By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, July 10, 2025
The U.S. is not supposed to end up in a situation where
it has a doddering old man as president. Many people have a role in ensuring
the good physical and mental health of the president, but high among them is
the president’s physician.
At the end of February 2024, White House physician Kevin O’Connor
declared that Biden “continues to be fit for duty and fully executes all of
his responsibilities without any exceptions or accommodations.” This diagnosis
came several months after Biden’s inability to remember dates and the sequence
of events during his testimony to special counsel Robert Hur.
Subsequently, in books like Original Sin, the
American people learned that while in office, the former president was
forgetting the names of national security adviser Jake Sullivan and
communications director Kate Bedingfield; didn’t recognize DNC chairman Jaime
Harrison, Representative Eric Swalwell, or actor George Clooney when he met
them despite knowing them for years; was “disoriented” and “out of it,” mouth
agape, during his rare cabinet meetings, and so on. Jake Tapper and Alex
Thompson wrote, “Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting
walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting
the president in a wheelchair. . . . The doctor often argued with Biden’s
political officials to get more rest time into the president’s schedule.
O’Connor sometimes quipped that Biden’s staff members were trying to kill him,
while he was trying to keep him alive.”
That certainly makes it sound like O’Connor’s publicly
released diagnosis was not accurate, and represented happy-talk that
contradicted his private diagnosis.
In fact, according to Original Sin, by February
2024, Biden’s political advisers contemplated having Biden undergo a cognitive
exam to dispel the increasingly loud questions about his mental health and
acuity. O’Connor reportedly argued against giving Biden one, insisting that he
saw the president frequently and never saw any reason for concern.
O’Connor never conducted any media interviews or answered
any questions from the media about the president’s health during Biden’s
presidency.
The American people have a lot of indisputably fair,
overdue questions for Dr. O’Connor. But apparently, he is not interested in answering any of them:
O’Connor invoked his Fifth
Amendment rights Wednesday and did not answer questions during a closed-door
deposition with the House Oversight Committee.
“It’s now clear there was a
conspiracy to cover up President Biden’s cognitive decline after Dr. Kevin
O’Connor, Biden’s physician and family business associate, refused to answer
any questions and chose to hide behind the Fifth Amendment,” said Oversight
Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky).
“The American people demand
transparency but Dr. O’Connor would rather conceal the truth. Dr. O’Connor took
the Fifth when asked if he was told to lie about President Biden’s health and
whether he was fit to be President of the United States.”
Now, only Joe Biden has the authority to say, “I waive my
right to doctor-patient confidentiality.” If there was no coordinated effort to
hide the truth about Biden’s health while he was president, you would think
Biden would want O’Connor to testify, truthfully and completely. By not waiving
doctor-patient confidentiality, Biden is putting O’Connor in a difficult
position where he cannot explain and defend his diagnosis of the president’s
health, harming the doctor’s reputation.
Biden could have said O’Connor had his permission to
answer all questions about his diagnosis of the president’s health. But Biden
hasn’t done that.
Recall that for a very short time in April, Biden
launched an unofficial “comeback tour” after the opening months of a
post-presidency where reportedly he hadn’t reached out to a single member of Congress for a chat
at all. When Biden did appear on The View in early May, he continued
to insist that if he had stayed in the race, he would have won, and that he
“wasn’t surprised” that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. His wife Jill finished many of his answers.
Four days before the official publication of Original
Sin, the Bidens announced that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate
cancer. The morning after the announcement, oncologist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel shocked the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning
Joe by declaring, “Oh, he’s had this for many years, maybe even a
decade, growing there and spreading. ”
While we’re at it, someone should ask O’Connor why he
concluded that Biden didn’t need to get a PSA test during his presidency.
Why ICE Has to Be Larger Than Other Federal Law
Enforcement Agencies
It’s not hard to find critics on the left who find it
outrageous that the Big Beautiful Bill Act allocates more than $100 billion to
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and border enforcement through
September 2029, and that the Trump administration intends to hire 10,000 more
ICE officers. (There are legitimate questions about how easily and quickly ICE will
be able to find, hire, train, and retained qualified candidates for those
jobs.) ICE says that it
currently “has more than 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel in
more than 400 offices in the United States and around the world.”
Judith Levine, writing over in The Guardian, laments, “The colossal
buildup of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will create the largest
domestic police force in the US; its resources will be greater than those of
every federal surveillance and carceral agency combined; it will employ more
agents than the FBI.”
It’s worth keeping in mind that what we ask U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement to do is significantly larger than what we
ask the FBI to do. The mission is larger, so it is not surprising that the
required workforce will be larger.
Different organizations will give you slightly different
estimates, but there is a broad consensus that there are around 11 million to
12 million illegal immigrants in the United States on any given day. The Center
for Migration Studies put the figure at 11.7 million in September. The Migration
Policy Institute puts it at 11 million, as did the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security in 2022. But some estimates are higher; earlier this year,
the Federation for American Immigration Reform “estimated that approximately 18.6 million illegal aliens reside
in the United States.”
The FBI has a lot of work to do, but in any given year,
there are about 5.7 million
open arrest warrants in the United States — that’s an estimate of every wanted
criminal at every level of government, not just federal crimes.
Thankfully, serial killers are fairly rare, and they’re apparently getting rarer. Yes, from prime-time crime dramas
on televisions, you would think that roughly one out of every seven Americans
was a serial killer.
Terrorists and those plotting terrorist attacks on
American soil are also fairly rare, although there is some indication that
domestic terrorism is getting less rare than it was in past decades.
Organized crime is a much smaller factor in American life
than it used to be, largely thanks to the RICO act. According to a fascinating 2022 article from The Economist, even
criminal organizations have adapted to the modern “gig economy” — fewer large
hierarchal organizations, more flexible, loosely affiliated networks:
“These days, Americans don’t see in
the news the violence of transnational organized crime but they’re actually
threatened more,” says Joseph Gillespie of the FBI. There are still people
committing damaging crimes — such as importing fentanyl, which killed 71,000 people last year — or running big fraud
operations. But according to Mr Gillespie, the groups behind this are more
specialized, have fewer members and are far less territorially organized than
in the past. Instead of having, in effect, a large permanent staff, they hire services
as they need them. “It used to be easier for us, in decades past, when they
wore their titles on their sleeves,” he sighs.
Thankfully kidnapping is fairly rare, as well: “In the United States,
child abductions by strangers are quite rare, representing less than one
percent of missing children cases. . . . In the U.S., the majority of child
abductions are perpetrated not by drivers of creepy vans offering “free candy”
but by family members or acquaintances instead. This type of abduction
typically occurs in the context of custody disputes or familial disagreements.”
If I said to you, “Quick, let’s find a serial killer,
terrorist, member of an organized crime family, or a kidnapper,” thankfully,
you would have a hard time finding one, and in most cases, have no idea where
to start looking.
But if I said to you, “Quick, let’s find an illegal
immigrant,” you would probably have a couple of strong ideas of where to start
looking. Outside the Home Depot looking for work, picking fruits in fields on
American farms, cleaning hotel rooms — statistically, these are all relatively
safe bets to find an illegal immigrant being paid under the table. The Center for Migration Studies determined that in New
York State alone, “24 occupations currently have at least 5,000 undocumented
workers, including construction laborers, maids and housekeepers, cooks, home
health/personal care aides, janitors, and delivery drivers.”
In fact, you could argue that finding illegal immigrants
in the U.S. isn’t really much of a challenge; arresting them and removing them
from the country is. That’s why ICE needs more agents.
No comments:
Post a Comment