The special counsel has put the president\u2019s memory in the spotlight, but if we\u2019re talking about amnesia: 6 January, anyone?<\/p>\n
To the US, where one likely candidate for the presidency delivers hour-long rambling speeches<\/a> in which he explains that he\u2019s going to be a dictator, but all the chat is about whether the other candidate has lost his marbles. And yes, let me pre-emptively apologise, because I can already tell that we will only be on about the third paragraph of this column before I have exhausted the Guardian\u2019s approved list of euphemisms for being a couple of world leaders\u2019 names short of a full set.<\/p>\n Anyway, our business today is with the president, Joe Biden, who called an impromptu press conference on Thursday night in which he hotly insisted that his memory was just fine<\/a>. The occasion was the publication of a justice department report that cleared Biden of criminal charges over his handling of highly classified materials. This year-long investigation was carried out by special counsel Robert Hur, who happens to be a registered Republican, and whose report specifically mentions the president\u2019s \u201csignificantly limited\u201d memory. Mr Hur says that part of the reason he didn\u2019t bring charges was that \u201cat trial, Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.\u201d Oh dear. A real muffin-basket of an attack-line gifted to Donald Trump there, and confirmation of my long-held conviction that fake sympathy is far deadlier a tone than open attack.<\/p>\n Biden had almost left the stage last night when he returned to the podium to take a question on the Israel-Gaza conflict, in which he unfortunately referred to the Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as \u201cthe Mexican president<\/a>\u201d. On the one hand, this was always going to happen just at the moment he was insisting his memory was great, just as it is a truth universally acknowledged that people correcting someone else\u2019s grammar or spelling will normally involuntarily commit some howler of their own in the process. Call it the pedants\u2019 curse \u2013 or indeed, the pedant\u2019s curse.<\/p>\n Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The special counsel has put the president\u2019s memory in the spotlight, but if we\u2019re talking about amnesia: 6 January, anyone? To the US, where one likely candidate for the presidency delivers hour-long rambling speeches in which he explains that he\u2019s going to be a dictator, but all the chat is about whether the other candidate … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}