We’ve mentioned before that we just can’t see Joe Biden’s handlers putting him in a debate with Donald Trump. The indicators of Biden’s mental condition, which turn up again and again as he does these short, mostly canned, TV appearances rather than full-on campaign stops, make it entirely implausible that Sundown Joe will be able to hold up during the course of a 90-minute verbal melee with Trump, who is one of the fiercest debaters in modern American political history (the way Trump carved up a gigantic field of pretty darned talented Republican hopefuls in 2016, all of whom were considerably more intelligent and sharper than Biden is now, should be a good indication of what’s coming on that debate stage).

Nothing since that writing has changed. For example, this isn’t the kind of thing you can sell to the American public when Trump, who might irritate people with his brusque style but is never boring and has no trouble making his opinion understood, is your opponent…

What the f—- is @JoeBiden *trying* to say here 🙄 pic.twitter.com/Br8wNvieEV

— Jon Nicosia (@NewsPolitics) September 15, 2020

It turns out we’re in pretty good company on this question. At The American Spectator, Rob Crisell makes a very strong case that Team Biden will pull the plug on Sundown Joe debating Trump – they just have to figure out how. Crisell points to Joe’s last lengthy in-person public speaking appearance, which was a 45-minute debacle in Kenosha two weeks ago…

Biden’s appearance in Kenosha indicates that his mental and physical decline has accelerated.

Many, including myself, found his performance shocking and more than a little sad. Throughout his roughly 45-minute speech, he seems to be moving in slow motion. He’s unsure of his movements. He’s frail and stoop-shouldered. He appears to be out of breath much of the time. He mumbles and slurs his words. Worse, he commits dozens of mistakes, messing up lines from old speeches and making a hash of new material.

The result is an inedible stew of words, chock-full of non sequiturs, filler phrases, thought fragments, and gibberish.

Some examples:

• To the primarily black audience, he says, “When Dr. King, when he said — I know that’s ancient history, you weren’t even born.” He never quotes MLK, instead recycling a boilerplate story about Bull Conner and firehoses that allegedly explains his support for civil rights.
• On prison reform: “Because right now we’re in a situation where you get out of prison, and I think you all know this, you get a bus ticket and 25 bucks.” What is he implying about his audience that he assumes they would “know all this?”
• On civil unrest: “Protesting is protesting, my buddy John Lewis used to say.” A few minutes later, he again name-checks the deceased Lewis, this time crediting him with another prosaic — and just as made-up — quote: “As John said, the only answer is to vote. It’s the only answer.”
• He delivers a laughably bad paraphrase of Psalm 91, which he misidentifies as Psalm 23.
• Forgetting for a moment why he’s in Kenosha, he jokingly says, “I can lay out for you [my plan] … I won’t now because they’ll shoot me.”
• With his finger in the face of a black woman in the front row, he muses, “You ever think you’d turn on the TV, and roughly two out of three ads would be biracial couples selling a product?”
• On black inventors: “A black man invented the light bulb, not a white guy named Edison. Okay?” Lewis Howard Latimer (whose name Biden didn’t bother to mention) made important improvements to the lightbulb filament, but he didn’t invent the lightbulb.
• On American schools supposedly ignoring black history: “Did anybody know before what’s recently happened? That black wall street in Oklahoma was burned to the ground?” This is a cryptic reference to the horrific massacre of 300 black citizens in Oklahoma 100 years ago.
• On racial injustice: “I don’t think we have any alternative but to fight back.” He hastily corrects himself: “ … alternative than just go tell the truth, just tell the truth.”
• On mental health: “Every major university and prestigious university of the country has pointed out that increases by 58 percent the chances of that child, no matter what home they came from, will get all the way through all 12 years of school. It also insists that we provide for — Right now, we have one one school psychologist for every 1,505 kids in America. We know now that about 60 percent of a child’s brain is developed by the time they’ve reached that age — And anxiety that exists with children that can be identified early is able to be dealt with. Anxiety … and their situation again — where, when you do that, we know, we know that the most at-risk generation for the first time in American history is the Z generation.” Trying to make sense of this word salad might drive you crazy.
• Interrupting himself during a solemn point about police brutality: “Hey, that’s my wife, Jill! Hey, Jilly! I’m Jill’s husband, actually.”

Clearly, Biden is a shadow of the skilled performer he once was.

Rush Limbaugh picked up on this Monday and then expanded on it thanks to a comment from a caller…

RUSH: This is Wes in Philadelphia. Great to have you. Welcome.

CALLER: Rush, mega prayers from Philadelphia, PA.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: If you could indulge me one moment to comment on Biden, Plugs, in a debate because I, too, do not believe the debates will happen. I think, as someone who’s seen dementia, he suffers sundown syndrome. So when the lights go down in the evening, his cognitive —

RUSH: Well, now, you’re jumping ahead, but you’re exactly right about this. There is something about people who suffer dementia and the 8 o’clock p.m. hour and later. There’s something about it, their functionality decreases. So that was gonna be one of the two support stories I was going to use.

And you’ve come in here as a caller, attempted to horn in on what I was gonna make a point about by going off topic about what you promised — you wanted to talk about the absurdity of masks on the sideline. Now you come and steal my thunder on Plugs not doing a debate. But I’ll forgive you because I’m a nice guy and actually you’re right, so I can’t be critical of you….

