Watching President Joe Biden try to make his way through a speech is painful enough. Reading a transcript of it is worse. Not just because Biden’s words are even more confusing in print, but because you start to feel a strong sense of pity for the person responsible for figuring out what he is trying to say, how much of it to transcribe verbatim, and which facts to correct.
Then there are all the times the transcriber just has to give up and put “(inaudible)” in places where Biden so garbles his words that nobody can make them out. That happened at a Cabinet meeting earlier this month, when Biden said “I’m going to ask Natalie, quickly, to explain, while you’re all here, how it works. We don’t have the ability — it’s not — we don’t have a laptop to type over (inaudible). We’re just going to show you.” (See whether you can decipher the missing words at the 3:34 mark on the video.)