right wing media had shown dozens of videos of obvious senile behavior by biden since 2020 (wandering off the podium or verbalizing stage directions or the famous falling up the stairs)
as for 7/10
ask an israeli about the "konseptsia"
the IDF general staff had for decades a paradigm of hamas as sedentary bandits who will not risk their own rule
so they ignored not just the observers reports from that evening but ALL reports
including publicly released vids by hamas of them training to capture a israeli settlement AND a report in '22 detailing the plan from israeli military intelligence based on captured hamas docs
biden and his staff couldn't really hide his condition - it was deliberately ignored by the MSM
hamas couldn't hide their preparations - they were ignored by the IDF general staff
'hamas couldn't hide their preparations - they were ignored by the IDF general staff'
Isn't it more the case that the IDF knew that an attack was coming ONE DAY. That day could have been March 18 next year, some time in 2031 or on 7 October. If every time you think Hamas might launch an attack you go onto high alert, you would be on high alert every single moment of every single day. And the day that Hamas sees you are on high alert they simply postpone their attack until you stand down. It's not as easy as you make out.
"right wing media had shown dozens of videos of obvious senile behavior by biden since 2020 (wandering off the podium or verbalizing stage directions or the famous falling up the stairs)... biden and his staff couldn't really hide his condition - it was deliberately ignored by the MSM"
Yeah this is accurate. It was actually reported right from the beginning that his physicals didn't include a cognitive test. Don't ask a question you don't want the answer to. Even now I am not really sure that there was such a marked decline between 2020 and 2024 that a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment wouldn't be accurate for both time periods, but this would have been devastating politically in 2020 and so no baseline was established as one would for their own parent or grandparent.
I'm more than a little surprised there hasn't been a comment from someone truly knowledgeable about dementia/senility explaining how weak the information is on which people are diagnosing Biden's condition. Your examples tell us almost nothing.
I am not sure if you are replying to me or the thread. My wife sees older patients and does cognitive testing. I am not attempting to actually diagnose from a distance any more than I would suppositionally claim Donald Trump fits the profile of a grandiose narcissist. Senility isn't an actual medical diagnosis and there are lots of types of dementia, even my wife wouldn't claim to know if Biden has one of them without tests. Mild cognitive impairment from aging doesn't require any forms of dementia.
Trump took a Montreal Cognitive Assessment. Biden never did as President.
"There's been a lot of focus on his cognitive abilities, questions raised by opponents and others, and in 2018 the former president [Donald Trump] had a test that measured mental acuity, was that part of today's test?" Cooper asked Gupta. Gupta replied. "I read pretty carefully through the doctor's report and they mention neurological exam, but that was more in terms of testing motor strength and sensation and things like that."
I was not responding to your other comment. I hadn't read it when I commented.
I'd argue your other comment and this one strengthen my point.
Absence of evidence (no cognitive test) is at best extremely weak evidence.
Have you never tripped on a stair going up? There is a very long list of reasons this happens which have nothing to do with cognitive decline, senility, or dementia.
It's my understanding we reach our cognitive peak at ~30 years old. That would mean everyone older has cognitive decline.
He was never all that smart. But he didn’t have obvious clearly diminished capacity in 2008. Now you are using even more sophistry.
He actually won the VP debate with Ryan in 2012. He clearly had reasonable mental capacity then.
Nor was it obvious he was of diminished capacity in 2019 when the nomination process started. It only started becoming obvious around when he got the nomination.
And I grant reasonable people could disagree where between then and the end of 2021 that it was obvious - I.e. no doubt.
To repeat, there was plenty of evidence of notably diminished capacity by the end of 2021. But as AK notes, the MSM covered it up. Yes, those around him covered up even more. But it was still obvious to any normal person who chose to pay attention by then.
There was an article, I believe in the WSJ, that talks about how much Biden was being shielded and stage managed. I think this is some context to what Arnold is writing about. Richard Hanania summarized some of it in a note. I would wager this was different from how Biden would have done if he had been President earlier in his life. https://substack.com/@richardhanania/note/c-82219080
Maybe what's in wsj is more compelling but some things on Hanania's list are completely irrelevant to mental decline. How is a failing voice relevant? Others are more concerning but rather subjective and could be other things besides cognitive decline.
And claims of intentional coverup seem far more speculative.
