This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like I’m losing my mind:
Yes, he’s incredible. Last night at 1:30 AM. (The time stamp is PST)
And again this morning:
Just a reminder: this is not normal behavior for any adult much less a president.
Meanwhile, on CNN we have this:
Aaron Rupar’s newsletter by Noah Berlatsky today was written before Biden’s cancer diagnosis was revealed but it discusses this phenomenon and asks whether this is something that Democrats should be jumping on:
As you are probably aware, former president Joe Biden is old. If you were not aware of that fact, journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have written a new book about how Joe Biden — who dropped out of the presidential race because of concerns that he was old — was, in fact, old.
This breaking news has led to much handwringing and scolding at high profile news outlets. Joe Biden, they have concluded, is old. Is this a scandal that will be a major issue in the 2026 midterms, and maybe even in the 2028 elections? Should Democrats spend time and energy focusing on the fact that Joe Biden is old?
I think you’ll agree, after some serious thought, that the answer here is NO, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!
Ahem.
This is fairly straightforward. Joe Biden is not running for president. Joe Biden wasn’t even the candidate in 2024. Joe Biden’s fitness for office is not the most pressing issue facing the country in 2026, or 2028.
This is trivially obvious. But the fact that the media, and some Democrats, continue to be obsessed with the last election points to some real problems going forward. The country has been transformed in terrifying and dangerous ways since November 2024. The electoral landscape has also changed drastically.
Learning lessons from the past is important. But freezing ourselves forever at the moment Donald Trump won the presidency does no one any good. Journalists and Democrats need to take into account where we are now if they want to face the challenges of the moment and the future. Those challenges do not — again, they do not — include Joe Biden’s age.
All true. But it looks like we’re going to do more navel gazing and the press is going to keep piling on. We’ve been through this before. And the pattern never changes and it never works out well for the Democrats. You can throw your candidates on the pyre and dance around it deliriously and it will never appease either the media or the Republicans, it just makes it worse.
I said the other day that this era is a roller coaster. Just when you feel that maybe the country is waking up and Trump is losing altitude something happens to pull you right back down into the mud and the muck.
This week is Jake Tapper and Biden stalker Alex Thompson’s new book debut and we have good reason to believe that the media is undaunted in their desire to pump the “Biden is an old, demented, pathological liar who destroyed the country” (sound like anyone else we know?) theme to help them sell it. Considering that both the Trump and the media seem to be intent upon putting the cancer diagnosis into that pot — accusing Biden of knowing he had cancer and covering it up — I think we’re in for a rough spell.