Biden's Cancer

First, Newark Terminal A is everything you haven’t imagined about New Jersey. Very nice.

Anyway, it’s probably impossible to ignore Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis. I’m not a doctor or an expert, but I have a prostate and I’m in my early 60’s, and I’ll tell you that the (excellent) physicians at the University of Rochester clearly think that prostate cancer is overtreated. Also, it’s very difficult to diagnose, and they don’t even do a digital exam (not complaining). They do a PSA (prostate specific antigen) blood test, but they don’t get excited unless it’s really elevated.

So the fact that Biden’s prostate cancer wasn’t diagnosed isn’t super surprising to me. He’s a smart guy and I assume had had a similar discussion with his physicians as I’ve had with mine. (The cliche here is that “most men die with prostate cancer, few die of it.”) I read somewhere that his kind of cancer doesn’t elevate the PSA much. I think this is more a tale about how we need more funding to diagnose prostate cancer than a specific failing of his physicians.

That said, the party that spent over 20 years demonizing Hillary Clinton sure aren’t going to let go of Biden’s health as a distraction. Though I think that Biden shouldn’t have run for another term, the fact that he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer really has little to do with how I feel about the issue. For all we know, Trump has prostate cancer. He wouldn’t tell us if he did.

The key points here are:

• Biden isn’t President, so talking about what’s wrong with him is something we do because we care about him as a person, not a politician.

• He dropped out due to his health, which was the right thing to do.

• Trump is clearly not firing on all cylinders, mentally, but everyone wants to ignore that fact.

I wish the weak-ass Democrats who go on the Sunday shows would say that. But they don’t, for two reasons. First, Democrats don’t like to go on Sunday shows — bookers have to beg them to come on, so the A team doesn’t get on them. Second, with a few exceptions, they don’t push back on Republican framing.

So here we are — weeks of discussing Biden and cancer so the media won’t have to undergo a reckoning about their role in electing Trump, and so Republicans can sneak through a massive cut in Medicaid so Elon and his ilk won’t have to pay taxes.