I am 78 and one morning this week I was sitting at my computer reading news of the senile decay of US president Joe Biden, 81, when I discovered I'd dressed with my shorts on back-to-front and inside out.

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Does the president, just newsworthily described by Special Counsel Robert Hur as "a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory [and] diminished faculties in advancing age" have any of these sorts of wardrobe wobbles I am now occasionally prone to?

"The presidential contest in the United States this year is likely to pit two decrepit men against each other," Yale scholar-commentator Robert Moyn has just written in his online piece The Trouble With Old Men.

"Were the incumbent to win he would be 86 by the end of his second term," Moyn marvels and laments.

Biden's likely opponent, Donald Trump, is 77 now and if he becomes president in November will be 82 by the end of his second term.

This coming presidential contest, already of riveting interest to all thinking folk, surely takes on some added interest for mature-age folk alert to their own decrepitude.

Is Biden as muddle-headed and enfeebled by age as his enemies accuse and as worried Americans fear? Surely not.

But facts count for very little in today's America and........

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