It's evident that those close to Biden were aware of his mental decline and may have intentionally suppressed this information. Their refusal to allow a cognitive test further supports this concern.
I think that 'undetected' is the wrong word here. They are detected just fine, but when they are reported, to the appropriate authorities, nothing gets done. It is as if we are all villagers who will no longer respond to the latest cry of 'Wolf! Wolf'.
When I first heard the story that some rich guy was inviting celebrities to his private island to have sex with underage girls, I thought the chance of this being true was vanishingly small. There was just no way, I thought, that this could be kept quiet. It had supposedly been going on for years. Some of the celebrities would notice, and when they got home they would be on the phone to the police, or the newspapers, or their publicist, or their elected officials. There is no way that the evil ones could keep a lid on this. So I didn't believe it.
But Jeffrey Epstein really did do this. And in looking into the matter, I found that many people did indeed do as I suggested. It wasn't that 'they didn't notice' but instead 'they noticed but it didn't matter'. So the lesson to be learned is that you can cover up _anything_, perhaps not forever, but for a very long time. So it is less surprising that people thought they could cover up Biden's mental state -- because coverups work. And who knows how many other ones are going on at this time?
I think that we need some serious investigation into the mechanisms involved in running a successful coverup. Asking about _how_, exactly, it gets done. Then we are likely to need a few more laws, or clarifications of laws we already have, to make sure that the people involved are prosecuted. And that whistleblowers are protected. I also think we need to strengthen the protection for whistleblowers from within law enforcement, so we can find out how much of a problem 'declined to prosecute because of political pressure' is.
I don't disagree but I'd argue that the most successful coverups aren't really coverups. If the people around Biden never talked about Biden's fitness for continuing and never much thought about it beyond maybe occasional jokes about something they witnessed Biden do, there isn't really anything to keep secret. Nobody is perpetrating a coverup when simply ignoring whatever they might see or be inclined to believe.
I don't know what to say about Epstein Island.
As for the tunnels, my memory is they were a known problem, just not the extent of the tunnels. And how would the world have reacted if Israel had addressed the tunnel problem before Oct 7?
Maybe the possibility of Oct 7 was also known but again, if you don't know when it will happen, it gets harder to address it. And I argue no matter how unprepared Israel was for this, Hamas executed it with a level of perfection very atypical for them. That is also hard to prepare for.
Really excellent 3 examples, tho the Biden cover-up should have explicitly included the Hur report: 1) Biden was clearly violating laws about securing secret documents, which he had no power to declassify (unlike Trump), and 2) he was too senile to go to trial, because his senility would protect him from a guilty verdict.
Like most older folks, he was progressing from occasional forgetfulness, thru often, to usually, to most often dysfunctional. Semi-senile in 2020, should not have been the Dem nominee, much less the victor.
After the Hur report, VP Harris should have invoked the 25th amendment, and she plus the other cabinet officials should have replaced him with her, the Dem chosen DEI VP. She and they should be impeached by Congress, so that it doesn’t happen again. And General Milley should get a dishonorable discharge and as much punishment as the laws I don’t know about, allow. Punishment of elite for violating laws is how to hugely reduce the violations.
The 4 FISA judges who authorized illegal spying on Trump in 2016 should also be impeached—it was their job to make sure the FBI / CIA was reporting first hand reliable info, and Not accept obfuscation, like they did. It’s like Fin companies who privatize profit, but socialize risk and not paying for their mistakes, which leads to overly risky investment. Govt swamp folk act for their own benefit instead of doing their duty, when they don’t like the results of doing their job as written.
Biden’s capacity had obviously been diminished from the first day of his presidency. He was unable to speak clearly without a teleprompter, he needed to be led off stage on numerous occasions, he was shielded from the media, his work days and hours were sharply limited, and he was closely attended whenever he walked more than a few steps.
Given that, his debate performance was much better than I expected. However, Biden was down in the polls and he needed to go. The debate provided a convenient pretext for the party leaders, journalists, and pundits who had been running interference for him to feign surprise at his condition.
Those same people are now falling all over themselves to announce that they are “shocked, shocked” by the cover up - a cover up that was on display for the world to see for years.
The blogger (yes, "blogger") Grey Enlightenment touches on this theme alot, on just how possible - not impossible - it is to keep a secret today, even in large organizations.
I've been reached out to by press in the past (like the site The Information) to talk about Google moderation policies but I just ignored it. More people do stuff like that than most probably assume.
