It doesn’t take an expert to tell us that Biden shows all the signs of dementia

Last week, the special prosecutor said Biden’s memory was so dysfunctional he couldn’t be tried for textbook national security violations. Biden’s push-back press conference painfully showcased his mental failings. Since then, Democrats have tentatively acknowledged his age but insist he’s still sharp. Naturally, the experts were called. But who needs experts? We know what we see.

One expert obligingly wrote for the New York Times that everyone is a bit forgetful and, while this may worsen as they get older, it really doesn’t mean anything. Charan Ranganath, “a professor of psychology and neuroscience and the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis,” explained that “[a]s an expert on memory, I can assure you that everyone forgets.”

To which I, no expert at all, say, “duh!” Anyone who has failed to ace a test because he doesn’t have a photographic memory knows about forgetting things.

Naturally, Ranganath’s essay isn’t quite that simplistic. He acknowledges that forgetting increases with age, especially when it comes to forgetting words. Also, he explains that there’s a difference between forgetting and what I call data retrieval. That means you know the general data, but the details are filed in your brain, and you can’t access them. For Ranganath, Biden’s inability to remember the precise date on which his son died reflects that problem.

Image by Andrea Widburg

Ranganath also acknowledges Biden’s misspeaks: “For instance, in July 2023, Mr. Biden mistakenly stated in a speech that ‘we have over 100 people dead,’ when he should have said, ‘over one million.’” This, we’re told, is a stutter. No. You and I know that a stutter would see Biden saying, “over one-one-one m-m-m-million.” Substituting “one hundred” for “one million” is a cognitive, not a speech, error.

In other words, the expert stated the obvious. Very few people have photographic memories, while some people’s memories are generally better than others. I cannot, and never could, recognize people’s faces, and I’m not that great with names, either. I now apologize in advance, as it saves time and keeps people from taking offense when I have no idea who they are after having had an enjoyable conversation with them mere weeks before.

People (mostly Biden’s opponents) have also demanded that he take a cognitive test. Naturally, Biden refused. I’d refuse, too, and I’m reasonably certain I’m not suffering from dementia.

The Daily Mail has the “gold-standard” test. For me, some of the challenges are easy. I can do the “alternating trail making,” the visuoconstructional skills (drawing both a cube and a clock), the animal naming, the verbal fluency, the abstraction (i.e., abstract analysis), and probably the orientation (i.e., date and place) without any difficulty.

However, when it comes to paying attention and committing random information to memory…well, those worry me. My memory works by association, attaching new information to old. If you throw words at me and expect me to remember them 10 minutes later, it’s not going to happen.

Again, while I’m reasonably certain that while people interacting with me could say I’m a bit scatty, no one would say I am showing signs of dementia. And the important point is that you don’t need to be an expert to know that. A legal analogy will help.

At a trial, there are two kinds of witnesses: Percipient witnesses (people testifying as to what they personally know) and expert witnesses (people who apply their expertise to what they either know personally or that was supplied to them). Importantly, you can find experts to say, quite literally, anything. That doesn’t mean they’re lying. It just means that, for every belief, there is an expert.

However, experts mostly aren’t necessary. The law has long recognized that you don’t need experts to affirm the obvious. If a man says that, on the day in question, there was ice everywhere, including needles of ice blowing through the air, you don’t need an expert to affirm that this was, in fact, a cold day.

Regarding whether someone is of sound mind, the law says that percipient testimony is admissible and has evidentiary weight. It’s nice if you have a doctor come in and say that “Mrs. Smith, aged 100 when she wrote her will, aced the cognitive test,” but if you have a stream of witnesses offering examples that she was sharp as a tack until the day she died, that’s good, too.

This gets me to Biden. We don’t need experts. It’s enough that we, the American people, are the percipient witnesses. We know that Biden was always a dishonest man and often a stupid one, as well as being a bully. But he was sharp. If you go back and watch his debate against Paul Ryan in 2012, the dishonesty and bullying were on display, but he was fully compos mentis. There’s no doubt that all his marbles were rolling around in his head just fine:

Compare that experience with Biden 2020-2024. He’s no longer a bully; he’s randomly angry, which laypeople associate with dementia. When his memory fails, he doesn’t acknowledge it but, instead, deflects with jokes or blame, something else we associate with dementia. He’s unable to orient himself even within small spaces, another obvious sign of dementia. Just a few videos show his diminished grasp of the world around him:

When it comes to judging Biden’s state of mind, We the People are the experts, and we know exactly what’s happening. The nature of his presidency hasn’t changed, of course, because (a) he’s no less cognitively able than he was in January 2021 and (b) he’s not in charge, anyway, so it’s fine for him to head the ticket in 2024. But it’s certainly true that nobody with any mental competency should vote for him.

And one more thing: If Democrats really believe Biden’s not demented, they should be demanding that he get indicted for national security violations so that he can properly defend himself in a court of law.

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