OUT: 'Weekend at Bernie's' … IN: 'The Death of Stalin'

"The Death of Stalin" is one of the funniest black comedies of the last decade, maybe of all time — but what if turned out not just to be history but prophecy, too?

Set in the days just before and after the debilitating stroke that would quickly kill Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the movie revels in the antics of his would-be successors who don't know how to live in a world without him. But they sure do want to rule it.

Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer would all fit right in.

I can't praise the movie highly enough or count how many times I've watched it. But it's impossible to so much as mention "The Death of Stalin" without praising the comic performances of Steve Buscemi (as Khrushchev), Simon Russell Beale (Beria), Jason Isaacs (Zhukov), Michael Palin (Molotov), and most especially Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov — all vanity, ambition, and cluelessness.

Last night, the world learned that in 2024, America might be closer to the USSR in 1953 than we should be comfortable admitting, as a new leak revealed that Presidentish Joe Biden might potentially have something much more serious than COVID.

Early Monday, Jordan Schachtel reported additional information about this Charlie Kirk report that it wasn't COVID, which PJ Media has not independently confirmed.

According to this source, US Secret Service informed LV Metro that there was an emergency situation involving Joe Biden and to close necessary streets so that POTUS could be transported immediately to University Medical, which they began to do in earnest. Then, mysteriously, there was a stand down order and the USSS informed local Vegas PD that they were going to "medivac" POTUS to Johns Hopkins.

So what was it? I'll get to that in a moment.

I was only joking on Sunday when I posted this tweet that went kinda viral:

I was not joking on Monday when I followed that up with, "Yesterday's tweet was a joke. But if we haven't seen Biden by Tuesday night, I'm going to think that the guy who wrote his dropping-out note is still trying to get the wording just right on the medical examiner's report."

We still haven't seen Biden. We heard him, briefly, when he phoned into ~~his~~ Kamala Harris's campaign headquarters Monday evening, sounding perhaps a bit confused and certainly slurry.

Now, there are claims that when we saw Biden board Air Force One outside of Las Vegas on Wednesday of last week, barely able to walk, he had just experienced stroke-like symptoms. (Again, PJ Media has not independently confirmed this.) Could it have been a transient ischemic attack (TIA)?

"Often called a ministroke," according to the Mayo Clinic, "a TIA can serve as both a warning of a future stroke and a chance to prevent it."

"About 1 in 3 people who has a TIA will eventually have a stroke, with about half occurring within a year after the TIA."

While a TIA usually only lasts for a few minutes — that's the transient part — and the symptoms rarely last more than 24 hours, a couple of those symptoms ought to sound familiar to PJ Media readers who have followed Biden's health troubles:

Weakness, numbness or paralysis in the face, arm or leg, typically on one side of the body.
Slurred speech or trouble understanding others.
Blindness in one or both eyes or double vision.
Dizziness or loss of balance or coordination.

I'm looking at the second and fourth items and wondering, "How many TIAs has he had, anyway? And how cynically Soviet were Democrats' maneuvers to replace him?"

Welcome to "The Death of Stalin" director Armando Iannucci's world. We just live in it.