When last we met in this space, the subject of the aging Joe Biden’s mental acuity came up. I essentially contended that he wasn’t as far gone as many conservatives would have it. But now I’m not so sure. Since he turned withdrawal from Afghanistan into a Munich 1938 moment, he’s been on a permanent downhill slide. The only thing that might stop it is if the avalanche catching up to him buries him in snow. He’s already paid a mental price, and it’s one that someone in his demographic doesn’t recover from. It manifests itself in increasingly erratic behavior.

First came resignation, as when in a short session with the White House press corps he placed his head atop his folded hands. A guilty house pet is known to do that, pleading for some TLC and other reassurance. He barely could summon the energy to speak, and when he did, the words registered in a hush.

The next day, in a joint appearance with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, he displayed the same mental and physical fatigue in his demeanor and remarks. When it was Bennett’s turn to speak, Biden sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and soon folded his hands, on his lap this time, and one had to assume he was dozing off. (Because no snoring was detected, it’s unlikely he was ever fully asleep.)

Then came August 31, and a very different-sounding Biden (shouldn’t he be regularly drug tested?), as he defiantly marked the official end of America’s presence in what he’s turned into Talibanland. Just following the military’s recommendations, he said. He passed the blame in many ways. And he was just warming up. By the following week, he was attacking the American people, especially those who did not agree with him on his panic-driven approach to COVID-19. “Unlike anything I’d ever heard from an American president,” the kindly Mike Pence said. But as a friend reminded me, isn’t that the way it is with many a victim of dementia, shifting from sad passivity to snarling aggression?

Well, at least we know who could play Joe Biden in Joe Biden: The Movie. The other day I caught a showing on Starz of The Father, with the great Anthony Hopkins in the title role. It won him an Oscar last year, for capturing the sadness and meanness of an oldster unable to cope with, let alone understand and accept, his now irreversible mental decline. It’s a horrible sentence to be condemned to in one’s final stage of life.

Under Biden there are worse fates, and to these he still subscribes of his own volition, it would seem, as when attacking the Texas abortion law as “almost un-American” and siccing the Justice Department on the state. Perhaps in such moments he forgets that he’s a Catholic, a rosary-carrying Catholic at that, as he likes to boast, which leaves many puzzled as to why he would be such an ardent opponent of life in its first stages. At this point, that’s too complicated a question to throw his way.

What we do know is that Democrats have come a long way on abortion. Where not that long ago they wanted it to be “safe, legal, and rare,” today they’re insistent that it be anything but rare and enjoy the status of a holy sacrament. It’s a strange way to find meaning in life, assuming there’s any meaning left to it. And under the leadership of Joe Biden, how can there be?