my takeaway from a lot of this—substantive "what should the dems do" questions aside because I have no idea—is that people are incredibly weird about aging and disability
Not a disability theorist per say, but a music therapist who works extensively with disabled people and the elderly (both well elderly like Biden and people in memory care) and autistic myself.
This is not the first time I’ve seen this particular group of reporters let their inaccurate knowledge of how specific disabilities function and biases about people with disabilities lead them to poor conclusions at best, rancid bigotry at worst. That affected how seriously I took their reporting.
Remember how horrible some of these same reporters were to Sen. Fetterman when he asked for captioning during interviews post stroke? And the ageist ‘just asking questions’ about Biden in 2020, or Nancy Pelosi? And the initial reactions to that big Atlantic article about Biden’s stutter?
That along with their lack of understanding (accidental or deliberate?) about how aging affects brain functions in ways that may bring changes to short term memory without affecting deeper knowledge or decision making skills gives me a less than positive impression of any conclusions they draw.
The implicit message I got from this whole news cycle is that many of these reporters think that disabled people don’t belong in public life. Biden’s interviews put a lot of my fears about his candidacy to rest, but it gave me a new one:
