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Memory Lane and “The Empathy Thing”
Axios has obtained and released lengthy excerpts from the audio recordings of Joe Biden’s October 2023 testimony before Special Counsel Robert Hur. Here’s just one:
And there, you have it. A focused, 20-second direct question followed by over four minutes of painful, incoherent, and irrelevant rambling. Eventually, as Biden winds down to his trademark “…anyway…,” Robert Hur asks if he’d like to take a brief break, but Joe–seemingly oblivious of, and unable to read, the room–responds, “No, no, let’s keep going, get it done.”
Since the “words on the page” transcript of Biden’s testimony was released about six months after it was given, perhaps we should not be all that surprised to hear of it again, this time in a different format. Still, I found it disconcerting to listen to Biden’s halting responses, as he became more and more lost in a sea of confused, disconnected, and sad personal and political reminiscences that had nothing to do with the subject at hand.
In February 2024, Robert Hur laid out his conclusions, in his formal report, that there was, in fact, some fire to the smoke of accusations that had precipitated the investigation of Biden’s improper retention of classified documents, but that further action against the president would be futile (my word, not Hur’s), because:
…at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.
Hur continued:
Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. 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.
For the crime of having noticed–and pointing out–the obvious, Hur was excoriated by many in the press, and many partisans on the Hill–who clearly wanted to see Biden fully exonerated–including Vice President Kamala Harris, who said that Hur’s remarks were “gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate,” and that:
The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated. And so I will say that when it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.
The rest of Biden, Inc., which was still pushing the narrative that Joe led his family and his staff in a pre-dawn version of the Hare and Hounds running game (which he always won, BTW) through the White House grounds every morning, swiftly fell into line.
The subject of the Axios audio excerpts came up on another post here, with the word “appalling” used to describe them.
Here was my response:
“Appalling” doesn’t even cover the half of it. A focused, 20-second direct question followed by over four minutes of painful, incoherent, and irrelevant rambling.
Crimenutely.
Let’s accept the conventional wisdom that he wasn’t this bad all the time. Perhaps he was this bad only 25% of the time. Perhaps 50% of the time, he could muddle through (just barely, sort of). And perhaps 25% of the time he really was doing quadruple backflips off the Resolute Desk while solving Fermat’s Last Theorem in his head before sticking the landing.
If he was your loved one, if you cared about his legacy, if you cared about what’s left of the family reputation, would you risk his appearing on a debate stage in front of an audience of 50 million people, with those odds?
Ugh.
His family should have stopped this. Before he ran in 2020. Before he ran in 2024. At any point in between. It’s a scenario that almost everyone understands: Take the car keys away from Grampa, even if the stubborn old fool doesn’t want to give them up. In many cases, it’s the most loving thing a family member can do.
It takes a lot to make me feel sorry for Scranton Joe, who I’ve always thought was a nasty, greedy, corrupt, venal, and selfish man. This does make me feel (almost) sorry for him. Maybe Beau was the one person who loved him enough, whom he trusted enough, whom he might have listened to, and who might have talked him off the stage. The rest of the family seems to have either insisted, or allowed, that he should remain in a highly challenging, highly visible position where he clearly couldn’t cope, but where they, in return, retained their own visibility and power.
And his humiliations continue, as he makes the rounds on national and international media, sometimes accompanied by his wife, who steps in and takes over when she doesn’t appear to like the way the interview is going.
Double ugh.
My message to anyone here who thinks that I’ve gone squishy is that it’s possible to believe two opposing notions at the same time. In this case, they are that 1) I loathe watching what has been done to Joe Biden by those who should have his best interests at heart, and 2) I loathe Joe Biden, and everything he represents.
Almost four years ago, in the aftermath of the pullout from Afghanistan, I wrote a post here, titled The Empathy Thing. On re-reading it, and the comments that went along with it, I am reminded that the debate following the Afghanistan withdrawal might have been an inflection point, but that it became a wasted opportunity instead. I see how so many of the details on record at the time foreshadowed the inevitability of the current situation, how very little has changed since, and how things might have been very different. And I’m sad for what the country has been through since.
Here’s the original post:
August 23, 2021:
I typed four words into Google: “joe biden president empathic.” Here are the top hits:
- Biden may be just the person America needs. In the entire history of American presidential campaigns, there may never have been a wider gap in empathy than between Donald Trump and Joe Biden–November 2020.
