Call it The Sixth Unsense, starring Joe Biden. It's no comedy, either; this time, Biden's two brain fades in a week are serious enough for an American media outlet to report. 

On Sunday, Biden had told a campaign-event audience in Las Vegas that he had consulted with French president François Mitterand in 2021's G7 summit about America being "back" under his leadership. That may have come as a surprise to Mitterand, who left office in 1995 and died the year after. 

One might pass that off as a singular gaffe; Mitterand and Macron start with the same letter, for instance. However, in a couple of New York fundraisers last night, Biden claimed twice to have consulted Helmut Kohl about the January 6 riot. That caught the attention of NBC News, which then reported the earlier confusion of the doddering incumbent:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday twice referred to the late German chancellor Helmut Kohl instead of former Chancellor Angela Merkel while detailing a 2021 conversation at campaign events. ...

Biden's gaffes Wednesday came at a series of fundraisers in New York as he described conversations he said he had with European leaders at a meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized nations in the U.K. in 2021, months after the Jan. 6 riot.

Biden said at both events that "Helmut Kohl," who died in 2017, had asked him how he would respond if he read about people storming the British Parliament and killing officers "to stop the election of a prime minister." Merkel attended the 2021 summit in the U.K.

Biden cited Kohl twice last night for this anecdote, which itself was almost certainly a fabulist fantasy anyway, a point to which we'll return in a moment. Not only are the names in this case dissimilar, the two chancellors were different sexes, too. And Biden didn't figure out his error before telling the story the second time, which makes it sound less like a gaffe and more like memory issues.

Biden has had plenty of "memory issues" over the years anyway. His memory keeps putting him at events in which he never participated, and giving speeches about his life using details stolen from others. Until the last few years, that was evidence of Biden's pathological lying, and I'm not sure that's not the issue here, too. I doubt that Merkel would have asked Biden about January 6 at a G7 summit or anywhere else, and a Google search of reporting from the 2021 summit doesn't turn up any evidence for such a claim. A BBC report does report on Biden's theme of American policy returning to the pre-Trump norm, but that's as close as it gets to Biden's anecdote regardless of whether the German chancellor was Merkel, Kohl, or Willie Brandt.

Even with that, though, Biden's clearly losing his grip on reality, even that which would make his fabulism believable. He's demonstrably not well, so much so that the White House barely allows reporters to question him at all these days. Apparently they feel as though he can't even be trusted for a five-minute powderpuff interview for the Super Bowl, and this may show why they're right. 

And what does it say when NBC News -- NBC News! -- reports on this in a straight fashion with full context? And Politico? And Axios, the Daily Beast, and Mediaite, all of whom headline Biden's dead-people citations? The Washington Post hasn't covered it at all yet, although the New York Times did ... kinda. First the NYT offered up Biden's defense of his age in the fifth paragraph:

Mr. Biden also pre-empted criticism of his age by joking that he was not 81, but “40 times two.” But in the drawing rooms and ballrooms of New York City, any enthusiasm for a second Biden term seemed to be mingled with fear about the thought of a second one from Mr. Trump.  

However, readers have to go down to the seventh and eighth paragraphs to find out that Biden's age really is a problem:

At each event, Mr. Biden retooled his message for the crowd, but he largely focused on Mr. Trump, even if a few of his stories seemed to veer off script and lose a sense of chronology.

Several times, Mr. Biden diverged from his original point in a story about his upbringing, his decades in Congress or his concern about Mr. Trump. At one point, Mr. Biden mentioned meeting with Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, at a Group of 7 summit shortly after taking office in 2021; Mr. Kohl died in 2017. 

"Seemed to"? "Seemed to"? Unless the NYT really wants to credit Biden with a Sixth Sense set of gifts, Biden clearly and objectively lost "chronology," and seems to be doing so on a regular basis. Not only is Biden cooking up fables using dead people, he's having trouble completing thoughts when speaking in public without a script. The NYT alludes to that in noting that Biden "diverged from his original point ... several times," but anyone who watches Biden on camera can see the same thing for themselves. Fox & Friends noted it after watching Biden's presser on Tuesday about negotiations with Hamas on hostage swaps:

This is not a man who has the capacity to lead the United States. This isn't even a man who has the capacity to lead an HOA meeting. His cognition is deteriorating in front of our eyes, and the American media has colluded to keep it under wraps ... at least until now, when Biden's pulling a Haley Joel Osment and making his decline impossible to hide.

Will the American news media finally start demanding answers about the cognitive decline of the Commander in Chief? The WaPo won't and the NYT wants to minimize it, but they may be left behind in this instance.  

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