This latest flub by the man who would be president suggests that he needs glasses or to have the teleprompter moved closer. The video that follows is an excerpt from his remarks yesterday on crime, and in it he appears to squint and struggle to read the words, culminating in a serving of word salad when he reaches the name and city of the Baton Rouge police chief. A transcript follows.
Illegal guns sold from the back door of a gun shop in Virginia don’t end up in a murder scene in Baltimore. And if they do, then local and federal law enforcement can better coordinate to trace illegal gun sales back to a shady gun dealer and hold them accountable. Police chief Murray of the Baltimore — excuse me, police chief Mary — police chief Murphy, Paul, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, talked about how he’s coordinating more closely with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, to help take on criminal organizations committing violent crimes in the city. This kind of coordination is essential to keeping the weapons war out of the hands of dangerous criminals, fugitives and gangs, as well as organized crime.
As J.E. Dyer notes in her incisive piece on the entire speech — which unsurprisingly focuses on one type of crime, gun violence, and one solution, fewer guns — Biden repeats a threat he has made before: “If you wanted or think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s or maybe some nuclear weapons.” But as Tucker Carlson noted on his Fox News Channel show last night, “isn’t this guy telling us that January 6th insurrection by the QAnon army nearly toppled democracy”?
As for Biden’s continuing decline, a group of House Republicans urged him last week to submit to a cognitive evaluation, but so far the White House has remained mum on the topic.
