This is a detailed response to Daniel Warner's short piece in Counterpunch this weekend, titled "Biden’s Physical Age is Not the Real Problem."

Warner argues that the real problem with Biden is that "beyond his physical and mental states are his inability to react to a changing world" and that

the best argument against Biden and his geriatric cronies, like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, is not their physical decline or lack of mental acuity. The biggest problem is their adherence to an outdated vision of the United States and its relation to the rest of the world.

Warner's argument contains an essential truth. But there are in fact several problems with Biden beyond those of his age, problems which greatly complicate our picture of Biden's inadequacy.

The first one is that Biden and his cronies are doing what they do under the cover of "secrecy,' and moreover under the cover of the persecution of journalists. But such "secrecy" doesn't really work in the Age of the Internet; anyone who operates a persistent Google or YouTube search can find out that the CIA-informed US corporate media presentation of Ukraine is not the truth. The general picture offered by any smidgen of research one cares to name is that, so far, a lot of people have died for the sake of outcomes that are so far not much different than what existed previously, except of course that the whole thing has been a disaster for the rest of the world.

The point of "secrecy," then, is not actually to keep things secret. Rather, there must be facades, so that when the warmongers are pressed on the pointlessness of their activities, the press secretaries can point to the facades while the "secrecy" (combined with various lies) will give the warmongers the appearance of "plausible deniability." The outcome of such activity is that everything Biden and his subordinates say appears disingenuous. Biden's failure to convince is especially apparent in his administration's explanation of the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline. Wolfgang Streeck comments as follows:

Take, for example, the semi-official ersatz account of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, published by the New York Times and handed to the German weekly, Die Zeit: the supposed culprits were six people, as yet unknown, on a Polish yacht rented somewhere in East Germany, who had conveniently left traces on the boat’s kitchen table of the powerful explosives they had taken along to the crime scene. Apart from the truest of the true believers and, of course, the loyal manufacturers of public consent, it didn’t require a lot of thinking to see that the story had been concocted to crowd out the account presented by Seymour Hersh, the immortal investigative reporter. What was exciting about it for the dietristic mind was that it was so obviously ridiculous that it seemed its ridiculousness could not be due to incompetence – not even the CIA could be as dumb as that – but was rather intentional, raising the question of what it might have been intended for.

In such an environment one imagines that there's another story to the Pentagon documents leak, one we aren't really being told. More precisely, we have to guess that the leak was part of a greater campaign of perception management which the public will be allowed to see in its full flower at some later point in the devolution of the proxy war.

Second, what the US is trying to do "under Biden" (assuming he's really in charge) is actually quite different from what the US tried in the Cold War. If Biden's actions appear to be like restarting a second Cold War, that's because the combatants cover the same turf. At any rate, in the Cold War, the imagined assumption was that the US could, through nation-building, establish perimeters against "Communism." Today the US imagines the overthrow of Putin, an openly capitalist leader, through a destructive proxy war in which the sacrifice of the Ukrainian regime, occurring as you read these words, will ostensibly be rewarded by the magically-occurring collapse of the Russian one. (And once the dust settles, they imagine, Ukraine can be rebuilt for the greater glory of the IMF and the privatizers.) On the surface the greater war against Russia appears as another one of those death-by-embargo schemes. The problem with such schemes is, of course, that the more you widen the circle of those nations that are to be embargoed, the less effective those embargoes will be. If embargo didn't succeed in overthrowing the Castros in Cuba, the PSUV in Venezuela, or the clerics in Iran, why would it work if the US adds Putin in Russia to the list?

Third, the (pseudo) Left in the United States appears to be going along with the Biden failure to keep up with the world, as if Biden were the best officeholder they could possibly imagine and as if they were happy to have his delusions fill up their empty little heads. Build Back Better almost passed, or so they tell themselves. Let's take a look at Bernie Sanders' endorsement of Joe Biden:

“The last thing this country needs is a Donald Trump or some other right-wing demagogue who is going to try to undermine American democracy or take away a woman’s right to choose, or not address the crisis of gun violence, or racism, sexism or homophobia,” Sanders said in an interview. “So, I’m in to do what I can to make sure that the president is reelected.”

One thing political observers may have noticed over the past six years is that decisions about Sanders' laundry-list of things have, under Biden as well as under Trump, devolved unto the states rather than being Federal matters. It's also pretty clear that Biden would lose to Trump if he didn't lose to RFK Jr. or Marianne Williamson first. You can do it, (pseudo)lefties -- if you approach the family altars and pray really hard for a Biden win you can assure victory for a President who can't really campaign in any adequate manner. It's all up to you, or so you can tell yourselves.

In sum, Biden appears not merely as a delusional leader who is -- between the ears -- trapped in an obsolete past, but rather as the epicenter of a set of more-generally-accepted delusions thrown up out of a general inability to think of how things could be different, a "complete atrophy of political imagination." I suppose the Democratic and Republican Parties could spontaneously disband and things would improve. But -- as the character of Steven Hyde once asked on "That '70s Show" -- how would that be funny?