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:

1. 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.
2. US Election: For Joe Biden, Empathy Wins the Presidency--January 2020
3. Biden’s empathy could reshape U.S. attitudes about gender--July 2021
4. How Empathy Defines Joe Biden--August 2020
5. Joe Biden’s Empathy Offensive--June 2020
6. Joe Biden: An Empathetic Leader Whose Time Has Come--November 2020
7. “Empathy Matters”: Joe Biden endorsers highlight the same trait--April 2020
8. Joe Biden’s empathy may result in a ‘therapeutic’ foreign policy--November 2020
9. 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:

1. Biden Ran on Competence and Empathy. Afghanistan is Testing That--The New York Times
2. President Biden Calls Past Week “Heartbreaking,” in Redo, With Empathy--Deadline
3. Empathizer-in-Chief exposed as a lie--New York Post
4. 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:

1. How to handle a lack of empathy in dementia patients
2. Why there is a lack of empathy within people with dementia
3. Emotion detection deficits and decreased empathy in patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease
4. Study shows why some dementia patients lack empathy
5. Imaging helps understand empathy loss in dementia
6. 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.