Joe Biden’s really bad awful week

“Biden Cleared in Documents Case; Report Raises Concerns About His Memory,” read a headline in The New York Times, leading with what Democrats desperately hoped the main takeaway would be.

“Biden Knowingly Kept and Shared Classified Material, Special Counsel Concludes,” read the contemporaneous story in The Wall Street Journal, foregrounding exactly the opposite.

There’s a stark reminder for you of how everything involved in that bombshell report, and Joe Biden’s fitness for a second term, is being seen through a partisan media lens.

What is the reasonable American, our favorite kind of reader, to make of all of this?

More specifically, how should the country process Robert Hur’s sly statement that he had decided not to press charges against the president (even after he leaves office) not because there was no case to make in terms of his keeping classified materials in his garage, but because Hur and his staff thought that any jury would likely see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and thus decline to convict?

For admirers of thinly veiled political hardball, of brutally effective statements doused in deceptive sugar, Hur delivered a rhetorical masterpiece for the ages. With patronizing blather as camouflage, Hur managed to do more political damage to Biden than if he had actually decided to press charges on those classified documents in his garage. No wonder the White House was seething.

Reasonable Americans don’t see Biden as a malicious or nefarious man because he’s not. But they do see him as having some worrying cognitive issues because, well, that’s clear to everyone except perhaps the president himself. Even in the one news conference of his career where it was crucially important not to confuse one political leader or country for another, Biden was unable to pull that off. For those of us who have had difficult conversations with angry, elderly parents over driving or living circumstances, it was especially painful to watch.

But in our view, Biden’s memory issue, as it pertains to his fitness for another term as president of the United States, is a matter for the Democratic Party, which must nominate a candidate for voters in the fall. Using its best judgment and weighing all alternatives. Period.

Hur is not qualified to offer a medical opinion, and it was outside of his remit to do so. We smell a rat in how he weaseled that criticism into his report by using it as a justification for non-prosecution. This was as disingenuous as it was inappropriate.

That said, the report raised legitimate and troubling concerns about Biden’s careless and self-serving handling of those classified documents.