It’s official: Joe Biden is old. Even the mainstream media is now admitting it.

All it took was a hit piece 10 days ago from The New York Times and, as National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes, “Seemingly overnight, discussing Joe Biden’s age, memory, and mental state isn’t ‘gross, lowest-common-denominator politics’ anymore!”

Geraghty’s remark refers to an attack last August by CNN’s Chris Cillizza, who leveled the charge at Geraghty for having jumped the gun on Biden’s cognitive competence. “Something is wrong with President Biden,” Geraghty wrote at the time, “and we are all being asked to pretend we don’t notice.” Here’s Cillizza’s reply in full:

This is the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life. If Republicans have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward. If they don’t, they should stop doing what they’re doing. Immediately.

Well…

NOW - Biden to seize assets of Russia’s kleptocracy. pic.twitter.com/DIuaIsqgMz

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) April 28, 2022

We at The Patriot Post were calling attention to Biden’s mental unfitness for office even before the 2020 election, but a lot of good it did us. Biden didn’t get all 81 million of those votes on the up-and-up, but a disconcertingly large percentage of the American people were sufficiently uninformed or disinterested enough to have deemed him competent to take on the world’s toughest job.

It was clear to us back then that he wasn’t firing on all cylinders, and we suspect it was also clear to many in the corrupt corporate media. But they had an election to win, an orange guy to vanquish. That mission having been accomplished, and Biden’s colossal shortcomings having since become undeniable even to casual observers, they’ve now set their sights on the next election — a midterm that looks grim indeed.

Apparently, the editors of The Wall Street Journal were, amongst themselves, joking and speculating about Biden’s age-related troubles early last year:

A pastime around our office in early 2021 was guessing when Democrats would begin to point out that President Biden was too old for the job and should pack it in. The consensus was after a drubbing in the midterm election, but congrats to the colleague (he knows who he is) who figured sometime early this year. He wins the office pool because the drive to shove the President out the door has already begun.

Columnist Mark Leibovich at the reliably left-elite Atlantic was even more brutal, making the case for why Biden shouldn’t run again in 2024, even though he’s repeatedly insisted that he plans to do so. “Yes, he’s fit to be president right now,” reads the article’s subhead. “But he’s too old for the next election.” This, of course, is only half-true. Were Biden’s age not an issue right now, Leibovich wouldn’t be writing about it. But write he does:

As a point of professional comparison, Biden would be enjoying his 15th year of retirement if he had spent his career as a commercial airline pilot, or his 24th year if he had been an air-traffic controller. There’s a reason the FAA mandates compulsory departure times for these positions (65 for pilots, 56 for controllers). These are life-and-death tasks that demand peak stamina and mental acuity. The pressure can be crushing, burnout is rampant, and no one wants to see grandpop in the damn cockpit.

Now that the hermetic seal around Joe Biden’s age has been broken, we can look for a shift in the Leftmedia’s reporting, especially in how it covers potential successors. The trouble is, the Democrats don’t have much of a bench. Kamala Harris? Pete Buttigieg? Really?

The 2024 election is still a long way away, but the party in power is essentially without a candidate. The normally friendly mainstream media has made that much abundantly clear.