The establishment media appeared to work overtime to defend President Joe Biden’s “deteriorated” memory against special counsel Robert Hur’s powerful analysis of Biden’s cognition.
The defense is the media’s latest painstaking endeavor to provide cover for Biden, whom Hur detailed as not competent to stand trial for stealing classified documents. Biden is an “elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote in his report on Biden’s wrongdoing.
Joe Biden classified documents
Biden claimed in a press conference his memory is “fine.”
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White HouseOver the weekend, NBC News’s Akshay Syal and Ghael Fobes sought quotes from neurologists who were willing to justify and diminish Hur’s analysis of Biden’s inability to remember simple facts about his life.
In a story titled, “As Biden’s memory issues draw attention, neurologists weigh in,” Syal and Fobes used the “experts” to shamelessly defend Biden’s memory:
Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.
Since a report released on Thursday by special counsel Robert Hur described President Joe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” there have been significant misperceptions about the cognitive changes associated with aging, neurologists say.
However, neurologists say blanking on the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past, especially when under stress, can simply be part of normal aging.
The New York Times‘s opinionist Frank Bruni took a similar tact. Instead of pointing to experts to justify Biden’s “poor” memory, he pointed at former President Donald Trump in an article titled “Trump Is Really Old, Too.”
Bruni failed to draw an even comparison between Trump’s age and Biden’s “deteriorated” memory:
To our intensifying discussion about whether President Biden has grown mentally fuzzy and too old for a second term, I’d like to add this question: How would we even notice Donald Trump’s lapse into incoherence, when derangement is essentially his brand?
…But was there a bevy of headlines about a brain ravaged by time? Were there notations that Trump, at 77, was already as old as Ronald Reagan at the end of his presidency, and that after another four years in the White House, Trump would be a touch older than Biden at the end of his first term and thus the oldest president ever?
…Most certainly not. And that’s both noteworthy and troubling, because we can’t know — really know — that Biden’s occasionally prolonged, futile search for the right word or name is firmer evidence of cognitive fade than Trump’s hallucinatory musings are.
CNN’s Mira Cheng also tried to downplay Biden’s “poor” cognition with a report titled, “What is a typical degree of cognitive ability for a person in their 80s?”
Cheng tried to draw a comparison between Biden and Trump’s age, but like the NBC News report, she used “experts” to downplay Biden’s “poor” cognition:
A decline in cognitive abilities is a normal part of healthy aging, said Dr. Emily Rogalski, Rosalind Franklin Professor of Neurology at the University of Chicago. Overall, cognition peaks in our 30s and gradually declines over time.
Common changes in thinking as people age include slower word and name recall, difficulty with multitasking and mild decreases in attention span, according to the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. These skills are part of what scientists call fluid abilities, which decline steadily throughout our lifetimes.
About one-third of Democrats doubt Biden’s mental fitness, the latest Harvard/Harris survey found in December. Another poll revealed a whopping 82 percent of Americans harbor concerns about his physical and mental health.
Polling also shows Biden holds the worst net approval rating in presidential history at this time in office.Robert
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