- US Election: For Joe Biden, Empathy Wins the Presidency–January 2020
- Biden’s empathy could reshape U.S. attitudes about gender–July 2021
- How Empathy Defines Joe Biden–August 2020
- Joe Biden’s Empathy Offensive–June 2020
- Joe Biden: An Empathetic Leader Whose Time Has Come–November 2020
- “Empathy Matters”: Joe Biden endorsers highlight the same trait–April 2020
- Joe Biden’s empathy may result in a ‘therapeutic’ foreign policy–November 2020
- Biden’s first address to the nation: Truth, empathy, and results–March 2021.
It’s absolutely sick-making.
I’ve never seen it myself. The glad-handing, the rictus grin, the hair-sniffing and groping of young children, the weird–almost perverse–stories he tells about himself: I’ve been creeped out by all those things for decades. Then there’s the lying. About his education, his academic achievements, his wife’s tragic car accident (good old empathetic Joe; ruining a man’s life by falsely accusing him of driving while intoxicated and causing the crash that killed his wife and daughter), his plagiarism, his positions on a half-a-century worth of failed domestic and foreign policy initiatives. And what was it the other day–oh, right: His time spent driving an eighteen-wheeler around the country.
I’ve known a few mountebanks in my life. But Joe Biden may just take the cake.
But. The Empathy Thing.
Somehow (well, not really somehow–-actually through a carefully crafted and controlled media blitz, decades in the making and still ongoing) the empathy thing has stuck to Joe Biden like flypaper. He’s had so much personal tragedy. His wife died. His daughter died. His son fought in Iraq, suffered from cancer, and died. Another son is a complete train wreck. He’s had a life-threatening aneurysm (two actually) requiring brain surgery, and a pulmonary embolism. No one has ever borne as much suffering with as much grace as Joe Biden! He’s Everyman! He gets us. He feels our pain. He loves us. Never mind if he’s creepily handsy, tells the guy in a wheelchair to stand up and take a bow, can’t remember the name of the woman who’s running the FEMA effort in New York, thinks his vice president is some sort of general, or often seems to occupy an alternate reality inside his own headspace. He’s just a regular guy with problems, like you and me. He cries for us, and he cares!
I suppose, just like pride, such gullibility goeth before a fall, and this week, the chattering classes fell. Joe’s grandfatherly forays (four so far?) before the cameras to explain himself vis-a-vis the catastrophe in Kabul have been spectacularly unconvincing if the point of them was to convince us that the people running the operation at the highest level are anything other than incompetent boobs. That they are incompetent boobs, and that the incompetent boobery goes all the way to the top, comes across loud and clear.
But what has really shocked (shocked!!!) the chatterati has been Biden’s lack of empathic affect at the human toll of this debacle, or even at the evidently dangerous circumstances the swift withdrawal has created for Americans still in Afghanistan. Reminded by George Stephanopoulos that desperate Afghans were clinging to planes and falling off them from hundreds of feet up in the air to their deaths, Biden snapped, “That was four, five, days ago!” (Actually, at the time he said that, it was two days ago. But who’s counting? And why? Is there some sort of statute of limitations on that sort of horror?)
All this chaos? Unavoidable. Would have happened no matter what. Couldn’t have been handled better. Americans who want to leave? All they have to do is get to the airport. No one is preventing them getting to the airport. The Taliban is keeping its word. (Meanwhile, American citizens have been told not to go to the Kabul airport unless individually instructed to do so because such a journey is unsafe.) When asked about the chaos and desperation at the airport, Biden responded, “But nobody’s died! Nobody’s died!” (That was then. This is now.)
Today [Sunday 8/23/2021], Biden did manage to enunciate the word “heartbreaking,” when it appeared before him on the teleprompter, but as with his other appearances, his affect was flat and disengaged relative to the horror he’s reporting on, and he regularly stumbled and, several times, got completely lost.
And so now we have (in response to a Google, “joe biden president empathic” search:
- Biden Ran on Competence and Empathy. Afghanistan is Testing That–The New York Times
- President Biden Calls Past Week “Heartbreaking,” in Redo, With Empathy–Deadline
- Empathizer-in-Chief exposed as a lie–New York Post
- Biden, who promised empathy in 2020, blasted for abandoning Americans overseas–Fox.
So what’s going on here?
