With the first symptoms, President Biden unquestioningly took the test.
The result, being positive, he dutifully self-quarantined. Why subject others in the White House to possible COVID infection?
What an enormous gulf between that civic action and Biden’s apparent refusal to submit to serious tests of his cognitive ability. His resistance poses an infinitely greater menace to his party, country, and arguably the world, than a bout of COVID.
Yet the Democratic Party, so far, has put up with it.
This is despite mounting evidence that the head of the world’s greatest power has serious cognitive problems. Each Biden attempt to reassure the public only raises more concerns.
Months ago, an old Canadian neurosurgeon friend of mine told me that Biden had Parkinson's. Recently he amplified his views when I asked via email how he could be so sure.
“According to my American neurosurgical pals, one believes he has Lewy Body Dementia. The other one agrees with me that he has Parkinson’s Disease. Apparently, these two diagnoses are related and are at two ends of the scale. With Lewy Body Dementia, memory is the first to deteriorate, and the stiffness, shuffling of gait, and poor balance are the last to be affected. Tremor is not a major component.... Parkinson’s is the reverse.
“However, medication for both these Diseases can mask the symptoms. It is understood that Biden has had memory problems for some time. The two episodes that really reveal he is sick were his frozen state in LA, where he needed help from Obama and the problems he experienced in the Debate, and how his wife needed to physically support him afterward. If he has dementia of another variety, then the White House Press Secretary is not lying that Biden is not suffering from Parkinson's.
“Regardless, his loss of facial expression, his slowness and shuffling of gait, his lack of full arm swinging, and his early stooped forward posture are all physical characteristics of progressive Parkinson’s.
“Whatever the diagnosis, he is not medically fit to last another 4+ years.”
I asked my neurosurgeon friend if there were any other specific symptoms that he spotted with Biden; also why no one had picked up on the President’s problem years ago;
“Thinking more about his symptoms is his loss of vocal strength, a tremor I noted when he reached for a wireless microphone, and the hand posture as he walks.
As to why no one picked it up two plus years ago--they probably didn't want to know and/or they didn't want the world to know. “
Yet, the resistance continues as more experts weigh in. One of the most disturbing was Columbia University linguist John McWhorter. In an Oped in the New York Times, He analysed Biden’s recent statements. He did it through the prism of “Pidgin languages,” the verbal shorthand resulting from a mash-up of two different languages, like pidgin English, which was once spoken on the coast of China. Just as a pidgin language can come together in our brain, says McWhorter, it can also “unravel” ---as the brain unravels.
“I’ve been reminded of that as the nation tries to process President Biden’s jumbled syntax during his debate with Donald Trump and in his subsequent interview with George Stephanopoulos.
“Biden has never been the most starchy of orators, but many observers, myself included, were struck by how far his sentences had strayed from the complexities and subtleties he once controlled effortlessly. It is alarming to see someone who is asking to be elected president of the United States — someone who already serves as president of the United States — communicate in such an ineffective manner.
“….In his interview last week with George Stephanopoulos, Biden repeatedly used verbless chunks in the place of sentences, with utterances such as “No indication of any serious condition,” “Nobody’s fault, mine” and “Large crowds, overwhelming response, no slipping.” This is hardly unknown in casual speech, but Biden leaned on it a lot given the gravity of the interview.”
McWhorter cited other such elliptical phrases--nonsequiters—from Bien’s recent appearances.
“Any one of these examples would have been unremarkable on its ow The issue is that they piled up to such a degree, in contexts in which a more considered style of expression is the order of the day. In particular, they are occurring at the very moment that the president is trying to reassure the nation that he is in complete control of his verbal faculties. Biden was never exactly Churchillian, but even in interviews as recent as four years ago, the contrast to the present is striking.
“Trump’s speaking style is the big elephant in the room here. Yes, his speech is its own kind of ramshackle, well, jazz. It is unprecedentedly informal for a president in public addresses. But though his references grow ever more fantastical, I see no change in his fundamental fluency over the past few years.
“In the end, informality and a messy imagination are one thing. The rapid decline of complex sentence structure into something even distantly resembling pidgin is another. Pidgins do a basic job but aren’t designed for detail, grace or suasion. Increasingly, Biden’s speech submits to an alarmingly similar judgment.”
