Great news.
President Biden's doctors say he is healthy and fit for
duty, based on his physical.
Because everyone who was unsure if he should run for
president again was worried that he's not in the right physical shape.
That was the big concern.
I just hope he's able to walk in and out of the helicopters.
Doctors declared US president, Joe Biden, 80 years old, healthy and quote fit for
duty on Thursday after a physical examination included moving a legion from
his chest and declaring him free of symptoms of long COVID after his bout last
year with the virus.
"The president remains fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities
without any exemptions or accommodations.".
White House physician, Kevin O'Connor said in the summary of the health exam.
The exam was closely watched as Biden prepares for its expected run for
a second term in 2024.
The summary said, Biden did not have any long COVID symptoms and
his stiff gait has not worsened since his last exam in November, 2021.
Biden said his physical went well.
"Everything went really well folks, thank God for small favors," he told NBC News.
Biden takes the statin Crestor to keep his cholesterol levels low,
an anticoagulant in response to atrial fibrillation that remains asymptomatic and
medication to treat seasonal allergies and acid reflux, the summary said.
The summary made no mention of whether Biden underwent any cognitive tests,
sometimes given to people of his age.
Maybe even should be given to people who often lose their train of thought, and
then say really random stuff and repeat themselves constantly and
change tracks mid sentence and "Listen folks, my leg here.
And the point is I love eating salad, and
let's go back to the chinese balloons aren't for the faint of heart friends.".
Biden is the oldest person to ever serve as US president,
has waved off questions about his age, but polls indicate voters have concerns about
his ability to serve for four more years if he wins in '24.
Asked about the concerns over Biden's age, White House Press Secretary,
Karine Jean Pierre, who is paid to always say he's going to be good,
said "This is a president that works day in and day out in a grueling fashion with
a grueling schedule and delivers," pretty much avoiding the question.
About three quarters of Americans, including more than half of Democrats and
the vast majority of Republicans say Biden is too old to work in government.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Feb 6 through 13.
Most Democratic respondents said the president remains mentally sharp, but
about half of them said he cannot handle the physical toll of the presidency.
Biden does not drink alcohol or smoke tobacco and
works out five times a week, the physical noted.
No, they're not really on marijuana, I'm kidding.
Biden would be 86 by the end of a prospective second term,
making him 13 years older than the average life expectancy of an American male
according to the 2020 US Center for Disease Control and Prevention Data.
A fact that really depressed me and
I started doing math about my own life when I read that.
Biden said during a PBS interview last week that any americans concerned about
his age should "watch me" perform the duties of the presidency.
We are and that's sort of where the concerns are coming from sir.
They're not coming from nowhere, we're watching you.
But you did pretty good, the state of the union in the last 15 minutes,
not in the first hour and a half when you were somehow misreading and
adding things that made no sense during a speech you were reading.
It was on a prompter and you were like, "listen folks,
here's the point about gargoyles" I'm like that's not written there.
Why are you adding that?
>> Trump, you said the same.
>> Yeah, look, it can go both ways.
First of all, on one hand I've sat with him, I've interviewed him and
spoke with him for even longer than than the interview lasted at that one specific
instance, and he's sharp.
That goes without saying that, that wasn't any concern that I had.
But on the other hand, you have someone who's in his 80s.
It's a problem in our party all the way from top to bottom.
So yeah, in a perfect world, obviously,
you'd want someone who is young enough to be able to stay up late.
But so much of our problem right now, so much of what we're focused on
right now is just making sure that we can find somebody who's electable.
It's kind of the self fulfilling prophecy that we have going on right now.
Because the whole Biden's biggest advantage going into this,
into his presidency was that he was viewed as electable and
that made him electable because of the self fulfilling prophecy.
So, I don't really know what the answer is here other than just,
yeah, I don't really know what the answer is on this one.
I really don't know.
>> I have a sense of the answer, and
I think you guys are both right in your own ways.
So first, Brian sat down with President Biden for an interview.
Check that out on his channel.
No lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, a really interesting interview.
And so to me, the mental acuity of Biden versus Trump, I'll take Biden any day.
Biden never claimed that he invented the word fake or that wind causes cancer or
never quite asked, "hey should we nuke a hurricane?
Would that help the situation?".
So like for the right wing pretending, yeah, ladies and gentlemen,
we got him, Biden's got having mental issues.
Dude, you guy was born with mental issues and it's only gotten worse, okay?
On the other hand, the comedy of this physical, I get it.
Like you want to tell the physical part, right?
But of course Ben's right, that's not the main question.
It's not like Fox news was attacking him on his acid reflux and
they were like, [LAUGH] yeah, what is the state of Biden's acid reflux?
And they're like, yeah, I got the acid reflux report right here, okay?
Stiff gait, not a problem, okay.
No, we're worried about mental acuity of course.
But guys, this is a third rail issue.
I remember when we brought it up during the primaries,
and the world collapsed in on us.
It wasn't just politicians, it was like Democrats.
It was like reporters, you can't talk about that.
I'm like, well, I think that's kind of our job, right?
And now by the way, none of them ever came back and said, yeah, you guys are right.
He's got some issues and we just don't know how much.
And guys look, my dad's 82, right?
And he's a really smart guy, watches the show,
still reads the news on his game, not on his game like he used to be though.
And so that's just a fact of life.
It happens to all of us.
It happens to the best of us.
So, this is picking people who are super old on both sides is
not the best of ideas, and it and you shouldn't discriminate.
There's a difference between Bernie Sanders who's still got a lot of fight
in him and I'm not picking him because he's a progressive.
And Feinstein who obviously has mental decline, right?
There's differences and you have to make your own judgment call on it.
