Cognitive Decline: In Washington, it's a contagious disease

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Medical Correspondent Vincent Boom-Batz, M.D.

The media has been spilling a lot of pixels these days ruminating without evidence about Joe Biden's cognitive decline.  Here's just a few egregious examples from the last two weeks alone:

🚨🚨Scoop: Biden’s cheat sheets - use of note cards, pre-screened questions worries donors. https://t.co/i2XptZAAOk

— Jim VandeHei (@JimVandeHei) February 23, 2024

Do you prepare for important meetings? Court hearings?  Speeches?   Congratulations, you may be a vegetable! 

If you don't believe us (or conventional-wisdom fount Axios), just ask The New York Times:

It appears that cognitive decline is contagious.  Consider the nonstop farrago of incomprehensible demented nonsense from the Tangerine-Faced Defendant.  In just one speech he was unable to pronounce “evangelical,” claimed he was leading Nikki Haley by 91 points, complained about “swastickers” plastered on buildings in Washington, said unnamed woke types were replacing baseball fields with “knocker” fields, said everyone agreed with overturning Roe, and repeated the mainstream Republican talking point that doctors were killing babies after they were born.

Those ravings followed hard on the heels of his confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, and then later claiming he intended to “interpose” the two names to make a (false) point:

"It’s very hard to be sarcastic when I interpose," Trump told the crowd. "I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki from tricky Nikki, tricky Dicky."

But somehow our mainstream media's cognitive abilities short-circuit when it comes to highlighting the overwhelming evidence of Trump's dementia. You might argue that this cognitive breakdown is severe enough to warrant replacing the broken-down old hacks now covering the election with younger journalists who haven't yet lost their ability to report what's really going on.

Just this week, the failing memories of the press were displayed again in the coverage of the Alabama Supreme Court's decision to outlaw IVF on the grounds that the embryos frozen in those test tubes are bouncing bundles of baby joy entitled to the same protections as real live human beings who can be seen without a microscope.

The decision was made possible by the bent Supreme Court's overruling of Roe, on the grounds that states can and should be entrusted to make decisions about matters like reproductive rights and the definition of human life.  Many states had already said that a fertilized egg was as human as the baby Jesus, but those laws had been nullified by Roe. 

As a result of Trump packing the Supreme Court with three new bent forced-birthers, 

there are fears around not only what this means for the future of IVF in Alabama, but reproductive rights across the country. Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, emphasized this didn’t just happen because of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling — and it didn’t start with overturning Roe v. Wade, either.

“There has been a concerted effort in Alabama and elsewhere for years to give legal rights to embryos and fetuses,” Kolbi-Molinas said. “Extremist politicians see decisions like this as part of the building blocks to force the U.S. Supreme Court to eventually say that not only are states permitted to ban abortion, but if embryos and fetuses have legal rights the same way as people, then states must ban abortion.”

This was apparent to anyone who followed the issue of reproductive freedom over the past 40 years.  Some, like Ross the boy no one would have lunch with Leverett House, intended this very outcome.

Others like NPR tried to sound the alarm:

“What is happening is that for 50 years, there has been a constitutional right to privacy and now that right is going away. States can pass laws banning or restricting reproductive medical procedures.” That covers abortion, but could also include IVF, as it is a process inherently focused on the creation of fertilized eggs — and what happens next with them.

And yet thanks to the cognitive decline of our media, the threat to Alabamans who want to have a child came as an utter shock:

To be fair, it's not just The New York Times that was perplexed by fetal-personhood laws and the demise of reproductive freedom.

Republicans too seem to be suffering from near-universal memory lapses and cognitive breakdown.  

Let's help them reclaim their past. Since 1996, Republican platforms have stated that fetuses are entitled to all the rights of children. Now-forgotten moderate mainstream Republican George Bush liked to emphasize the supposedly inherent humanity of embryos by trotting out in front the cameras what his flacks called “snowflake children,” which were children born from embryos (as indeed all are):

Kellyanne's ex doesn't remember much

The message was unmistakable: Within every frozen embryo were the beginnings of a[n adoptable, artificially produced] child... When Karl Zinsmeister, my domestic policy adviser, suggested inviting a group of snowflake babies to the White House, I thought the idea was perfect. Each had come from a frozen embryo that, rather than being destroyed for research, was implanted in an adoptive mother.

He was using those children as props to explain his opposition to stem cell research using frozen embryos – the same embryos that Republicans are now shocked, shocked to discover are routinely destroyed in IVF procedures.

Just this week, Republicans have piously stated their support for IVF, including the 166 House Republicans who signed onto legislation that would have granted full Constitutional rights to embryos.  These Republicans have such bad short-term memories that you have to wonder if they could pass a competency exam.

Which leads to yet another group of supposedly distinguished political savants: ex-Republicans now doing business as never-Trumper allies, who can't stop moaning about what has happened to their once beloved thoughtful moderate party.

They seem to have forgotten the last 30 years of Republican policy positions on reproductive freedom, Bush's insane spineless anti-science decision to cripple stem cell research, and, of course, the fact that three of the six bent Republican Justices who voted to overturn Roe were appointed by Presidents named Bush.  

George Conway, prominent never-Trumper has to be reminded that he cast his ballot in 2016 for his wife's employer, Trump (who appointed three bent forced-birthers to the Supreme Court, in case you like George have forgotten).  At least when called on it he had the grace to apologize, but otherwise he seems to have forgotten his years toiling in the Republican slime factories for the Federalist Society and Clinton's impeachment.

Or former Iraq warmonger Tom Nichols, who seems to have grave difficulty recalling why his shilling for George Bush's disgraceful war of lies and torture in Iraq was so terrible, including the bit about helping to form today's Republican view that the rule of law is, shall we say, optional.

We can't even characterize the case of longtime Republican neocon bag carrier Bill Kristol as cognitive decline because he started from such a low baseline.  He's forgotten that as late as 2021 he was described by The Washington Post as a “prominent anti-abortion commentator.” 

Back in the day he was the forced-birth movement's favorite yeshiva bocher:

Billy just can't remember

A story that I love is the one where Jody Bottum met with Bill Kristol about a job at The Weekly Standard. Jody told Kristol that the day the Standard wavered on the question of abortion would be the day Jody quit. Jody says Kristol “drew his finger along the desk, tapped it for emphasis and said, “We are square on life and getting squarer.”

Back in those long-ago days, the Standard used a pro-life article written by Kristol as a copy-editing test. This to warn any pro-choicer that this magazine was pro-life.

Those were the days, my friend.  

Here's five words for Billy: woman, uterus, freedom, embryo, hypocrisy. Now let's wait five minutes and see how many he can remember.

That's why when we hear plaintive mourning over the wonderful vanished Republican party of snowflake babies and fetal personhood, we wonder if these blowhards are likewise too cognitively impaired to be taken seriously as contributors to political discourse in our time.

What to do about the epidemic of cognitive decline and memory loss in Washington, afflicting as it does the Washington punditocracy, virtually every elected Republican, and even our dear precious Republican allies?

We think that they all need to take a break from their current pursuits, which clearly strain their increasingly fogged brains, and just take the time to enjoy looking at flowers and clouds from their Chevy Chase porches.

As for us, we'll go ridin' with Biden.