Hey, here’s some news: it turns out that the president of the United States is not Donald Trump, as Kamala Harris seems to think as she continues to promise change from this horrible administration. And it certainly isn’t Harris herself. After all, as we all know, the Candidate of Joy is an outsider’s outsider, except when she flies down to the border and affects a sneer of cold command for a ten-minute photo op.
No, the president of the United States (are you sitting down?) is none other than Old Joe Biden. It’s understandable if you’re surprised. The old fellow hasn’t been in the news lately, but on Sunday he did something Democrats rarely do: he paused to take a question, and it went about as well as you’d expect.
Old Joe and “Dr.” Jill were getting out of a limo when reporters began to barrage the alleged president with questions. Old Joe stared in the reporters’ direction and Jill strode purposefully past her vacantly gaping better half as one reporter called out, “Mr. President! Will you deploy more U.S. troops to the Middle East?” Biden turned to follow Jill, apparently deciding to ignore the press gaggle as she had, but he looked toward them when another called out, “Mr. President! Has Netanyahu gone too far?” He began walking toward them as the first reporter tried another question: “Any comment on the strikes in Yemen, Mr. President?”
REPORTER: "Any comment on the strikes in Yemen, Mr. President!?"
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 30, 2024
BIDEN (or whatever's left of him): "I've spoken to both sides. They gotta settle the strike. I'm supporting the collective bargaining effort. I think they'll settle the strike."
🤔 pic.twitter.com/iFawNWdWyH
That was the one Old Joe decided to answer. The weary world, hungry for his wisdom, watched the Commander-In-Chief of the most powerful military on the planet stated: “I've spoken to both sides. They gotta settle the strike. I'm supporting the collective bargaining effort. I think they'll settle the strike."
The reporter was asking about the IDF’s strike against the Houthis in Yemen on Sunday, which the Jerusalem Post described as “the most powerful one against the terror group since the beginning of the war, even exceeding the massive strike on Hodeidah in July.” The Post noted that “dozens of Israeli aircraft, including F-15I fighter planes, participated in the operation, striking 1,800 kilometers from Israeli territory after the Houthis fired three ballistic missiles on the Tel Aviv and central Israel areas in recent weeks, including one on Saturday.” Coming so quickly after Israel’s decapitation of Hizballah in Lebanon, this was an impressive display indeed, but Old Joe answered as if he had heard an entirely different question.
The New York Times reported Monday that “thousands of dockworkers who load and unload cargo ships could walk off the job on Tuesday, halting nearly all activity at ports from Maine to Texas.” This could have staggering consequences: “A strike could cost the economy $5 billion a day, or about 6 percent of gross domestic product.” That is likely the strike that was on Biden’s mind.
Now, it could simply be that Old Joe didn’t hear the “in Yemen” part of the question, and so assumed that the reporter was asking him about longshoremen. That’s a plausible enough explanation, although there have been numerous other Biden-by-the-plane videos in which the background noise makes Old Joe’s conversation with reporters almost impossible to hear, and yet Biden seems to understand perfectly well what is being said to him.
Related: Okay, Old Joe Biden Has Dementia, But Does the Entire State Department Have It, Too?
The problem with this video is that the viewer simply cannot be sure if Biden simply misheard the question or if he is so far gone cognitively at this point that he heard “strike” and gave a boilerplate “strike” response, albeit to an altogether different kind of “strike.” Leftists can insist all day long that this was a simply auditory mistake in a noisy environment, but no one can really be sure. Biden’s record of cognitive decline is so extraordinarily long at this point that we cannot discount the possibility that he has only the vaguest connection with reality at this point.
And yet he will be the ostensible president of the United States for another three and a half months. We are now, thanks to his misrule over the last few years, in a period of multiple global crises. Any one of them could boil over into a massive international challenge to the nation at any point between now and Jan. 20, 2025, and yet no one except those who are actually running things in Washington has any clear idea of who is really in charge. The worst part of this is that if Kamala Harris is elected president, that situation will continue long past Jan. 20, 2025 as well.
