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The One Tweet That Perfectly Captured the NYT's Hypocrisy on Age and Mental Health

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  February 11, 2024 11:30 AM

There isn’t a single person in America who felt that Joe Biden’s White House presser on Thursday night was a winner. The president came out in full force to push back against the findings of Special Counsel Robert Hur, who concluded that Biden willfully retained classified materials but couldn’t be charged because he is too old and senile. The report is riddled with passages about how Biden was unable to recall his vice presidency or when his son, Beau, died. But have no fear, The New York Times came out with this doozy on Biden’s degrading mental health (via NYT): 

A lengthy report by the Department of Justice on President Biden’s handling of classified documents contained some astonishing assessments of his well-being and mental health. 

Mr. Biden, 81, was an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties” who “did not remember when he was vice president,” the special counsel Robert K. Hur said. 

In conversations recorded in 2017, Mr. Biden was “often painfully slow” and “struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” So impaired was Mr. Biden that a jury was unlikely to convict him, Mr. Hur said. 

Republicans were quick to pounce, some calling the president unfit for office and demanding his removal. 

But while the report disparaged Mr. Biden’s mental health, medical experts on Friday noted that its judgments were not based 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, and 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. 

And this tweet captured the rank hypocrisy that you’d expect when the institutional Left knows they’re witnessing a potentially game-changing election event: 

The irony is that the Times has rolled out damning articles about Joe’s age. I guess their controlled burn turned into a wildfire on this one. Stories about Biden’s age and memory ramped up ahead of the 2022 midterms, where some speculated it was done to foster an argument that Biden shouldn’t run for a second term should there be a red wave. The political environment could have fostered one, but all Republicans got was a razor-thin majority in the House. Joe was staying put.  

The White House tried to spin the Hur report as a win due to the lack of charges, but the political damage was done. Joe didn’t know when Beau died—the script writes itself. 

You can see why this report kept Biden's advisers up at night. They knew it would be riddled with embarrassing details. Biden is the weakest incumbent to run for re-election in recent memory, with numerous core Democratic voter groups souring on him—this is an issue the White House could do without. It’s also one they can’t fix: Biden’s presser was marked by lies and mixing up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico.

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Last, there’s that saying when you’re explaining, you’re losing. Rolling out the ‘experts’ is a loser move. First, what these folks have to say could never be boiled down to a catchy soundbite to neutralize the top voter concern about Biden. Second, after the COVID pandemic, the era of the expert is and should be met with extreme skepticism from the public. This field, long known to be apolitical, was politicized and weaponized to keep us in the bunker.  

The Left is fraught with a condescending and cultish attachment to credentialism when it comes to these issues. On the trail, the anecdotal and the first-hand accounts are what sells. It’s what voters see. And for too long, they’ve seen a man who is way too old to be president. Yes, his memory is shot, too. 

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It's getting too predictable and funny now: