Senility Pays, If Everyone Else is Gaga Too

Why McConnell isn’t going anywhere.

Uninformed speculation around Washington has it that Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s seizures will soon induce his colleagues to hustle him offstage before additional embarrassment ensues.

This is unlikely for several reasons.

To begin with, McConnell’s vacant moments are, so I’m informed by insiders, a consequence of concussion consequent on his frequent tumbles which are in turn the result of his muscle-weakening post-polio syndrome. Nothing, according to these admittedly somewhat tendentious reports, is going so wrong in the McConnell cranium to prevent him keeping America safe for his corporate donors

But even if McConnell is actually shedding marbles at an accelerating clip, his job is safe, thanks to sundry companions in senility shuffling, or being wheeled, around the political stage.

HOW BIDEN SHOCKED THEM AT THE NATO SUMMIT

Naturally, in this context, Joe Biden springs immediately to mind. A European leader who observed the president at the Nato summit in Vilnius, the first time he had seen the president in a year, reported on his return home that he had been “shocked at [Biden’s] deterioration in that time.” Obviously, if McConnell’s problems only serve to highlight the faltering steps of the Leader of the Free World, it is a development wholly unwelcome to the Democrats, who for some reason relish the thought of a Biden-Trump rematch and are therefore vehemently unreceptive to any suggestion he be put out to pasture.

WHY THEY HAVE TO PRETEND FEINSTEIN IS ALIVE

While Biden, though he now routinely boards Air Force One through the baggage entrance rather than risk the long climb to the main door, will perhaps make it to November ‘24 in a vaguely sentient state, the same is clearly not the case for Dianne Feinstein, Senior Senator from California. Though she is patently flatlining mentally, the Dems are horrified at the prospect of her being ejected from her Senate seat anytime before next year’s California’s senate election. The party establishment is hell bent on installing one of their own, greasy corporate flunkey Adam Schiff, as California Senator and are pouring money into his campaign to that end. But should Feinstein leave, Governor Gavin Newson might have to honor a prior pledge to appoint a Black woman to finish out her term. In which case he would be hard put to avoid nominating progressive congresswoman Barbara Lee, thus giving her a leg-up in her campaign to be the party’s nominee in the election.

THE SOVIETS SHOWED THE WAY.

Gerontocrat regimes can last quite a while, viz the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, three leaders in varying states of deterioration who nonetheless kept the show on the road through the late ‘70s and early’80s. But look what happened then: a youthful moderniser (Gorbachev) hailed by all, who swiftly ran the show into the ground, culminating in total collapse.

Maybe Biden should start talking up the Brezhnev years as inspiring precedent.