PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Biden, Feinstein, and Fetterman: The Democrats’ Growing Cognitive Problem.

[Fetterman’s] soliloquy is not transcribable. Perhaps it would be charitable to display a modicum more sympathy for Fetterman’s plight than was shown to [Herschel] Walker. But that basic human decency must be tempered by the recollection that medical professionals assured Pennsylvania’s voters that then-candidate Fetterman would not be impaired in the long term by his 2022 stroke and by the fact that his performance fails to represent the interests of the voters who sent him to Congress.

The double standard that is being applied to Fetterman strains under the weight of its application to California senator Dianne Feinstein, whose condition is rapidly worsening. The longtime legislator recently returned to the Senate after a prolonged absence amid her recovery from a bout of shingles. The senator’s inability to conduct the people’s business was, however, apparently news to her.

On Tuesday, Slate writer Jim Newell and Los Angeles Times staff writer Benjamin Oreskes encountered Feinstein and asked her how her return to work was faring. It didn’t go well. Newell says:

When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn.

“No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.

OK.

“You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”

When asked whether she meant that she’d been working from home, she turned feisty.

“No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”

After deflecting one final question about those, like Rep. Ro Khanna, who’ve called on her to resign, she was wheeled away.

Perhaps the senator briefly succumbed to a moment of absent-mindedness owing to her age. While her years are not much greater than the average among members of the upper chamber of Congress, such incidents are a political problem for a party helmed by a figure who is similarly prone to confusion and verbal missteps.

If only we had late night comedians who didn’t have a palace guard mentality — Biden, Feinstein, and Fetterman would be savaged on a nightly basis.

UPDATE: ‘We Sale Your Bank:’ WaPo Reporter Rewrites Disastrous Fetterman Word Salad as a ‘Quote.’

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Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.