November 2022

They are in my inbox. They are in my voicemail.

“It’s passed,” US president Joe Biden said of his student loan forgiveness plan at a recent forum. “I got it passed by a vote or two.” But he didn’t “get it passed,” nor were there any votes. He issued an executive order. “Where’s Jackie?” Biden asked at a conference in September, scanning the crowd for US Representative Jackie Walorski (R-IN). “I thought she was going to be here.” The month before, he’d pronounced himself “shocked and saddened” by Walorski’s death in an automobile accident. I am not a doctor. I do not play a doctor on TV, or on the Internet. You’re probably not a doctor, either. But our lack of credentials to issue medical diagnoses doesn’t prevent us from noticing, and making plausible inferences from, visible signs of (likely age-related) mental decline.