It's truly a no-win situation for the American people, but for the future credibility of our institutions, I don't see any way around it.
Like a depth charge dropped from a battleship that forces a submarine to the surface, the foreign policy turmoil in Afghanistan has illuminated an ugly reality that if we're all honest, we already knew to be the case. President Biden is not leading this country.
He may be the man in the suit who reads off teleprompters at "press conferences" and staged media events. He may be the smiling elderly man who refers to note cards when trying to feign a friendly conversation with the high school kid behind the ice cream counter. But there's no way he's in command of the inner-workings of America's executive branch of government.
This isn't a political objection. With as embarrassing as this poorly aged tweet may be…
…Biden is hardly the first American president to fall short of meeting campaign promises. If being a disappointment was enough to disqualify a Commander-in-Chief, we would have stopped after George Washington.
No, this isn't about the president's inability to follow through on what he said, it's about the president's inability to even know what he's saying. Note what we're witnessing in our current moment isn't spin, it's confusion.
The bizarre incoherence has prompted serious journalists to start asking questions. And the answers they're getting – or not getting – from Biden's own hand-picked team are anything but reassuring.
Those kinds of clumsy dodges lend credibility to assessments that could otherwise be dismissed as partisan sniping. For instance, former-White-House-physician-turned-Republican-Congressman Ronny Jackson, who served both Presidents Obama and Trump, recently acknowledged in an interview that he believes Biden has "created a national security disaster for this country" because "he's not cognitively prepared to be our president."
For his part, Jackson believes the time is quickly approaching when Biden's own Democrat Party won't be able to "cover for him" any longer. These compiling awkward statements and responses to the crisis in Afghanistan may just prove him right. After all, even staunch partisans are at a loss how to explain things like this:
The degree to which the evacuation of Americans and Afghans from the Kabul airport has improved in recent days isn't proof the president is pulling things together. It's proof someone else is, or some other group of people are, the president. Americans have a right to know who that is.
As much as it is frightening to think what it would mean, our current situation is precisely why the 25th Amendment was written and ratified by the states, allowing the transfer of power away from a physically or mentally incapacitated president to the vice president.
So what happens if she herself or the next in line (Speaker of the House) are mentally incapacitated? Well…
Hey America, maybe it's time we drop the tribal politics thing and consider electing some mentally stable folks to office. What do you say?