Another shoe yet to drop... the Biden Crime Family. And this one should catch a lot of senior Dems, up to and including Obama and Hillary! Even if Joe skates due to decrepitude, he can be put on the stand, and the whole sordid story made public while he takes the 5th.
I don’t think you have any evidence to link Obama, let alone Hillary to it. But on the rest, I agree 100% this is another example in the EXACT same category.
The evidence came out in congressional hearings.
The fact that the evidence that has come out MAY not be enough to convict Joe Biden in a court of law (the MSM’s fig leaf rationale for not reporting on the story) is irrelevant to why it wasn’t reported on and pursued.
Thank you for raising the Biden Parkinson's disgrace. I remember a cartoon flagging this issue after a Biden-Trump debate in 2020, so I agree with konshtok (below) that it was already visible. Biden was always a figurehead, willing to be controlled, possibly so he could satisfy his vanity and shield his and his family's illegal activities (e.g., Hunter pardon). The diffusion of the "social fact" would make for an interesting sociology journal article (e.g., on legacy media's collusion).
More interesting is who has actually been calling the shots (e.g., open borders, endless wars, softness on crime, etc.)? In all welfare states, the bureaucracy keeps the trains running late, while the political class has "baptists" and "bootleggers" (Yandle, 1983) setting direction on their agenda. My leading hypothesis is Obama, the first President to stay in DC and still young, but maybe it's coordinated by a Obama/Pelosi/Schumer politburo. Or some forum that lets true believer donors have a voice in the direction of the private organization that is the Democratic (and Republican) party, the members of the duopoly competing and collaborating (i.e., co-opetition) in the market for governmental control.
I usually favor incompetence over conspiracy as an explanation, but the Biden disgrace fuels the conspiracy theories and, more importantly, further undermines trust in our institutions.
Like a couple of the commenters, I don't think the Biden infirmity belongs on this list- I think literally everyone knew Biden was too infirm and senile to be the President- even in 2020- but that the people who could have driven him to resign/be replaced, the Democrats and the mainstream media, were allied in protecting the Democrat Party. That latter part, though a conspiracy of a kind, isn't clothed in secrecy- just a common plan of non-discussion and non-action.
The other two examples are excellent ones, though. The pager ploy was impressive but I don't think the people involved were necessarily numerous and it was carried out with carefully selected people- probably not numbering more than two to 5 dozen- and maybe not very many knew of all the details of what was being done. The October 7 attack, though, is more astonishing one- that had to involve at least 1000 people and I had always been under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the Israelis had significant numbers of human intelligence resources inside of Gaza. We might eventually learn that the Israeli government was warned that something big was about to happen (and I mean learn with harder and more incontrovertible evidence) and at the top levels the information was disbelieved or discounted heavily.
The Biden issue really doesn't belong in this list.
As noted by a couple of other commenters there was very little conspiracy or plotting going on. Biden's infirmity was self-evident to anybody willing to look. Also, much of the operation of the Executive branch and government agencies rests on the convenient fiction that the President consents to the actions being taken in his name. The fact that his staff often seem to be doing their own thing is a problem for even the most energetic Presidents. Questioning whether the lack of consent is due to ignorance, incompetence, or incomprehension might have unforeseen consequences.
A couple of other points
Hur was smart enough not to claim Biden was incapable of comprehending a trial. He quite specifically said that his decision was based on a jury viewing Biden sympathetically as an old man with memory problems and thus unlikely to convict, not that Biden was likely to effectively claim to be incompetent to stand trial.
Though the wording in the 25th Amendment is probably deliberately ambiguous, the overall procedure clearly contemplates replacement of a President who is alive but physically unable to execute the duties of the office, not a physically functional President with diminished capacities or one disliked by a Party that wants to replace him. Think Reagan in a coma if the bullet had done more damage, not claims that Trump was deranged.
I agree it was a pretense in which all were basically tacitly complicit, but one difference to me is this. When the left denigrated George W. Bush’s intelligence, and suggested he was being manipulated, there were names attached to their hysteria: Cheney, Rumsfeld.
With Biden, there was no household name, as to who was running the country.
Even with Reagan: I was only a kid but I remember Tip O’Neill was frequently invoked. Maybe also George Schultz?
