Further clarifications about that thing that happened

Since it seems to be look back at how LGM dealt with the eventual removal of Joe Biden from the Democratic ticket week here, and because various commenters are obviously still upset about my particular role in that, I’m offering the following observations:

(1) In early July I spoke to several medical experts who, in their professional opinion, believe that Joe Biden has various symptoms consistent with parkinsonism (the family of diseases of which Parkinson’s disease is by far the best known).

(2) All of these experts are of the further opinion that, if an 81-year-old patient of theirs was displaying the symptoms Biden has been displaying, they would test that patient for parkinsonism.

From this, I concluded that the reason the White House is giving for the fact that Biden had not and has not been tested for parkinsonism — that he has no symptoms consistent with the disease — is a bad reason, medically speaking, and is therefore a product of political rather than medical considerations.

Nothing that has happened in the subsequent month has led me to doubt that conclusion.

Here I want to address a very delicate issue, which is the following counter-factual: Would I have investigated this issue and written about it if I thought there was no reasonable prospect of replacing Biden with Harris? The answer is: I would not have done this, because there are things more important than getting to the bottom of the president’s current medical condition, most notably, the overwhelming importance of defeating Donald Trump this fall. So I investigated this and wrote about it both because I believe it is in itself an important issue, and because, to the extent that raising legitimate questions about Biden’s health was more likely than not to advance the goal of defeating Donald Trump, then those questions should be raised.

To be clear, I would not have raised those questions if I thought they weren’t, independent of pragmatic political calculations, legitimate questions in and of themselves. Rather bizarrely, a lot of LGM commenters seem to be of the view that the question of whether or not Biden has parkinsonism has somehow been resolved in the negative, and that bringing it up at all was therefore a bad thing to do, and part and parcel of the unscrupulous campaign to remove Biden by stabbing him in the back — a maneuver for which I believe the Germans in their charming Teutonic way have a single word.

This of course is not true: we don’t know whether Biden has parkinsonism, but we do know, or anyway I believe we should know, that someone like him, absent the whole running for president business, would certainly have been tested, because even a low chance of having parkinsonism would justify testing for the disease, in order to treat it if warranted. And that remains true whether it’s eventually discovered he has the disease or not. (The whole point of testing in the presence of symptoms is to determine what those symptoms mean, which can’t be determined without testing, at least until the presence of a disease is unmistakable even without testing).

So I have no regrets whatsoever about pursuing this story, which was not only a legitimate issue on its own terms, but may — and I’m not speaking primarily of my own modest contribution here, but rather more of that of the many medical experts who, both on and off the record reached the same conclusion — have contributed in some small way to the now undeniably correct decision to replace Biden with Harris.

So that’s my apology, and I hope you can all accept it in the purest Latinate sense of the word.