We Need to Talk About Joe

Folks, it's past time to talk seriously about Joe Biden's mental decline.

The evidence was on full display at the carefully controlled, 10 minute stump speech Biden gave in St. Louis yesterday.  His staffers have been doing their best to limit Biden's exposure to cameras and extended speaking engagements, but they cannot continue to conceal what is evident: Joe Biden is exhibiting signs of accelerating cognitive decline - regularly slurring his words, losing thoughts mid-sentence, combining words together, or making incoherent ramblings.

We cannot simply let negative partisanship (a strong dislike for Trump) or support for another candidate cloud an objective evaluation of what is plain to see.  Watch old tapes of Biden.  Much like Trump, Biden used to be be much more lucid in his thinking, crisp in his enunciation, and able to make a series of compound sentences without mistakes.

This isn't something charming or folksy, it isn't simply a style of delivery, and it isn't a stutter.  It is called Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and represents "the stage between the expected cognitive decline of normal aging and the more serious decline of dementia. It can involve problems with memory, language, thinking and judgment that are greater than normal age-related changes."

It is notable that Joe Biden's 2019 physical did not include a cognitive test.  It should have.  The American people have a right to expect this of Biden, as we do of Trump, as part of a rigorous evaluation of a candidate's fitness for office.

The only test that hasn’t been done is the cognitive functioning test,” Olshansky added. “But the fact that he’s on the campaign trail and meeting a rigorous travel and meeting schedule probably would suffice as a replacement for the formal test for cognitive functioning.”  He said that cognitive tests are typically not required unless problems are detected.  - Washington Post, Dec. 17, 2019

My contention is that problems have been detected - at basically every speaking event Biden has given in recent months.  Biden must have his cognitive abilities formally evaluated and have those results released to the public prior to the 2020 Democratic National Convention.