Old Joe Biden is 80 now, and even after the Democrats’ triumphant (albeit highly suspicious) showing in the midterms, some on the Left still believe that the foggy-minded old liar is well past his sell-by date. The putative president himself has not made any official announcement that he is running again, but last week, at a state dinner with the callow, wet-behind-the-ears 44-year-old French President Emmanuel Macron, Biden joined in a toast to a 2024 run. Nevertheless, the 2024 campaign is still a long way off, and if the alleged president is ultimately judged to be too old to continue pretending to be our nation’s chief executive, another prominent Democrat is strongly considering stepping in. Yes, I’m talking about Bernie Sanders.
Of course, Bernie is actually older than Joe, although the rumors that he was Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs’ campaign manager in the 1920 presidential election are false. Sanders will be 83 when Election Month 2024 rolls around, but he has one clear advantage over Biden right away: while Joe gives us more or less daily indications of his advancing dementia, Sanders appears to be of completely sound mind. Imagine that! A Democrat candidate of sound mind! But of course, the fact that Sanders is apparently still all there upstairs is no indication that the thoughts he still has are worth anything.
Sanders adviser Faiz Shakir told CBS News that Bernie was seriously considering throwing his vintage Bogart-era fedora into the ring. “I assume that he would give it a hard look,” Shakir said, assuming that Sanders still has good enough eyesight to accomplish such a feat. “I don’t want to make the judgment for him. Obviously, it would be his choice to make. But I assume that he would want to reevaluate it.”
Shakir did acknowledge that the age issue is as much of a factor for Sanders as it is for Biden. He said that the superannuated Commie curmudgeon is “very aware that he’s older now and he’d have to make a real judgment about his own vigor and his stamina and his desire and hunger and passion to do this a third time. But if it were an open field? Yeah, I’m confident he would take another look at it and say, ‘Do I want to do this or not?'”
Shakir also added that Bernie would defer to his fellow, if unacknowledged, socialist Biden if Joe decided he wanted to keep on being the Chief Figurehead into his late eighties: “Personally, I take President Biden at his word and our orbit takes him at his word that he’s taking it seriously and presume that he is leaning toward yes” regarding running, if that term can justifiably be used of men as old as Biden and Sanders, in 2024.
Nothing has changed in this since April, when Shakir acknowledged that “in the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Sanders has not ruled out another run for president.” Sanders spokesman Mike Casca even claimed that “Senator Sanders is the most popular officeholder in the country.”
Related: Progressive Group Announces Plan to Oppose Biden Renomination in 2024
If he really is the most popular officeholder in the country, that’s a sad commentary on the state of public awareness today, but it could well be true, although Ron DeSantis would give Ol’ Bern a run for his money. In any case, if Bernie Sanders succeeds Old Joe Biden as president, we’ll be in real trouble. You think things are bad now? Just wait. After all, back in 1988, Sanders and his new bride honeymooned in the Workers’ Paradise itself, the Soviet Union. Imagine wanting to visit a totalitarian state that imprisoned and enslaved its own people, and doing so because you actually admired their political system. Nor has Bernie changed his political views one iota since then. If he ever became president, our slide toward socialism would turn into a gallop, and the mess he made would likely be irreparable, which is not to say that the mess Biden is making is going to be easy to clean up by any means.
Eventually, time is going to catch up to all of these socialist gerontocrats, but power is just too alluring and too lucrative in America today for them ever to retire. Bernie is already a multimillionaire with three luxurious homes. His socialism has served him well. And even if he does ultimately opt to sit out the 2024 election, we won’t be out of the woods by any means: his spiritual children, AOC and the rest, are set to continue to plague the American people for decades to come.
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