Some swell thoughts and observations as the process of selecting the leader of the free world careens through the primary election stage:
– The fresh young face, the guy full of pep and get-up-and-go, this election year is now President Donald J. Trump, at a callow 73 years old.
Our go-go president, whipping up big crowds at the drop of a Make America Great Again hat, has now dislodged Mayor Pete Buttigieg as the only viable youngster in the race, no doubt attracting the support of woke young people everywhere.
“We don’t want some old guy,” young people are no doubt saying. “We want the guy who’s only 73!”
This comes as Joe Biden, who is 77, has established himself as the Comeback Septuagenarian, launching into angry, finger-pointing screeds at those who dare doubt his inevitability, like an old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn. Let him talk long enough, and he’ll get to the word salad stage, sputtering random, disconnected words, and it becomes a do-it-yourself project figuring out what the ding-dong heck Joe is trying to say this time.
(Don’t believe me? Here’s what Biden said in Texas: “We hold these truths to be self evident. All men and women created by, you know, you know, the thing.” If Joe is elected, all we can do is pray and put our fate in the hands of “you know, you know, The Thing.”)
And then, at 78, we have Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, who gesticulates wildly like Elizabeth Warren, shooting out his arms when giving a speech, then wiggling his hands like he’s writing a big check in the air. (We don’t have to make payment on Bernie’s big air checks, at least for now.)
Bernie keeps pointing out what’s right about Cuba and Fidel, making folks out here in Flyover Country ask, “What’s THAT all about?”
Biden and Sanders would be octogenarians by the time they finished the term of office they now seek. Which makes a late-term sexagenarian (not as sexy as it sounds) like me wonder if they haven’t pondered the joys of a senior-discount morning coffee group at McDonalds, with a bunch of retired guys their own age. Why deprive yourself of retirement into your 80s? Who needs the stress of being leader of the free world?
Haven’t they ever walked into a room and forgotten what they came there to get? Of course, if you’re president, the guy with the nuclear launch codes follows you around, and he could remind you what you came there to get. So, there’s that. And you have plenty of doctors and nurses around, in case a rotator cuff or knee goes bad on you.
I’m going with young and energetic Donald Trump. I don’t want to hear about the virtues of Cuba from Bernie, or seek guidance from “The Thing” to figure out what Joe Biden is saying this time.
I look at this as a youth movement.
– Farmers everywhere in our great country, who grow the food on our tables, are no doubt having a good laugh now that Michael “Call me Mike” Bloomberg dropped out of the presidential race after spending $500 million to secure a grand total of four delegate votes (from American Samoa).
You’ll recall that Bloomberg told a gathering a few years back that it doesn’t take much “gray matter” to be a farmer. All you do is make a hole, put a seed in it, cover it up, water it, and you get corn.
Well, I spent some years in the fabulously fertile farm country of Central Illinois – home of the best soil on planet Earth – and I could have told Michael/Mike that he was seriously underestimating the gray matter of farmers. They have to be mechanics, biologists, chemists, truck drivers, money managers, economists, savvy gamblers, and more, to succeed in a brutal business in which a late spring, bugs, lack of rain, too much rain, low prices, or a long list of other factors can spell disaster.
Michael/Mike thinks he’s smarter than a farmer. But I know of no farmer who ever spent $500 million and only managed to get four plants to sprout.
Dave Simpson can be contacted at davesimpson145@hotmail.com
