Joe Biden has been in Washington, D.C., since 1972. It’s therefore easy to go through his past stances on issues and use those issues against him now. Doing so creates one kind of Biden v. Biden campaign video. The GOP, however, has come up with a stunning and disturbing new kind of Biden v. Biden campaign video, one that compares the Biden of eight years ago to the Biden of today.

Biden is an exceptionally weak presidential candidate. He’s been in American politics for 48 years and has always been a living example of the Peter principle. One doesn’t hear much about that principle nowadays, but it was a big deal in the 1970s.

The Peter Principle was a 1969 book that Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull wrote. It asserts that people who are competent at one thing invariably get promoted and often end up in a job that doesn’t match their area of competency. Peter and Hull, therefore, said that, in a hierarchical environment, employees rise to their “level of incompetence.” Joe functions perpetually at that level.

From the beginning, Biden’s primary skill was bringing home the bacon to Delaware, so he kept getting sent back to D.C. Merely by showing up every six years, he earned promotions.

In the Senate, Biden hung around with segregationists, showed a crude racial sensibility during the Clarence Thomas hearings, and backed a crime bill that sent almost two generations of black men to prison. His runs for the presidency were invariably stymied by his plagiarism and lying, as well as his basic stupidity. And of course, there was his weirdness around little girls and grown women.

It was because of his incompetence that Obama chose Biden as a running mate. There was no risk that Biden would get in Obama’s way. Additionally, Biden’s longevity, despite his stupidity and corruption, gave an air of experience and gravitas to a leftist community organizer.

By 2019, Joe stood for stability. He was no wild-eyed leftist like the rest of the top Democrat candidates. Instead, he was old Joe, the political moderate. Except, of course – and this is where the Biden v. Biden videos practically write themselves – he is no longer a moderate. Now that he’s the anointed one, Biden has chosen to turn his back on his entire political career and explicitly promises to be one of the most progressive presidents ever. To this end, Biden’s pretty much bought into the entire Bernie Sanders socialist playbook.

In addition to showing Biden running against his past stances, as he shifted from moderate leftist to a radical, there’s even more compelling Biden v. Biden material out there. Biden is a fragile, confused old man. One doesn’t have to be a specialist in geriatric diseases to recognize that he is suffering from severe cognitive decline. Saying that, though, is not the same as seeing it.

The GOP has therefore released a campaign advertisement that compares today’s Biden with a past Biden. The commercial doesn’t go back to Biden in 1972, when he was young, frisky, and assaulting female interns. All it needs to do is look at Biden in 2008. He was still a dim bulb then, but he was glib and in control of his material. That man is gone, and he’s not coming back:

Joe Biden is incoherent, incompetent, and unfit to lead.pic.twitter.com/x4ET9wjHqJ

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) August 7, 2020

In 1975, when Saturday Night Live was in its first season, the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, took an inordinately long time to die. Some news networks would periodically let viewers know that he wasn’t dead yet. After his death, when Chevy Chase read the parodied news on SNL’s “Weekend Update,” Chase would periodically announce, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!”

A reader suggested to me that Biden’s dementia is so extreme that we could headline every story about him, “Joe Biden still has dementia.” As it is, nothing makes that point more clearly than the GOP’s newest ad.

Image: Joe Biden by Gage Skidmore; creative commons, some rights reserved.