Axar.az presents an article “ I was real wrong” by John Samuel Tieman.

I was wrong. I was one of those folks who thought that Joe Biden was just fine. Old, slow, but otherwise OK, that's what I thought. I'd seen him do the “State Of The Union” speech. I presumed that's how he always performed. I was wrong. Real wrong.

There's a new book, ”Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, And His Disastrous Choice To Run Again”. It's by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. The book chronicles Biden's decline over his time in the White House, and how his staff kept that decline concealed from the public. It's damning.

The 2024 Biden vs. Trump debate, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, was held on June 27. A lot of us were shocked by Pres. Biden's poor performance. The shock gave rise to three questions. One, is he electable? Two, can he function as president? And, three, who will run if Biden drops out? Vice-President Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump, as we all know. Many observers feel that Biden's poor debate performance, and the fact that he left Harris only three months to run, doomed the Democrat to defeat.

Perhaps most shocking is the number of insiders who knew of the president's cognitive decline. “Original Sin” is based on over 200 interviews. It chronicles incidents both sad and disturbing. For example, Biden began "staring blankly" at people that he had known for years. When he was tired, he became "more disoriented and incoherent". There were cabinet members who went months without seeing their president.

But we can't just blame the folks around Joe Biden. We all heard the rumors. I remember when special counsel Robert Hur described Joe Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. I wondered if that was true at the time.

It is customary for the president to get annual check-ups. The public feels that it has a right to know of a president's physical well-being. What about a president's mental well-being? We know more about human psychology than we have ever known. Should we not know if a leader is cognitively impaired? Should we not know if a leader has a personality disorder?

We must be careful not to assume that everyone, with a mental illness, is nonfunctional. Abraham Lincoln suffered overwhelming depression, but he was a pretty good president. James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce and Calvin Coolidge may also have suffered from depression. Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson seem to have suffered anxiety disorders. Each day millions wake up and go to work, all the while suffering from a mental illness. It's possible to imagine someone going through life and never suffering a mental illness. In The World According To Dr. Tieman, however, everyone owes their country a few years in a therapist's office.

It's worth repeating that not everyone, with a mental illness, is nonfunctional. What is under consideration here is a disorder of such magnitude that it makes a person dangerous. In this case, that person is the President Of The United States.

The problem, in part, is that everyone is in denial that everyone owes their country a few years in a therapist's office. It's the other guy who needs to get therapy, right? I sometimes think that we should think of having therapists in our lives just like we think of having dentists in our lives. You need a dentist. I need a dentist. The president needs a dentist. But it's a slow shift in society, from denial to acceptance of the ubiquitous need for attention to mental health. We're not there yet. Certainly, denial is my favorite defense mechanism.