Joe Biden’s made-up stories and manner raise serious questions about his mental health
President Biden is having a series of worrisome episodes that seem to be a mix of his trademark plagiarism (adopting episodes from other public figures’ lives as his own in addition to appropriating their words) and what we sometimes euphemistically call a “senior moment.”
Recently, President Biden told a truck driver: “I used to drive a tractor-trailer.” This wasn’t the first time he had made the claim. But the White House has since conceded that it is a fabrication; asked for proof of Biden’s truck-driving career, aides pointed to a newspaper article showing Biden riding in a truck — once — as part of a publicity stunt. He keeps telling this story, and it keeps being untrue.
But that’s par for the course for Biden, who infamously slandered an innocent man in the matter of the death of his first wife and daughter, claiming that the man had been a drunken driver. He wasn’t, there was no suggestion that he was, and police reports at the time suggested that it was probably Mrs. Biden who had been at fault in the accident. Yet Biden spent years alleging that the man “drank his lunch” before causing the accident.
Biden also has a rich fantasy life, which is not limited to his mythical truck-driving days. There is cloak-and-dagger stuff, too. On Wednesday, he told an audience that during the Six-Day War, he had acted as a liaison between Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and the Egyptian government. The Six-Day War occurred in 1967, when Levi Eshkol was the prime minister of Israel and Biden was plagiarizing his way toward finishing No. 76 of 85 in law school. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing as a Joe Biden back then. (And nobody was asking for one.) He was years away from beginning his Senate career. This is another fantasy, one that Biden keeps repeating. Is it an ordinary lie, or is it a delusion?
(Biden did later meet Golda Meir. The Israelis were not impressed with the young senator, and certainly were not asking him to be their back channel to Egypt.)
Because of Biden’s long history of habitual dishonesty, it is difficult to tell how much of this is Biden being Biden and how much of it is Biden no longer quite being Biden — how much is his longstanding and familiar moral disability and how much is, as it may be, late-life mental disability.
We need an independent medical assessment of the president’s mental health. That is a sobering fact to face, but face it we must. And right now, we need a Democrat who will say so in public. |
