May 19, 2025 | 🙅‍♂️Joe Biden's got cancer, Dems say don't talk about his mental decline

Hi everyone!

The Biden family announced on Sunday that the former president has advanced prostate cancer that's already spread to his bones. The audio from his testimony with Special Counsel Robert Hur during the classified documents investigation was released last week, and showed the president in 2023 unable to string his own thoughts together or answer questions clearly. When Hur decided not to prosecute Biden back in 2023, he said that his reason was that "it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him... of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness." Hur referred to Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory."

The book "Original Sin" from CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson drops on Tuesday, revealing that Biden was deteriorating mentally during his time in the White House and that this was covered up by close aides and staff. At the risk of being insensitive, I think the question must be asked: is the revelation about Biden's failing mental state and inability to run the country so damaging that they had to admit he's likely dying?

If so, it seems to be working, at least on the Dem side. When asked about the confluence of these two events, Dem strategist David Axelrod said that the "conversations" around Biden's in-office decline "are going to happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now as he's struggling through this." This opens the door for anyone who discusses the book, the Hur tapes, and continues to be critical of the former president to be called names by the other side. I think that's okay, though, I think the conservatives are well used to being called names and don't really care anymore.

As questions continue to swirl about who was running the country while Biden was substantially and visibly checked out, new questions are emerging about how long Biden has known he's had cancer. In 2022, he made comments about the pollution from the oil industry in Delaware, saying "that's why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer." At the time, the White House walked it back, just like they walked back so many other of his off-the-cuff remarks, but the question remains: Did Joe Biden have cancer in 2022? And if so, why did the White House keep telling us the president had a clean bill of health?

What else were they lying about? Just last year, White House doctor Kevin O'Connor said Biden was "completely fit for the presidency." On Morning Joe today, a doctor revealed that Biden's most recent in-office physical did not show a test for prostate cancer, which is alarming, as Bush, Obama, and Trump all had those tests. It strains credulity to think that Biden, his aides, his family, and his doctors did not know that he had this condition. The president is under the medical microscope, not just out of necessity for the health of the nation, but at the demand of the press. Were they treating the cancer this whole time? Doctors say he must have known about it, that if he was under medical care, stage 4 cancer doesn't spring out of nowhere all of a sudden.
 

The Biden administration was an effort by Democrats to convince the American people that the president was only a small part of the executive branch, that he didn't really matter if he had a good machine, that the machine was what the electorate had voted for. Americans rebuked that notion fully with the reelection of Donald Trump, a man who is clearly calling the shots, is on top of his mental faculties, and directs staff rather than being directed by them.

One of those directions was the appointment of Alice Johnson to head up the plan to identify candidates for presidential pardons. Trump commuted her life sentence in 2018 and gave her a full pardon in 2020. Her crime was to assist in communications between drug dealers in the 1990s in Memphis. This came after her son died, a bad divorce, and financial problems. She served 21 years in an Alabama prison before she was sprung by Trump.

"I am going to find as many as I possibly can find," she told Lara Trump about getting people sprung, "but I'm also going to be advocating [for change] and looking at the things that are out there, on the books, that need to be changed, but to also do what the president has entrusted me to do, and let's find those individuals who need their second chance, those individuals who had lost hope in a system that was totally corrupt." Who better to go off in search of people who should be up for pardons, if not a woman who has gone through it?

A guy who believes in "pro-mortalism" bombed an IVF clinic in Palm Springs over the weekend. He's believed to have died in the explosion, though no embryos were harmed and no one else was killed. He wrote in a manifesto, "The end goal is for the truth (Efilism) to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life."

"Life can only continue as long as people hold the delusional belief that it is not a zero sum game causing senseless torture, and messes it can never, or only partially, clean up. I think we need a war against pro-lifers," the suspect said.

I don't think we have a mental health problem in the US, I think we have a meaning problem. The philosophical takeover of our collective consciousness by a relativist world view means that many people don't have the basis to make the determination that life is better than death. People need tools to morally ground themselves and to use those tools to enact a morally correct decision-making process. A good rule of thumb is to stick with the 10 Commandments, which are baseline, and then add the Beatitudes which add empathy.

Religion is not just about worship or believing in God, it's about having the tools to understand what it means to live a moral life, even when you don't live up to those standards. The Judeo-Christian moral framework was actually a huge social advancement that allowed for the creation of Western, high-trust societies where people can walk safely in the streets, for the most part, and all the rest. When we abandon religion, we abandon a moral framework.

Here's what's on my desk today:

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