We live with an Augean stable of corruption and incompetence.

From You Gonna Investigate That? by Charles C.W. Cooke.  Of the barrels of ink spent commenting on the debate last week and its implications going forward, only a thimbleful has been spent on non-political substance and even less on the core issue.

If we accept that the President is substantially cognitively impaired (and acknowledging the continuum challenge of something like dementia), then there are several obvious non-political questions which follow.

Who knew about the condition when?

What were the actions taken by whom to hide the condition from the public and other decision makers?

Who has been making the decisions for which the President has been nominally responsible?

What should be done about a scenario where a President is non compos mentis but there is a formal mechanism (the election) in a mere five months?  

Cooke is focused on the legacy mainstream media's conscious or unconscious role.  It appears that they are likely to have played a very significant role in the first two questions.  They knew and they chose not to report.  More than that, they knew, chose not to report, and sought to discredit those that did report.  

It is an institutional failure of tragic scope and one which needs exploration.

I think that the press helped to cover up Joe Biden’s condition, and that it did so as a matter of habit, out of a corrupt desire to help the Democratic Party. Some in the press strongly deny this. They insist that they didn’t know how bad it was. They say that they were as shocked as anyone by what they saw last Thursday night. They contend that they are not the perpetrators but the victims.

Okay, then. If that’s true, we ought to talk through its implications. If it’s true, then the press was duped — and duped by the federal government of the United States of America. If it’s true, then the executive branch has been engaged in a massive — and effective — conspiracy to keep Biden’s infirmity from the people who are supposed to report the news. If it’s true, then the White House fooled the media; it outwitted the media; it embarrassed the media. If it’s true, then the president and his political party colluded to suppress the ability of the sacred Fourth Estate to relay matters of public interest to the voters, and, in the process, it made a mockery of the First Amendment.

We need strong political parties actively competing with one another and held accountable by an inquisitive and impartial media.

We have instead lapsed into a uniparty in which established interests in both parties (as well as their bureaucratic counterparts in the administrative state) look after one another at the center and are in turn protected by the legacy mainstream media.  A pox on all of them.  Time to clean the Augean stable of corruption and incompetence.