With the Democratic primary largely on hold at the moment and no big public rallies being staged (because of you-know-what), it’s probably easy to lose track of the fact that Joe Biden is still trying to secure his place as the official nominee for the presidency. He’s finding other ways to try to generate some headlines, however. As John pointed out yesterday, Uncle Joe plans to appear presidential by giving his own series of pandemic updates to the nation in a sort of “shadow administration” function. He launched one of the first ones yesterday and it was… not good.

You can watch the wheels come off of his presentation in this video that Breitbart posted to their Twitter feed. Things seemed to be going fairly normally for a little while as Biden obviously recites some remarks while reading them off the teleprompter. But then the prompter obviously must have failed. At that point, Joe went to full ramble mode. The video is only a bit more than thirty seconds in length, but it feels a lot longer. Frankly, it’s pretty uncomfortable to sit through, but make sure you have the sound on for this.

Every American needs to see Joe Biden's latest brain freeze. pic.twitter.com/CfrrHRElfy — Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) March 23, 2020

This is about as close as we can get to a transcript of Biden’s remarks falling into disarray.

“And uh, and, and in addition to that, uh, and in addition to that, we have to, uh, make sure that we, uh, we are in a position that we are, well, lemme, lemme go a second thing. I’ve spoken enough on that ”

To be clear, there was almost certainly some sort of technical failure going on here. A couple of seconds into the clip you can see Biden gesturing with his right hand, most likely urging a staffer to keep the teleprompter rolling. I’m assuming it just froze up at that point. But it was the former Veep’s performance after that technical failure that sends some worrisome signals.

Let’s keep one thing in mind. This wasn’t some moment where Biden got caught by surprise when a reporter tossed a loaded question at him or an awkward answer to a pointed comment from an audience member at a town hall. This was a planned, staged event where Biden was able to set the tone and tempo at a time of his choosing. All he had to do was successfully read the words on the teleprompter. And even if the prompter failed, he had plenty of time to practice the remarks in advance, allowing him to push forward and summarize his message in the same general theme. He didn’t even manage to meet that low bar.

Was Uncle Joe just “confused ” again? Maybe. Maybe not. But just stop and think about what the task was that he was trying to accomplish. He had a set of remarks on a very important subject that he wanted to impart to the nation. But right in the middle of his delivery, he just had a brain freeze. I’m not trying to diagnose the guy because I’m no doctor. Heck, I can’t even diagnose myself. But even in the best-case scenario imaginable here, are we to conclude that Biden is no longer able to even deliver four minutes of prepared remarks without having them literally fed to him word for word by the teleprompter?

This meltdown happened in one of the most controlled and stage-managed environments imaginable. If Joe Biden can’t even pull that off, how is he going to perform if he’s sitting across the table from Putin, Erdogan or Kim Jong-un? “Lemme, lemme go a second” isn’t going to dazzle his negotiating partner.

I swear to you that I’m not trying to be unkind to Joe Biden or just run him down in the name of gaining some momentary political advantage. My family has struggled with “mental clarity” issues involving some of us in our advancing years, as I’ve mentioned here in the past. I can totally sympathize. But this guy is asking to be made the leader of the free world and be given the launch codes. And if the Democrats are taking this election seriously and honestly care about something besides just replacing Donald Trump with any other warm body they can find, the DNC should be having a long, serious discussion about this by now. They are not yet officially committed to making Joe Biden the nominee and there are other options still available.