Legal Commentary

The Vice President's delicate condition

By Beldar

Writing at Forbes.com, Henry I. Miller opines that "Joe Biden's call for a thorough neurological examination":

Are these aberrations stupidity, dementia or personality disorders? To find out, shouldn?t there be some vetting or testing of people in, or who aspire to, governmental positions as critical as the vice-presidency? After all, we require bus drivers and hairdressers to prove their competence before they are permitted to ply their trades, and applicants to most police forces undergo psychological testing.

Biden should submit to a thorough neurological and psychiatric examination, with special attention to whether he is experiencing ?transient ischemic attacks? ? marked by impaired blood flow to the brain ? small strokes, seizures, or suffers from a brain tumor. After all, we often demand to know whether a candidate has recovered from open-heart surgery, cancer or a stroke, and many states require elderly drivers to be re-licensed.

Aren?t the vice-president?s highest-level security clearance and his influence on public policy as important as the ability to drive a car?

....

Don?t voters have a right to know whether Biden is ill or merely unlikeable, impulsive and prone to deceitfulness?

I'm not sure how much of this is tongue-in-cheek. I don't know, or know of, Mr. Miller. I can tell from this op-ed that he has a fairly good sense of humor. And he came up with a couple of pretty good anecdotes about Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) that I hadn't heard before; by themselves, they're worth following the link to his piece. I'm not sure whether he's urging this prescription (i.e., that Biden seek medical and perhaps psychiatric help) upon the Obama-Biden[?] campaign, or whether he's contending instead that the American press or the voting public ought to demand it of the Obama-Biden[?] campaign, and penalize them at the ballot-box if they're non-compliant.

Either way, I don't agree. I am pretty skeptical of sentences which begin, "Don't voters have a right to know ....?" Voters decide for themselves, for better and often quite demonstrably for worse, how much and what type of vetting they want. Voters can and do employ ridiculous double standards. And it wasn't just the mainstream media who gave Obama a free ride in 2008. A majority of the American republic, as represented through the presidential electors from their respective states, ratified that inaction by electing a man who'd campaigned on his "Kansas values" even though he never lived in Kansas for a single day. Some of us cared; some of us were horrified; but not enough of us were, obviously, and so we've been stuck with both President Cypher and his faithful sidekick, Bozo the Veep, for the last three-and-three-quarter years now.

But the voters don't need a neuro or psych report on Joe Biden. His unfitness for office is obvious, but it was obvious in 2008 too. No amount of professional whitewash could change that; Joe Biden's as far beyond rehabilitation as he is beyond the onset of male pattern baldness.

Nope, even without expert opinions, everyone knows Joe Biden is a disgrace, a bad joke, a catastrophe being kept from America only by Barack Obama's steady heartbeat, may the Lord protect and preserve his good health. The question is whether more of us, this time, will care.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on August 20, 2012 (boomark / email).