You’ll never believe what François Mitterrand just told me

The water is boiling. We’re the frogs. And it’s working because we’re just sitting here.

The president of the United States has started offering detailed accounts of his recent conversations with dead people. He talked to François Mitterrand after being inaugurated in 2021, despite that French leader's death in 1996, and he recently had a warm discussion with the equally dead Helmut Kohl. Just ask him — he'll tell you all about it.

A relentlessly dishonest and dangerously stupid news media cripples us. We’ve lost the ability to say what's happening.

Meanwhile, a special counsel chosen to evaluate the same president's unlawful storage of classified material in poorly secured personal locations concludes that the apparent crime isn't prosecutable, because it would be hard to prove intent when the defendant is suffering from such obvious cognitive impairment. Actual quote:

We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.

See, you can’t prove that the president of the United States intended to do anything because his brain has turned into a potato. He’s too far gone for a jury trial. Also, "Mister President, I have the football." That whole nuclear launch codes thing should work out just fine. He would probably consult with Beau before he actually fired any missiles, and Beau Biden is an experienced military officer, man. Not a joke!

What’s happening to us is that we’ve experienced such a colossal implosion of ordinary standards and the simple capacity for reason that we can’t avoid slamming into every wall we encounter. “Oh, right, there's a wall in front of us. Stop with the conspiracy theories!” A relentlessly dishonest and dangerously stupid news media cripples us. We’ve lost the ability to say what's happening.

One of my grandmothers kept driving to the supermarket when she was mostly blind and barely able to walk. She said she used the curb to keep her near the right spot on the road, so there was nothing to worry about. We hid her car keys and pulled the distributor cap out of her car. But we allow a man who talks to dead people to control the launch codes for nuclear weapons.

Shame on us. Shame on us all for the degradation of our standards and the loss of honesty that make us incapable of self-government. I’d say that they're grinding our faces in it, but the truth is that we’re grinding our faces in it.

Joe Biden isn’t fit for the office he holds. He never was. Pete Buttigieg isn’t qualified to be the secretary of transportation because he was the mayor of a medium-sized and not terribly well-run city. Karine Jean-Pierre isn’t smart enough to succeed as a waitress. We’re allowing our country to be turned into a joke.

Democratic prosecutors are charging the Republican presidential front-runner with nonsense crimes and raiding his home, while the Democratic president won't be prosecuted for keeping classified materials in his house, back when he wasn’t in office, because he’s too far gone to have demonstrable intent. We’re not a nation — we're the plot of a Marx Brothers farce about a satirical banana republic. “Gentlemen, Biden here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: He really is an idiot.”

We won’t vote our way out of this. Partisan politics descended into a sewer of idiocy and sociopathy because the culture of our country went to hell.

We need journalists and professors who aren’t actively stupid and depraved. We need open discussion, honest communities, connected families, and decent people. Several years beyond the point at which the whole sick show became unsustainably foolish, we need to become fiercely intolerant of garbage journalism and half-wit activists — and garbage journalists who are half-wit activists.

Speak up. Do it now. Call or email the White House and tell them that the senile president of the United States is illegitimate and can’t continue to hold the office.

When the people who run your garbage local newspaper publish insane gibberish, tell them. (If you're still subscribing to a terrible local newspaper because it’s a habit, for crying out loud stop paying them to insult you.)

When your child’s teacher sends the students home with insipid homework and moronic leftist garbage, say so.

When your city council or your school board holds pointless meetings on symbolic resolutions about Gaza or Putin, for crying out loud tell them to get back to their real work.

Americans are responsible for the collapse of American standards. We're tolerating this descent. Stop tolerating it. Our decline is shameful, and it starts in our homes and communities.