‘Planet Earth wants Joe Biden to give up – and here is how’
There’s nothing worse than walking into a room, and forgetting what you were there for.
But when it’s a TV studio in a US presidential debate and the guy opposite is a convicted felon, it’s not just humiliating – it’s unforgivable.
Joe Biden is in the running to be leader of the free world against a malignant bag of racist pus, and is on course to lose not only his presidency but America’s supremacy as a global democratic superpower.
Every person on Planet Earth will be the worse for a second Donald Trump presidency, not least because this time he won’t leave office without a war, and won’t care if it’s with his own people, or China, or both.
In 1979, when Biden and Trump were merely middle-aged, British television had a sitcom called Only When I Laugh. Three patients on a hospital ward made a case of appendicitis last four years, without ever changing their pyjamas. These early bed-blockers were of different social classes and political views, with constant bickering. The presidential debate was like that, only without the social perspicacity or canned laughter.
Trump is as incapable of constructing a coherent sentence as he is of building anything that doesn’t look like a gold-plated Freudian nightmare. Watching Biden try to hold a thought was like waiting for a greased-up museum curator to stop juggling Ming vases. Head in hands, peering through fingertips, dear GOD not enough glue in the world.
You’ve got a fascist Oompa Loompa who had to be jemmied out of the Oval Office last time he was allowed in it, having a slap-fight with an extra from Awakenings. Whoever wins, we all lose: the bad guys emboldened, legislature paralysed, and voters so disenchanted they’ll give up democracy as a bad job.
Luckily there is a narrow path out of this hellscape and back to sanity, if only we can get Biden to totter along it.
(
Getty Images)
There are 4,000 delegates in the Democratic Party with the right to nominate a presidential candidate. Biden currently has 3,900 of them in his pocket, now where did I put them, no they’re not in here, um, maybe in my other jacket. And roughly 3,900 of them are currently wondering if injecting your boy with anabolic steroids would invalidate the ballot, and why not give that a shot.
Usually the Democratic National Convention, held a few short weeks from now, rubber-stamps their choice. This year, for silly reasons to do with Ohio, they’re going to do it a bit earlier, and online, in a move welcomed by North Korea, China, and Vladimir Putin, who will ensure he gets 374% of all available votes cast.
It is convention that those delegates stick with their first choice, unless that person chooses to quit. But it’s also convention that they obey what the voters from their home states want, and if there’s anyone left in America who thinks Biden could undertake a quick game of Ludo without a nap they’re probably strapped to a bed and debating only with themselves.
If the temperature of the voters changes, the party rules allow for delegates to “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them”. They could – theoretically – rely on polling or home state pressure to justify picking someone else.
(
Getty Images)
Doing so would mean instant and massive party divisions. Biden would try to cling on, loyalists would split the votes, and the contenders for the crown – none of whom is a clear and obvious replacement – would fight like cats in a sack, meaning whoever survived would be buffeted like Trump’s combover caught in the jets of Air Force One.
The best and most obvious solution is for Biden to face reality, accept he can’t get through and doesn’t deserve to suffer five more minutes of this never mind five years, and step aside, so that bunfight can happen and the party unify behind a clear winner who can eat without a bib.
Trump would be facing someone decades younger, ambitious, and yet to be proven a wrong’un in repeated courts of law. His own lack of lucidity would make him look like the doddering old gonk that he is, and America could do what it did in 1960 when John F Kennedy battled it out at the convention with Lyndon B Johnson, and get behind someone who at least looked likely to survive the winter.
It rests with Biden, who came off stage last night and said “let’s keep going!”, like Thelma and Louise as they fly over the cliff edge. Anyone who has a senior male in their circle knows that persuading them to give up the car keys is like defusing a bomb being held by a cross old grizzly who wants to pretend he’s still sexy. It’s a delicate thing, the male ego, and gets even more fragile with age, and he only reacts badly if you shout “PLEASE STOP, GRANDAD”.
But there is one person every 81-year-old man listens to: his nurse. Which is why it’s time for Jill Biden to stop saying “wow, Joe, you answered every question!” like a classroom assistant dealing with a 4-year-old, and gently point out the armchair that’s waiting.
Do it for the sake of the free world. DO IT FOR US, JILL.
