It seems astounding that this should still even be a question after four years of pretense that Joe Biden was capable of the presidency, but Michael Schaffer at Politico looks at journalists’ discomfort — as a matter of courtesy, manners, and “ethics” — at reporting candidly on geriatric politicians’ observable diminishing grip on reality and on the things they’re elected to govern.

The story opens with reporters getting 88-year-old D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton to say she was running for re-election, followed by her office disavowing that she has actually decided to do so. For a person of less advanced age, one would expect her to actually know what she had decided, and what she hadn’t, on the central question of whether to run again or retire. Schaffer notes, properly, the relevance of the problem: “For people interested in how Washington works, it’s an........

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