Credit where credit is due. If Joe Biden is as cognitively challenged as a number of specialists in the diseases of aging have reported, his handlers are doing a bang-up job. Yesterday the former vice president gave what far-left CNN analyst John Avlon pronounced the best speech of his campaign. The location selected for this “big speech” — Gettysburg — was intended to be as evocative as the subject: a call for unity and healing. The speech was peppered with quotes from Lincoln’s famous oration.
Of course bringing off a speech of this magnitude requires perfection, which in turn depends on speaking the truth. Therein lies the rub for Biden. For him the truth is whatever the DNC tells him it is. If they tell him that unfettered, government-provided abortion is now the law of the land, then so be it. Bring up his career-long support for the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortion, and he will respond, “What support?” And that won’t necessarily be the dementia talking.
Biden learns the speeches written for him by rote, not by content. That combined with his propensity for verbal miscues heightens the likelihood he will misspeak. Yesterday, he chose a hell of a moment to read the wrong word off the teleprompter:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
We can disagree about how we move forward, but we must take the first steps. And it starts with how we treat one another. How we talk to one another. How we respect one another. In the second inaugural, Lincoln said, ‘With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we’re in to build up the nation’s wounds — bind up the nation’s wounds.’ Now, we have our work to reunite America. To bind up our nation’s wounds. To move past shadow and suspicion. And so we, you and I together, we press on, even now. After hearing the second inaugural address, Frederick Douglas told President Lincoln, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.’ We have to be dedicated to our own sacred effort. [Emphasis added]
Replacing Lincoln’s word bind with build in that context is an unforgivable error. It’s also an unhappy harbinger of what the nation can look forward to in the event Biden is elected.
