I know what you're thinking.  He's an animal, obviously.  He threw a young staffer up against a cold marble wall in an isolated chamber of the Capitol's labyrinthine corridors and reached under her skirt.  When she struggled to free herself from the senator and managed to wriggle away, he angrily pointed a finger in her face and said accusingly and with a "tight" voice, "You're nothing to me.  You're nothing!" before leaving her disheveled and confused up against the wall and walking away.  What a monster!  What an animal!  

This is the same Senator Biden who just two years earlier had joined forces with that other hunter of women, sexual predator Senator Ted Kennedy, to upend the confirmation hearings of a well regarded, brilliant, black, but conservative nominee to the Supreme Court by accusing him of having a potty mouth.  To this day, the allegations against now-justice Clarence Thomas never even approached anything close to physical assault, they were largely contradicted by a thorough criminal inquiry by the FBI, and the woman who accused him of using sexually suggestive language is widely considered a liar.  Nevertheless, Gropey Joe, who can't keep his hands off young girls, and Killer Ted Kennedy, Biden's fellow Democrat serial-rapist and the murderer of another young female staffer, cynically turned the incendiary smear of sexual impropriety into a well rehearsed and unconscionable "veto by accusation" against any conservative jurist seeking confirmation before their Judiciary Committee, a disgraceful tradition the Democrats have continued right up to the present day.  While he upended the historically neutral committee and transformed it into one of the most coarse and venal legislative bodies since the Dreyfus Affair for purely political reward, deep within the bowels of the Capitol Building, Biden engaged in the exact type of inexcusable sexual assault of which he accused others.  What hypocrisy.  What an absolute animal.  

He says he doesn't remember the incident, and he may be telling the truth.  With every appearance before a television camera these days, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Slow Joe's mind is long gone.  As with a body clinging to life with a brain failing to demonstrate consciousness, it is difficult to describe Old Joe's cognition as anything much beyond that of a vegetative state.  His is a brain firing on so few cylinders that medical professionals must be astonished that it is not sitting pickled in a jar in a lab with electrodes jutting out from all sides.  He's running to be the first president who won't even remember running.

He cannot distinguish between Tom Wolf, the current governor of Pennsylvania, and Dale Wolf, who served briefly as governor of Delaware back in 1993.  He thinks Theresa May is Margaret Thatcher.  He thinks Chancellor Angela Merkel is also Margaret Thatcher.  During one debate, he told parents to keep the "record player" on at night so that black children could learn proper English.  He has repeatedly tried to reference the Declaration of Independence in his speeches and found himself so tongue-tied that he was left shouting at his audience, "You know, the thing!"  He told a crowd in South Carolina he is running for the United States Senate.  He bragged of working with Deng Xiaoping, who died a quarter-century ago, on the Paris Climate Accord during the Obama administration.  He thinks "poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids," especially when they rubbed his legs and twisted his leg hair while he served as their lifeguard.  He believes that his deceased son was the attorney general of the United States (he was not), that 150 million people have been killed from gun violence since 2007, that a child care tax credit would "put 720 million women back in the workforce," and that the best way to tackle violence against women is by "punching at it and punching at it and punching at it."

He recently confused 2014 for 1976, discussed his sharp memories of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the late '70s, confused New Hampshire for Vermont, Nevada for New Hampshire, and South Carolina as the mythical North South Carolina.  When he's not biting his wife's fingers like a toddler, he talks about increasing health care premiums to make them affordable, choosing "truth over facts," and how he's looking forward to "appointing the first African-American woman to the United States Senate."  His economic plans involve "clipping coupons at the stock market" and yelling at blue-collar factory workers for needing an "AR-14."  He has repeatedly mistaken his wife for his sister and his sister for his wife.  He referred to Bernie Sanders as "the president" and "my friend Vermont" and called Cory Booker "the president," too, but astonishingly forgot President Obama's name altogether and settled for calling him "my boss."  In a short speech in St. Louis, he declared to a stunned audience that he was most certainly an "Obiden-Bama Democrat."  And as if reverting to his rapey impulses, he told CBS4 Miami recently that "economic intercourse" would have to wait for many more months.  (God help anyone stuck in lockdown with Rapey Joe.)

Half the time, he does not seem to remember that he was once vice president or that he ever left the Senate.  He has no idea what century, let alone what decade, we're in.  He even falls asleep on camera during his own "town hall."  His brain is mush; for all intents and purposes, Joe Biden is a vegetable.  

But how can a man who spent nearly forty years in the Senate before becoming vice president be considered anything but a political fossil?  Biden has been part of the federal government for so long that he has changed positions back and forth multiple times as political fortune required.  Today he claims to be a devoted advocate of "black lives matter," but for half a century, he worked aggressively against school integration, gutted welfare to black single mothers, voted for Clinton's 1994 crime legislation to eliminate "predators on our streets," referred to the young upstart Obama as "bright and clean" for a black American, and served as the eulogist for one of last century's most famous segregationists.  Today he rails against "corporate greed," but twenty years ago, he worked to overturn Glass-Steagall so that the firewall between investment banking and FDIC-insured local banking disappeared.  Today, he is a close ally of Iran and China; in 2003, he called for the invasion of Iraq.  Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense during the Obama administration, said bluntly in his memoir that Biden has "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."  By any measure, he is a politician's politician who shifts positions as quickly as he stakes them out.

He is running today to "change Washington," but Biden is the epitome of Washington.  For fifty years, he has influenced America's foreign and domestic policy; everything he runs against today he helped create not long ago.  Only a fossilized relic of D.C. could look back over a half-century of actively working toward America's decline and claim that he's just getting started.  Like some mosquito trapped in amber, Biden is lost in time, clueless as to where he is but certain that there is more American blood for him to drain.  He represents nothing but the mineralized remains of another age.  Like those minerals beneath our feet, his weak and decrepit condition lays bare that he will soon return to the earth.  

Animal, vegetable, or mineral?  What difference, at this point, does it really make?

Hat tip to Caitlin Johnstone, who has catalogued the video evidence of Biden's mental demise.

Image: Kelly Kline via Flickr.