I’m sure that dedicated political watchers on here have their suspicions about who was in charge of the Biden administration - but that’s not the same thing - it didn’t penetrate down to the populace.
And I find that in itself more interesting even than the supposed “fiction” of Biden’s command.
My working hypothesis is that there was no one person who was "in charge". Rather, most everyone "knew" what would be good to do and what would be bad to do. So they did what they knew was right.
Which was one reason the Harris campaign found it so hard to break from the administration. They knew, just knew, that it hadn't really done anything wrong.
This post seems like it'd be a worthy discussion topic with Martin Gurri; how does the year of "successful" secrets interact with the Revolt of the Public, and Trump's re-election? Two poles of information control. I'd listen.
Regarding Biden cover up there is no need of laws. Whoever participated in the cover up, starting from the WH speakers, should be accused of perjury. Then up to the jury to decide but this is a betrayal of the US Constitution.
You write: "We are learning now that President Biden’s incapacity was apparent early in his Administration and was clear to many people close to the President."
The questions are:
1. How long before then was it apparent to the president and his wife that this was a starting?
2. Did this knowledge influence the selection of Kamala Harris as VP running mate. Was there a. quid pro quo that in return for selection she would never move to invoke the 25th?
I agree wholly about Biden. The only way you could claim to have played a straight bat is if you maintained that, despite any outward signs to the contrary, he was sharp as a tack right up to the debates, then suddenly seemed not sufficiently switched-on to continue; and that’s simply not credible.
you are living in a left wing media bubble
right wing media had shown dozens of videos of obvious senile behavior by biden since 2020 (wandering off the podium or verbalizing stage directions or the famous falling up the stairs)
as for 7/10
ask an israeli about the "konseptsia"
the IDF general staff had for decades a paradigm of hamas as sedentary bandits who will not risk their own rule
so they ignored not just the observers reports from that evening but ALL reports
including publicly released vids by hamas of them training to capture a israeli settlement AND a report in '22 detailing the plan from israeli military intelligence based on captured hamas docs
biden and his staff couldn't really hide his condition - it was deliberately ignored by the MSM
hamas couldn't hide their preparations - they were ignored by the IDF general staff
'hamas couldn't hide their preparations - they were ignored by the IDF general staff'
Isn't it more the case that the IDF knew that an attack was coming ONE DAY. That day could have been March 18 next year, some time in 2031 or on 7 October. If every time you think Hamas might launch an attack you go onto high alert, you would be on high alert every single moment of every single day. And the day that Hamas sees you are on high alert they simply postpone their attack until you stand down. It's not as easy as you make out.
that is off topic
for me the topic is conspiracies and how obvious or not they are
but to your point
the IDF general staff was adamant in its pronouncement to both the media and the politicians that hamas is deterred
and we know that that was what they believed and not just PR because they had made no plans for dealing with an attack when it comes
"right wing media had shown dozens of videos of obvious senile behavior by biden since 2020 (wandering off the podium or verbalizing stage directions or the famous falling up the stairs)... biden and his staff couldn't really hide his condition - it was deliberately ignored by the MSM"
Yeah this is accurate. It was actually reported right from the beginning that his physicals didn't include a cognitive test. Don't ask a question you don't want the answer to. Even now I am not really sure that there was such a marked decline between 2020 and 2024 that a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment wouldn't be accurate for both time periods, but this would have been devastating politically in 2020 and so no baseline was established as one would for their own parent or grandparent.
I'm more than a little surprised there hasn't been a comment from someone truly knowledgeable about dementia/senility explaining how weak the information is on which people are diagnosing Biden's condition. Your examples tell us almost nothing.
https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/blog/donald-trump-joe-biden-dementia
I am not sure if you are replying to me or the thread. My wife sees older patients and does cognitive testing. I am not attempting to actually diagnose from a distance any more than I would suppositionally claim Donald Trump fits the profile of a grandiose narcissist. Senility isn't an actual medical diagnosis and there are lots of types of dementia, even my wife wouldn't claim to know if Biden has one of them without tests. Mild cognitive impairment from aging doesn't require any forms of dementia.
Trump took a Montreal Cognitive Assessment. Biden never did as President.
"There's been a lot of focus on his cognitive abilities, questions raised by opponents and others, and in 2018 the former president [Donald Trump] had a test that measured mental acuity, was that part of today's test?" Cooper asked Gupta. Gupta replied. "I read pretty carefully through the doctor's report and they mention neurological exam, but that was more in terms of testing motor strength and sensation and things like that."
