“I know liberals say, ‘Don’t say Joe Biden is old,'” comedian Jon Stewart quipped to a Los Angeles crowd during a stand-up performance streamed on Netflix this weekend. “I know you don’t want to say it because Trump is so scary, but he’s so f***ing old … when you watch him on television, you’re nervous, aren’t ya?”
“I’m not saying that Biden can’t contribute to society, he just shouldn’t be president.”
For those keeping count at home, Stewart’s one joke — if you want to call it that but it really wasn’t a joke — contained two nods to the tender sensibilities of Los Angelenos. The first was “Trump is so scary,” because heaven forbid that anyone say anything negative about Biden without also including an Orange Man Worse reference. As to what Biden might still have to contribute to society, I have no idea what that might be aside from graft, dirty diapers (I’ll get to that in a moment), and the inevitable presidential memoir that Biden won’t write and that no one will read.
Stewart could have delivered some genuinely funny material, but alas, this is not 1998.
Remember when comedians weren’t afraid to challenge people’s comfortable notions? Good times, good times.
I wasn’t kidding about the dirty diapers, either.
In one word, kindly describe President Joe Biden. pic.twitter.com/OqVUHuwgyo
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) May 6, 2024
By now I’m sure you’ve seen this clip from Sunday, in which Biden adopts a pose instantly familiar to the parents of a toddler. There’s a diaper in need of changing, and it looks like it’s going to be a nasty one. I’ve never entertained a thought like this one in my 20-plus years of blogging, but now I wonder if the Marine One detail has a protocol in place for dealing with presidential oopsies.
But back to Stewart, whose performance leaves him wide open to a devastating question: where the hell were you in 2020 with the age references?
I’m no math whiz — that’s how I ended up a writer instead of an engineer — but simple counting is not beyond my skills. Still, I can barely muster the world’s weakest “I told you so” for Stewart about Biden’s age because that’s how the linear nature of time works.
Yes, I might not be much good at math but I do like to include a little science in each and every column.
If Biden wins reelection and goes on to survive his second term, he’ll be 87 when it ends. We didn’t even need prophets to foretell us — it’s on the calendar. That’s a decade older than the previous record-holder, Ronald Reagan, was when he left office in 1989. Reagan at the end of his second term was in better shape than Biden is at the end of his first.
Somehow, Stewart failed to notice that if Biden was almost 78 when he ran for president four years ago, then he was going to be nearly 82 when running for reelection in 2024. You don’t even need to take off your shoes and count on your toes to do 78 + 4 = 82.
But I guess Jon Stewart does.
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