The influential business magazine Forbes posted an article titled “Does Joe Biden Have Dementia? Does It Matter?” by senior contributor Elizabeth Bauer. It was a provocative piece that made the not-so-startling suggestion that Joe Biden needs to have a cognitive assessment done

But that suggestion was apparently too much for the staid financial publication and they pulled it after a few hours.

What’s so controversial? Bauer summarizes the evidence and then makes the point that Trump took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment screening test in 2018 and aced it. So why not Biden?

And — folks, this is where I’ll take off the journalist hat for just a moment: I have watched someone take this test. To a cognitively unimpaired person, the questions seem trivial. But the individual that I watched take this screening could not answer questions that to an unimpaired person would seem obvious. These are not “trick questions”; it’s not an IQ test nor is it designed to ferret out nuances. But if a person really does have impairment, the test really will identify it. Which means that, yes, if Biden’s gaffes and his outbursts are just “Biden being Biden,” then there should be an easy enough answer: Biden could take the screening test just as easily as Trump did, and just as easily pass it, and then everyone can just shut up about the issue — unless, that is, the claims of Republicans that he has been pushed and manipulated into this election against his own best interest, and he’d be better off having stayed in retirement, are actually well-founded.

The article quoted is from a cached version. Bauer isn’t talking and Forbes refuses to comment.

But the question of why any hint that Biden isn’t “quite right in the head” is taboo in major media persists. In Forbes’s case, there are a couple of innocent explanations, notably that Bauer crossed the line from journalist to opinion writing — something she admits upfront. The simple question there would be why the editor allowed it to be posted in the first place? If Forbes has a policy against opinion pieces not labeled as such, why did it appear?

The second possibility is that Forbes has a policy against controversial subjects being given space, especially issues impacting a presidential race and the decision to deep-six the piece came from the very top. If so, the least they could have done is post an editor’s note of some kind offering the reader an explanation.

But is this issue really that controversial? Even rabid left-wingers are beginning to talk about it.

Ted Rall, a conservative-bashing, Trump-hating liberal made the painful observation about Biden that many of us who have seen an aging loved one decline due to Alzheimer’s or dementia know well.

I spent the last few years watching my mother’s decline due to dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. She had been brilliant…. No one who has been close to someone deteriorating from that disease could fail to see the same signs in Joe Biden.

And the far-left radical Jacobian pulls no punches in making the point that Biden is incompetent.

Biden’s most significant public appearance since last week, however, took the form of a sit-down with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell — his first and only substantive interview in more than a week. Touching, among other things, on health care, the Iraq War, and the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Biden’s strange and rambling appearance can only be called an alarming harbinger of what lies ahead, should he ultimately become the Democratic nominee.

With some Democrats actually suggesting that primaries and debates be canceled to limit Biden’s public exposure, it’s safe to say that most Democrats know what’s ailing Biden.

That they don’t seem to care if the man they want to be president is mentally competent to serve is chilling.