"As far as we know, for President Biden, we didn't see any kind of test like that performed," Gupta added. - Nov 19, 2021 - https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-unlike-trump-didnt-take-cognitive-test-annual-exam-sanjay-gupta-says-1651558
I was not responding to your other comment. I hadn't read it when I commented.
I'd argue your other comment and this one strengthen my point.
Absence of evidence (no cognitive test) is at best extremely weak evidence.
Have you never tripped on a stair going up? There is a very long list of reasons this happens which have nothing to do with cognitive decline, senility, or dementia.
It's my understanding we reach our cognitive peak at ~30 years old. That would mean everyone older has cognitive decline.
Your words are either sophistry, or of a high school debater.
The issue was not whether or not Biden met some technical, medical or legal definition of “senile” or “dementia”
The issue was whether he possessed the mental capacity to be leader of the free world.
And it was clear from videos dating to 2020, but CERTAINLY by early in 2022, that he did not.
And I'd argue he didn't have the mental capacity in 2008. So what? Regardless, that misses the point.
No, you are missing the point.
He was never all that smart. But he didn’t have obvious clearly diminished capacity in 2008. Now you are using even more sophistry.
He actually won the VP debate with Ryan in 2012. He clearly had reasonable mental capacity then.
Nor was it obvious he was of diminished capacity in 2019 when the nomination process started. It only started becoming obvious around when he got the nomination.
And I grant reasonable people could disagree where between then and the end of 2021 that it was obvious - I.e. no doubt.
To repeat, there was plenty of evidence of notably diminished capacity by the end of 2021. But as AK notes, the MSM covered it up. Yes, those around him covered up even more. But it was still obvious to any normal person who chose to pay attention by then.
There was an article, I believe in the WSJ, that talks about how much Biden was being shielded and stage managed. I think this is some context to what Arnold is writing about. Richard Hanania summarized some of it in a note. I would wager this was different from how Biden would have done if he had been President earlier in his life. https://substack.com/@richardhanania/note/c-82219080
Maybe what's in wsj is more compelling but some things on Hanania's list are completely irrelevant to mental decline. How is a failing voice relevant? Others are more concerning but rather subjective and could be other things besides cognitive decline.
And claims of intentional coverup seem far more speculative.
It's evident that those close to Biden were aware of his mental decline and may have intentionally suppressed this information. Their refusal to allow a cognitive test further supports this concern.
I think that 'undetected' is the wrong word here. They are detected just fine, but when they are reported, to the appropriate authorities, nothing gets done. It is as if we are all villagers who will no longer respond to the latest cry of 'Wolf! Wolf'.
When I first heard the story that some rich guy was inviting celebrities to his private island to have sex with underage girls, I thought the chance of this being true was vanishingly small. There was just no way, I thought, that this could be kept quiet. It had supposedly been going on for years. Some of the celebrities would notice, and when they got home they would be on the phone to the police, or the newspapers, or their publicist, or their elected officials. There is no way that the evil ones could keep a lid on this. So I didn't believe it.
But Jeffrey Epstein really did do this. And in looking into the matter, I found that many people did indeed do as I suggested. It wasn't that 'they didn't notice' but instead 'they noticed but it didn't matter'. So the lesson to be learned is that you can cover up _anything_, perhaps not forever, but for a very long time. So it is less surprising that people thought they could cover up Biden's mental state -- because coverups work. And who knows how many other ones are going on at this time?
I think that we need some serious investigation into the mechanisms involved in running a successful coverup. Asking about _how_, exactly, it gets done. Then we are likely to need a few more laws, or clarifications of laws we already have, to make sure that the people involved are prosecuted. And that whistleblowers are protected. I also think we need to strengthen the protection for whistleblowers from within law enforcement, so we can find out how much of a problem 'declined to prosecute because of political pressure' is.
I don't disagree but I'd argue that the most successful coverups aren't really coverups. If the people around Biden never talked about Biden's fitness for continuing and never much thought about it beyond maybe occasional jokes about something they witnessed Biden do, there isn't really anything to keep secret. Nobody is perpetrating a coverup when simply ignoring whatever they might see or be inclined to believe.
I don't know what to say about Epstein Island.
