Assuming we can discount the explanation that a sitting United States president publicly acknowledged that, yes, in fact he should go blank himself, Joe Biden’s recent Santa-related mishap may mean far more than we think.
Though a perennial also-ran comfortable with being the corrupt tool of those around him -- family, staffers, donors, etc. -- Biden used to be able to combine his unparalleled skills as a profane gaffe machine with at least some semblance of situational awareness (“At least use the other credit card, Hunter, for God’s sake!” etc.).
Now it appears that even that glimmer of cognition has left him with his “Let’s Go Brandon -- I agree!” statement. And during an impossible-to-mess-up happy-joy video op chatting with parents about Santa Claus -- talk about projecting competence and leadership to the world.
The former Joe Biden, the unabashedly and publicly nasty “lying dog-faced pony soldier” of just twenty months ago, would -- with narrowing eyes -- have told the parent that he was ordering NORAD to surround his chimney with attack drones (or at least said that he knew that other Big Guy and was going to tell him to put his kids on the naughty list immediately).
But what if this explanation is wrong? What if Joe is still as sharp as when he was finding out the names of AMTRAK conductors to make up stories about them later? That’s almost scarier.