It was not enough that Special Counsel Robert Hur found insufficient evidence to charge President Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents when he was vice president—Hur felt compelled to address Biden’s mental acuity, reporting that he was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
That’s akin to finding someone innocent of an alleged crime but adding that they mumbled during the interrogation.
Yes, Biden is 81 and tends to forget things and makes some gaffes, but age is not always a determining factor. If the same miscues were made at 31, would someone’s age be called into question? Someone’s age doesn’t always have a bearing on errors of fact and misstatements.
What the special counsel should be concerned with is someone’s moral turpitude—their care and concern for the less privileged, not whether they were consistently coherent.
Moreover, while we are talking about the age of presidential candidates, Trump is only four years younger than Biden and his gaffes are countless. And what about his moral acuity?
In short, let’s set aside age, race, gender, and other meaningless vital statistics and measure a candidate’s capacity for governmental matters. When it comes to handling top-secret, classified documents, Trump not only mishandled them, he concealed many of them. Trump’s recent comments to stand by Russia no matter what it does, for instance, is of grave concern to global affairs. This is not a Trump gaffe but a promise, like all other boneheaded comments.
Nobody’s perfect, and no president has been, but at least we can talk about several who have been exemplary of high morality and not a fount of low, demeaning attacks on the helpless.