I’m taken back to my internship in 1964 at the city hospital of Houston, Texas. An alcoholic patient presented to the emergency room. Taking his history yielded grandiose, authoritative, almost spellbinding responses that were obviously untrue.
This was “confabulation.” He had no memory, knew nothing of himself, and felt compelled to give answers from his still-fertile imagination.
The diagnosis was a deficiency of Vitamin B1, thiamine, which is available in many common foods that were not part of his diet.
Was he lying? Not really, he was telling the truth as he knew it, an “honest confabulation,” not to be confused with a deliberate web of lies by someone trying to promote alternate reality in others more susceptible.
The recent debate took place from 9-10:30 p.m. A man awake at the end of his day is not at his best dealing with a torrent of baloney. Joe Biden had a sore throat, was obviously tired, and couldn’t know where to start in on this avalanche of lies and distortions. The moderators had already surrendered to the confabulator and given him control of the discourse.
It should make citizens’ blood boil to see this pretender loud-talk and try to shame our devoted president in front of a national audience with these carefully crafted lies.
None of this was a defeat for Biden. It was another demonstration of how far Donald Trump will go beyond boundaries of decency and honesty to seek his goals of power and domination.
— Bill Compton
Anchorage
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