Bernie Is An Agent Of Change. For Those Too Brittle To Handle Change, There's Status Quo Joe

Those who saddled the Democratic Party with Hillary simply brought us Trump. Watch the flaming assholes in this great video above, spewing shit from their rancid pie-holes about their hatred for Bernie (and, of course, even if unsaid, for the working class)-- identity politics dip-shits, NeverTrump Republicans, rich status quo class enemies... Why should anyone listen to them? Oh, yeah... corporate media washes our brains with them 24-7.

Thursday, Business Insider's Joseph Zeballos-Roig penned a quickie on 2020's Hillary stand-in, Status Quo Joe. He perceives a shift in the foolish trend to repeat 2016 by nominating Biden, exactly what Trump is working for. Business Insider polls since December have been showing Biden's "electability" numbers increasingly heading south. He wrote that though the dynamics are far from being set in stone by centering his appeal as being the candidate most able to defeat Trump and restoring a sense of normalcy Biden has tied himself to electability numbers. If they continue trending downward, Biden's got nothing. He isn't running on anything but and anti-Trump "return to normalcy." Democratic primary voters should expect more from their nominee.

He's so tied in knots over decades of compromise and conflict that he can't even defend his corrupt family from Trump's attacks without exposing that they're a pack of vile lobbyists who have been trading on his name for decades. Is, "yes, they stink but not as badly as Trump's family," a good defense?





Policy, Biden is running on... "I'm not Bernie and nothing will fundamentally change if I'm elected." Even though his fundraising stumbled-- grassroots voters aren't sending him money-- the wealthy are still flocking to him as a safe haven from... socialism!!

Yesterday at Politico, Michael Kruse gently brought up the issue no one is supposed to talk about-- like Trump, Biden is increasingly less coherent and showing more and more signs of senility. Kruse, like other reporters grappling with how to write about it without mentioning dementia or senility or Biden's and Trump's face-lifts and false teeth and dye-jobs, write, unfairly, about age. "His age is the subtext, and increasingly the text, too, of not only his bid but the Democratic Party’s primary as a whole," wrote Kruse. "Even as fading poll numbers loosen his status as the favorite and the mounting impeachment fervor over Ukraine threatens to exact a collateral toll, Biden’s age remains an overarching issue.

It’s an issue because of the simple math: Only three presidents have served in their 70s-- Trump, Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower-- and no president ever has finished a term at the age Biden would begin his. It’s an issue because of things Biden has said and done-- suggesting, for instance, he thought he was in Vermont when he actually was in New Hampshire, dropping that wince-worthy phrase that his “ time is up” in the first debate and oddly invoking a record player in the last debate. His lifelong habit of flubs, gaffes and often garbled speaking now can seem less like “Joe being Joe” and more like an ominous indicator of a creeping loss of mental acuity.

It’s an issue because Biden himself has tried in sometimes awkward ways to keep it from being one, inviting a heckler to run with him during a parade and challenging a reporter to a wrestling match. And it’s an issue because opponents, from Trump (“Sleepy Joe”) to those in his own party trying to knock him off, have made it an issue-- from Eric Swalwell saying it was time to “pass the torch” to Tim Ryan saying he’s “declining” to Julian Castro ( dubiously) accusing him of “forgetting” things to Cory Booker dishing out readymade Republican attack ad fodder by bluntly declaring on CNN that “there’s a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling” and “there are definitely moments where you listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder.” Even the famously gracious Jimmy Carter, who just turned 95, delivered a candid if unhelpful assessment last month when he said he didn’t believe he could have handled “the duties that I experienced when I was president” if he had been 80.

This isn’t just about Biden’s age-- it’s about ours, and the tension between a vast cohort of Baby Boomers who have trained themselves to believe they’re only as old as they feel and a couple of impatient generations lined up behind them, wondering when they’re going to get a chance to take over. And yet it’s about far more than simply a number next to a name. Our sense of who is old in this primary has become entwined with our appetite for bold and new ideas. All three of the top-polling Democrats, after all, are in their 70s, but it’s Biden, the centrist who advocates for a return to a pre-Trump time, who is getting dinged the most for his advanced age-- not Elizabeth Warren, who wants “ big, structural change” and turned 70 in June. Up until this week when he had to have two heart stents implanted, neither was Bernie Sanders, who continues to call for his “ revolution” and is in fact the oldest of the lot.

But there is an entire cohort of Biden supporters for whom his age-- actual and perceived-- is the very thing that recommends him. After the tumult of the Trump years, these voters crave the experience and order and stability Biden promises. For them, Biden is the beneficiary of shifting social and cultural notions that make it harder to pinpoint what it actually means to be old. Federal law protects workers from age discrimination starting at 40. People can join AARP at 50. They’re usually eligible for Medicare at 65 and Social Security at 66. Scientifically, though, a half-dozen aging experts I talked to for this story told me, there’s such vast variability in how people age that it’s ill-advised and even irresponsible to try to draw conclusions about an individual based on a date of birth. “There are people at 80 who perform better than 20-year-olds,” said Christopher Van Dyck of Yale University, “even on these cognitive speed, memory-type tasks.” Furthermore, beyond decades of a healthy diet and sufficient exercise, a significant, intangible, practically mysterious part of the nature of anybody’s aging, said Tracy Chippendale of New York University, is just … luck. Genes. Joe Biden’s father died at 86. His mother died at 92. People, said Denise Park of the University of Texas at Dallas, have to make a determination “based on the behavior that they observe.”

That’s essentially what Biden’s repeatedly asked voters to do.

“Watch me,” he said in June. “Just watch me.”

...We started freaking out about the age of our presidents because of something that happened exactly 100 years ago this week.

On October 2, 1919, Woodrow Wilson collapsed in a bathroom at the White House, felled by a stroke that paralyzed his left side and rendered him incapacitated for the last nearly year and a half of his term. He was, the White House head usher would recall, “helpless.” Wilson, 63 when he was stricken, didn’t hold a cabinet meeting for more than seven months. His aides and his wife banded to do the work of the administration while attempting, too, to obscure the extent of his infirmity. But senators and staff who visited him saw “ an emaciated old man” and “ a very old man” who “acted like one.” It was, in the assessment of one of Wilson’s biographers, “the worst crisis of presidential disability in American history.”

...Age matters. Because health matters. “Eventually, something like what happened to Woodrow Wilson is going to happen to us again,” Nixon biographer John Aloysius Farrell said in an interview. “I’ve seen almost everything-- an assassination, two impeachments-- in all my years as a watcher of politics. But I’ve never seen a president die of natural causes in office-- and, you know, we’re due.”