Type two more words into Google: “empathy dementia.” Here we go:
- How to handle a lack of empathy in dementia patients
- Why there is a lack of empathy within people with dementia
- Emotion detection deficits and decreased empathy in patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease
- Study shows why some dementia patients lack empathy
- Imaging helps understand empathy loss in dementia
- The study reveals the underlying cause of empathy loss.
And so on.
I didn’t really need to do the last Google search, because, like so many others, I’ve lived alongside it. I’ve watched more than one person in my life fade away as their world closes in until there is nothing of themselves left, and they have no more awareness of a life beyond their own basic needs than does a day-old infant. And then, one day, not even that. And along the way, as part of the continuum of cognitive decline, the ability to appreciate, respond to, or even simply just recognize the emotions of others, or to respond in an emotionally appropriate, or even vaguely kind way, declines along with everything else. I am sure it’s pure torture to experience it on the inside. I know it’s pure torture to experience the fallout from it as the “other.”
I fear there is something very, very wrong going on here. And today [Sunday 8/23/2021], when I see that the Telegraph (not normally a “Boy Eats Own Foot!!!” sort of shrieking tabloid, and usually a fairly reliable news source) has a lengthy article titled Joe Biden’s aides ‘too afraid’ to tell him he was wrong on Afghanistan, say White House Insiders, I worry a little:
President Joe Biden’s aides were “too scared” to question him on key decisions made in the run-up to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, sources close to the administration have told The Telegraph.
Mr Biden, who is facing the greatest crisis of his presidency, is said to have insisted on recalling troops ahead of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and ignored warnings that it would not leave the military with enough time to get US citizens and allies out.
Speaking to people close to the administration, The Telegraph has managed to build a picture of a stubborn-headed and defensive president continuing to tout his foreign policy nous, and a staff too afraid to question him.
One former defence official, who is in regular contact with senior White House aides, suggested that there was not much pushback from concerned officials because they were “too afraid”.
I don’t think this can go on much longer. I’m not sure what comes next. But I don’t think it’s going to be either easy or pretty. And as much as I loathe just about everything Joe Biden represents, I’m not going to enjoy it much.
It did go on, much longer than I hoped it would. But I’m still not enjoying it much.
Published in General
FYI, anyone with the time and inclination:
The full 5 hour audio available here.
I agree. I just finished reading House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. The lead character, Lily Bart, through her own actions helped by others, is completely destroyed. A main discussion point is whether she is a sympathetic character. The general consensus is no, she is too complicit and has enough base motivations that one does not feel sympathy for her. On the other hand, one does feel pity. Lily Bart has more redeeming qualities than Joe Biden, so I don’t even pity him. But he was ill-served by his grasping, greedy family and his failure of a party and everyone else who didn’t “take away his car keys”. As I wrote in an earlier post after the debate:
“I don’t feel sorry for Joe Biden—I believe he is reaping what he has sown. But he is being torn apart by all the factions with which he is surrounded. And that is sad to watch.”
The best assessment of that rotting bag of oatmeal, as Bongino called him, is that “he is just stupid enough to always think he is the smartest person in the room”. Wish I could remember where I heard that.
In my experience, most of the people whose career involves them always believing themselves to be the smartest person in the room are anything but.
In what I laughingly call “my career” I had the experience of seeing two of those have their careers destroyed because of that characteristic. In one case, I was forced to be one of three people in the room when it happened.
Joe Biden was always a nasty piece of work – he never had empathy for anyone. And I guess Jill and Hunter adopted that trait by the way they treat him now – it is elder abuse for the benefit of holding onto power. And that trait was also adopted by the Democrat Party and the Legacy Media. They are all complicit in the lie that Joe was mentally competent. What a disgraceful time in the history of our country.
I think it’s possible to view the August 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal (just seven months into Biden’s presidency) and the June 2024 debate (just seven months before he left office) as figurative “bookends” to his term.
It’s pretty clear from the Afghanistan debacle that Biden was riding herd over his “Generals,” who later appeared before Congress first in rather general open, and then in “much more blunt” closed session testimony, to the effect that they had (to a man, I believe) recommended a different plan, and a different course of action, because they believed that a sudden, precipitous withdrawal would risk exactly the sort of outcome that did occur. Not much was made of their testimony, other than by Axios (which appeared, even then, to be doing its best to go after the story), and none of them went rogue at the time the events were taking place or in its immediate aftermath. The only serving officer who did speak out–former USMC LtCol Stuart Scheller–is, as far as I know, the only member of the military at any rank who paid a price for speaking what is now widely recognized as the truth. (Apparently Scheller has been working since late April as a Senior Advisor to an Undersecretary at the DoD.)
