On denial – Ezra Klein, Jake Tapper in NYT:

‘So what was going on behind that description?

I think Robert Hur and the prosecutors were legitimately flabbergasted by how President Biden appeared in that deposition in the interview in October 2023. They were stunned.

And I think they legitimately debated how he would appear to a jury and thought: If there’s even one person who sees him the way that we see him — which is addled — we’re not going to be able to get a conviction.
What was happening in those conversations that he seemed so addled? If you read the transcript of the Hur interview, he is just meandering, unable to focus on a train of thought. He doesn’t know dates. He’s asked about a period that’s significant for the investigation, about his holding and sharing information that is of a classified nature — so 2017, 2018.
First of all, he thinks that it is around that time that Beau died and that Beau was deployed. It’s not. Beau died in 2015, and he had been deployed years before that.
Second of all, he’s just unable to place events.’

(…)

‘What are other accommodations that the staff begins to make over the course of that term?

The hours in which he’s asked to function. It’s not normal to say that a president can’t do anything after 6 p.m. — or should only very rarely do something after 6 p.m. That’s not normal.’

(…)

‘I give the Democratic Party some credit here. It did, in the end, happen in 2024. It happened too late, but the party did something very unusual and pushed Biden off the ticket. It did persuade him not to run.
Well, it’s like what Churchill said about the United States: You can always count on them to do the right thing after they’ve exhausted every other possible option.’

Read the complete interview here.

Back then, all other possibilities were not timely exhausted.

Are all other possibilities exhausted right now?

And yes one is reminded of let’s say the time that Konstantin Chernenko served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The land of the free and the land of the not so free don’t know how to handle aging leaders.

But the medical condition of Biden is also a convenient scapegoat.

And I know some octogenarians who hate Trump but who are comforted by his energy. Maybe there is hope for the octogenarian, they tell themselves.

Then again, hope is overestimated.