No One Set Joe Biden Up: He Destroyed Himself

Veteran reporter Seymour Hersh on his sub stack revealed a haunting picture of a lonely, confused and isolated president deliberately kept isolated by his own inner circle and staff from his oldest friends, even though he wants to see them.

Such a pattern of behavior by a presidential inner circle can only confirm two extraordinary realities. First, that the old president is even more confused and out of this world in private than he is when he is wheeled out on display in public. For his condition must be hidden from his own closest friends.

And second, that the decisions being taken around Biden are no longer his own at all but are being made by his unelected courtiers who are not even formal officials of government, and therefore subject to delivering routine testimony to Congress.

How could his staff have been so inept as to let an 81-year-old man with clear serious health problems (many doctors and nurses have privately confirmed to me his physical micro-patterns of behavior are consistent with advanced Parkinson’s Disease) on the national stage in such a condition?

Also, to the surprise and delight of the Trump campaign planners who pressed for it, this first debate was the earliest ever held in an election year between two presidential contenders. Why did the Biden camp agree to it?

The apparent answer to that question is clear: holding the debate that early still gives the Democrats a two-month window of opportunity to ease Biden – who loves being president – out of the Oval Office before the Democratic National Convention is held in Chicago from August 19 to August 22.

Finally, the extraordinary Hersh has exposed the inner machinations of Biden’s imperial court. And Hersh, at 87, is certainly not at all senile. He is as formidable and alert as he was when he exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam 52 years ago and when I cooperated with him in exposing George W. Bush administration’s deliberately orchestrated plans to conquer and occupy Iraq before the 2003 second Gulf War.

So, the conspiracy theory that “someone” set up President Biden to make a fool of himself in the Great Debate and Take the Fall sounds very reasonable and plausible. But it is already clear that it is not true.

The British-based Reuters News Agency currently has a far better political bureau in Washington than the Washington Post, the Associated Press or the New York Times. On July 1^st, Reuters reporters Trevor Hunnicutt, Nandita Bose, Jarrett Renshaw and Steve Holland exposed the muddled thinking and miscalculations that went into the disastrous decision to let a burned-out Biden debate Trump. Their work is a model of careful, meticulous reporting. It reveals layers of stupidity and incompetence in Biden’s inner circle that no conspiracy theorist could conceive of.

Conspiracy theorists, after all, imagine a perfect world where the most complicated, arcane, ridiculous and improbable of plots always work perfectly. They have never lived in the real world and therefore remain piss ignorant of the sacred Second Law of Thermodynamics – often pithily paraphrased as Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

The Reuters team reported that Biden’s people over-prepared him and exhausted the poor old fool before the debate (the same thing happened to the much younger and far more dynamic Barack Obama in his first debate with Mitt Romney in 2012).

So, it is clear that this was not a conspiracy but even worse, a total screw up by Biden’s handlers as well as by the old fool himself.

And these are the people who tell him what to do with the nuclear codes.

“It is my belief that he was over-coached, over-practiced. And I believe, Biden senior aide Anita Dunn put him in a venue that was conducive for Trump and not for him,” John Morgan, a Florida-based attorney and major Biden fundraiser, told the Reuters reporters.

Far from setting Biden up for a humiliating fall, his inner staff was riding high and filled with confidence before the debate began, the Reuters team reported.

Confidence going into the event was high. Only a month before, Trump had been convicted in a New York State court, albeit in a trial conducted under the most partisan and obviously politically motivated of circumstances, on 34 counts of paying hush money to get a pornographic actress, one Stormy Daniels, to lie.

Now, compared with sending half a million Ukrainian young men to their needless deaths in a totally unavoidable war purely to make Biden and his foreign policy team look good, that is hardly a major issue. But to the hair-splitting, micro-managing, LGBT-obsessed, legally myopic lice who teem in almost all of America’s political circles, but particularly flourish under Biden, this still seemed like a Big Thing.

Then, to make matters worse, they obsessed with setting up an absurd false image of the 81-year-old Biden – for more than 40 years the laziest, least dynamic and most sedentary of US senators and vice presidents, as an Action Man Hero flitting back and forth across Europe and North America in the weeks before the Great Debate.

This absurdity fooled nobody of course, except for the Candidate himself and his circle of sycophants. All it truly did was drain Biden of his remaining tiny reserves of physical and intellectual energy.

To say that the President of the United States walked and talked like a corpse through the debate would be unfair to any cadaver.

One is tempted to compare Biden’s performance on CNN with the dead cocaine dealer and money launderer in the cult comedy classic “Weekend at Bernie’s.” Except Terry Kiser’s Bernie, when dead, showed far more wit, dynamism and panache than Biden ever did when supposedly still living during his debate with Trump. The only time he appeared animated at all was when Trump ridiculed his golf handicap.

This too was an especially shrewd move by Trump. Liberal commentators for nine years have accused Trump of being infantile in his behavior. It has all flowed off him like water off a duck’s back.

But when Biden, who has ludicrously always claimed to be a Mature Adult, instead revealed himself as the most petty and petulant of old fools, that was indeed a truly devastating moment.

Here we come to the crux of the issue. No dark conspiracy centered around Bill and Hillary Clinton, or Barack and Michelle Obama – who in truth are the most likely beneficiaries of this fiasco – were the architects of it. Biden’s own inner circle meticulously prepared every step of the disaster. It was Biden’s own loyal team. And they were so fool and incompetent they thought they were building their Hero up rather than setting him up for the long fall.

Biden’s team made the same mistake Jimmy Carter’s team made before his disastrous debates with Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980. They over-prepared. They micromanaged. They crammed Biden’s head. And it was never capable of holding complicated and multiple accurate facts in great numbers in the first place.

In the weeks before the debate, Biden held back-to-back visits in Europe. The president bounced around Western Europe and the United States like a rebounding table tennis, or ping-pong ball for weeks before the first debate. And on that High Noon event itself in the CNN studios in Atlanta, Georgia, it showed.

And who appointed these amazing idiots to their positions of such influence and weight around the President of the United States in the first place? Why, they were all chosen and approved by Biden himself.

It took a genius at political ineptitude, senility, stupidity, arrogance and comical incompetence to destroy the tattered remnants of the White House incumbent’s credibility as President of the United States.

When up against his own mountainous, towering stupidity, Joe Biden never stood a chance.