Republicans Just Can’t Quit Joe Biden

But they’re right about this: Kamala Harris should’ve taken over as president a year ago.

The only thing Republicans hate more than Joe Biden is the thought that they won’t have him available to kick around much longer.

So, it’s no surprise that they see Biden’s mental frailties as the most significant crisis facing the nation today. If investigations don’t conclude with criminal indictments of Biden’s inner circle and all family members old enough to attend middle school, expect investigations of the investigations. We’ve only just begun.

I happen to think they’re right about Biden’s mental decline, at least in retrospect. This month marks a year since that terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad disaster of a presidential debate in which Biden melted before our eyes.

As a Democratic candidate for Congress at the time, I’d had a dog in that fight, and he came home whimpering and hid under the bed. Raising money the next month was like selling MAGA hats at a Bernie Sanders rally.

I was one of thousands of Democratic candidates who was privately praying for Biden to vacate the ticket and let the party choose a replacement in August. And I was fine with his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.

If I had to do it over again, I’d have said so publicly. At the time, I didn’t, figuring my opinion wouldn’t matter at all. I chose the path of least resistance, one that I’ve followed earnestly in my life. Not my finest hour.

But with the benefit of hindsight – and much more information – it’s now clear that the right thing to do was unrelated to what anyone on the outside was saying. It was that Biden – and more importantly, his tight circle of advisers (or shielders) – could and should have done the right thing in the interests of his country and his own health:

He should have resigned as President of the United States.

The next thing that would have happened is for Vice President Kamala Harris to have taken over as President and run for election in November, 2024, with all the benefits that incumbency bestows. I’m not thinking Republicans would have been all that excited about that, even though to listen to them now, that’s what they purport to have wanted for America’s sake.

Just another reason not to listen to them now.

I do think Harris would have won handily against Trump, who would have been deprived of the “Sleepy Joe” portion of his own garbled and deranged demagoguery. Which brings us to the proverbial elephant in the room, which is that the last thing Republicans should want – or would dare tolerate during the current administration – is a serious set of protocols for dealing with a mentally unfit president.

You needn’t dig deeper than Trump’s slurred and disoriented ramblings at – of all places, a West Point commencement address – to see that we’ve got one of those again. There’s abundant video evidence all over, and more gets introduced most every day that Trump speaks in public.

My favorite recent example was posted by the brilliant women of the I’ve Had It Podcast.

The Republicans’ latest display of Biden Derangement Syndrome has nothing, of course, to do with either Biden or derangement. It’s just politics.

The party desperately wants to return Biden to the stage to serve again as their political piñata. That would address their most urgent need: to distract from the fact that the narcissist-in-chief is currently demolishing our democracy and reputation around the world.

I suppose the Democrats would do the same if their president was such a train wreck.

But that does not excuse the continued, unbridled MAGA joy in reveling in Biden’s tragic circumstance. That’s nothing short of depraved. Albeit on brand.

For their part, Democrats have borrowed from the Republican playbook by attacking the messengers – in this case, journalist Jim Acosta of CNN, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and whoever else decides to cash in with Biden books.

I’m not down for that. As a journalist, I’m not criticizing someone for putting out the truth, even if it’s in the mercenary context of book sales. What would their critics have them do, take Biden’s secrets to their grave?

Joe Biden is a good man who deserves better than this. His 50-plus-year career in public life will be warmly remembered as one of the distinguished in American history, even if it was marred at the end.

In 2020, when Biden was running in the Democratic primaries, I was all in. But on the radio show I hosted at the time, I said ad nauseam that he should run as “one-term Joe,” the man of decency who would settle the nation down and rescue it from Trump.

He was that guy, until he wasn’t.

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