’s not tired to help minimize his “verbal
flubs.” These people are aware that Biden is losing
his mind, but they are pushing him toward the White
House anyway.
If Biden supporters were really intellectually
honest with themselves about what’s going on, they’d
see that they don’t actually want Joe Biden to be
president, they want his unelected, unaccountable
handlers to be president. From a position of
intellectual honesty they’d be taking the position
of arch neocon Bill Kristol, who once
said he’d “prefer the deep state to the
Trump state.”
And of course that wouldn’t be a first among U.S.
presidents even in recent history. Ronald Reagan had
early signs of Alzheimer’s disease during his
presidency according
to his own son, and George W. Bush was
infamously just a puppet of his handlers like Dick
Cheney. Indeed it would be possible to have an
actual, literal Jim Henson puppet as president of
the United States without America’s unelected power
establishment skipping a single beat.
But that’s exactly the point: having a real human
being in there with even a semi-functional mind can
put some inertia on the most sociopathic impulses of
America’s unelected permanent government. Both
Donald Trump and Barack Obama are of course horrible
presidents who have continued and expanded the Bush
administration’s most evil agendas, but Obama slowed
down the push to arm Ukraine against
Russia and slammed
the brakes on a full-scale bombing
campaign on Syria, while Trump was unable to get
along with John Bolton and is losing
interest in Venezuela while resisting the
push to start new wars. Despite all their flaws,
they’ve resisted the permanent government’s worst
impulses in some key ways. If it’s just Biden’s
handlers and the unelected power establishment,
there’s no humanity anywhere near the brake pedal.
Joe Biden thanks his longfriend timefriend who's a friend and has been a friend in and out of public life.
pic.twitter.com/EoUWZeW0an
So this makes sense to
talk about no matter how you look at it. But we’re
not. In mainstream discourse we’re speaking as
though this is just a charmingly gaffe-prone old man
who makes a few controversial statements from time
to time but would still make a fine president, when
really he shouldn’t even be allowed a driver’s
license.
And I just find that
really creepy and uncomfortable. As someone who’s
never been able to leave elephants in rooms alone,
the fact that the leading presidential contender is
neurologically incapable of speaking coherently for
eighty seconds sticks out like dog’s balls and it’s
absolutely freakish that this isn’t front and center
of our political discourse right now. Biden’s
dementia should be the very first thing we discuss
whenever his name comes up, not the last.
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Peace and joy
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