Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a primary election night campaign rally Tuesday, March 3, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

You only had to watch Joe Biden’s painful Facebook whatever on Friday to see that the stories about his rapidly accelerating mental decrepitude are not partisan exaggerations but a measured and accurate portrayal of this reality.

Trump: Gives amazing press conference on responding to the China coronavirus which sends the stock market to its biggest single day point gain ever

Biden: Can't even manage to host a simple live broadcast without it failing (Imagine if he had to run response to the coronavirus) https://t.co/q6bHAUkJfG

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 14, 2020

Over the past days, we’ve seen Joe Biden forget what office he is running for, confuse his wife with his sister, forget which state he is in, and react, very Alzheimer’s-like anger, to potential voters who challenge him.

There is an old, old joke in the British Army about a cavalry officer (who were renowned for being a bit dim and inbred) being so stupid that even the horses had begun to take notice. In this case, the Democrats and the media have observed that #QuidProJoe seems a bit untethered from this particular dimension. They were pretty open about it up until the South Carolina primary when Joe Biden went from teetering on the knife’s edge of being forced out of the race to being the presumptive nominee.

The extent to which the media, in particular, are going to cover this up is extraordinary. Just last week, Forbes published a piece titled Does Joe Biden Have Dementia? Does It Matter? by senior contributor Elizabeth Bauer. The correct answers, of course, are yes and yes. But we’ll never know what Bauer concluded because Forbes not only took down the article, it was able to get it deleted from the WayBack Machine. Based on people who pulled quotes before it went the way of people who question decisions made by the Chinese government, we see a pretty strong case was made for him showing unmistakable signs of dementia:

Don Surber:

 “Trump did indeed ace the Montreal Cognitive Assessment screening test back in 2018. At the time, this produced triumphant reactions from some; others declared that this test would not pick up on nuances of mental decline or the bigger picture of whether Trump is fit to serve as president. And the Montreal screening is hardly the sort of test that identifies how clever one is, or how much wisdom one has, of the sort that might come in handy in managing, well, just about anything a president has to manage.”

Via PJMedia

And — folks, this is where I’ll take off the journalist hat for just a moment: I have watched someone take this test. To a cognitively unimpaired person, the questions seem trivial. But the individual that I watched take this screening could not answer questions that to an unimpaired person would seem obvious. These are not “trick questions”; it’s not an IQ test nor is it designed to ferret out nuances.  But if a person really does have impairment, the test really will identify it.

Which means that, yes, if Biden’s gaffes and his outbursts are just “Biden being Biden,” then there should be an easy enough answer: Biden could take the screening test just as easily as Trump did, and just as easily pass it, and then everyone can just shut up about the issue — unless, that is, the claims of Republicans that he has been pushed and manipulated into this election against his own best interest, and he’d be better off having stayed in retirement, are actually well-founded.

What she’s essentially saying, it seems to me, is that she thinks he may have dementia, she believes he should submit to cognitive testing, and that the final decision should be left to the voters.

For a party that has spent four years demanding that President Trump disclose this or that detail of his personal life, the spectacle of an entire political party and our brave firefighters in the media run like scalded dogs from the issue is hilarious. An actual political party would demand full disclosure of what is an obvious mental defect on the part of Joe Biden before the Milwaukee Convention. A real party would have demanded it when Biden’s first appearances in Iowa became public. There is only one reason why Biden is being left in the race: to stop Bernie Sanders.

The second order issue becomes once Biden has the nomination, then what? The stress of the campaign is going to rapidly accelerate Biden’s visible decline. By election day his campaign manager will be spoon-feeding him cream-of-wheat and changing his Depends®. This will be apparent even to voters still in thrall to big city (and California) Democrat machines who could, conceivably, balk at electing someone who is in a near vegetative state to the presidency. Why would the Democrats want that? Maybe they don’t. Maybe they think the Torricelli rule will play out the same way on the national scene just as it did in New Jersey.