Stay with us here. Just two months before the 1964 presidential election between President Lyndon Johnson and Republican challenger Barry Goldwater, the cover headline of a long-forgotten publication, Fact magazine, ushered in the modern era of left-wing journalistic malfeasance: “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit To Be President!” it blared. The entire magazine then launched into a feature story titled “The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.”

Goldwater seemed bound to lose to Johnson with or without the Fact hit piece, but, as City Journal contributing editor Harry Stein noted, that unprecedented attack taught us “a lesson about bias, double standards, and the slope of the playing field that millions of Americans have had no reason to forget ever since.”

Goldwater, of course, isn’t the only Republican to have had his mental state, his fitness for office, challenged by the Left and taken up by its media foot soldiers. Another outsider, Donald Trump, certainly got the treatment. Leading the pack were the Trump-deranged New York Times and three equally deranged professors — one from Harvard, one from Yale, and one from North Carolina — who wrote a book about it: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.

“There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump … profound, illuminating and discomforting,” gushed PBS’s Bill Moyers. “The stand these psychiatrists are taking takes courage, and their conclusions are compelling,” chimed the Dying Democracy Darknessers at The Washington Post.

But why buy the book? The headline to the trio’s Times op-ed told us all we needed to know: “Trump Is Mentally Unfit, No Exam Needed.”

So, where are they now? Where are all these mental health experts now that our current president, Joe Biden, is in such an obvious and inarguable state of cognitive decline? Why now, when we have a genuinely non compos mentis commander-in-chief, does no one on the Left have the guts to talk about it?

Could it be that they voted for the guy? That they supported his candidacy just a few months ago, even though they already knew? Could it be that they’re just running out the clock, waiting for Biden’s fellow Democrats to compassionately escort him off the stage in favor of The First African-American-Indian-Jamaican Woman President in History?

The signs of Biden’s mental decline have been apparent for some time now. Here’s what we wrote on Election Day: “Joe Biden simply isn’t the man he was when he first ran for president more than 30 years ago. And he isn’t the man he was when Barack Obama tabbed him as his VP a dozen years ago. He was 65 then, and he was eligible for Social Security. He’s 77 now, and he looks and sounds and behaves like a man a decade older than that. In fact, if Biden wins this election, he’ll be older when he takes office than our oldest-ever president, Ronald Reagan, was when he left office after serving two full terms.”

Democrats have certainly noticed that Biden has been slipping badly. But last year, they also noticed something far more important to them: Among all their candidates for president, Joe Biden had the best chance of defeating Donald Trump. That’s what the polling consistently showed, and that’s why, even though Biden embarrassed himself in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada — in the states that got to know him best — the party powers propped him up in South Carolina: They knew that Socialist Bernie Sanders, who was threatening to run away with the nomination, would get stomped by Trump in the general election.

It was a cruel and calculated decision by the Democrats. But it worked.

They’ve made other calculations, too. Some three dozen House Democrats are trying to keep Biden’s finger off the nuclear button, and a bipartisan group of senators is attempting to limit his war powers. And, as our Mark Alexander wrote yesterday, “Weeks before the election, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi seeded the 25th Amendment legislation for Biden’s path to resign. As I noted then, ‘Pelosi’s target is, ostensibly, Trump. But if Biden wins, this will provide Democrats plausible deniability to remove him.’”

“Forty-two days into the administration,” said Fox News’s Tucker Carlson last night, “and still no solo press conference from Joe Biden. That is the longest stretch of silence from any new president in at least a century. … Even CNN is complaining about it. … But honestly, we’re just as happy that Joe Biden remains in seclusion. Imagine a full press conference from Joe Biden. An endless hour of blank spots and mumbling and his wife interjecting with the right answer. How depressing would that be? It’s one thing to know your country is being led by a guy in cognitive decline. It’s another thing to see it. And we don’t want to see it.”

Biden’s incoherence has become alarming, and we’re not sure we want to see it either. But the president’s handlers can’t continue to hide his condition from the American people.