Here we go again
I would occasionally walk into a room and forget what I came for. Of course I could run, but not very far, and certainly not six miles! Nor could I solve certain problems in mathematics. But what do you expect? I was eight years old.
There were things I couldn’t do at eight that I have no trouble doing at sixty-eight. But if you remove the context of age, it’s easy to make assumptions. It’s easy to blame old age for an inability to perform an ordinary task, or for forgetfulness, or for a stumble on a word, when the actual culprit is lack of experience, or just plain old-fashioned human error. Too often in this youth-obsessed culture the default, thoughtless explanation is the ageist one. We’re all too quick to blame old age on mistakes and stumbles we’ve made since we were young.
The mainstream media’s obsession with Joe Biden’s age relies on this culturally inherent bias toward ageism to push its sensationalistic narrative. Many of us won’t let Joe Biden have a head cold, or a bad night, or stumble over a word, not because he’s human but because he’s old, and the media exploits this knee jerk tendency.
Why do they do this? Because it’s good for ratings. Because they learned absolutely nothing from what happened when they endlessly pushed the fake controversy of Hillary’s emails back in 2016. Maybe it’s even because they don’t want to become targets of vengeance in a possible Trump second term. Whatever the reason, they are despicable for doing it. And every time they make a mistake this blatant, we end up paying for it. This time around the price could be democracy itself.
A recent example of the mainstream media’s despicableness was when they frantically demanded that Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, explain why a neurologist visited the White House eight times this year. The answer, of course, is because a thousand people work for the White House, and many of them are veterans, and many of those veterans have neurological disorders due to combat experience. He wasn’t there for the President. And no, Biden doesn’t have Parkinson’s disease.
It’s also because the Biden White House is open and honest about doctor visits. Unlike Trump, they publish their visitors log for all to see. Trump, on the other hand, famously hid a 2019 late night visit to Walter Reed Medical Center. The media didn’t have quite the feeding frenzy over that that they have over every little insignificant detail about Biden’s medical visits.
The fact remains, the President has a health checkup once a year. One of the specialists who sees him is a neurologist. The results of that checkup are always published. Biden’s medical report contains no lies, no exaggerations, no omissions, no breathless proclamations about how he’s the fittest president in history. It contains plain old boring and sober medical metrics, like height, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, blood composition, and so on. The President, in short, is fit and healthy.
But the mainstream media won’t leave this narrative alone. And because they keep pushing it, others are pushing it too. And whether or not they know it, they are doing Vladimir Putin’s work for him. Because nobody wants to get rid of Joe Biden more than Vladimir. Vlad know something the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge, that Joe Biden is very good for America, and we can’t win without him. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.