OK, Now assuming, one way or another, Biden drops out. What about Trump?
If we consider it reasonable that someone with severe psychiatric problems be prevented from purchasing a firearm, why go along with a system that might permit a similarly disturbed individual to gain control over the largest military arsenal the world has ever known?
Indeed, the power of an American president to declare war, to secretly dispatch Special Forces units to all corners of the globe, to order the execution by drone or killer teams of anyone he deems a threat to the United States, that power has dangerously escalated over the past few years. In fact, there may be no practical limit: The Supreme Court recently declared that there is virtually no crime that the President—acting in his official capacity-- can be held accountable for.
Who in their right mind would hand such powers to a person suffering from severe Parkinson’s or Dementia?
Who—on the other hand-- would want to hand such powers to Trump?
In 2015, before Trump’s first election, articles from Vanity Fair to Time to Psychology Today suggested that Trump is a textbook study of Narcissism. He’s a swaggering egotist; vain, self-centered, convinced of his own greatness, who (some theorize) unconsciously compensates for an underlying low self-esteem with bullying, blustering and braggadocchio.
“He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics,” clinical psychologist Dr. George Simon, who conducts lectures and seminars on manipulative behaviour, told Vanity Fair. “Otherwise, I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s, like a dream come true.”
Just a minute.---Some of the world’s greatest political and business leaders have also been labeled narcissists, from Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle to Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, and George Soros. Though difficult to live and work with, they’ve proved extremely valuable and productive members of society.
The threat is when narcissism runs rampant; as the Harvard Business Review wrote, “The danger is that narcissism can turn unproductive when lacking self-knowledge and restraining anchors, narcissists become unrealistic dreamers. They nurture grand schemes and harbor the illusion that only circumstances or enemies block their success…
“…the very adulation that the narcissist demands can have a corrosive effect. As he expands, he listens even less to words of caution and advice.… The result is sometimes flagrant risk-taking that can lead to catastrophe.”
Dr. George Simon, an expert on personality disorders, explains, “Narcissism becomes particularly “malignant” (i.e. malevolent, dangerous, harmful, incurable) when it goes beyond mere vanity and excessive self-focus. Malignant narcissists not only see themselves as superior to others but believe in their superiority to the degree that they view others as relatively worthless, expendable, and justifiably exploitable.
“This type of narcissism is a defining characteristic of psychopathy/sociopathy and is rooted in an individual’s deficient capacity for empathy. It’s almost impossible for a person with such shallow feelings and such haughtiness to really care about others or to form a conscience with any of the qualities we typically associate with a humane attitude, which is why most researchers and thinkers on the topic of psychopathy think of psychopaths as individuals without a conscience altogether.”
Extreme narcissists, we are told, lash out brutally at those who would dare question their talent or goals. They lie, cheat, change their story from one moment to the next; ignore anything that might challenge their view of the world or of themselves.
According to a 2015 cover story in Time about Donald Trump and Narcissism, “Trump indeed appears to be emotionally incontinent, a man wholly without—you should pardon the expression—any psychic sphincter. The boundary most people draw between thought and speech, between emotion and action, does not appear to exist for Trump. He says what he wants to say, insults whom he wants to insult, and never, ever considers apology or retreat.
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“Make no mistake,” warns Dr. Simon, “no one is more dangerous than a person who sets him or herself above others to the point that he or she feels entitled to prey on those viewed as inferior.’
That opinion was written almost ten years ago.
Viewing Trump’s actions over the past decade, would anyone take issue?
Given our past experiences with expert economists and vaccination experts I would argue that expert witnesses much like in court can be arranged to state just about any opinion that is deemed necessary. Especially if the stakes are high and they couldn’t be higher.
Democracy means the will of the people. I think Trump and Biden’s mental issues are both apparent to any and all. We don’t need experts to reassure us or tell us what we can plainly see for ourselves.
We need to allow people to do what the constitution empowers them to do: choose their own leadership. If people want a doddering Biden, so be it. If they want a narcissistic Trump, so be it.
No thank you to the ‘expert’ run technocracy.