Joe Biden, like Forrest Gump, is not a smart man. His latest Ron Burgundy moment comes as Exhibit 1,322b.
READ MORE: Joe Biden, President Non Compos Mentis
On Monday, he quoted a woman calling high-speed internet “the best thing that has happened to rural America since the Rural Electrification Act brought electricity to farms in the 30s and 40s.” When he finished reading that off a teleprompter, he read the words: “End of quote.”
When you lead the No. 1 news team in San Diego, this sort of thing can lead to job loss, beard growth, alcoholism, depression, and drinking milk from the carton on a hot day. But Joe Biden merely serves as president of the United States. And Monday’s teleprompter snafu does not come as the first, anyhow. Must one repeat the line about “repeat the line”?
From dressing protectors as the Easter Bunny to screening “journalist” questions in advance, there seems no easy solution. Certainly going off teleprompter without a safety net strikes his on-edge handlers as no solution at all.
Earlier this month, for instance, the president startled League of Conservation Voters by announcing, “We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean.” (RELATED: Think Biden’s Railroad Across the Indian Ocean Is a Fantasy? Check Out California’s Vaunted ‘Bullet Train.’)
Hmmm.
Why not sail a boat all the way across the Indian Ocean instead? Aviation exists as an option, too. Biden may or may not have traveled more than 1 million miles on Amtrak. But that’s not good reason to cover ocean with track. And what happens upon the occasional derailment?
If only he had added an “e” to potato or failed to cite a publication he read regularly — perhaps then the press, Saturday Night Live, and every late-night comic would have associated him with his gaffes forever. As it stands, the notion of building a railroad across the ocean does not indict one as a dullard the way misspelling a word does.
A few days before floating the idea of a transoceanic railway, the president, in non sequitur fashion, punctuated remarks with “God save the queen.”
Not just June but every month one could pen a column on all the president’s blunders. Still, books, not columns, remain the appropriate format in which to document the president’s gaffes.
They fuel speculation about his fitness for office that implicitly revolve around his age. Even Chuck Todd on this past weekend’s Meet the Press raised to Sen. Amy Klobuchar the question of the president’s mental and physical fitness for office.
Is it possible that the same man unfit for office at 80 was also unfit for it at 45? If so, it means that stupidity, not senility, disqualifies him from high office.
Consider Joe Biden at 45.
When a voter asked about his academic credentials, Biden showed not just a massive inferiority complex but a tiny brain. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” he said in New Hampshire. “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.” He went on to boast about his “three degrees,” how he “ended up in the top half of my class” in law school, and how he won “outstanding student” in the political science department.
None of it was true. All of it was checkable. Unlike, say, Bill Clinton, Biden did not understand that even politicians required the good sense about what lies to tell and which ones to avoid telling. Biden seemed to tell his lies on impulse because of a bruise to his ego and not out of any Machiavellian reason.
During that same presidential run, he infamously expropriated British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock’s life story. Again, the lies seemed quite disprovable not only because whether Biden came from a family of coal miners struck as either true or false but because Kinnock ran against Margaret Thatcher for prime minister two years earlier largely on that tale. He delivered the speech on his life not in Cameroon or some other distant place, but in the U.K., which witnessed television commercials showing Kinnock telling the story of his life that Biden adopted, verbatim at times, as his shortly thereafter.
This required recklessness. It also required a degree of stupidity. How does one think one could get away with that?
Fifteen years ago, then-Sen. Claire McCaskill conceded, “My friend Joe Biden has a tendency to talk forever and sometimes say stuff that’s kind of stupid.”
Now people chalk up to age what we all knew back then was IQ. There’s no fool like an old fool.
