07/10/2024
Media pros like Piers are place WAY too much importance on speaking in complete sentences and with correct grammatical structure as a sign of mental health. The patterns Biden, a lifelong stutterer who was known for gaffes and misspeaking long before his cognitive state was being questioned, seem to irk talking heads and pundits like Piers much more than the rambling, fragmented, repetitive stream-of-semi-consciousness bu****ittery constantly engaged in by Trump. They ascribe Biden's "bad" speech patterns to dementia, but somehow Trump's crazy-assed monologues about preferring to be electrocuted to being bitten by a shark are excused as poetic license. The fact that both Biden and Trump have been able to win enough millions of votes in spite of the fact that they speak in ways that sound nothing like someone reading a prewritten speech or PhD dissertation should be all that is needed to demonstrate that folks just don't give a rat's ass about obeying the rules of proper English that would make sense for written statements. Probably 90 percent of the American public don't care about a politician's verbal elocution. Biden's post-debate polls even with all the attacks and calls for him to step aside or step down are something like 1.3% lower than before. I was a political cartoonist for over 25 years, a role that required using both hemispheres of my brain, and found it maddening to deal with most newspaper editors and reporters because they were so utterly left-brained. They, like Piers and all the corporate news geeks who are freaking out over Biden's horrible debate performance, are super-verbal. And usually STRICTLY super-verbal, so they can't handle anyone communicating in ways that fall outside of the standard framework they operate within. They can't handle them nor can they even comprehend them.
As for the clip of Biden not being sure whether to stand up... big deal. Proves nothing. The woman next to him remains seated, but the pastor or whatever his title is who seems to call for the congregation is unclear when he says something that sounds like everyone should stand up, so Biden is reacting in a perfectly logical way. When you go to a church that you are not a regular member of and are not familiar with their norms for when to stand, when to sit, when to kneel, you try to take cues from what others are doing but in this case we can’t see what is going on with the congregation. It looks to me like Biden is waiting to see if everyone is going to stand or not and when the woman next to him finally does stand, then he stands. You are reading into his body language way too much that is not there.
The atmosphere in camp Joe Biden can’t have been particularly positive since the first presidential debate versus Donald Trump - and calls for the incumbent ...
