The Humiliation of Robert Hur

Biden isn't mentally incompetent, you lying bozos.

Image: Robert Hur, lying bozo

Full-time right-wing apparatchik and sometime special prosecutor Robert Hur showed up in Congress this week. House Republicans invited him to talk about how President Joe Biden is old, old, old, and can’t remember even how old he is because he is that old. Hur took his oath, adjusted his microphone, and then plunged his face into a vat of orangutan feces.

Then he just kept doing that; mic adjust, orangutan feces, mic adjust, orangutan feces, till everyone agreed he stank too badly to continue, and they called it a day.

Usually Republicans do not call witnesses into Congress to sit there in the Congress seat and humiliate themselves with monkey turds. So what happened?

Well, the super-short version is that Hur, in line with Republican talking points, attempted to smear Biden as mentally incompetent. But Biden is not mentally incompetent. So when Hur was tried to testify that Biden was mentally incompetent, it was easy for Democrats on the committee to demonstrate that this was false. Cue bowl of apeshit.

The slightly longer version: Hur, a Republican flunky, was appointed as special prosecutor by centrist dingbat and Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s post-presidency retention of classified documents. Hur found that Biden had not committed any crimes and had cooperated with investigators, which everyone knew already.

But since Hur wants to damage Biden, he claimed in his report that Biden was a doddering old man who couldn’t be prosecuted because his memory was shot. Among other things, Hur said that Biden didn’t remember the day of his son’s death.

But in the transcript of his interviews with Biden, which were just released, Hur is so impressed with Biden’s acuity that he says Biden had “a photographic understanding and recall.” The transcripts also show that Biden remembered the day of his son’s death, though he had to think momentarily to identify the year—which is a pretty normal thing to do when you get older and have spent lots of times on earth where things happen.

With the transcripts in front of them, Democrats were easily able to show that Hur was a duplicitous lying liar, and they one after another nailed him to the wall with his own lying words. Even Fox News admitted that the GOP lawmakers and Hur got steamrolled.

Fox lies about why the GOP got steamrolled of course. They argue that GOP lawmakers should have focused more on Biden’s memory issues. But those memory issues don’t exist; they’re a lie. That’s why Hur was forced to ingest monkey feces in the first place.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this dynamic play out either. Republicans were caught flat-footed by Biden’s energetic State of the Union speech. Trump and others were so surprised they claimed (with no evidence of course) that Biden was taking performance enhancing drugs. Before the speech, only 45% of those surveyed said the nation was going in the right direction; afterwards that number was 62%, a 17-point shift. People who went into the speech prepared for an incompetent president saw that, whatever else you may think of Biden, he is entirely lucid.

The GOP keeps insisting that Biden is mentally incompetent; it’s become their main attack line. It’s been picked up by mainstream outlets like the New York Times, which the GOP probably sees as a success. They believe that if voters think Biden is unable to do the job of president, they won’t vote for him.

The problem with this strategy is that Biden is not mentally incompetent. Further, as president, he has lots of opportunities to demonstrate to the public that he is not mentally incompetent. He also is going to be running a campaign in which he will spend millions on ads in which he will be in front of voters, being obviously not mentally incompetent.

He’s also pretty likely to appear in a debate with Donald Trump, who is increasingly incoherent. If the GOP has set expectations so that Biden just has to appear minimally competent (which he is) that’s not going to go great when people realize that he is in fact competent.

Lying about Biden’s mental competence feels to the GOP (and even to some people on the left) like a win in the short term. But underestimating your opponent is not necessarily a great strategy.

This doesn’t mean Biden will win the election; the future is hard to predict, and polls right now are not great for Democrats. But the SOTU and the Hur testimony show that by insisting that Biden is mentally incompetent, Republicans are setting themselves up for humiliation after humiliation.

The GOP probably helps Biden in the long term when they lie about his ability to do his job. By using mental competence and age as a slur, though, they normalize stigma against marginalized people. So even though it ultimately redounds to the good of Democrats, the press should stop enabling GOP nonsense, and inform their readers that Biden is in fact perfectly competent. It’s fun to watch Hur dunk his head in shit, but there’s no reason for New York Times opinion writers like Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat to follow suit. Rinse off, stop lying, inform your readers accurately so you don’t look like a giant turd brain when Biden delivers a speech. Don’t be fucking Robert Hur.