As for the tunnels, my memory is they were a known problem, just not the extent of the tunnels. And how would the world have reacted if Israel had addressed the tunnel problem before Oct 7?
Maybe the possibility of Oct 7 was also known but again, if you don't know when it will happen, it gets harder to address it. And I argue no matter how unprepared Israel was for this, Hamas executed it with a level of perfection very atypical for them. That is also hard to prepare for.
Rob H has a set of different examples with a similar POV.
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/deceitful-messages-scarcity-american
One of my record skips: we need more jobs for low IQ folk. Not education, jobs.
I’d expect Rob to be a good person to interview for Arnold, he’s done dozens for his book Troubled.
Really excellent 3 examples, tho the Biden cover-up should have explicitly included the Hur report: 1) Biden was clearly violating laws about securing secret documents, which he had no power to declassify (unlike Trump), and 2) he was too senile to go to trial, because his senility would protect him from a guilty verdict.
Like most older folks, he was progressing from occasional forgetfulness, thru often, to usually, to most often dysfunctional. Semi-senile in 2020, should not have been the Dem nominee, much less the victor.
After the Hur report, VP Harris should have invoked the 25th amendment, and she plus the other cabinet officials should have replaced him with her, the Dem chosen DEI VP. She and they should be impeached by Congress, so that it doesn’t happen again. And General Milley should get a dishonorable discharge and as much punishment as the laws I don’t know about, allow. Punishment of elite for violating laws is how to hugely reduce the violations.
The 4 FISA judges who authorized illegal spying on Trump in 2016 should also be impeached—it was their job to make sure the FBI / CIA was reporting first hand reliable info, and Not accept obfuscation, like they did. It’s like Fin companies who privatize profit, but socialize risk and not paying for their mistakes, which leads to overly risky investment. Govt swamp folk act for their own benefit instead of doing their duty, when they don’t like the results of doing their job as written.
Biden’s capacity had obviously been diminished from the first day of his presidency. He was unable to speak clearly without a teleprompter, he needed to be led off stage on numerous occasions, he was shielded from the media, his work days and hours were sharply limited, and he was closely attended whenever he walked more than a few steps.
Given that, his debate performance was much better than I expected. However, Biden was down in the polls and he needed to go. The debate provided a convenient pretext for the party leaders, journalists, and pundits who had been running interference for him to feign surprise at his condition.
Those same people are now falling all over themselves to announce that they are “shocked, shocked” by the cover up - a cover up that was on display for the world to see for years.
We used to believe that keeping secrets was impossible in the Information Age. It's astonishing how wrong that was.
The blogger (yes, "blogger") Grey Enlightenment touches on this theme alot, on just how possible - not impossible - it is to keep a secret today, even in large organizations.
I've been reached out to by press in the past (like the site The Information) to talk about Google moderation policies but I just ignored it. More people do stuff like that than most probably assume.
Another shoe yet to drop... the Biden Crime Family. And this one should catch a lot of senior Dems, up to and including Obama and Hillary! Even if Joe skates due to decrepitude, he can be put on the stand, and the whole sordid story made public while he takes the 5th.
I don’t think you have any evidence to link Obama, let alone Hillary to it. But on the rest, I agree 100% this is another example in the EXACT same category.
The evidence came out in congressional hearings.
The fact that the evidence that has come out MAY not be enough to convict Joe Biden in a court of law (the MSM’s fig leaf rationale for not reporting on the story) is irrelevant to why it wasn’t reported on and pursued.
Thank you for raising the Biden Parkinson's disgrace. I remember a cartoon flagging this issue after a Biden-Trump debate in 2020, so I agree with konshtok (below) that it was already visible. Biden was always a figurehead, willing to be controlled, possibly so he could satisfy his vanity and shield his and his family's illegal activities (e.g., Hunter pardon). The diffusion of the "social fact" would make for an interesting sociology journal article (e.g., on legacy media's collusion).
More interesting is who has actually been calling the shots (e.g., open borders, endless wars, softness on crime, etc.)? In all welfare states, the bureaucracy keeps the trains running late, while the political class has "baptists" and "bootleggers" (Yandle, 1983) setting direction on their agenda. My leading hypothesis is Obama, the first President to stay in DC and still young, but maybe it's coordinated by a Obama/Pelosi/Schumer politburo. Or some forum that lets true believer donors have a voice in the direction of the private organization that is the Democratic (and Republican) party, the members of the duopoly competing and collaborating (i.e., co-opetition) in the market for governmental control.
