An increasing debt to the truth.

President Joe Biden, left, walks off stage with first lady Jill Biden, right, following the presidential debate with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Former First Lady Jill Biden is on TV and out on the interview circuit promoting her book titled, “View from the East Wing: A Memoir.”

In the book and in interviews, she tells us that she was just gobsmacked by her husband’s shocking performance during his debate with Donald Trump last June. We all remember it. It was that debate at the CNN Studios in Atlanta on June 27, 2024 that brought Joe Biden’s reelection bid, along with his nearly five-decade career in politics, to an ignominious end.

In a CBS Sunday Morning interview that aired this week the former First Lady said that she was afraid that her husband – the President of the United States – was having a stroke. She went on to say, “I had never, ever seen Joe like that before or since.”

I have questions.

First, if you truly feared that your spouse was having a stroke, would you just sit there? It has been drilled into us – time is the enemy on strokes. If Jill Biden thought her husband was having a stroke, she should have taken immediate action to get him medical attention.

But we all know she didn’t think he was having a stroke. She thought it was Thursday. That is to say, she had, “…seen Joe like that before,” because we had all seen Joe like that before. We had all seen the shaking hands with invisible people, and his inability to exit a stage, and the garbled sentences, and the vacant stare and the inability to complete a thought.

That sets up my second question. Will the country ever get to a tipping point on being lied to? The HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” has a great line that I have appropriated. A Soviet nuclear scientist says at a state inquiry on the disaster:

Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Eventually, that debt comes due.”

When will that happen in our politics? Politicians have always “gilded the lily.” But today’s politicians – particularly Democrats protected by the media – lie with shocking boldness.

Will that rapidly increasing ‘debt to the truth’ ever reach critical mass after which a political tsunami ensues, washing the entire scurrilous lot of lying politicians and their lying apologists out of our lives? And will the legacy media ever stop enabling the lying and start realizing that their very continued existence depends on finding a way to regain the trust of the American heartland?

There’s no way that Jill Biden didn’t know that the president was a cognitive mess. Any of us who have ever had a relative sink into the abyss of dementia – and most of us have – knew exactly what we were seeing.

We could see that the President of the United States was mentally unfit.

But all that time the administration, the media and the lefty pundit class were in unison. ‘Sharp as a tack,” they said. ‘Outrunning us all.’

They were all lying then. Jill Biden is lying now.

And the debt to the truth remains unpaid – while interest accrues.