President Shambles: "...well, anyway."

In the Hur-Biden exchange, when Joe Biden wanders into a thicket and can't find his way out, he concludes his random thoughts with a, "...[well,] anyway." Here are some examples. Once I realized the transcript restarted its minute count every time the group took a break, I decided that I'd peg my references to page numbers instead of minutes. What follows is from the PDF file labeled "hur1," which looks suspiciously like "hurl."

Page 20

PRESIDENT BIDEN: I don't ever recall that happening. It may have. But usually what I'd do, I'd write down on a notecard, follow up with Jake on "bang," follow up with "boom on boom." And then I'd call my team in and say, what, what do you think this means, that, that so-and-so move forces here or there, or so-and-so said such-and-such, and follow on that. And I'd ask, can you do me a memo on that? And they'd go back and -- and, anyway.

Page 53

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Like, Ted Kaufman was with me [for the] vast bulk of my career, and who I never had to explain anything to after a while. I'm not being facetious. On an issue, you know, that -- follow up on this. Well, they you know, they knew the background, they -- and I'm not talking foreign policy or classified. I'm just talking, you know, how do we prevent the auto strike, you know. What do we do to deal with -- well, anyway.

Page 66

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Is that how the stuff got in my, my -- didn't get in my garage until much later. There was stuff one day. I came home and all of it was on the garage floor. This was later though. It must've been after -- anyway.

Page 84

PRESIDENT BIDEN: -- close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was like my right arm and Hunt was my left. These guys were a year and a day apart and they could finish each other's sentences, and Beau I used to go home on the train, and in the period that I was still in the Senate -- anyway. (Indiscernible 0:48:27.6). There was pressure -- not pressure. Beau knew how much I adored him, and I know this sounds -- maybe this sounds so everybody knew how close we were. There was not anybody in the world who wondered whether or not -- anyway.

Page 107

PRESIDENT BIDEN : -- the manager; he didn't own it. He couldn't afford a big gift, but he could afford the payments. And it was $5700 and I have all the material from it. I have, like, the original key ring, the original -- anyway.

Page 112

PRESIDENT BIDEN: that I should just keep -- for posterity's sake, I should keep a diary. Every day, put down important things that happened that day and move on. I never was that organized. And so I -- anyway.

Page 114

PRESIDENT BIDEN : No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But here's my point, what I would do if I was given this to read, and I finished the -- you know, I'd stick it in a notebook, pick up and I'd walk out, I'd forget I had it in the notebook. That's what I'm trying to [say]. But I didn't store things in notebooks to keep them. That's not -- if I were going to. And if they're classified, I would take them -- I'd call -- I think I've done that here. I'm not sure. I probably said to staff, hey, I found this, return it. And so it's -- anyway.

My conclusion, after finding so many of these "anyway" moments (I left a ton of them out), isn't that Biden is particularly senile or Alzheimer's-ridden when he does this. He's simply old, and "anyway" is something he says when he can't remember the direction in which his previous sentences were taking him. Robert Hur's assessment of Biden as "well meaning," with "a poor memory," looks more and more accurate as I comb through this transcript. Hur is not a doctor qualified to make medical judgments, so he keeps his assessment nontechnical and, I think, fair. That said, a lot of this reads like rambling.

That'll be all of us someday.