The report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and then Biden’s press conference in response illustrated what everyone already knows: The emperor has no memory. In Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale about the emperor’s new clothes, everyone knows the emperor is naked, but most are dedicated to maintaining the fiction rather than being thought of as fools. Democrats ought to read that story and learn something.

We say that because two narratives have been distilled in the aftermath of a truly disastrous day for Biden: One, Special Counsel Robert Hur was wrong to highlight the president’s memory and age issues. Democrats and their media allies complain that Hur’s analysis of Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” is a disgraceful thing for the special counsel to write down. Two, Republicans are just being mean to “pounce” on the story and make political hay out of it.

In other words, the story isn’t that Biden is unfit for office; it’s that people shouldn’t point it out.

Why circle the wagons like this and pretend? Democrat strategist James Carville got right to the point by saying, “The most damaging thing that can happen to a politician is to have an existing negative suspicion confirmed.” Indeed, 86% of voters think Biden is “too old” to serve a second term.

Like the people in the fable who don’t want to be considered fools for not seeing the emperor’s invisible clothes, doubling down is the only answer.

Our Jordan Candler compiles Short Cuts daily, and today’s entry is full of essential quotes that tell the story of leftist spin.

Biden’s 25th Amendment insurance policy, otherwise known as Kamala Harris, led the charge. Hur’s report “could not be more wrong on the facts and [was] clearly politically motivated,” she said, and his assessment of Biden’s cognitive decline was “gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who, other than being a black lesbian, was chosen for the job because she so ably captures Biden’s typical eloquence, said, “Look, as it relates to his age, as it relates to, uh, what has been said, uh, by, you know, by, uh, in this report, it is something that we don’t believe lives in reality in the sense of, this is, this is a president, I have spent, I’ve known this president since 2009, I’ve known this president…” You get the idea. Besides, she said, “elected officials … misspeak sometimes.”

Ian Sams, spokesman for the White House Counsel’s office, emphasized the “Republicans are mean” narrative. He accused Republicans of “made up claims of a two-tiered system of justice,” which he says created the pressure under which the special counsel “spends time making gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms of the president.”

Various Democrats laughably asserted that Biden is “completely mentally sharp” and “on top of his game.”

Democrat strategist Jon Reinish also complained about the double standard … against Joe Biden: “The scrutiny and the coverage on whatever Biden’s gaffes are is 10,000 times what the scrutiny and the toughness and calling out are when Donald Trump rambles incoherently, mashes facts and comes across as if he has no grasp on reality.”

As Biden would yell: “Come on, man! Give me a break! That’s a bunch of malarkey!”

In fact, because the mainstream media is effectively a Democrat super PAC, “journalists” did the same job as White House spinmeisters. When they weren’t almost literally pounding the table about how very different this classified documents case is from Jack Smith’s probe of Donald Trump, they were rhetorically hammering Hur for using unkind “adjectives and adverbs that are not the province of the Department of Justice.”

NBC News frets, “Democratic allies raised concern that Republicans will grow emboldened now to use the Hur report as a political cudgel and try to keep its damaging statements in public discussion during oversight hearings, and potentially even use it to revive their impeachment inquiry into Biden.” As if the fact that the president is non compos mentis is a made-up problem and the real story is that Republicans would dare point it out.

NBC concludes its story with an unintentionally hilarious quote from a Biden “ally”: “They have to relax and put him out there. The more people see him, the better they will feel.”

Yeah, that worked about as well Thursday night as it did for the fable’s emperor parading through the streets totally naked.