Today is Monday, November 20, 2023. In two days, this country will mark the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963. In 1963, I believe, I was in third grade and the event would be indelibly etched on the psyches of the Baby Boomer generation. The incident marked the death of America’s innocence, I would say. Coincidentally, I was watching a program on The Sixties yesterday on CNN and it covered the assassination of the 35th president. Some of the newsreels from that period, especially the shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby, were fascinating. There were early reels of Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, and others reporting on the shocking news out of Texas. The President was 46 years old when he was shot dead by Oswald on that fateful day in November. Kennedy is the only president-elect, I believe, who has a Pulitzer Prize, for his book, Profiles in Courage, written while he was in the Senate. Even after so many years of Kennedy’s death, conspiracy theories about the assassination still abound to this day. The FBI and the Warren Commission, brought into being by the successor to Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, both concluded that Oswald had acted alone. There has been an entire market of books written by people claiming the assassination was done by other players, principally the Soviets under Nikita Khrushchev or Cuban leader Fidel Castro because of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion authorized by Kennedy in April 1961. There have even been whispers that the Mafia was implicated in his assassination. I wonder if the American people will ever know the whole truth regarding Kennedy’s murder.

No matter what you may think of John F. Kennedy as a president (he was struck down just two years into his only term in office) and as a man, you cannot ever compare him to the likes of a Donald J. Trump running for office in 2024. The contrasts between them are so vast you can’t even bridge the divide between them. As for the age of this unfit candidate serving to disqualify him, an online article in The Atlantic has posed the same question that has dogged Joseph R. Biden. David Dee Delgado has written “Has Anyone Noticed That Trump Is Really Old?”

What seems to have escaped people who are still in Chump’s camp is this: he is an old man just as Joe Biden is an old man. Delgado asserts that Chump is 77 years old. Then Delgado points out some sobering facts about the age of the Orange Hemorrhoid: when Chump was born, Harry S. Truman was president and Perry Como topped the year’s pop charts. Israel and Pakistan did not even exist back then. Korea was a unified country, and Vietnam was not.

Even Chump’s cultural references are dated, and only getting more so. He cites artists like Elton John and the Rolling Stones.

The same applies to his political touchstones “in which his view of immigration, in which foreign countries dispatch their undesirables en masse, seems to be shaped largely by the 1980 Mariel boat lift.” He rails against “Communism” and “Marxists” like a Cold Warrior of yore ( yet he still has a peculiar affection for the Russians, rather than enmity, which would have been the case of someone born so long ago as he).

These days, Chump sure seems to be struggling with mental acuity. At a rally in Iowa, he confused “Sioux City” with “Sioux Falls,” a city in South Dakota. He said that Kim Jong Un rules a nation of 1.4 billion, appearing to confuse the North Korean leader he so admires with China’s Xi Jinping. He has on multiple occasions mixed up his past election opponents, confusing Barack Obama for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and Jeb Bush and George W. Bush.

While Biden’s age has received intense scrutiny, it’s Chump’s own aging that has not received nearly so much attention in the press or from the public. Until now! For some inexplicable, crazy reason, next to Biden, Chump doesn’t seem as old. But he is elderly – less than four years younger than Biden. If age is an issue now for Biden, it definitely needs to be asked of Chump as well.

The reason why Chump seems to get a pass on aging is related to how he focuses so much on how he looks. Here he is with heavy orange makeup, hair dye, and the elaborate nest of hair he constructs atop his head, but his embellishments have also done their job, making him look less old (even though he does look ridiculous) than he might otherwise be.

Another way that Chump has avoided the description of being old is his tendency to bluster all the time which has probably served to hide his age. “Biden’s tone of voice is soft and sometimes slow; he sounds old, in a simple aural sense.” However, if you closely examine what Chump is actually saying, most of it is unintelligible. However, it’s barked out in that familiar overbearing voice which hides the disturbing substance of what he’s actually saying. It adds to the illusion that Chump is younger than Biden.

Delgado concludes that “The idea that Trump has the stamina for the presidency but Biden does not has little evidence to back it up – and even if he did, that would be no reason to risk another round of his administration.” Well said.

Let’s hope more voices in the media will now cast aspersions on Chump’s age and his mental acuity so that voters will really see him for the enfeebled man he really is – not to dismiss the fact that he will behave like a Neo-Nazi for the 21st century if he’s ever reelected.

Tomorrow we head toward Italy, hopefully, if there is no bad weather thrown our way to delay our flight, which is at 7:50 p.m.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

I hope to be back on November 28th or November 29, depending on how I feel.

Stay safe and be well.