Even The Nation is worried about Genocide Joe (but not really), but the Pentagon is!

The Nation, home of virulent duopoly upholders and third-party haters such as John Nichols? Yes.

Indeed, it is Green Party hater Nichols himself who wrote earlier this week, with this headline:

"Biden Can No Longer Avoid Questions About His Fitness For A Second Term." (Somebody at The Nation doesn't know AP style for headers, as in reality, every word after "Biden" should be in lowercase, but that's another story.)

John-Boy is writing about the Biden classified documents special counsel report where counsel Robert Hur said, among other things, that Biden is:

"(A)n elderly man with a poor memory."

He is, even if Biden got indignant. (Cue Irish Alzheimer's issues.)

And, in the act of getting indignant, proved Hur right:

Biden insisted "my memory is fine" — and then referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi as the president of Mexico when talking about the war in Gaza. Earlier in the week, the president made similar gaffes, referring to Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, instead of French President Emmanuel Macron, and the late Helmut Kohl instead of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Oy. At least both Sisi and actual Mexican president AMLO are still alive.

Elsewhere, Dear Leader-era White House counsel Dan Pfeiffer called it a "partisan hit job" and Kamala Is A Cop said it was inaccurate. (She doesn't even have the excuse of being elderly and with a poor memory for her flubs.)

Contra Jeet Heer, not even Taylor Swift may be able to save him.

The Dan Pfeiffers of the world who say it was partisan, gratuitous and more are right. 

The Kamala Harrises who say it's inaccurate are wrong, even before Alzeimer's Joe proved them wrong. Back to Nichols:

In reality, the debate about Biden’s age was a stubborn problem before Hur released the report, in which he wrote, “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” but then damningly described the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and asserted that, during interviews with the special counsel, Biden had failed to remember the dates of his tenure as vice president and, most painfully, couldn’t recall when his beloved son Beau had died. Biden pointedly, and at times emotionally, rejected Hur’s claims, but they reinforced an impression that has been a lingering challenge for the president.

That's the bottom lime. Hur made it worse, arguably, with a semi-condescending backhanded politeness.

That said, let's not give Nichols too many kudos. He says:

But Biden has always been known for his gaffes.

And then goes into spin mode about the Sisi comment. And, he then doesn't ask the bottom-line question:

Are these gaffes more frequent now?

And, speaking of Jeet, he calls out Biden for abortion ambivalence. That's no gaffe and never has been.

That said, if Nichols and Heer were really worried about Biden, they'd be apoplectic over some of the "swing states" polling numbers that Counterpunch's Jeff St. Clair presented in yesterday's Roaming Charges.

Don't worry, though, Blue Anon. The Nation won't give Jill Stein, Cornel West or anybody even further to the left the time of day, and will loyally sheepdog this fall.

And, on Nichols? It's not generic Green/leftist hating. I called him out four years ago for "licking Biden's green taint."

And, if all of the above REALLY wanted to worry along duopoly lines, they'd read Ken Klippenstein at the Intercept. The Pentagon is worried about older elected officials in general, though not mentioning any names in a story from last September. There is this:

The U.S.’s current leadership is not only the oldest in history, but also the number of older people in Congress has grown dramatically in recent years. In 1981, only 4 percent of Congress was over the age of 70. By 2022, that number had spiked to 23 percent. In 2017, Vox reported that a pharmacist had filled Alzheimer’s prescriptions for multiple members of Congress. 

With little incentive for an elected official to disclose such an illness, it is difficult to know just how pervasive the problem is. Feinstein’s retinue of staffers have for years sought to conceal her decline, having established a system to prevent her from walking the halls of Congress alone and risk having an unsupervised interaction with a reporter.

That's even as Ken talks about Ms. Russiagate, Nancy Pelosi, announcing she was going to run again.

The late Dianne Feinstein and the still alive Mitch McConnell, as part of the "Gang of Eight," did ineed have access to classified material from the CIA, and presumably at times from the NSA as well.

But, Ken doesn't update for ... possibly Dementia Joe.

Various forms of dementia, whether Alzheimer's, Lewy body, or atherosclerotic or arteriosclerotic (types of vascular), can do more than affect memory and intellect. We're not stereotypical Vulcans, androids or whatever; our intellect includes our emotions, per David Hume et al.

Let us remember that it's Joe Biden who can get fixated in anger against the Houthis not "submitting" to him and say it's time to bomb them again. It's Joe Biden who can get fixated in anger when Hamas proposes an "unacceptable" truce.

But, the intellect is also involved, and not just memory. It's Joe Biden who may not be able to cipher through Israeli lies about the UNRWA.

Finally, since Klippenstein went Russiagate, if you will, with Pelosi, and we're in Cold War 2.0 with Russia and China, and backing Ukraine in a proxy war?

Joe Biden controls the nuclear "football." What if, as humongously unlikely as it is, Vladimir Putin launched a nuclear first strike and Biden couldn't remember the US codes? Or, back to emotions plus intellect, without bad memory. What if a new version of an Able Archer happened and Biden refused to accept NSA staffers saying there was an error situation of some sort?

This should scare the shit out of people.

And, ditto for the degree Donald Trump faces the same concerns. And, yes, Dementia Don looks more and more real, too. (Waiting for Republicans or conservative media to go John Nichols and say "Trump has always done this.")

And, the scariness of a second-term Biden should be held just as true of a second-term Trump.