The Easter Bunny and Joe Biden’s Competence

The ongoing apparent cognitive decline of Joe Biden is no laughing matter and nor should it be seen as a partisan issue. The US remains the most powerful country on the planet and it matters.

Back in June last year, I wrote a piece about Joe Biden titled “We need to talk about Biden – Honestly” and flagged a range of troubling signs. First and foremost was his apparent cognitive decline and second was that he appeared to be compromised by his son, Hunter Biden. My conclusion was that we should all be worried.

Since that time, the situation has only become worse. In the most recent example of Biden’s apparent decline, Biden attended the annual Whitehouse Easter Sunday egg roll. In a series of incidents, a person dressed as a giant Easter Bunny was seen to shepherd Biden through the event or, as some called it, act as his handler. In another incident, it is possible to hear Biden’s wife, caught on a microphone, telling Biden that he needed to wave to the crowd. You can view these incidents below:

These incidents are not, in themselves, a cause for worry. However, the pattern of incidents, and the seeming increase in incidents, should raise increasing doubts about Biden’s fitness for office. For example, just before the Easter incident, a video shows Joe Biden seemingly lost after a speech. Some have interpreted his strange behaviour following the speech as showing him trying to shake hands with a person who was not there. It is not an unreasonable interpretation of the video, but some might interpret it as Biden being unsure of where to go. I have copied a video of the incident below.

If it were the case that the incident in the video above was isolated, then it would be fair to describe the interpretations as uncharitable. However, the problems with Biden’s seeming confusion are now so acute that it is difficult not to accept the negative interpretation. It is a pattern. Although a highly partisan outlet, the US Federalist magazine asks a fair question that flows from the rapidly growing mountain of evidence of cognitive decline:

Who’s in charge of the United States is an important question, and this isn’t a laughing matter.

As the Federalist magazine points out, it is becoming increasingly clear that Biden is no longer running the Whitehouse. So when we see an Easter Bunny apparently in charge of the president of the US, it should raise alarm bells. And, like many others contemplating Biden’s poor state of mind, the Federalist magazine is left wondering who is really in charge.

As for the Hunter Biden story, since writing in June, more evidence has accrued that Hunter’s international business activities have seriously compromised Joe Biden. Hunter’s business dealings include US enemies, particularly Russia and China, as well as involvement in shady businesses in Ukraine. As most people will be aware, the story commences with Hunter Biden abandoning a laptop computer at a repair shop and the discovery of a trove of very dubious correspondence about his business activities (as well as a smorgasbord of scandalous private videos and images). There was strong evidence of “pay to play”, whereby Hunter appeared to be selling access to his father/father’s influence.

The first response to the story was a denial of the veracity of the laptop (claimed as Russian disinformation). As that response fell apart, the next step was to point out that Joe Biden could not be responsible for Hunter’s behaviour; Biden knew nothing of Hunter’s business dealings, and he could not be held accountable for his son’s actions. Now, journalists are turning up more and more evidence that Joe Biden was intricately involved in Hunter Biden’s business dealings and that Hunter Biden was funnelling money to his father. For example, this quote is from the New York Post:

First, there are the Treasury Department documents presented by Republican Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, along with bank statements on Hunter’s laptop showing millions of dollars paid by CEFC [a Chinese state linked firm] to Hunter and his business ­partners.

Then there is evidence, from Bobulinski and from the laptop, that Joe met Hunter’s foreign business partners on multiple occasions while he was vice ­president.

In addition, there is evidence on the laptop that Hunter and his father had commingled finances and shared bank accounts, and also that Hunter paid some of Joe’s household bills, including a monthly phone bill and maintenance and renovations on one of his Delaware properties.

There is still a long way to run on finding out how close the financial relationship between Biden and his son was. Nevertheless, the information that has already entered the public domain has gone beyond being just smoke, and we are starting to see the fire. It is becoming harder and harder for Biden and his administration to distance Joe Biden from his son’s businesses and, crucially, deny that Biden was a beneficiary of those businesses. It is not just that there is a stink of corruption that worries commentators; the involvement of Joe Biden in his son’s business becomes a national security issue for the US when the corruption involves China and Russia. And if Biden is a security issue for the US, that means a security issue for all US allies.

Of course, it is not just national security that should concern the wider world. The United States is the motor of the world economy, and the US economy looks like it is heading into a crisis. It would be easy to say that Joe Biden’s policies have driven the US to its current poor position, but that would raise the fundamental question; are the policies coming out of the Whitehouse Joe Biden’s? That this question needs to be asked captures the appalling current state of presidential leadership.

As of the moment, the world is going through the kind of instability that we have not seen since the 1930s. There are geopolitical crises in progress, and a slow-motion economic car crash appears to be speeding up towards some kind of denouement. This is precisely when the world needs firm and competent leadership in the US. However, in place of this kind of leadership, we have a US president who needs to be chaperoned by an Easter Bunny. It is far from being a happy situation for the US and should worry us all.