None of Biden’s “Generals” (I include under the umbrella term other senior officials in associated defense and intelligence-type agencies who–I suspect–felt as Mark Milley and Kenneth McKenzie did) spoke up. They didn’t widely leak their dissatisfaction to the press, ginning up the firestorms of criticisms that erupted every time Joe Biden said, or did, something that the “Generals” didn’t like or approve of. They didn’t phone up (as far as I’m aware) Taliban leaders and assure them that, should Biden suddenly go off the rails and order a nuclear strike on their Supreme Leader’s compound in Kandahar, the “Generals” would be sure to give him plenty of notice so he could take evasive action. They didn’t, ex-officio (and even, I believe, while a few of them were still serving), sign open letter after open letter, which letters appeared all over legacy media, in an effort to lift up diminish their current Commander-in-Chief, Joe Biden, in the interests of elevating another.
The lid was firmly on, from that moment forward.
It seems as though the Afghanistan withdrawal may have been the moment when Biden, Inc. dug in, and after which the the movement to protect and elevate the Biden presidency in the face of what was deemed an unthinkable alternative, lost touch with the voters, and overcame reality.
Enough has been written about what I’m calling the other “bookend” to the Biden Presidency, debate night on June 27, 2024, the night the whole edifice came crashing down, that I don’t think I have to belabor the point.
To anyone who says:
I have only two words in response:
“Abbey Gate.”
There were others. God rest their souls.
PS: One of Biden’s false claims, during that disastrous June 2024 debate, not quite three years after Abbey Gate [edited to fix original, incorrect, date reference] was that “The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any – this – this decade – doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like [Trump] did.”
How soon he forgot. Which has been exactly my point throughout all these miserable conversations.
And as evidence of Press complicity in the cover-up of his declining faculties, Biden took a total of 7 questions about the Afghanistan withdrawal during the remainder of his presidency.
@she I was re-reading the C.S. Lewis passage Men Without Chests, the first section of The Abolition of Man, and when I came back to Ricochet your post was here. I think Lewis is saying we must teach boys how to become men and girls how to become women when they are young. This includes learning the morality of right and wrong behavior and understanding the meaning of a balance between reason and emotion. There is a lot embedded within this concept.
I’m sure the propagandistic approach we have allowed to envelop our education approach along with the changes to family life and child-rearing has taken things much farther than Lewis could have seen.
What the Biden family has not only allowed but fostered themselves and been joined in that horrendous endeavor by many government and media officials is as bad as things can get.
The first twenty-five minutes or so of Mark Halperin’s (highly recommended) “Next Up” podcast from May 14 are well worth a listen.
https://x.com/NextUpHalperin/status/1922666367104204849
Halperin, hardly a swivel-eyed loon, picks apart the emerging polite fiction that Jake Tapper is one of those who have long been trying to uncover the truth about Biden’s cognitive decline.
In this debate, Halperin’s opinions fall very much on the side of Christine Rosen of Commentary Magazine, (see here) and Charles CW Cooke, as expressed in the most recent National Review Editors’ podcast.
Halperin speaks of his own disillusionment with Biden, which began in 2017, after Biden had exited the Vice-Presidential role, and when Halperin encountered Biden on a book tour, during which Halperin describes Biden as a “glassy-eyed” and a “train wreck,” who had “trouble following the conversation.” Halperin relates that he said to himself, “How could his family and his advisors, possibly let him go on a book tour, when he was in no position to go on a public stage? ♥
This was in 2017.
And so Halperin subscribes to the idea that Biden’s decline should have been perfectly obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, and he does not believe that Biden’s family (no matter their motives or skill) could have engendered a “cover-up of something that was on television on a nearly nightly basis” without the explicit consent and collusion of the press.
I agree. In a world where we’ve been taught to distrust the evidence of our own eyes and our own experience, as we’re instructed that we must wait for the “experts” to descend from on high and tell us what to think (“a man can be a woman” is one of the more egregious examples; you get the idea), sometimes there’s a moment, or a movement, so clarifying that it transcends all boundaries, and we are forced to acknowledge simple and raw truth.
