Senility trumps socialism? Now that’s a strange, strange land

THE fixers in the US Democratic Party made a call. Indeed, it looks like they made a number of calls — to Pete Buttigieg, to Amy Klobuchar and to Beto O’Rourke — but the main call was this: in their backing of Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders, they were going for cognitive decline over communism?

I’m not being ageist here — Bernie is actually older than Biden — but he is not in “second childhood” as Biden clearly is, much though the respectable media insists on ignoring it.

I watched CNN after Biden turned it around massively on Super Tuesday, and I didn’t hear anything much stronger than the suggestion that Biden is a “flawed” candidate.

I guess they were just euphoric, due to the rarity of the phenomenon they had just witnessed. Those watery liberals had pulled a political stroke of epic proportions, they had displayed a ruthlessness of the kind that has been the sole domain of the far right for some time.

In taking out most of the runners in the race, and herding them together behind poor old Joe, they had done something akin to the black-hearted Tories shafting Theresa May when she was UK prime minister, while Labour persisted with the ludicrous Jeremy Corbyn — they had decided that winning the arguments may be uplifting in itself, but winning elections is better.

And in this strange time, in that strange, strange land, the Democratic fixers must have figured it like this: millions want to vote Trump out, and the one thing that will stop them doing that — the only thing — is the word “socialist”.

Words like “senility”, the people will take.

Senility beats socialism — that is the call, and a truly inspirational one it is too.