Dementia sloughs away all the nuances of personality, leaving behind and magnifying a few core traits.  Joe Biden has a documented history of being dumb, self-centered, and mean, so those traits are now worse. Add in his neo-Marxism, and the result is someone who goes to Buffalo, where a mentally ill man slaughtered ten innocent people, and Biden, instead of trying to heal wounds, spouted falsehoods and calumnies to score political points.  Biden is despicable.

The speech was vintage Biden: squinting at the TelePrompter, weird inflections untethered to the content of his words, clownlike grimaces, and a generally creepy vibe.  It's easier to read the transcript.

Biden copies his mentor, Obama, by making sure he's the central topic of any speech.  For example, he explained that, when he called Kathy Hochul asking for permission to visit her state, "She said, 'This is a big Scranton.'"  Get it?  Biden's from Scranton...

And as he always does, Biden dragged in his own family tragedies, saying that "we know a little bit of what's like [sic] to lose a piece of your soul when you lose a son, a daughter, a husband, a wife, a mother, a father."  And it's certainly true that Biden had his fair share of loss, losing his wife and daughter in 1972 and his son, Beau, in 2015.  However, Joe brings them up obsessively, to the point at which one loses any sense of his personal tragedies and hears only "me, me, me."  This was especially true when Biden used Beau as a shield to deflect attention from the troops who died during his disgraceful Afghanistan pullout.

Where Biden veered into loathsomeness was when he decided that an appearance just a few days after a terrible mass murder would be the perfect opportunity to score political points.  In this context, it's important to note that Biden, to date, has ignored most mass shootings — and there have been many of late, possibly because the left's COVID response and racism have broken apart America's social fabric and further weakened damaged personalities.  To merit his attention, the narrative requires a crazy White person killing non-White people.  The innumerable Black, Hispanic, and Asian mass shooters do not exist in Biden's narrow ideological framework.

Image: Biden statement in Buffalo.  YouTube screen grab.

But Biden knew what had happened in Buffalo.  This shooting, he said, was "domestic terrorism.  Violence inflicted in the service of hate and a vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group."

Biden also knew where to place the blame: on those evil people who've been saying that individuals "will be replaced — that's the word, 'replaced' — by the 'other' — by people who don't look like them and who are, therefore, in a perverse ideology that they possess and being fed [sic], lesser beings."  And those evil people are, of course, white supremacists.  On the White House website, the title of the transcript of his statement has Biden "calling on All Americans to Condemn White Supremacy."

Tucker Carlson gave a good rundown of this "replacement theory" statement from Biden, showing both that Biden is referring to conservatives and that the replacement theory is a purely leftist construct, with Joe Biden himself on board:

The truth is that, outside Democrat-heavy areas, true Americans don't care about race and color.  They care about values and push back, through elections and cultural campaigns against Marxists of any color pushing aside traditional, constitutional values.  But for one murderous, cat-killing, crazy boy, well, it got under his skin to hear Democrats promise to do away with him.  The zeitgeist always gets to the crazy ones first.

For Biden, though, the answer is censorship: "you can't prevent people from being radicalized to violence, but we can address the relentless exploitation of the internet to recruit and mobilize terrorism."

Additionally, Biden wants to come for your guns: "we can keep assault weapons off our streets.  We've done it before.  I did it when we passed the crime bill last time.  And violence went down, shootings went down."  In fact, so-called "assault weapons" — presumably AR-15-style weapons — are rarely involved in murders, and when they were banned, homicide rates were unaffected.

More than that, though, we know that the Buffalo shooter chose his target because of New York's hostility to concealed carry.  He picked a location that was, for him, the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.  He knew he would be able to kill at will because no one could oppose him.  When people are allowed to carry weapons for defense, there are no mass shootings.  Sadly, some people may die, but the shooter is always stopped before he can rack up the high numbers.

I'm not disappointed in Biden's speech.  It was everything I expected: self-centered, erroneous, politicized, and mean-spirited.