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You know that Joe Biden is beyond salvation by the infantilizing language used by the people around him.
“Big Boy press conference” is how White House press secretaries John Kirby and Karine Jean-Pierre have repeatedly described the president’s rendezvous with the restive media Thursday.
It’s hard to think of a phrase more condescending than “Big Boy” when referring to the 81-year-old commander-in-chief.
Despite their lies and coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline, those who know the president best are inadvertently signaling to us what bad shape he is in.
They use the same language and tone of voice that carers use with elderly dementia patients.
It was a similar vibe when Jill Biden grabbed a microphone at the post-debate party and patronized her husband as if he were a potty-training toddler.
“Joe! You did such a good job!” she gushed at him in a loud sing song voice.
“You answered every question!”
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi adopted the same infantilizing language Wednesday when she appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to extravagantly praise the president for his “spectacular” performance at the NATO summit, knowing he would be watching his favorite TV show.
“I’m very proud of the president,” she said.
Really?
He read a short speech off a teleprompter.
It’s all ‘elderspeak’
It’s an insulting, demoralizing way to speak to an adult, but baby talk is an automatic human response when confronted by an elderly person in cognitive decline.
I worked in a nursing home one summer, and it was instinctive to treat the residents with dementia like babies, switching to simplistic vocabulary, speaking slowly or at a higher pitch.
You were helping them with basic functions, like showering, toileting and feeding, and it felt kinder to speak patiently as if they were children.
What to know about the fallout from President Biden’s debate performance:
- President Biden’s poor performance in the first 2024 presidential debate has left even some Democrats unsure of his fitness for office and future as the party’s candidate.
- Former President Barack Obama admitted that Biden had a “bad” debate, while his rival former President Donald Trump suggested that he was in a “trance” and “choked.”
- Biden told a crowd at a North Carolina rally the day after the debate that he doesn’t “debate as well as I used to” — but insisted that he can still “do this job.”
- The New York Times editorial board called on the president to serve the country by dropping out of the race. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a similar editorial a day later.
- Biden gathered with his family at Camp David to assess the campaign’s future, with his son Hunter reportedly pushing for him to stay in the race. Family members questioned whether the president’s top advisers should be fired after the disastrous debate.
- In a pre-taped interview with ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, Biden claimed that his “bad episode” at the debate was the result of a cold and not any cognitive issues.
- Biden has rejected calls for him to step down from fellow Democrats, insisting to Stephanopoulos that he is the most qualified to win the election. At a Wisconsin rally, he declared that he is “running and going to win again.”
The babying tone creeps into your voice without you realizing.
It’s well-meaning but it also serves as a psychological distancing mechanism to help a carer deal with baffling and confronting behavior.
Dementia researchers call it “elderspeak” and some now regard it as abusive, because it is belittling and diminishes an older person’s self-confidence.
It has to be humiliating for the president to be patronized by his wife and staff in public, even if he is only dimly aware of it.
But now they can no longer deny their badly kept secret, all that Democrats seem to care about is that they might lose the November election.
They don’t seem to care about the danger they have placed the country in with a gaga president in control of the nuclear codes who admits he’s no good after 8pm.
As they issue carefully coded statements to the media, while kvetching behind closed doors about the selfish old man who refuses to bow out gracefully, Democrats look like a rabble of incompetent fraudsters who have come to the end of the dead-end road where duplicity inevitably leads.
Clooney’s disgrace
Hollywood big shot George Clooney disgraced himself with an op-ed in The New York Times Wednesday admitting belatedly what the White House denied, that Biden was non compos mentis at the star-studded fundraiser he hosted in LA last month.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was . . . the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
What a coward. Clooney was happy to saddle America with a cognitively impaired president for another four years as long as nobody found out.
Old Obama hands now are reduced to issuing veiled threats to Joe on social media: Hey Joe, step down or we’ll tell America what you’re really like.
“Joe Biden can leave office as one of the greatest presidents in our lifetimes,” tweeted former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, “or he can leave [as] a stubborn old man who allowed hubris and insecurity to destroy his legacy.”
The old man hanging on to power was the “arrogant and small Joe Biden . . . bragging, defensive, angry, weak,” Lovett wrote, in a taste of the character assassination in store if the president didn’t do what he was told.
“The blowhard with a chip on his shoulder, stubborn, something to prove, his fellow senators rolling their eyes as the finger wags harder, and the stories get longer.”
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd also changed his tune, claiming in a podcast Wednesday that Biden’s refusal to withdraw from the presidential race has made him “rethink a lot of the Biden biography. I still can’t believe he ran for president in the first place, given that his family was in crisis in 2018 . . . I think the entire narrative on Joe Biden is gonna change, in that everything’s always been about his ambition and his ambition comes first.”
No kidding.
Too bad for the former sycophants, but the American people have already wised up to who Biden is and always has been.
The “empathetic, decent” Uncle Joe from Scranton was a fake, and the Obama people and media handmaidens always knew it.
They just leveraged Biden’s personal mythology to fool voters and deny Donald Trump a second term, but now their lies have come home to roost.
For Republicans it’s popcorn time.
“What I’m worried about, Miranda, is whether I can die from an overdose of schadenfreude,” one confided this week.
Eyes on November
Tempting as it is to revel in the Democrats getting a taste of their own medicine, there’s no guarantee of victory in November.
For one thing, Democrats are hellbent on cheating. We know this because they aggressively opposed a Republican bill that requires proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.
There was only one reason to oppose the Save Act, and that is that Dems want illegal aliens to vote in November, or at least register to vote so their ballots can be utilized.
The bill passed the House Wednesday afternoon 221-198, with all but five Democrats voting against it.
“Over the past four years, Joe Biden has welcomed millions upon millions of illegals into the country,” said House speaker Mike Johnson.
“We have long known this was an intentional effort to turn them into voters . . . House Democrats have now proven they believe that illegal aliens should vote in American elections.”
The White House has announced that Biden will veto the bill.
There’s no hiding their wicked plan.