I read this yesterday, decided that it was a double Julie Principle abomination (“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Biden’s demented, the Times gotta lie…“) and too outrageous to be worth even my pathetic time, and then it kept ticking away in my skull like a home-made bomb until I couldn’t stand it any more.

New York Times Stockholm Syndrome columnist David Brooks, once a conservative with intellectual pretensions, not just another Times progressive toady, actually wrote…

“The Republicans who portray [Biden] as a doddering old man based on highly selective YouTube clips are wrong. In my interviews with him, he’s like a pitcher who used to throw 94 miles an hour who now throws 87. He is clearly still an effective pitcher. People who work with him allow that he does tire more easily, but they say that he is very much the dynamic force driving this administration. In fact, I’ve noticed some improvements in his communication style as he’s aged. He used to try to cram every fact in the known universe into every answer; now he’s more disciplined. When he’s describing some national problem, he is more crisp and focused than he used to be, clearer on what is the essential point here — more confidence-inspiring, not less….”

I’m pretty sure I’ve been watching Joe Biden longer than David Brooks has, and I’m dead certain I know more about baseball than he does, so I must offer this correction. If you must compare Biden to a pitcher, it would not be one who once had a 94 mph fastball (actually, today that’s not very impressive, as most successful pitchers throw at least 96 or so), but rather a journeyman hurler who at his peak could throw maybe 86 or 87 at best, and who has bounced around from team to team as an innings-eating mop-up man for an inexplicably long time, never being more than the guy who barely makes the last slot on the squad out of Spring Training, never given a start in a big game or brought on in relief in a “high leverage situation,” and who holds on to a job by being an upbeat presence in the clubhouse, loyal to his managers, and encouraging to younger, more talented pitchers coming up. There is no baseball analogy to Biden after that, because when pitchers obviously decline in their abilities and those abilities were nothing to get them on a Wheaties box in the first place, they get cut. If they are lucky, maybe they get a job as a pitching coach on a minor league team in Altoona.

[I should mention that the geezer making that horrible pitch in the GIF above is the great Nolan Ryan.]

Almost no pitchers who weren’t Hall of Fame level at their peaks can survive if they lose 7 miles an hour off their fastballs. As it happens, the Boston Red Sox this season learned this the hard way. Corey Kluber was a two-time Cy Young winner, one of the best pitchers in the game, when he threw 93 miles an hour. Then little by little he lost it, had arm trouble, and by last year barely managed a .500 record with a team that played winning ball, the Tampa Bay Rays. They wisely didn’t re-sign him, but the Red Sox did, though Kluber’s best fastball was then about 87. He got clobbered, ending the season with an earned run average over 7, which is the level of a batting practice pitcher.

But Kluber was at least a great pitcher once. Nobody ever thought Joe Biden was a great U.S. Senator. I was writing about what an obvious dummy he was decades ago, and I was far from the only one. I think it was about 2018 when I noticed that what little glint of intelligence that had been in Joe’s eye had vanished, along with his energy level and orientation. I was stunned that he ran for President, stunned that his wife and family allowed him to do it, and I would have been stunned that the Democratic Party nominated him except by that time I realized that it had become so Machiavellian that it would have nominated—oh, pick any celebrity moron—if it calculated that he would attract more votes than the awful group of 2020 election contenders.

As it happens, just last week another journalist, former ESPN reporter Sage Steele, told Bill Maher that interviewing Biden in 2021 was “the saddest thing” because he seemed confused, “couldn’t finish his sentences,” “trailed off,” and “struggled.”

“That made me sad,” she told Maher. “The human aspect of what we’re witnessing right now, to me, is heartbreaking.” She added that she realized while talking to Biden “why he was in the basement during the whole election cycle — because even then he couldn’t finish his sentences.”

But…but… he’s so crisp!

I’m a little surprised that Brooks would hang himself out like this for all the world to see his own decline. Obviously some sort of memo had gone out through the DNC to the left-biased media line of defense that it’s time to circle the metaphorical wagons. Let’s play Ann Althouse for a bit and see if the Times readers also got their memos…

And the answer is…aaarghhh. Oh no! This is even worse than I expected. I gave up before I could find a single letter chiding Brooks for his obvious gaslighting. Many readers thanked him for “the truth.” Most just shifted into diatribes about Donald Trump. This one was telling: “If you truly want to do your part to avoid a Trumpian fiasco, ask yourself if this article, or similar, is the best use of your prominent platform.”