Exhibit A of President Biden’s mental unfitness for office is a recent executive order to advance diversity, inclusion, and equity in the federal workforce. It aspires to transform the federal civil service, top to bottom. In the president’s words, “even with decades of progress building a federal workforce that looks like America, the enduring legacies of employment discrimination, systemic racism, and gender inequality are still felt today.” The directive will replace a system based on demonstrated merit with employment based on outward traits having zero to do with objective competence. It will be a weeping effort, since the president will direct the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget together with and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to alter the basic ways millions of public officials are hired and promoted. …

The smoking-gun evidence for dementia here is the missive’s obvious crackpot nature, an example of identity politics run amok. Does the president honestly believe that the Department of Defense will work better if its workforce better resembles the general population? Will planes fly on schedule if we hire more LGBT identifiers or senior citizen as air traffic controllers? This is delusional thinking, and one can only wonder why a sensible adviser did not counsel the president not to sign it.

[Ahem. This is most certainly *not* “smoking-gun evidence for dementia,” not unless we want to go the full Soviet in using mental-health interventions on policy disputes. Is it stupid policy? Yes. Will it help any of the issues Weissberg cites? No. That doesn’t make Biden senile; it makes him an idiot, evidence for which stretches back decades. The 25th Amendment does not apply to stupidity, but an actual and acute incompetence that creates an inability to execute the functions of office. Let’s stop grasping at short cuts. — Ed]