Ageing Attacks on Biden Ignore His Significant Accomplishments and the Alternative Choices

By Donald A. Collins | 9 August 2023
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

An old friend and columnist for many newspapers just emailed me and my wife Sally a response to my July 30th OP ED entitled “Is It Time for A Constitutional Amendment on Ageing?”

You can read that column again here.

I quote most of what my friend sent me as his views on Biden, and many other issues are mine.

Your piece, Don, re a Constitutional Amendment on aging recalls that familiar quotation attributed to Abraham Lincoln, to wit: “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that counts. It’s the life in your years.” (Though my favorite aging quip is George Burns’s: “I’ve reached an age that when I bend over to tie my shoes, I wonder if there’s anything else I can do while I’m down there.)

Biden has had an above average first term, yet I’ve still had qualms about his serving a second term. This is a mental tennis match with myself. Biden would be in his mid-80s at the conclusion of a second term. Well, we’ve all left our mid-80s in the dust and I don’t think any of us has lost too many steps in that time.

Even today, at 92, you’re regularly turning out interesting, readable columns, as well as, playing golf (!) And only the other day I was looking at a dozen or so columns I contributed to my local newspaper and reprinted by papers in Chicago, Orlando, Hartford and Baltimore; they were written while I was in my mid-80s and I doubt if my age could be gauged by reading them. (On Sept. 30, I’ll reach 90.)

The point is: unless the three of us are anomalies, which I doubt, we’re living proof that cerebral pursuits need not be written off as greatly diminished with aging. Then again, we’ve had friends over 50 who have suffered dementia.

Should Alzheimer’s or dementia afflict Joe Biden during a second term, we do have the 25th Amendment.

I believe the actual, but unspoken, motivation behind much of the noise about Biden’s age is: If Biden should be incapacitated during a second term and removed from office through application of the 25th amendment, he would be succeeded by, heaven forbid, a black woman!

Hope you and Sally are still enjoying health and life, as much as I certainly am.

He modestly did not mention his long career as a public relations advocate for family planning for which he wrote innumerable treatises that were adopted by others mostly without attribution.

Now as we face an uncertain future, it is so fortunate that there is strongly in place a new generation of skilled activists who continue to forward the truths about reproductive rights as we continue to battle against cultural and religious zealots who currently have women attacked for having vaginas that need emptied of fetal material! These same anti-feminists join with other racists in attacking people of color and the LBGTQ folks.

None of Biden’s potential GOP opponents in the 2024 election can escape all of their authoritarian labels of being anti-abortion, uncertain on the climate issue, ready to give less support to Ukraine or embracing the need to acknowledge the rights of the LBGTQ community. A sour mix of unacceptable biases.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us” and “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”.

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