A note about the first panel: this of course refers to the famous moment in the Reagan/Mondale debates, when Reagan sought to dispel doubts about his age and alertness (after a poor showing in the first debate) with, well, a clever one-liner some speechwriter had come up with. And it worked! Everyone agreed the clever one-liner certainly put those doubts to rest. It’s particularly terrifying, given what we now know — the man was a few short years away from being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and more to the point, his own son has speculated that he might have been in the early stages of the disease at that moment, and into his second term as President of the United States. I thought a long time about that panel, and thanks to Sparky’s List had the opportunity to discuss it with a reader whose parent has Alzheimer’s. At any rate, it’s a comment on a specific and disturbing moment in American politics; it’s not meant as a joke at the expense of anyone suffering from that disease, and should not be taken as such.
BY TOM TOMORROW