A confession: I may have completely misunderstood the importance of a basic command of the English Language, even elementary standards of coherence, to political success in Weimar America. After all, the puppet masters that installed Joe Biden in the Oval Office did so with full knowledge that lapses into incoherence would be a common feature of his presidency, and would likely accelerate as his dementia progressed. And they fully backed, quite successfully, the senatorial candidacy of John Fetterman, a slacker even before his stroke, when that medical calamity rendered him linguistically dysfunctional.

On the presumption that an ability to even minimally handle speaking understandably was relevant to performance as a member of the purported “world’s greatest deliberative body,” I yesterday called on Senator John Fetterman to resign in order to seek the medical care that he deserves. He still deserves that care – therapies to restore his mental and verbal function to something resembling his pre-stroke status. I have seen other stoke victims who completely lost the ability to speak restore their verbal facility to a remarkable degree.

But it appears as though my understanding of the political consequences of an  inability to be coherent was exaggerated, at least compared to the understanding of the real political pros, the ones who are so accomplished that they are able to exercise great power – such as running the Biden presidency – without the public being aware of their role, much less holding them accountable. Exercising political power without accountability may be toxic to notions of small-r republican propriety, but in terms of realpolitik, it is an awesome achievement.

Yesterday, these hidden powers took what might amount to a bow, with a wink and a nudge, as they put Fetterman and Biden together in a public forum, two men with extreme difficulty maintaining  the pretense of coherence.

Biden managed his time at the podium with only minor (for him) lack of presentability, with a joke that only drew the sound of crickets in response.

But Senator Fetterman once again got lost in his thoughts and started mispronouncing basic vocabulary words:

FETTERMAN: "[Biden] is here to commit to work with the governor and the delegadation to make sure that we get this fixed quick, fast, as well, too. This is a president that is committed to infructure, yeah, and then on top of that the jewel kind of a law of the infration."

It may be that the oligarchs who run our politics don’t care if we realize that their front men (and front women) are incoherent and incapable of basic adult functioning. They may see that as a feature, not a bug. That would be the case if they want us to simply give up and recognize that we are not in control, they are. This would, of course, necessitate a means for ensuring that electoral backlash never happens. The electrions of Biden and Fetterman in the face of their obvious infirmities ay be evidence that they are correct.

Photo credit: Twitter video screengrab