As we discussed on Friday, Joe Biden finally agreed to sit down for an interview with CBS News that aired this morning. To put it charitably, it did not go very well. Biden was clearly stumbling over his words as he often does and losing the thread of what he was talking about. But CBS has since released another clip from the interview and it delivered another curious moment. Biden was asked what it was the finally drove him to drop out of the race and endorse Kamala Harris as the replacement nominee. The President began his response by saying that he originally ran for the office to be "a transition president." That much is true and you can go back to interviews that were done in 2020 and hear him saying it. But then he followed that up by saying "I can't even say how old I am." Did he misspeak, or was that a moment of honest confession? Even in context, it's difficult to say, but it's worrisome to realize that this is still the guy who is followed around by the person carrying the nuclear codes. (NY Post)

President Biden offered a blunt explanation this week about why he got out of the 2024 presidential race.

“Although it’s a great honor to be a president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do what I — most important thing you can do. And that is — we must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” Biden said during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, which is set to air Sunday.

“When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president,” Biden added. “I can’t even say how old I am – it’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth.”

To be fair to Joe Biden, he did follow up the remark about not being able to say how old he is by saying, "It's hard for me to get it out of my mouth." So what did he mean? Is he sometimes unable to remember his age? (He's still 81, for the record. He'll turn 82 a couple of weeks after the election.) I can relate to a certain extent. I'm getting ready to turn 65 and I sometimes have to pause and figure out my current age. This might also have been an admission that he realizes he trips over his words sometimes and he's not sure if he would pronounce his age correctly. The most charitable interpretation would be that he knows how incredibly old he is and he finds it difficult to say it aloud. It's left to the viewer to decide for themselves.

It was after that exchange that Biden drifted into suggestions that there could be a bloodbath if he lost. He then seemed to attempt to correct himself to say there might be a bloodbath if Trump loses. Neither of those made any sense. If the Democrats lose, there will be no reason for Trump supporters to engage in any sort of violent uprising. If the Democrats win, they will retain control of the deep state and the weaponized justice system. They will be riding out and cracking down like slavedrivers on anyone who appears tempted to perform a rerun of January 6. 

Biden also returns to his concerns about "putting people in place in states where they’re going to count the votes." It was a rather mangled bit of phrasing, but there still doesn't seem to be any explanation for it other than a complaint about having election monitors in place at the polls. Upon further consideration, this may be more of a confession than first meets the eye. Who in the world would be bothered by having people monitoring the veracity of the ballots that are received, either by mail or through in-person voting? The answer is obvious. The only people who don't want the poll workers to be monitored would be those with something to hide. 

We have been given more than sufficient reason to demand that every ballot - particularly the mail-in ballots - be checked against the in-person voting rolls to see if any of them tried to vote twice. They should be matched against local obituary listings to sniff out any dead people who are voting. And every name should be verified for immigration status, particularly now. I'm glad that CBS managed to convince Joe Biden to do this interview. There was nothing groundbreaking in there, but it was a good reminder of how we managed to reach the current crisis conditions in the United States and of the importance of removing these people from power.