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What do you think about all of the breathless reporting about Democrat insiders losing their shit over this?
Are those people not plugged in or constantly hyper-consuming political information including full speech readouts, press releases, presidential daily schedules, Politico inside scoops etc?
For what it is worth he was worse last night than when I saw him speak live a few weeks ago. Illness, stress and lack of rest can exacerbate age related decline pretty quickly, I've seen it happen in literal days when I worked in social care. UTI's and cold/flu being the most usual culprits.
And if you actually have exposure to him it's possible he was coming across reasonably well in lower stress situations, with less time to have to speak. That plus bias towards your own side would do a lot of heavy lifting.
Most of my contacts are in British politics not American, but a couple of them actually met Biden fairly recently and were shocked to see the difference last night as well, which indicates that perhaps something did get worse in the immediate past.
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I think they thought they could hide his decline.
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I think a lot of them have fallen into the trap of believing their own propaganda, that Biden's apparent frailty and incoherence were merely Republican propaganda brought out by misconstruing events and taking clips out of context.
They did the same thing with Hillary Clinton; the Republicans swore she was ill, Democrats swore this was foul calumny, then Hillary collapsed at the 9/11 memorial. (Obviously her illness, whatever it was, was considerably less serious)
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I think those people have been in quite a lot of struggle sessions where the very suggestion that Biden might be a little bit over-the-hill is laughable Drumphist propaganda and if you humor that idea it’s a sign that you may be a dangerous racist sexist fascist who needs to be voted off the island. But now they have a moment where the conditioning is broken by intense public ridicule and the scales fall off.
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