American politics can only get crazier

Famously, ‘May you live in interesting times’ is a Chinese curse. Americans have got to know this all too well as of late. Within a month, we Yanks have seen a sitting president reveal his senility during a nationally televised CNN debate. Less than a fortnight later, we saw his opponent survive an assassination attempt. Then, a bandaged-up Donald Trump hosted the Republican National Convention (RNC), alongside rock star Kid Rock, UFC boss Dana White and SlutWalk founder Amber Rose. Now, Joe Biden has departed from the presidential race. In many ways, this latest development is actually the craziest of them all. Especially considering that, for years now, America’s largest press outlets have been reassuring a nervous citizenry that our octogenarian president is alright, if not better. Prominent television host Joe Scarborough recently declared on his Morning Joe MSNBC show that this version of Biden is ‘the best Biden ever’. A year before that, he described Biden as ‘very sharp’. Just a few years back in 2020, the PolitiFact website ran a formal fact-check of Fox News anchor Brit Hume’s claim that Biden was ‘senile’. Fact-checkers went so far as to interview a doctor of geriatric medicine before flatly calling...