Lemme tell y'all something about "age"...

[Scruffy1]

62. I'm nearly as old as Joe.

Physically I'm getting a little creaky but can still ride my bike and spent a good part of the last few years renovating a house here in El Paso including all the plumbing under the slab. Sometimes I have to think a bit to recall something but 'm searching through a memory bank of 75 years. I still read about 2 or 3 non fiction books a week. Can't play guitar much anymore but that's carpal tunnel not my mind. I'm still the guy I always was.
As for the press, throughout history they have always been "herders" Every writer trying to best the rest in hyperbole. It was true in the nineteenth and 20th centuries in the USA. Look how they joined together to push the Mexican American War, the Spanish American War and most recently the War on a Feeling (Afghanistan and Iraq). The scary part about the last one it got the shrub reelected because he did something. Even the cynical ones who thought it was OK. If you tell them that the supply of oil is so fragmented that US oil production has no correlation with oil price they look at you like your crazy. Rightly or wrongly Presidents always get the blame for economic conditions like inflation. They just have to roll with it. Nobody in El Chuco gives a damn what the national press says. El Diario from Juarez is the most read paper here. I expect Joe to carry the election here by about 80% and that includes Fort Bliss.