One thing that has been on my mind for weeks now — brooding in the background as a potentially splenetic 4,000-word long-form blurt of acute psychological and civic discomfort — is the decay of President Joe Biden happening before our very eyes during the calendar year 2023. I went back to when I first joined National Review full-time to read what I was saying about it (as recently as February of this year) and to see how my references to it progressed to the present day, and two things were immediately clear: (1) I really had a lot to learn about writing back then, and (2) my concern — beyond partisan politics, just as observation — has been escalating from that time all along, not merely upward in a straight line, but accelerating exponentially. Not because I like Joe Biden, mind you, but because I like America. And when America’s president is currently already bobbing mentally like an untethered buoy out to sea, the idea of a major party renominating him is just an act of civic insanity.