…

Speaking of — and I was just joking with the caller accusing him of stealing from me, folks. He knew it. He understood it. That’s why he was laughing along with me. But he is right. He is right that people who suffer from dementia, there is something about the 8 o’clock hour, 8 p.m. and later, that makes the circumstance deteriorate and worsen. And when you learn that, when you are first exposed to it and you read about it, you yourself would conclude, there can’t possibly be any debates. There just can’t.

Now, I have that story, and I have another one here. And this is in the Spectator.org. It’s by Rob Crisell. The headline: “Why Biden Will Withdraw From the Debates — It’s the only way for Joe’s handlers to save him from himself.” It’s the American Spectator. Now, the aspect of this I was referring to is, in addition to the points made in this story, it’s called sundowning. People with dementia often, not always, but often get more confused and nervous in the late afternoon and the evening. If you have had someone in your family suffer from dementia or Parkinson’s — not Parkinson’s, but Alzheimer’s to one degree or another, you probably have seen this.

You’ve seen it with family members who had dementia. That as the day went on, as the afternoon grew later and then shifted into evening, you could see an obvious deterioration in the mental acuity of the family member who had dementia or Alzheimer’s. I know people who have seen it with their own parents and grandparents.

You’d have an average day where you would think, “Hey, grandma doing great today. Grandma’s really cool today.” And families are filled with hope when those days happen, and then on those same days, when you get to sundown and later, the deterioration picks up, and you can see it, and you get depressed because earlier in the day you thought, “Okay. This is gonna be a good day.”

I have heard Jill Biden say that her husband Joe was up early every morning on the phone with all sorts of people. And she says this as a way, “Hey, don’t believe this stuff about Joe having mental problems. He’s up, he’s up every morning early, he’s talking to countless people on the phone.” That’s not the time to look. You need to look at Joe Biden at sunset.

In fact, on Saturday Joe Biden sent word to the media that he was shutting the campaign down at 9 a.m. 9 a.m. Saturday, the word went out that the campaign was shutting down. Here it is. A reporter for NBC-MSNBC got word from the Biden camp– the reporter’s name is Jake Sherman — that they put a lid on the campaign Saturday at 9 a.m. So a Saturday, weeks away from the election, Biden shut down the campaign at 9 a.m. on Saturday.

So that prompted a CBS White House reporter named Kathryn Watson to tweet that she couldn’t understand why Joe was not out proving that he can outwork Trump. Kathryn Watson’s tweet: “Not sure why Biden isn’t doing more to show that he can outwork Trump.” That’s after she saw the Jake Sherman tweet claiming a lid has been called in Wilmington, meaning Biden’s not expected to have any public events today. Campaign is shut down. She tweets that she doesn’t understand why Biden’s not out doing more to show that he can outwork Trump.

She doesn’t have a clue, folks, just to show you the Drive-By Media may not even understand the depths of the problem. You shut the campaign down at 9 a.m. on a Saturday, well, let’s see the campaign at 5 p.m. Let’s see the campaign at 7 p.m. This is when debates are gonna happen. And I’m just telling you. Sundowning can be controlled — you know, you minimize symptoms somehow, but being on a stage with bright lights, clapping, pressure, that’s not among the ways that you minimize the symptoms.

I’ve been looking at this. I can’t recall when Biden is out in public at night, save for the Democrat debates which were way earlier this year. You gotta go back to January, February, March, and even then there weren’t very many. But of recent campaign appearances, I can’t recall, I can’t remember Biden out in public at night. And certainly not after a full day of negotiating world peace and having a helicopter ride to the hangar, two-hour speech and banter with 15,000 people and then going out and doing a debate. I haven’t seen Biden engage in that kind of rigorous schedule.

One of the big issues Team Biden isn’t going to be able to overcome is the fact they’ve got Joe reading off a teleprompter even in short interview questions because if he doesn’t have something to read he gets lost very, very quickly as he showed in Kenosha.

If you saw Brett Baier’s now-infamous interview with Team Biden spokesman T.J. Ducklo, you probably remember how defensive and hostile Ducklo became when Baier brought up the question of the teleprompter…

Well, it didn’t take long at all before there was no longer a question. A couple of days later Sundown Joe did an interview and made the mistake of holding a framed, glass-encased portrait of himself and his two sons as a prop, and naturally that generated a reflection on which…the teleprompter was easily visible.

That they’re using a teleprompter tells you they haven’t been able to make it work with an earpiece, which you might – might – be able to get away with in a debate. Biden probably can’t listen and talk at the same time in his current mental condition; that’s a skill even really sharp people can struggle with.

So he’s stuck purely speaking extemporaneously. Which he can’t do.

They won’t put Biden into those debates with Trump. They can’t afford to. He’ll get annihilated and the resulting collapse in morale among the Democrats’ voters will resonate all the way down the ballot.

Ducking the debates isn’t much better, but it’s the old saying: better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

Particularly after Trump went into an incredibly hostile ABC town hall Tuesday and came out mostly unscathed, so much so that Democrat shill Joe Lockhart, a former Hillary Clinton campaign flack now working for CNN, tweeted this…

This townhall performance is the reason I've argued against debating Trump. He lies in every answer and always delivers gratuitous insults. Debating him means fact checking him and no one can keep up with him. Media needs to plan for this.

— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) September 16, 2020

Sundown Joe needs doubt to win. He has to preserve it, or he’s cooked.