Joe Biden isn't speaking coherently enough to fact-check him

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

The good news (?) is that President Joe Biden was able to attend the G-7 summit in Japan this week. The bad news is that someone scheduled him to speak well after the normal end of his daily “work” schedule, with a lid typically being called well before lunch. The result was as predictable as it was uncomfortable to watch. Even having prepared remarks written for him and the usual cue cards from his handlers, Biden rambled on for more than forty seconds at one point, leaving the audience to wonder precisely what it was that they’d just witnessed. At PJ Media, our colleague Robert Spenser has the awkward details.

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If he didn’t bear the title of president of the United States and you met Old Joe Biden in any social setting, you’d smile and nod and not try to make any sense of what he was saying, because it would be abundantly clear that this is a man who is not in full possession of his faculties. But the poor WhiteHouse.gov transcript wonks have to try to turn Old Joe’s dementia-addled ramblings into something remotely approaching sense and accuracy, and he had them working overtime at a G7 Summit press conference on Sunday.

While it’s still somewhat painful to watch, turn on the volume and check out this clip from Japan. It’s 41 seconds of fundamental incoherence in front of an audience of world leaders. Even the non-English speakers had to have known that something was wrong.

It’s hard enough to get the corporate media to fact-check the Biden administration on the best of days, but what are they supposed to do with that? To their credit, when Joe’s team posted a transcript of these remarks on the White House website, they left in a couple of the blunders switching billions to trillions and putting strike-through fonts on the errors. But the rest of it was still very much cleaned up by his handlers. (You need to scroll down to the first question from the Q&A portion of the event to read it.)

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That wasn’t the only awkward moment of cognitive decline during the trip. While in Japan, Biden once again told troops that his son Beau had died in Iraq. Nobody corrected him.

President Biden told US forces stationed in Japan that his son Beau perished in the Iraq War, a video obtained exclusively by The Post reveals — after the president stoked questions about his own mental acuity by making the same incorrect claim at least twice last year.

“My son was a major in the US Army. We lost him in Iraq,” the 80-year-old president said during an informal visit with troops at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni Thursday.

Of course, Beau Biden died as a result of complications from brain cancer in a hospital back in the United States. But at this point, I no longer believe that Joe Biden is actually “lying” about this. To be clear, I’m not a doctor, but our family unfortunately has had plenty of experience with relatives reaching various stages of cognitive decline as they age. As far as I can tell, Biden isn’t even capable of lying about this aspect of his family history. He’s reached the point where he can no longer differentiate between actual events and the various stories he’s told over the years. He probably does believe that Beau died in Iraq at this point. It’s sad to watch. And the fact that his wife would push him to run for four more years in office in this condition demonstrates what a cruel woman she really is.

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