But the country wasn't waiting on bated breath to see
what Biden's acid reflux was.
>> All right,
and I think the answer in my opinion is even a little further than that.
I think it's not just age related.
I'm not a doctor, I'm not gonna diagnose obviously anything officially,
but I see a man that has memory lapses and confusion very often, not all the time.
It's great that he can do interviews sometimes all the way through, great.
These things come on slowly, but to expect him to be this sharp five years from now
when even two years ago in the Democratic debates, he was losing his place and
not knowing what to say and they're like,
"so you've got a whole minute left," he's like, "that's fine.
Just go ahead and take it," and didn't know what to say, what to do.
He was just recently asking for a dead woman to come up and
speak or say hello when he was there honoring her.
That's a little bit beyond being tired or going to bed early.
I think that is a man that sometimes has moments where he does not
know what he is saying, and
even goes off script weirdly when reading off a prompter that is not great.
>> Just a tiny bit of correction there, he was trying to honor her in the midst of
a different event, but it wasn't in her honor, forgot that she had passed away.
>> So I have mental decline and I should no longer speak about [INAUDIBLE].
>> But here's the thing folks, I don't know.
>> [LAUGH] I don't know why that one was the funniest to me.
He does do that, and he'll lean into.
>> He does.
"Listen folks, no joke about things that are not jokes possibly.
Listen, we gotta stop these chinese balloons, no joke.
Listen, we gotta, there's a homeless problem in America, no joke folks.".
Who's heard that was like, love that one.
As a joke in my stand up bag says and
I think this may be fairly presents Biden's issue.
Every time he speaks, all of us are thinking, finish the sentence Joe,
which ironically is the same thing he's thinking every time he speaks.
Land that plane bro.
>> Okay, last thing for me, the answer is primaries.
It doesn't hurt the party, it helps the party.
The Republicans have vicious primaries,
primaries filled with dozens of candidates.
By the way, think about it guys, in 2016,
Republicans have a very tumultuous primary with 17
candidates constantly attack each other left and right.
And people like they're dividing their party.
The Democrats try to get the primary over as quickly as possible,
have as little debates, etc, who wins?
The Republicans.
In 2020, the Democrats have a very large primary,
filled with about 24 to 27 candidates, and the Republicans don't have
a primary because of the president is an incumbent, who wins?
The Democrats win.
This idea that primaries hurt the candidates that it goes back
to 1980 when Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter.
That's true, that one did hurt him.
There's another one in 1780, what are we talking about?
That was millions of years ago.
The primaries now, definitively help, but
no one will ever, ever say that to you.
When goes around and
say you're gonna destroy the party if you try to run a real candidate against him.
>> Just quick point isn't mental decline.
Now, you just said 1700s was millions of years ago and that's [INAUDIBLE].
>> Yeah, okay, but I got great gait.
>> In a scenario like this year though,
where it's pretty much accepted that Joe Biden, if he does choose to to run again.
If he does announce his intention to run again,
then there won't be any primary because no one's going to primary him.
We're not gonna see another Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden situation.
So what happens in that instance?
>> No, I don't agree with your assumption.
I think there will be a primary.
I think there should be a very well wholesome primary,
full primary, full throated primary.
And I would encourage as many people as possible to run,
because if we don't have a primary, I think our chance of losing is much larger.
>> I don't imagine that we'll see in, I don't know.
My prediction is as good anybody's, but
I don't anticipate that we would see anything like that heading into 2024.
That's notwithstanding any of my own personal view on any of this.
I just don't believe that we'll see any primary.
I think that if Biden announces his intention to run for re election,
other candidates that the party as a whole will kind of just coalesce around him.
That's that's just what I expect to see in all honesty.
>> Okay, I'll do a semi prediction here,
Biden has never had a real debate in his life.
He debated like Sarah Palin and Weirdo Maniac, Donald Trump,
it's all been handed to him on a silver platter.
You get one smart debater against Joe bidyen, and
they're gonna have to carry him out on a stretcher.
And so and I don't mean like [LAUGH].
>> He did debate with Sanders a couple of times.
>> He did debate.
>> But with Sanders a couple of times.
>> Yeah, I mean look, they did that.
No, no, but that's a great point, Ben.
So they did these big debates obviously in the primaries in 2020, and
Bernie Sanders had a strategy to challenge him on his policies that
his team had worked on, and this was a big moment and they handed it to him.
He went out there and he didn't do it,
because he couldn't attack his friend Joe Biden.
So the only challenge he got in any of those debates was Kamala Harris going,
I was that girl on the bus.
And what happened?
Biden was like [SOUND] [LAUGH].
You can see it on tape, right?
Democrats have this idea that you're not supposed to challenge one another.
That some sort of cardinal sin, a capital crime.
No, you're supposed to attack each other, and it's not gratuitous.
You're not supposed to say they're ugly for no reason.
No, you're supposed to say this policy is better than that policy.
That policy sucks and here's why it sucks, and
here's how it hurts the American people.
But the American media has trained Democrats do not ever fight.
Do not ever, ever fight for your own positions, whether you're in a primary or
in a general election, and that's why they lose.
>> Right, and look by no means am I rooting against Biden if he's the nominee.
Obviously, I got to advise the Biden campaign on his debate strategy for
his last debates with Trump.
And I don't know what advice they took or didn't take, but
he came out very strong in those debates, and that's when he did fight.
That's when he was saying to Trump, "shut up man" to a sitting president.
That's when he was coming out hard.
And that's probably what pushed him over the edge and helped him win, I think.
But I think it's also very hard to argue that the best candidate we can find is
somebody who's in mental decline, that's insane,
or a country of 300 million people.