Ooof! That's got to hurt!
Joe Biden stands on a lectern to make a statement denying claims that he is loosing his mental faculties (I heard one commentator calling them his "mental facilities"
) - and then promptly displays that he is loosing his mental faculties by mixing up the names of the Egyptian and Mexican leaders (or something).
Not a good look.
What is clearly obvious to the onlooking world - that the US President has slipped seamlessly into his dotage and would now be better placed in a comfy-chair with a blanket over his knees than doing that silly walk/run thing on and off podiums at election rallies for the next 8 months (never mind being the actual president for the next four years) - seems to be lost on the American President himself, if not to anyone else in the room.
I'm not being funny, but isn't there some kind of provision for the situation of a president loosing his marbles while in office? I'm sure I remember that from one time before, when some suggestion of a potus going doolally was being mooted (was it Trump - I don't recall {not important though - I'm not the President of the United States of America}). Wouldn't now be a good time for, like, the men in white coats to quietly slip into the oval office and guide the old fellah away towards a push chair and a bowl of tapioca and milk-sops?
Mind you, not that the US doesn't have experience with this kind of thing.....
I seem to remember that Ronald Regan spent the last couple of years of his presidency in an advanced stage of alzheimers (should that be capitalised? It sounds like someone's name....what's the ruling on that?). It didn't seem to cause either him or the American public any problems. One wonders how much these American President's actually
do that doesn't have a team of men holding their hands behind the scenes, making all the big calls etc. So maybe the President being a lip-hanging geriatric is not so much of a problem as it might seem.
But going into an election like that? Can the Democrats really pull this off and expect the public to buy it?
The single remaining Democrat nominee doesn't apparently think so. Dean Phillips told Fox News that Biden was all but handing the keys to the White House to Donald Trump by refusing to step aside and let a more capable candidate secure the nomination. In a news report on the BBC last night, several American citizens who were interviewed in the street said that the President's competency was a worry to them (and they meant Biden's, the more general reading is surely a given). It stands to reason that the individual putting themselves forward for the (reputedly) 'Leadership of the free world' should at least be able to remember how to put his trousers on.( "Shorts on the
inside Mr President!)
Biden looks increasingly fazed and discombobulated as weeks go on and one suspects that senile decline is accelerating by the day. Such decline is often more rapid in its advancement as time progresses and it looks to me as though the Democrats are going to need to rethink things. Oddly enough it is Trump who has for once, shown possibly the kindness that others have failed to display. His immediate response on hearing the news when it broke a couple of days ago (following that Court announcement on Biden's faculties) was possibly meant more humanely than it was presented as being. He said, "The President is sick," and this is something that should recognised. If you put geriatrics into the most powerful positions in the world then this kind of thing is going to happen.
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I watched the BBC news report from Southern Gaza last night with mounting trepidation.
The report focused upon the city of Rafah, where upwards of 1.4 million people crowd into a space once occupied by a hundred or so thousand.
They live, crammed shoulder to shoulder, packed into banks of makeshift tents, with streams of untreated sewage pooling around them as they eek out a starvation existence under constant fear of bombing. A thin and ragged people, terrified for their lives.
And this is the place that Israel insists that it is going to unleash a full throttle military offensive against, as it plans the last scene denouement of its attempt to rid Gaza of Hamas.
Instructions have been handed out to the civilian occupants to up sticks and quit the area - where to they say not. Because there's nowhere left to go. North of the city, in the remaining part of Gaza, there is nothing left. 60 percent of the entire region lies in rubble. There is no water, no food, and no access to medical or aid facilities. Yet these people, herded by bombs and bullets, by leaflets and video postings of brutal destruction into the very region in which they now hudle, are now being told to flee for their lives or stay and be considered as collaborators of Hamas, and thereby fair game.
Will the world stand by and watch this happen? Will we just watch as a million plus defenceless people are bombed and shot out of existence? Given our leaders equanimity in the face of what has already been done in the name of Israel "defending itself", I really think it might.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council has said that no such offensive can be allowed to take place in what is essentially a "giant refugee camp" - it would result in a bloodbath he said - but there is no indication that Netanyahu is prepared to listen.
If Israel goes ahead and carries out its plans, under the watching eyes of the world, then I beg to suggest that it will be the end of them. They have been accorded license in their treatment of the Palestinian people over the decades,
way above that which would have been allowed to any other country. Their tragic history in respect of the Holocaust has bought them this much licence, but it cannot go on indefinitely. The liberal West has treated the nascent State of Israel with kid gloves, indeed to the point of giving it 'associate membership' of the very West itself. But if it is to continue to enjoy this special status in the eyes of the wealthy North, it is going to have to start behaving in a manner that justifies such preferential treatment.
And this means stopping its appaling activities in Gaza right now.
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.
....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'
We are the Bloodguard