Former President Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis has prompted entirely appropriate expressions of sympathy from notable Republicans, Democrats, world leaders, and the public at large. Extending well-wishes, thoughts, and prayers to political opponents is a humane and civilizing instinct that might, in some small way, improve the U.S.'s fraught political climate. Regardless, it's just the right thing to do.
But the former president's prognosis must not bring a premature end to the conversation about whether Biden was cognitively fit for office in 2024. On the contrary, the public should demand answers and accountability on this topic with renewed vigor—precisely because of the well-founded mistrust engendered by Biden's family members and inner circle, Democratic elites, and to some extent, the mainstream media. The reason we cannot necessarily accept, at face value, that Biden himself just learned about his diagnosis last week, is due to Biden's own actions and the actions of his senior advisors, campaign staff, and party leaders.
It might very well be the case that Biden only recently became aware of this very serious health problem. But the timing is suspicious, coming just after the release of special counsel Robert Hur's taped interviews with Biden, in which the lie that Hur had mischaracterized Biden as an "elderly man with a poor memory" was definitively exposed. The Biden White House had attempted to discredit Hur; Biden himself raged at a press conference and blamed Hur for bringing up Beau Biden's death. The tapes, obtained and released by Axios, explicitly contradict Biden's version of events—it was the president who first referenced the death of his son, evincing confusion over the exact date.
