No. of Recommendations: 14
And yet.
I was right. Still am.
No, you're not. At least, not if you're saying that the article you posted shows that Biden was "mega-senile," as you put it.
Being President involves absorbing a firehose of information, every day and on thousands and thousands of unrelated subjects. Constantly being asked to make decisions on matters you may have very few details about except what you're being briefed right in that moment. There is no way a President can ever have in their head, at any given moment, all the information that would be useful to making a decision at the moment they make it. There is no way a President can ever have in their heads every detail of every decision they've made in their term - or even in the last three weeks.
And the magnitude of the job means that mistakes will always be made - not massive mistakes, but informational mistakes. An aide might fail to include a particular element of a bill or EO while summarizing to the President; the President might misread or overlook a provision in a bill or EO when perusing it themselves; a President may not appreciate the consequences of a particular sentence or provision of a bill or EO. Etc.
In my own line of work, I deal with state government session. For many (if not most) significant pieces of state legislation that get passed, in the next year's session there's a "glitch" bill. The glitch bill corrects all the things that the scores of legislators, legislators' aides, agency heads, and governor's aides missed about the bill they passed.
That doesn't mean all those people are "mega senile." It doesn't mean the legislators and governors aren't really in charge. It just means that sometimes you sign off on something without realizing it does something that you didn't want it to do.
To give one last example - does your OP mean that Mike Johnson is mega-senile? Because the EO didn't pause LNG exports. It paused the processing and approval of new permits so that DOE could do a study on the impact on climate change. It did not, as Johnson says in the article, "Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Cause you understand we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you are fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine, because they gotta get their gas from him." Johnson's characterization is wrong. Exports of LNG to the EU continued.
Should we worry about Mike Johnson's mental health? That in this interview, he couldn't accurately remember the provisions of that EO? An EO that he said he printed out and read over with the President on that exact point? An EO that was on a topic of vital concern to his constituents and foreign policy? How damaged must Mike Johnson's mental acuity be that he doesn't know what he read? Who is making the decisions for Mike Johnson!!!
The answer is, of course, that we shouldn't conclude that Mike Johnson is mega-senile because he failed to remember what the EO actually said. We should simply realize that being the Speaker of the House is an impossibly demanding job, with gazillions of details to constantly be managing and remembering, and it's hardly unusual for a Speaker to misremember the details of any particular thing off the dome. And, of course, the job of President is even more demanding than that.....