This has been such a one.
That the United States legacy media was unable to make this great leap forward is dispiriting to say the least.
Not just dispiriting. How can anyone explain it? Not just the fact that the media did this, how about the many high-level government officials? If mere power is it then we really need to figure out how to have the people prevail over this behavior. I think it must be even more evil than we can imagine.
Going back to the thoughts of C.S. Lewis, have we engendered within our people when they were young an inability in terms of courage to take an action that likely removes them from their prestigious positions?
Well, perhaps. If they were capable of the insight you relate, perhaps the British government might understand.
Its latest initiative is explained in the Telegraph article, Children to be taught to show some ‘grit’
I can’t help thinking of a Punch cartoon from the 1950s, in which some middle-class English housewife who’s encountered–for the first time–“advertising” on ITV, the new commercial television platform, says to her friend something like “I just don’t understand the purpose of these advertisements. First, they give you a headache. Then, they try to sell you something to cure it”
If Britain thinks it can solve the crisis among young people with a couple of forty-minute modules, twice a week, taught by the same daft and woke people who got us into this situation in the first place, then Britain has another think coming…
Look at how corporate entities have approached the DEI phenomenon.
First, they signed on and made really significant and costly accommodations. To watch now how easily they backed off shows there was no conviction. Do they do any thinking about these things?
Play it as background music in the halls of Congress in perpetuity.
I suppose it’s understandable that he would have decided to keep those thoughts to himself at the time (2017), since Biden was out of office.
However, …
As far as I know, he continued to remain utterly silent on the matter after Biden announced for President. That would have been a good time for him to speak up, but that would have taken courage. Courage that was left to others, too few in number, to muster.
Sometimes, the bandwagon is imperfect. Sometimes, we catch up with it, and sometimes it catches up with us.
I believe in celebrating the moments when the latter become unavoidable, rather than in focusing on the former, when those who dislike us so intensely, can’t make the reach. YMMV. I’m sorry if it does. Because, when it comes down to it, we seem to have much in common. You may reject that theory. I do not.
Biden’s incapacity was evident during the 2020 campaign and every day afterwards. Any observer with half a brain could see that he was and is demented. All shame on the Legacy Media and the Dems and especially upon those in the know, especially his family, for abusing a sick old man and harming our country in this way.
Oh, I’m not focusing on Halperin’s failure to speak up until now. But I do think it bore mentioning. If for no other reason, I suppose, than to honor those courageous few who did.
PS:
Yes, we do seem to have much in common, “She”. For instance, we don’t suffer fools lightly.
Sounds like another president we could mention who can’t handle simple interview questions and switches to talking nonsense, usually about himself. YouTube link. Maybe the media could do the empathy ploy on him.
Anyone who thinks Trump’s mental state is comparable to Biden’s is probably dimmer than Biden is.
I was trying to figure out how to respond but you got it.
I should have said nothing. Not every comment deserves a response.
There is a gargantuan difference between this Trump Administration and the previous Biden Administration that won’t yield much in the way of comparison. It is in the comparative thinking (Biden versus Trump) going into the process of developing and implementing policy to serve specifically the interest of the American people. Any attempted comparison is ineffective because we now know essentially nothing was coming from Biden and we have no way to know actual sources although we do have clues. But huge amounts of resources, people and time, were spent covering for Biden’s cognitive deficiency, actually falsifying information and covering up facts. Any pretense to the contrary displays a lack of caring.
It sure would be interesting if they’re somehow able to nullify a bunch of “pardons,” including those supposedly signed when FJB was out of the country.
I would like to see some process in place that would deny any government contract or grant using taxpayer funding that would go to any entity with an identifiable official association with any official who can be verifiably connected to falsity we just went through. This is something like what President Trump has put in place against those law firms that were involved in things like the Russia Hoax and a lot of what was going on at USAID.
And the idea that law firms, for example, have some “civil right” to do business with the government, is laughable. But they’re trying it anyway.
Much of what we have just gone through is as close as one can get to law-breaking without resulting in official legal punishment since all the lying and covering up is a breach of each individual’s Constitutional oath.
They went waaaay over the line. They just never imagined there would come a day of reckoning.
I’m just waiting for someone here to appear and contest this idea, like @yarob, for instance.