Roof: Don’t focus on aging when voting but checkbook

Geez, do I miss the old days. I miss the Delaware State News coming at 5 p.m. with “Tomorrow’s headlines today.” I even miss when the editorial pages didn’t rely on obscure news feeds. I even miss old Walter Ihlenfeldt, who almost had a weekly column on the editorial page.

But I recall when Clemson University was nothing more than an A&M college — or what we often referred to as a “cow college” — whose major contributions to education centered on agriculture, textiles and engineering. They seem to have fallen on desperate times if they’ve named a quack like Leo Gugerty as a “professor emeritus” in, of all things, psychology (“Here’s what matters about candidates’ cognitions”). Sad to think that our daily paper would resort to a pseudo-diagnosis from someone without a medical degree.

Wait! That wasn’t a diagnosis. That was simply a letter from a partisan hack, telling us that we should disregard what we see in Joe Biden and completely trust the writer’s opinion of what is considered “part of a natural aging process.”

Really? It’s little wonder that psychiatrists tend to be held in such low esteem by the public. This guy isn’t even a medical doctor or a psychiatrist. He’s a psychologist.

Joe Biden isn’t suffering from aging issues. Age has nothing to do with it. If you are that young that you can’t understand, why don’t you take a trip to Doverama on Tuesday or Thursday, when the senior leagues are bowling? They are all “old” people, and you’ll find out that, what we see in Biden is not “normal” for 80-year-old people. I, and Donald Trump, are as old as he is, and though many don’t think of us as “normal,” we are certainly not considered inept or doddering.

Many of us remember Joe Biden when he first showed up here. We remember him playing the sympathy vote when his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. We remember him claiming the driver who hit her car after she failed to stop at an intersection was driving drunk. Though later completely refuted, he never apologized. As the late father of a friend and legislator for over 30 years stated a few weeks before he passed at age 94, “Joe has told so many lies during his lifetime, he now actually believes them.”

Back to the editorial: This ended up being nothing more than some obscure political hack trying to convince us that Joe Biden is as effective as he’s ever been. Sadly, there may be more truth in that than it appears. In his book, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” Robert Gates, a former CIA operative and director who served in cabinet positions under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, covered the truth quite well. He said, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past 4 decades.” Yet, if you conform to Mr. Gugerty’s logic, Gates made that remark when he was 80 years old, as well.

I also recall when Donald Trump was ostracized for being a “draft dodger.” That’s pretty rich when you consider that Joe Biden refused an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy and was deferred from the draft five times for issues such as asthma and stuttering, while being a lifeguard and a football player.

It’s well past the time of trying to analogize the situations between Joe Biden and Donald Trump based on aging. The media is simply lying. When Donald Trump was careful descending a wet ramp at a graduation ceremony, the media played that as a physical weakness, yet when Joe Biden did a header at the Air Force Academy, fell twice on the Air Force One entry stairs and has been relegated to entering the plane through its cargo access door, the media is silent. When the Italian prime minister has to retrieve him during a G-7 meeting or Barack Obama has to break his “freezing” episode and lead him off the stage, it should be an embarrassment to the world. Kindly tell me how many press conferences Joe Biden has held in the last four years and just how many times has that been followed up by “clarifying by the White House staff.” Excuse me? When does the White House staff speak for the president of the United States?

In November, before you vote, don’t pick up the newspaper or read anything online. Pick up your checkbook and see how much of your hard-earned money remains. Has your grocery bill gone down? Gas, water or heating oil? Electricity or TV/internet? Taxes from local or state government? How much credit card debt do you have now versus what you had four years ago? If this doesn’t dictate your vote, you’re not like “most” of us.

George Roof

Magnolia

Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.