Obama To Biden — Facial Marks Leave Behind A Trail Of Questions
Jun 30, 2023 | Shalini Rai
The horizontal lines were faint and could have been mistaken for a shallow indentation. They were noticed by reporters when they happened to see the octogenarian President up close earlier in the week and again on Wednesday
Was it a sleep device? What was ‘mysterious’ about that ‘line’? Why now?
Such and many other similar questions rang across the internet on Thursday when ‘mystery lines’ were seen on the face of U.S. President Joe Biden. The White House was quick to clarify that the ‘lines’ were caused because of the use of a ‘sleep device’. It said that President Biden had begun wearing a CPAP device, to help keep sleep apnea at bay.
The horizontal lines were faint and could have been mistaken for a shallow indentation. They were noticed by reporters when they happened to see the octogenarian President up close earlier in the week and again on Wednesday. This was when Biden left the White House to give an economic speech in Chicago.
A CPAP machine is a medical device that is typically used to prevent snoring and the damaging interruptions in breathing, even while asleep, which could be caused due to sleep apnea. CPAPs involve the use of a mask with straps that criss-cross the patient’s face.
President Biden’s health is under constant scrutiny due to the fact that he is the oldest president ever to occupy the White House and because he is seeking another four years in office in the upcoming 2024 election.
However, as unlikely as this sounds, President Biden is not the first US head of state on whose visage such ‘lines’ and ‘scars’ have been noticed. Back in 2012, when Barack Obama was the US President, photographers had captured what appeared like ‘surgical incisions’ above his right temple. That was not the only anomaly seen on the POTUS. Obama’s hair was deemed to have turned grey at astonishing speed. The ‘scars’ were ominous and left onlookers with a strange, deep sense of dread.
Memories of conspiratorial ‘Manchurian Candidate’ were brought forth. All manner of speculations were made on the overt, very clearly visible indentation that looked like a surgical scar and nothing but that the more you looked at it, from various angles. So, what’s going on?
While there may be no definitive answers, these incidents take us back to days when Manmohan Singh was the Indian Prime Minister and came in for varying degrees of mockery (ridicule even) because of the staccato nature of his walk. Some dubbed him an ‘automaton’, others called him a robot and still others went ahead and said he was being ‘remotely-controlled’ and that it was clearly visible in his gait.
Manmohan Singh is not alone in having been branded an automaton owing to the ‘inimitable’ quality of his gait. As the 2016 US Presidential elections were drawing to a close and all manner of insinuations were considered par for the course, Hillary Clinton, the democratic presidential candidate, was subjected to all manner of ridicule for the way she walked, with some even suggesting that a body double had taken her place since she herself was medically unfit to make public appearances. Outrageous conspiracy theories began doing the rounds, with some even propounding that Clinton was a ‘shape-shifter’. This is where it all goes haywire.
There may yet be satisfactory explanations for the lines on Biden’s face and the scar marks on Obama’s temple but when extreme, unsubstantiated ideas are sought to be passed off as ‘normal’, that’s when it all begins to come apart like a house of cards.
We may not know everything about what transpires in the upper echelons of world leadership and power corridors, but a little discernment goes a long way and helps keep the loony bits apart from logical, rational truth of the matter, however impossible and unlikely it may seem.