In this episode of Try to Control Your Shock and Amazement...
As I reported on February 11, an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the release of the Hur Report found that nearly nine out of 10 Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term. (We can safely assume that "too old" translates to "demonstrating steady cognitive decline.") The poll also found that six out of 10 respondents think that both 81-year-old Biden and 77-year-old Donald Trump are too old to be president.
Fair enough — with respect to this article. However, The New York Times has a "slightly" different take on the condition of the current president and the former president's respective brains.
Following Special Counsel Robert Hur's assertion that Joe Biden is simply a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," calls for the cognitively declining president to abandon his presidential campaign intensified, with some calling for him to immediately resign the presidency.
Ahh, but not so fast, argued the no-longer-vaunted New York Times. Hell no, Joe doesn't need to step aside. Not just yet, anyway. Nope, Joe's "memory loss" merely "requires careful diagnosis."
Citing no-doubt carefully selected "medical experts," the Times argued:
While the [Hur] report disparaged Mr. Biden’s mental health, medical experts on Friday noted that its judgments were not brd on science and that its methods bore no resemblance to those that doctors use to assess possible cognitive impairment.
In its simplest form, the issue is one that doctors and family members have been dealing with for decades: How do you know when an episode of confusion or a memory lapse is part of a serious decline?
The answer: “You don’t,” said David Loewenstein, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Aging at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
The diagnosis requires a battery of sophisticated and objective tests that probe several areas: different types of memory, language, executive function, problem-solving, spatial skills, and attention.
The tests, he said, determine if there is a medical condition, and if so, its nature and extent. Verbal stumbles are not proof, Dr. Loewenstein and other experts said.
“Forgetting an event doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem,” said Dr. John Morris, a neurology professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Please. This is nonsense — for one simple reason.
Biden apologists continue to focus only on his memory loss, ignoring the steadily diminishing president's attempts to shake hands with air, inability to find his way off stage, claim that he "works for the government in Senate," and his habit of claiming he has recently talked to various world leaders who have been dead for years.
Still, the Times argued, "to make an accurate diagnosis, a geriatric psychiatrist might ask how long the patient has been having problems with the ability to plan and organize, or to express himself or herself. If the person is forgetful, what is the person forgetting, and when?"
Fine. For argument's sake, let's buy the NYT's shtick. So what about Donald Trump? Did the same "standards" apply to him when he was president, per The Times? Yeah, no — not even close.
On the "Letters to the Editor" page on October 11, 2019, the headline read: "Trump Is Mentally Unfit, No Exam Needed." The page's subhead read: “Three mental health professionals who contributed to ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump’ cite recent actions that confirm their worries.”
The "mental health professionals" wrote, in part:
Our publications have been derided as violations of the Goldwater Rule, “armchair psychiatry” and political bias dressed up as professional opinions. But, as mental health professionals, we have felt a duty to address a public health crisis: a mentally unfit person in charge of the world’s most powerful military and its nuclear weapons.
We have found ample evidence of [Trump's] instability and grandiosity in the president’s own words and public statements, most recently confirmed in his referring to “my great and unmatched wisdom,” coupled with yet another threat to “totally destroy and obliterate” a foreign country.
Simply Trump being Trump, geniuses. But your man Biden is a mental mess.
The Bottom Line
Now, I'm neither a mental health professor nor an editor at The New York Times, but — and not to nitpick — there's a wide gap between Biden's very obvious declining cognitive capacity and Trump making hyperbolic statements for effect.
Trump has made over-the-top comments since he announced his first White House run in June 2015, and he's going to continue to do so. It's Trump. What the TDS-riddled crowd "forgets" is that he never follows through on his grandiose statements.
Yet Biden is controlled by God knows who on the far left, which should scare the bejesus out of the sane among us. Wait— it does.