"Should Elderly Politicians Make Like the Pope and Quit?"

Asks David Weigel.

Pope Benedict is three years younger than Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who's puttering around condemning the very idea of Cory Booker running against him....

[C]overage of Lautenberg... high-fives him for his vigor. A recent Philadelphia Inquirer story pointed out that the senator had returned from "a cold that became the flu" and was "wielding a cane -- which he insisted he didn't really need," but otherwise focused on his "feistiness."

Weigel mixes 2 topics: the individual's decision to continue despite age and infirmity and the way the media (and the rest of us) "play along." Nothing about what the Pope is doing changes the playing along part of it. We've come to believe that age discrimination is wrong, and we've allowed that to mean too much.

Age discrimination isn't like race discrimination! Age takes a toll on people and it matters and affects their performance. A specific individual may be doing relatively well for his age, and we ought to see him as an individual, but age matters. Statutory law prohibiting age discrimination tells us not to take age into account in some situations, but that doesn't include electoral politics. Feel free to boldly assail Lautenberg for clinging to his Senate seat. (And feel free to criticize judges who seem to be hanging on too long, especially Supreme Court Justices.)

Is the Pope any help here? He waited until he was 85 to step down. And he began the onerous work when he was nearly 80. The previous Pope — immensely admired — made a point of sticking with the job through a long, painful decline. I think both of these Popes encourage people to keep going and not to cede the work to the less old.

"Musician suing for age bias says his 88-year-old judge is too old to preside..."

Violinist Martin Stoner knows "it sounds kind of like hypocrisy," but Judge Robert Patterson is, he says, "slow-witted and unable to function." The federal judge is 88. Stoner, who is 60, is suing the Young Concert Artist for excluding him from a their competition which is for... young concert artists (apparently capped at age 20).

Patterson refused to comment, but his defenders claim he's sharp as a tack. When another judge fell ill two years ago, Patterson stepped in midtrial, ripped through a 2,282-page legal transcript in a single weekend and handled the case with aplomb, Manhattan Federal Court Chief Judge Loretta Preska told the New York Law Journal.

Stoner — are you surprised to hear? — is representing himself in this lawsuit.

Lower the drinking age to 18?

The Amethyst Initiative.

"This is a law that is routinely evaded," said John McCardell, the former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who founded the Amethyst Initiative. "It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory."...

McCardell said that binge drinking occurs primarily because students must hide their behavior.

In its statement (currently signed by 114 college heads), Amethyst says, "Twenty-one is not working" and "A culture of dangerous, clandestine 'binge-drinking' - often conducted off-campus - has developed.

"Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students. …

"By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law."

The initiative wisely invites debate about whether the drinking age should be lowered instead of calling outright for legislative change. Let's be scientific about this. It's one thing to say alcohol abuse and drunk driving are terrible, but it's another thing to figure out the causal connection to the legal drinking age. There's nothing wrong with responsible, moderate drinking. What's the best way to encourage young people who are inclined to drink to do it the right way? I doubt that prohibition is best, and I'm enough of a libertarian to want to resolve doubts in favor of freedom. But sure, let's debate. I'd like to see the evidence analyzed.

Andrew Sullivan's contest: Make videos about McCain's old age.

Here's the challenge:

It seems to me a legitimate and not too rude a subject to bring up in the campaign.S here's an opening challege: craft an ad that legitimately and fairly raises the issue of whether he is too old to lead; and one less high-minded one that strings clips of gaffes, stumbles, mental blocks in public, and mistakes to make the guy seem like Abraham Simpson on a bad day. put "YouTube ad contest" in the contents line.

Hey, is it legitimate and fair to point to the typos as evidence of Sullivan's competence?

You know, I'm concerned about McCain's age, but I'm also concerned about ageism, and it's a terrible and offensive idea to promote prejudice against the old by connecting the candidate to stereotypes about the old.

Imagine if a blogger who supported McCain as much as Sullivan supports Obama invited readers to edit together video clips that would make Obama look like a racist stereotype of a black person.

And remember: Old people are a huge demographic group, known for — among other things — voting.

There is a very appropriate way to judge whether an individual old person or black person or female person or gay person or disabled person is competent to serve as President: Look at the individual.

Should the government decide that you've lived long enough?

William Saletan says yes.

ADDED: I thought we'd committed to the belief that age discrimination is wrong. How could we backtrack on that?

Young people want to believe they will live to be very old, so even they would balk at telling old people they can't have the heart surgery they need.

Imagine the human interest stories there would be about beloved great grandparents who only need a simple pacemaker but whom the government has slated to die.

Saletan's idea is emotionally and politically obtuse.

TRex, unethical, but at least ashamed (or scared).

On Friday night, TRex put up a post at the high-traffic blog Firedoglake exhorting his readers: "Please feel free to post your comments on this post under the name 'Ann Althouse'. I've done it before. It's totally fun." Some time thereafter, he took the post down, but I have the text of it because I've set up a Google alert to keep track of the use and abuse of my name, so I received the text in my email.

I've known for a long time that unscrupulous webwriters appropriate my name, and I have a longstanding dispute with the blog Sadly, No for refusing to take down comments that appropriate my name. I have emailed them politely and seriously making the request, but they have refused repeatedly.

Now, I have TRex's confession that he is one of my impersonators. I don't know that he is an impersonator on Sadly, No, but the post he took down mentioned Sadly, No.

How shameful and embarrassing! At least he had the wits to think better of it and try to hide it. Or maybe he's just afraid of getting into trouble for impersonating me.

What an unscrupulous, pusillanimous little twerp!

IN THE COMMENT: Someone from Sadly, No shows up and makes some incredibly lame excuses for that blog's descent into outright sexist hate speech. I do what I can to shame them. How do men who imagine themselves to be liberal get the idea that they can treat a woman like this and not shoot their reputation to hell?

"How come 'national service' proponents never talk about drafting the old?"

Great question, by Ilya Somin.

[T]he moral case for conscripting the elderly for civilian service is arguably stronger than that for drafting the young. Many elderly people are healthy enough to perform nonstrenuous forms of "national service." Unlike the young, the elderly usually won't have to postpone careers, marriage and educational opportunities to fulfill their forced-labor obligations. Moreover, the elderly, to a far greater extent than the young, are beneficiaries of massive government redistributive programs, such as Social Security and Medicare--programs that transfer enormous amounts of wealth from other age groups to themselves. Nonelderly poor people who receive welfare benefits are required to work (or at least be looking for work) under the 1996 welfare reform law; it stands to reason that the elderly (most of whom are far from poor) can be required to work for the vastly larger government benefits that they receive.

Great issue! Somin thinks politicians focus on the young is that they don't vote. Old people do, and they'll blow a gasket if anyone tries to push them around. (And, lest you rile them, you'd better pay for all the drugs they see fit to take.)

Another thing is that young people are assumed to need training to fit into an orderly and good society. They tend to be in a state of flux, footloose, and full of dangerous passions. We old people are scared -- and jealous. So even as we're devising schemes to make our lives a bed of ease, we're thinking up new ways to control you. How lovely it is when you serve us.