I like Megan McArdle, the conservatarian political columnist for The Washington Post. I really do. I think she’s smart and talented and interesting. Best of all, she’s not someone who is bound by ideology or political allegiances. Ideology and allegiance are good in some cases and in some occupations, but not in hers and not at her paper. McCardle is as close to a “truth teller” as exists in the mainstream media today, and I appreciate that.

All of that said, McArdle’s column this week leaves me nearly despondent, mostly because it’s hopelessly naïve and, as a result, exposes the ridiculousness of the current American predicament. McArdle starts her piece by expressing sympathy for former President Joe Biden with his recent cancer diagnosis, but then jumps right in, openly and aggressively criticizing those who hid Biden’s mental incapacity from the nation for the better part of four years. So far, so good. Biden deserves our sympathy, while his enablers deserve our detestation. Unfortunately, it’s downhill from there, as McArdle uses her platform to call for Democrats and even her colleagues in the media to reflect on their treachery and determine how best to fix things going forward:

I’m convinced that deep institutional soul-searching is due in many quarters and that this conversation is too important to delay, even at the risk of adding to the Biden family’s distress. It is impossible to read “Original Sin” … without reaching a horrifying conclusion: The most powerful nation in the world and its nuclear arsenal were left in the hands of a man who could not reliably recognize people he’d known for years, maintain his train of thought, or speak in coherent sentences.

That’s great. I agree that these are reasonable conclusions, but I still have some questions. How is it that some of us reached those same conclusions in 2020? How did some of us already know this would happen before he won the White House? Why do some people—Democrats and the mainstream media—pretend that they need this book to explain to them now what many of us knew all along? More to the point, does anyone actually believe that the people who need to do soul searching will actually do it? Or, if they do, that they will come to the conclusion that they screwed up and put the nation in great jeopardy?