Because last week’s natterings unerringly become this week’s news, we are now trapped in a mind-numbing collective freakout about special counsel Robert Hur’s purposefully deceptive and broadly misunderstood takedown of President Joe Biden’s possible criminal conduct, a “report” replete with wholly gratuitous potshots about his mental acuity. The freakout has become a national news story on par with former President Donald Trump on Sunday threatening to abandon our NATO allies and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want.” (Note for those at home: these two things are actually not at all on par in terms of threats to world order and planetary stability.) As Margaret Sullivan points out, the Biden story consumed the weekend news cycle, while the Trump comments barely registered as a blip.

Interestingly, all of the #BidenTooOld coverage is about as new and revelatory as #ButHerEmails. If nothing else, it proves that a scandal holding that the president forgets things is always going to go down smoother than a scandal in which a special counsel flagrantly violated a long-standing Justice Department practice and protocol not to “criticize uncharged conduct.” As Sullivan was quick to point out, CNN and the New York Times and every U.S. corporate media entity and its cousin jumped onto the bandwagon. “For the media to make this the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice,” the former public editor of the New York Times wrote.

Biden is old and he forgets things. Nobody is unaware of these facts, up to and including President Joe Biden, who said as much of himself in his press conference last week. But the ploy worked as intended, with the Hill cheerfully reporting that as a result of the Hur report and the wall-to-wall questions it spontaneously raised, 86 percent of Americans now believe that Biden is too old to serve in office.

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