Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
I didn’t watch the last Democratic presidential primary debates because I figured that without 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.
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 sixty-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 fifteen hundred 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 three, four, and five 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 four 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 eighty 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.
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 US president he’d certainly have a lot egoically 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
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 13, 2019
Here are a few examples:
“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 US 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 Trump and 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.
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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So what’s the big fuss about? Muricans have been electing brain addled people for decades. Remember W?
Big difference between the slowness of W and the advanced dementia of Biden. W’s condition did not deteriorate over the 8 years and Biden will be incapacitated within 4 years.
Uncle Ronnie was out to lunch his second term. And once Bush 2 was elected he imitated Uncle Ronnie’s syrupy voice.
Big Mike is teeing up his campaign with his speaking tour with tickets topping out at $4,200. When Biden has had enough, Big Mike will step in to fill the void.
Biden is the perfect candidate to work with Pelosi.
They both can cry wolf in a crowded theater together.
And then they will ask each other why they are in the theater.
The stress must be unimaginable, a lifetime of horrific misdeeds culminating in a must win or perish hail mary.
It is the only logical answer for why he is even out there.
He is in such horrible shape it will be a miracle if he survives the campaign.
did corn pop have a record player?
Biden campaign ad:
The side effects of a joebotomy in full bloom.
Sundowning
Neurological Phenomenon
Sundowning, or sundown syndrome, is a neurological phenomenon associated with increased confusion and restlessness in patients with delirium or some form of dementia. Most commonly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, but also found in those with other forms of dementia, the term “sundowning” was coined due to the timing of the patient’s confusion. For patients with sundowning syndrome, a multitude of behavioral problems begin to occur in the evening or while the sun is setting. Sundowning seems to occur more frequently during the middle stages of Alzheimer’s disease and mixed dementia. Patients are generally able to understand that this behavioral pattern is abnormal. Sundowning seems to subside with the progression of a patient’s dementia. Research shows that 20–45% of Alzheimer’s patients will experience some sort of sundowning confusion.
Amen! This has been happening to me regularly in my later years. I have noticed that as I age, while sitting in my favorite chair and watching the sunset, I find I am not sure whether the sun is setting or rising. I would just locate West as opposed to East and that would solve the problem, but that was when I could remember East from West.
You go, Joe, don’t let ‘me get you down! Or was your name Bernie?
The author says “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”. Well, I stopped reading right there.
Why? Becasue with respect to part 1 of that, Biden is absolutely correct with respect to the entire black culture in the US – blacks as a whole do not know how to raise their kids. . Part 2 is bullshit.
Somethink like 755 of black children are born out of wedlock. That is a fact. 65% of black children live in a single parent home (compared to 25% of whites). That is a fact. The reality is inescapable – blacks as a whole DO NOT KNOW HOW TO RAISE THEIR CHILDREN. Why this dumb bitch would try to make the argument that what he said was racist is beyond me.
When you grow up in an environment that reinforces your perspective of perpetual victimhood any criticism of your behavior or identity, even if true, is going to draw a defensive reaction. It’s a US government policy to coddle certain parts of the population and the message is constantly amplified in the media.
Equal opportunity, affirmative action, and lack of coherent corporal punishment in the school system is simply social reinforcement. Trying to solve social issues with a financial bailout only aggravates the problem. The black minority has been given these crutches for years and any effort to curtail the entitlements will draw complaints of racial discrimination.
They’ve been allowed to ‘unlearn’ this by a state that incentivizes and pays for shiftlessness … it took 4 generations (MOL) … remove the incentives and they will relearn it in about 4 generations.
I really wonder why this screw-loose author gets near daily articles posted on this much esteemed blog.
I wondered the same about you. Near daily links to Mathis Miles.
That makeup he’s wearing about glows him through the screen.
I’d like to say that I feel sorry for Mr B., but I don’t. We are nearly the same age, but I believe that by having chosen a less self-aggrandizing and parasitic lifestyle I’ve managed to hold on to more of my marbles than is now the case for this increasingly pathetic figure. If he actually wins the nomination, look very clearly at who will be chosen for vice-prez, because that’s with whom you’ll end up if he manages to get elected.
Sadly, Mr B doesn’t seem able to recognize or remember the lyrics of “The party’s over…”:
Monte, my long-held idea is that ever since Uncle Ronnie, the Veep is in fact the capo di tutti capi. The president is a figurehead, the decider when it is convenient but otherwise it’s the Veep in Charge. Bush 1 attempted to retain control with a dunce like Quayle but then they went back to hiring a caretaker for the president.
If you have to say you are the decider, you are not the decider.
“I wear the pants in the house, right hon?” – Doc Pangloss
Bunches of “brain fade” in my family. FirstWife’s mother. My father’s mother and her “sundown syndrome”. My mother’s father’s decilne into a harmless regression. And me rarely leaving the house during my late wife’s final two years with Alzheimer’s. Dunno if that makes me an expert, but it’s been way to0 many hours of observation.
For all that Biden had some correctness in his ramble, the fact remains that it was an incoherent ramble. In no way a clear statement of a problem. And as usual from the Left, “Moar moolah!” was his solution.