Joe and Jill are goners who won’t go

Joe Biden just delivered the worst televised debate performance in history.

It started in his opening remarks when he hurriedly regurgitated a canned speech like a nervous 11^th grader in speech class, it continued into the early stages when he repeatedly suffered brain freezes in describing, for example, how he “beat Medicare,” and finally ended mercifully with a forgettable conclusion.

Even – especially – Democrats were stunned by his awkward, rambling incoherency and open-mouthed, vacant stares into space.

If this were a fight, a TKO would have been called in the first round. If this were softball, the Ten-Run Rule would have been invoked in the first inning.

The senility clips of the last few months which the White House defensively labelled “cheap fakes” as late as last week have now grown into a full 90-minute TV reality show. If you’re a Democrat, it’s like a bloody car wreck — it’s impossible to ignore and impossible to watch.  It was moderated by Biden’s hand-picked partisans at Democrat-friendly CNN, but the night was owned by an emcee named Donald Trump.

The editorial board of The New York Times – The New York friggin’ Times! – called on Biden to withdraw from the race. This is after he corralled 90-some percent of the Democratic delegates and is assured of a first vote win at the convention. Another Democrat pundit called him “toast.” Another said his performance was “painful.” Democrat organ Politico summed it up with “Democrats freak out.”

But Biden won’t withdraw. The very next day he was being escorted around by “doctor” Jill to badly read poor speeches off cheap teleprompters. We have no reports yet whether he read such parenthetical words as “pause for applause” from the teleprompter. Such gaffes are so common by him now that they’re barely reported anymore.

He won’t drop out because the “doctor” and her patient are addicted to the perks of the office of the Presidency of the United States. The digs are nice, the food is exquisite, the butt-kissing is sublime, and the airplane travel is first class (provided he doesn’t fall down or up the shortened stairs of Airforce One).

It’s the zombie presidency. The un-dead presidency. It’s dead but still twitches a destructive Executive Order or two spoon-fed to them by squirrely adolescent staffers until the Supreme Court throws it out. Even then they boast that they’ll do it again, the Supreme Court be damned. They’re the walking dead.

So, they plan to hang around. Screw the party, screw the country, screw the world. Something about them reminds me of the cheap, chiseling couple running the restaurant in Les Misérables. The illegitimate masters of the White House. But they’re not masters, they’re squatters. You want them out? You’ll have to vote them out. And even then you might have to evict them with the aid of the 82nd Airborne.

The only surprise from the debate was that the Democrats were surprised. Inexplicably, they were surprised that Biden delivered a performance consistent with his public performance over the last three years.

Where have these Dems been?

I predicted beforehand that Biden would do a little better than Republicans expected. He would not drool, not fall down and not sniff Trump’s hair, as many Republicans expected.

My prediction was correct. (I also predicted that Trump would do better than expected. I was right about that too. This guy is teachable, even if he sometimes goes out of his way to deny it.)

Democrats, however, apparently expected much better from Biden. They expected him to perform as if he was reading a teleprompter – despite the hard fact that over the last three years he’s shown little ability to do that.

It was a case of Democrats engaging in wishful thinking, or perhaps just coming to believe their own propaganda. In any case, their surprise at Biden’s poor performance was surprising to me.

The result was a Democrat piling-on. I wonder if the piling-on was designed to cover for their willful blindness over the past three years. Nobody’s saying “I’m with Joe” anymore, and instead they’re busy deleting the tweets where they said that just a few months ago.

It bodes badly for Biden and for a Democrat White House. The next set of polls will show Biden down by 6-8 points – at a stage in the election where he was ahead by 10 points in the close one of 2020.

It’s apt to get worse from there. Biden is entering laughing stock territory – Dan Quayle and Kamala Harris territory.

It’s hard to recover from being a laughing stock. People don’t vote for a laughing stock.

Only Biden himself – with a teleprompter-enabled speech from the Oval Office graciously announcing his withdrawal – can rescue the Democrats from themselves and probably only “doctor” Jill can rescue Biden from himself. But that would take a lot more courage, acumen and selflessness than either has ever shown.