Just hours before Joe Biden’s prostate cancer announcement, congressman Jim Clyburn, age 84, was on CNN saying he still thinks his 82 year old friend would’ve been fit to serve as president had he been reelected. Next he casually uttered something so insane I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

“I’ve seen people develop Alzheimer’s when they’re in their thirties and forties; so it’s not about age,” Clyburn said. 

The statement was so preposterous — like saying breast cancer isn’t about women because men get it too — that my gerontocracy meter broke. But that was just the first level to this layer cake of absurdity.

Consider Clyburn’s unusual insistence on staying in Congress after having ceded his party leadership role as House Majority Whip back in 2023. (Party veterans Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, both 85 years old, followed suit)

Also, Clyburn made his remark to, of all people, Jake Tapper. The CNN host had just co-written a book — published today! — reporting on what it calls the “cover-up” of President Biden’s mental and physical decline while in office.

Soon after Biden’s announcement, the mainstream media machine, including cable networks that are themselves around the same age as the former president, got to work reassuring its readers and viewers that everything was okay. 

Quoting a UCLA Health director, NBC reported, “In no way would this have any impact on his ability to govern, even if he were still president today.”

Except it could have. In fact, it did.

A less advanced case of prostate cancer incapacitated one of Biden’s cabinet officials last year, causing its own scandal and leaving our gazillion dollar nuclear weapons command and control system unmanned. Then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a spry 70 years old at the time, underwent surgery for his own prostate cancer (detected early in screening) and neglected to tell anyone in the White House that he’d be unavailable.

Austin was the Pentagon’s top civilian official. He was also in the chain of command, from Joe Biden right through to the military. Commands literally go through the Secretary. His nuclear slip was so blatant that the Defense Department’s Inspector General called him out and Congress examined what could have happened if the United States were attacked. 

Hanging over all of this is, of course, the cultural prohibition against speaking ill of the ill. Though well meaning, this convention is what got us into this trouble in the first place. It makes sense when it comes to one’s loved ones or anyone you might know personally. I suppose in our age of parasocial relationships, where people we see on screens can feel like our friends (except me, who really is your friend!), it makes sense that people would feel this way even about a former president. But they don’t know him; and to think you do is like the guy who thinks the stripper must be really into him. They’re doing a job!

We, the public, also have a job: to think critically about our political leaders. Even when it feels bad.

That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with him. I myself have watched with concern at the toll that chemotherapy exacted on a dear friend of mine this past year. It was awful and something I would wish on no one, including the former president. But he is not the same as a personal friend.

Defamation law distinguishes between public and private persons, imposing a much higher evidentiary standard on claims made of non-public figures. This is a recognition of the fact that public figures, owing to their privileged status, must be subjected to higher levels of scrutiny than ordinary people. 

So too must Biden.

Now people are asking if he knew about the cancer earlier. I’m not going to pretend to have any idea. Someone who does is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist who worked with Biden in his transition team, who on MSNBC’s Morning Joe suggested he’d had the cancer for years.

“He did not develop it in the last 100 to 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021. I don't think there's any disagreement about that.

That doesn’t mean that Biden knew about it, though of course people are assuming he did. But with the gerontocracy’s performance this year — from Clyburn to Connolly as well as multiple members of congress dying in office — can you blame them?

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— Edited by William M. Arkin