Why Joe Biden?

Because Democrats wanted to stay in power and propping him up, as impossible as that has now become, seemed to be the best plan.

I t’s not about Joe Biden, it’s about why Joe Biden?

For example, as the clamor about Robert Hur fades away, now never to be heard again, does anyone still wonder why Attorney General Merrick Garland was so desperate to prevent Americans from witnessing the recording of the president’s logorrheic, hours-long interview by the special counsel? The one that caused Hur to conclude that the president — notwithstanding his decades of willful Espionage Act violations — was too mentally deteriorated to indict? A conclusion that can only mean that he was too incapacitated to assist in his defense against criminal charges, or that the prosecutor feared a jury would think it an act of Eighth Amendment-level cruelty to subject so dissipated a man to the rigors of a felony indictment and trial?

No, of course no one need wonder about that. But again, the question is why Joe Biden?

On that, the point is that Garland went out, looked the country in the eye, and told us that the recording could not be released because to do so would compromise vital law-enforcement interests. He told us that it was congressional Republicans who were seeking political advantage by demanding production of the recording. All the while, Garland and every Democrat well knew that Republicans were simply doing exactly what the Democrats and their media chorus would be doing — at much higher decibel levels — if the Republican president were non compos mentis.

Garland was seeking nothing but political advantage, in the form of providing political cover. He wouldn’t produce the recording because to do so would have been a concession that Biden is not capable of functioning as president of the United States.

Garland owed that concession to the country. As a key cabinet principal, as the government’s top lawyer, and as one of the nation’s most important national-security officials, it was his duty  —instead of playing partisan games with Congress — to work with Vice President Kamala Harris, with other cabinet secretaries, and with the president himself to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Biden from office.

I don’t make this argument as a conservative disgruntled over Biden’s being a man of the Left. He is not, after all, much of one. He is an apparatchik who has always struggled to be where he perceived the Democratic mainstream to be. Hence, from abortion to immigration to crime, he’s flipped and flopped as necessary, remaining consistent only in his incoherence.

Moreover, if I were making a partisan point here, I would not be invoking a constitutional process that would make Harris the incumbent president of the United States — a development that in its own way is frightening because she is not up to the job for different reasons.

She is not, however, mentally incapacitated. And the nation has to have a president who is not mentally incapacitated.

Garland is not alone. His suppression of the Hur tape just makes him the most glaring example. Harris is also constitutionally obliged to invoke the 25th Amendment when “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It has, for at least two years, been her duty to do that in conjunction with the cabinet, and perhaps — if it were to be done responsibly — with senior members of Congress.

She hasn’t acted either. No top Democrat has.

Mind you, before freezing in a number of his all-too-frequent senior moments on Thursday night, the president of the United States was holed up, away from the White House, for a full week — while wars rage in Europe and the Middle East because the floundering Biden failed to deter our enemies from attacking our allies, and while a border-security crisis of Biden’s own making ravages communities across the nation.

For debate prep.

This isn’t a high-school competition. Then-incumbent president Gerald Ford had a disastrous debate against Jimmy Carter. Carter, as incumbent, was subpar against Ronald Reagan, who in turn, as president, performed poorly in his first debate against Walter Mondale. Mitt Romney ran rings around President Obama in their first debate. None of those men who faltered was a buffoon — far from it. But they were presidents and the presidency is a grueling, full-time job. They performed poorly because the presidency doesn’t lend itself to taking a week off for debate prep. And no one would have suggested that Obama, Reagan, Carter, or Ford do such a thing because none of them was mentally incapacitated — each knew that he was president, and that being president came first.

But Democrats decided to shut Joe Biden down for a week. Not because they wanted to, but because they figured they had to. It was the only chance Biden had — thin as it turned out to be — to get through a 90-minute session in which he’d be asked questions he couldn’t answer with note cards, in which he’d be challenged vigorously and need to be quick on his shuffling feet.

Here’s the thing, though. What we saw on Thursday night was the result of that week of preparation and rest. And it was a disaster. So . . . what must the prep have been like?

Biden’s closest aides and the top Democrats with whom they are in constant communication know better than anyone in America that the president cannot function, that he cannot do the job. Yet, rather than ease Biden out, invoke the 25th Amendment if he wouldn’t go voluntarily, and ensconce in the Oval Office the vice president they insisted in 2020 would be ready to take over if the octogenarian collapsed, they decided they had to try to drag Biden across the finish line.

Why?

Because the Democratic Party is a trainwreck.

As catastrophic as Biden is in his senescence, he remains useful cover for the fact that the youth, energy, and money in the Democratic Party is woke-leftist, Islamist, counter-constitutionalist, post-American, and unelectable.

This doesn’t mean the whole Democratic Party is that way. But it does mean that sensible Democrats have to mind their tongues and genuflect in the crazies’ direction if they want to remain viable. They may personally believe, like the majority of Americans believe, that the border needs to be secure; that we can’t allow millions of illegal aliens a year to enter the country; that we don’t want boys and men invading the formerly safe spaces of girls and women; that mere statistical racial disparities in outcomes do not establish racism; that crime — especially recidivist crime — is a serious problem; that we need to back Israel’s wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian patrons; that a radical “green energy” transition the country is not ready for weighs too heavily on the budgets of everyday Americans even as it drives the national economy deeper into the ditch; and that America, warts and all, is fundamentally good — rightly, the envy of the world. But woe betide the Democrat who gives voice to such commonsense views.

Democrats have thus rolled the dice with Biden, and with the nation’s security, because the alternative is dealing with that rift.

Joe Biden is a lifelong mediocrity. But he has the fortuity of being both a Democrat from another era and Obama’s vice president. Because he’s a doddering blank slate, Democrats of all camps could project onto him their kind of Democrat. He could run in 2020 as the guy who could face down the radicals, and then govern under the thumb of the radicals — but with enough rhetorical feints to the old establishment Dems that they might yet rally around him . . . especially with no alternatives except the hard left and Donald Trump.

Why Joe Biden? Because Democrats want to stay in power and propping him up, as impossible as that has now become, seemed to be the best plan. Sadly, it may yet be. That, if I may repeat myself, doesn’t change the basic fact: The nation has to have a president who is not mentally incapacitated.