Recently Joe Biden gave a public speech, and once it was over he turned to his right and put his hand forward, as if trying to shake someone's hand. There was nobody anywhere even near him (in the full video of the speech it's shown that the closest people at his right side are at least 10-20 meters away.) And it's not like he offered his hand but then quickly lowered it after noticing there's nobody there. He kept it in that position for quite many seconds.
Did he really try to shake hands with a non-existent person? Has he become so senile that he's hallucinating and seeing people that aren't there? Or, perhaps, was he so confused that he tried to shake someone's hand, saw that there was no-one there, and just stood there for a good several seconds perplexed, with his hand in that position, not knowing what to do, perhaps zoning or blacking out?
Many of the biggest and most famous conservative political commentators on YouTube and elsewhere seem to think so. When watching the videos of these commentators I don't get the impression that they are just saying so jokingly, making fun of Biden. (If they aren't being serious, the are certainly not making it clear.)
I would really, really want to take their side on this, make fun of Biden, and point out, once again, how utterly senile is becoming. However, my intellectual honesty doesn't allow me to do that.
As much as I hate doing this, I have to side with Biden on this one. Well, at least partially.
From the video, I didn't get the impression that he was trying to shake someone's hand. Instead, I got the strong impression that with that hand gesture he was asking someone on his right side something. Pointing at someone with that exact hand gesture is usually done as a much more polite version of pointing with a finger (which is often seen as a bit rude and impolite). Someone may do that to someone to draw that person's attention to ask him something (or draw someone else's attention to that person).
It is also quite possible that with the hand gesture he was asking someone there if he should exit the stage that way, which I think is also a perfectly plausible explanation (much more plausible than that he was trying to shake the hand of a non-existent person).
Thus I have to begrudgingly side with Biden on this one. I don't think he was trying to shake hands with anybody (real or imaginary). He was just gesturing to someone on his right side. I don't know what exactly he was signaling or asking, but I don't think it was a "handshake".
That being said, even if this is the case, I think it still may show a bit of his senility. The gesture, whatever he was asking, may signal a level of confusion and lack of awareness of his surroundings, or that he had forgotten what to do or where to go next, and thus was perhaps asking which side of the stage he should exit, or if he was asking something else from whoever he was gesturing at, he was unsure about what he was supposed to do next.
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