I usually favor incompetence over conspiracy as an explanation, but the Biden disgrace fuels the conspiracy theories and, more importantly, further undermines trust in our institutions.
Like a couple of the commenters, I don't think the Biden infirmity belongs on this list- I think literally everyone knew Biden was too infirm and senile to be the President- even in 2020- but that the people who could have driven him to resign/be replaced, the Democrats and the mainstream media, were allied in protecting the Democrat Party. That latter part, though a conspiracy of a kind, isn't clothed in secrecy- just a common plan of non-discussion and non-action.
The other two examples are excellent ones, though. The pager ploy was impressive but I don't think the people involved were necessarily numerous and it was carried out with carefully selected people- probably not numbering more than two to 5 dozen- and maybe not very many knew of all the details of what was being done. The October 7 attack, though, is more astonishing one- that had to involve at least 1000 people and I had always been under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the Israelis had significant numbers of human intelligence resources inside of Gaza. We might eventually learn that the Israeli government was warned that something big was about to happen (and I mean learn with harder and more incontrovertible evidence) and at the top levels the information was disbelieved or discounted heavily.
The Biden issue really doesn't belong in this list.
As noted by a couple of other commenters there was very little conspiracy or plotting going on. Biden's infirmity was self-evident to anybody willing to look. Also, much of the operation of the Executive branch and government agencies rests on the convenient fiction that the President consents to the actions being taken in his name. The fact that his staff often seem to be doing their own thing is a problem for even the most energetic Presidents. Questioning whether the lack of consent is due to ignorance, incompetence, or incomprehension might have unforeseen consequences.
A couple of other points
Hur was smart enough not to claim Biden was incapable of comprehending a trial. He quite specifically said that his decision was based on a jury viewing Biden sympathetically as an old man with memory problems and thus unlikely to convict, not that Biden was likely to effectively claim to be incompetent to stand trial.
Though the wording in the 25th Amendment is probably deliberately ambiguous, the overall procedure clearly contemplates replacement of a President who is alive but physically unable to execute the duties of the office, not a physically functional President with diminished capacities or one disliked by a Party that wants to replace him. Think Reagan in a coma if the bullet had done more damage, not claims that Trump was deranged.
I agree it was a pretense in which all were basically tacitly complicit, but one difference to me is this. When the left denigrated George W. Bush’s intelligence, and suggested he was being manipulated, there were names attached to their hysteria: Cheney, Rumsfeld.
With Biden, there was no household name, as to who was running the country.
Even with Reagan: I was only a kid but I remember Tip O’Neill was frequently invoked. Maybe also George Schultz?
I’m sure that dedicated political watchers on here have their suspicions about who was in charge of the Biden administration - but that’s not the same thing - it didn’t penetrate down to the populace.
And I find that in itself more interesting even than the supposed “fiction” of Biden’s command.
My working hypothesis is that there was no one person who was "in charge". Rather, most everyone "knew" what would be good to do and what would be bad to do. So they did what they knew was right.
Which was one reason the Harris campaign found it so hard to break from the administration. They knew, just knew, that it hadn't really done anything wrong.
This post seems like it'd be a worthy discussion topic with Martin Gurri; how does the year of "successful" secrets interact with the Revolt of the Public, and Trump's re-election? Two poles of information control. I'd listen.
They should be tried for treason.
Regarding Biden cover up there is no need of laws. Whoever participated in the cover up, starting from the WH speakers, should be accused of perjury. Then up to the jury to decide but this is a betrayal of the US Constitution.
This is a bit like "the adults in the room" during Trump 1. It's probably like a lot of the Reagan administration. Presidents as puppets.
You write: "We are learning now that President Biden’s incapacity was apparent early in his Administration and was clear to many people close to the President."
The questions are:
1. How long before then was it apparent to the president and his wife that this was a starting?
2. Did this knowledge influence the selection of Kamala Harris as VP running mate. Was there a. quid pro quo that in return for selection she would never move to invoke the 25th?
I agree wholly about Biden. The only way you could claim to have played a straight bat is if you maintained that, despite any outward signs to the contrary, he was sharp as a tack right up to the debates, then suddenly seemed not sufficiently switched-on to continue; and that’s simply not credible.