Joe Biden’s Manic State of the Union

by Jeff Childers

Last night, Joe Biden yelled at Congress for an hour straight. In a sort of furious, manic reverie, Joe Biden ‘delivered’ his divisive, angry, overcooked State of the Union speech on fast mode. It wasn’t so much a coherent speech, per se, as it was a long litany of loud one-liners. Joe was outraged about everything. Especially Trump. He shouted every single sentence in all-caps at the top of his lungs in his scratchy old-man voice, and then speared it to death with a double exclamation point. Every line sounded like a made-for-media punchline to a bad, overly elaborate, political inside joke.

Distractingly, Biden often stressed the wrong parts of his sentences and slightly slurred his words, eliding each syllable like an annoyed chronic drunk weaving a super complicated story explaining how that open bottle of vodka got there to the cop who pulled him over. One wonders whether Biden’s slurring, missed syllables, and other uncharacteristic speech issues could have been side effects from the powerful cocktail of downers offsetting the twenty Adderall Biden obviously gobbled up right before the speech.

Overall, Joe reminded viewers of an overly caffeinated wind-up monkey, feverishly clanging its cymbals over and over so fast and hard it falls over and then keeps flipping around and falling off the table, banging its furry arms together the whole time.

If last night’s goal was to fend off a last-ditch challenge from Gavin Newsom and beat everyone’s pitlike expectations, and if shouting stamina counts, then Joe got the job done. In its non-paywalled article, the New York Times’ headline concluded, “In-Your-Face Biden Takes on Trump and His Own Doubters.” This description from the Times’ article seemed pretty accurate:

(Biden) exhibited his stamina, his vitality, his capacity and, yes, his umbrage. Defiant and feisty, he dispensed with the conventions of the format to directly take on former President Donald J. Trump and attempted to make the election a referendum on his predecessor rather than himself. Mr. Biden shouted his lines, clearly intending to use volume to demonstrate vigor. The prepared text had 80 exclamation points in it and he surely added more on his own as he went along.

While Joe’s Big Speech was a lot of elderly sturm und drang, it symbolized nothing. Joe’s loud remarks fit into five emphatic but insubstantial categories: false claims about his record (thanks to me, seniors can now afford their prescription drugs forschwearingden!), false claims about the state of the country (the FBI says violent crime is at record lows!), demands for Republicans to do stuff (send me a damn border bill!), slams on President Trump (my predecessor…), and somehow speechwriters crammed in the entire laundry list of longstanding, loony, liberal policy dog treats (it’s time for big corporations and billionaires to pay their fair share!).  Politico noticed that Joe talked a LOT about CIA-riddled Ukraine and his mortal enemy, Putin, but not so much about an Israeli cease fire, Yemen, Iran, China, Taiwan, or any other foreign policy hotspot.

Surprisingly, CNN ran a pretty fair fact check, which found most everything Biden said to be either an outright lie, a lie by omission, or misleading.

Vexed Republicans often booed Biden. Marjorie Taylor Greene, no wallflower, heckled Biden throughout, while Mike Johnson sat behind Joe, shaking his head and looking especially sour whenever Joe fired off a particularly mendacious rhetorical cannonade. But afterwards, the social media battlefield was oddly muted; Joe doesn’t seem to have said anything particularly memorable apart from simply surviving what must have been a painful, demanding and expensive physical effort.

And so the drama continues.

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