About the special counsel’s report on Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Phil Klein writes:
Too old and senile to prosecute, apparently, and yet Democrats will spend the next year arguing that Biden has the physical stamina and mental acuity to serve another four years as president.
This sort of take is so typical of Manichaean American conservatives — especially of anti-anti-Trump conservatives such as Phil. There’s no nuance in Phil’s analysis, no empathy, no comprehension of the many gray areas that make up our political world. Phil’s implication here seems to be that a man who cannot remember when he was was vice president, or when the Afghanistan withdrawal occurred, or when his son died is probably also a man who is incapable of remembering things that are important to his job as president of the United States. To advance this idea, Phil cherry picks and weaponizes certain phrases from the report he cites. He notes a line about Biden appearing to the public “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”; pulls out the suggestion that Biden has terrible “limitations in his recall”; and links to the conclusion that it would be “difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
What Phil declines to relay, though — probably because he hopes you won’t look it up — is that the report doesn’t say at any point that Biden is having any trouble being president. Indeed, if one reads the document carefully, it is reasonable for one to assume that Biden struggled during the special counsel’s investigation precisely because he is so sharp, energetic, and, frankly, handsome during the rest of his time in the White House. What Biden apparently can’t do is perform his role as president and comply with the many right-wing witch-hunts that have been thrust unjustly into his life. But who could? Certainly not one of those younger men, who lack Biden’s stamina and wit.