It’s Not Biden’s Age, Stupids

            Polls keep saying the same thing: voters think President Joe Biden is too old.

            The latest comes from some outfit called “The New York Times.” According to these “Times” people: “An overwhelming 71% said [Biden] was ‘too old’ to be an effective president—an opinion shared across every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including a remarkable 54% of Mr. Biden’s own supporters.” Just because he’s 80.

            Almost 81.

If the election were held today, the poll monsters go on, “Trump would be poised to win more than 300 electoral college votes, far above the 270 needed to take the White House.”

            On paper, where things get printed, it looks bad. “Even Kamala Harrisno political juggernaut so far—fares a bit better than Mr. Biden, trailing Mr. Trump by three points in a hypothetical matchup, compared with Mr. Biden’s five-point deficit,” the Times says.

            Fortunately for Democrats, Biden doesn’t live on paper. Our commander-in-chief is a skeletal flesh-and-bone human being. And he has the answer to these so-called “polls”: “I don’t believe the polls.” Exactly so, Mr. President. Anyone who takes the $8 billion-a-year public opinion and election polling industry and its thousands of highly-educated analysts seriously is plainly a poltroon and a malarkey-peddling pony soldier!

Ooo, look at us with our 95% accuracy rate, we’re soooo smart!

            Democrats have got to get the president’s message, whatever that is, out there. Otherwise voters might listen to Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota, the 54-year-old twerp challenging Biden in the Democratic primaries. “83% of Democrats under 30 want a different nominee. You know, a lot of politicians lie, but the numbers don’t,” Phillips says. Phillips loves Biden and voted with him literally 100% of the time; his only beef with the prez is the age thing.

            Like how James Carville famously said “it’s the economy, stupid” and that somehow got Clinton elected president, Biden needs to tell someone loudly and proudly: “It’s not about my age, even more, stupids!”

            Studies prove it with 95% accuracy: when people are thinking about one thing, they’re not thinking about something else. So, if we want voters to stop focusing on Biden’s age, we need to seduce them into obsessing over a different subject entirely.

            For instance, Biden might run attack ads pointing out that, at 77, Trump is no spring chicken his own self. Ad copy first draft: “If Biden is too old, Trump is almost as old as he is so at bare minimum he’s almost too old too!”

            Or, for heterosexual male voters, we could just show and talk about women’s breasts. Age who?

            But really, because this is politics and it’s supposed to be about policies, Democrats should migrate the focus on age over to the president’s handling of the economy. Well, they’ve been trying that. The problem is, the voters hate Bidenomics. The thing about voters is, they don’t respond well when you remind them why they hate you.

Why do the voters hate Bidenomics? Because people are psychologically selfish. Rich people and the stock market are doing great but the voters are broke and so are unappreciative. “Whatever stories Americans are told about the strength of the economy under President Joe Biden, they are not going to be persuaded to look past the issue of their own living standards,” liberal economist James Galbraith writes. Ingrates!

            Never mind the economy. Which is an awesome economy, no matter what your wallet tells you. And another thing—why is your wallet talking? Are you on fentanyl? If so, why can you afford fancy opioids? Bidenomics, that’s why!

            Pivot, pivot, pivot! Maybe Biden should focus on young people. They were a key part of his coalition in 2020, dropped away from Democrats during the 2022 midterms and are expected to stay away in 2024. Let’s get them back.

            Biden’s ace in the hole: come out as trans. Trans-young! Biden will announce that he now identifies as a 33-year-old. Not as the racist 33-year-old SOB he was in 1975 when he ran for Congress in Delaware while opposing court-ordered school desegregation and supporting pro-apartheid senator Jesse Helms’ attacks on bussing. As a cool modern one with, like, a goatee.

Trans-young Biden will dump the birthdate he was assigned at birth in favor of his lifestyle birthdate, 1990. It’ll even be on his new driver’s license, assuming he’s able to get the old one back after Hunter took it away along with his car keys.

As a dude who retroactively came of age in the 2010s, he’ll be underpaid, overworked and totally unable to repay his college student loans—just like the young voters who are mad at him because he didn’t forgive their student loans.

Common ground!

            Maybe we should talk to Kamala.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

86ed

District of Columbia and two states, drivers over the age of 75 have to take a new road test to show that they are still competent to drive. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden, resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., claims that he will be perfectly OK to run the United States military until he is age 86, no test required.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Isn’t Organ Donation Mandatory?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4R_unkqDSqY/Th7AjZOQDfI/AAAAAAAAAcw/XuynXqZIEsI/s400/insidepix1.jpg

 

America’s Weird, Enduring Respect for Corpses

This week America’s news media obsessed over the shooting deaths of 12 people in Washington. The usual arguments over gun control seem irrelevant since there isn’t much that could have been done to prevent those particular killings. It was a navy base. Even in England, members of the military have access to automatic weapons. And even if we were inclined to start locking people up for hearing voices or feeling strange vibrations, we can’t build enough mental asylums to hold all of them.

On the other hand, it is estimated that 18 people die every day due to a national shortage of organ donations. This crisis can be solved.

Don’t worry: this is not one of Those pieces calling for you to consider signing the donor section on the back of your driver’s license.

My solution is more radical. When you die, the government should take your organs.

The transplant shortage is acute. Some patients are so desperate that they travel on ethically-dubious “medical tourism” junkets to China, which implants organs from executed prisoners. Others accept D-rate organs. Patients at the University of Maryland recently accepted kidneys that had recently been operated upon for benign or malignant tumors. Better bad kidneys than none at all.

The waiting list system is widely viewed as arbitrary and unfair. In June 2013 a federal judge made news by issuing an order suspending rules that effectively blocked children under the age of 12 from receiving organs from adult donors. Several children who might have died without the procedure benefited. Unfortunately, the court’s ruling probably killed a similar number of adult patients. Like cash, life is a zero-sum game.

It is widely believed that celebrities and wealthy people, most notably Billy Martin in 1995 and Steve Jobs in 2009, are able to cut the line, moving themselves up the waiting list. Technically, this isn’t true. But practically, it is.

A major factor determining whether or not you will receive a new organ is whether you can afford the $500,000-plus cost of the procedure and its maintenance, or whether your insurance coverage is sufficiently expensive to cover it. Rich people can pay, poor people can’t. “There’s a huge triage involved in getting in,” Arthur Caplan, chair of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told CNN. “If you’re a homeless alcoholic sleeping on the streets of L.A., and you’re going toe-to-toe with Steve Jobs, you’re going to lose.”

Where resources are scarce, politics get ugly. In 2012 the University of California at San Francisco kidney exchange was accused of denying a kidney to a man because of his status as an undocumented immigrant. A petition campaign changed UC officials’ minds.

This being America and anything more progressive than the collected works of Ronald Reagan being off the table, the mainstream media turns to free-market solutions: paying prospective donors, either while they are alive or after they die, for their kidneys, livers and other body parts that could be used to enhance or save someone’s life. In 2010 The Wall Street Journal published an essay urging that we adopt Iran’s approach, which guarantees a year of health care and a cash payment to donors. A June 2013 Slate piece by Sally Satel, “How to Fix the Organ Transplant Shortage,” called for “providing in-kind rewards — such as a down payment on a house, a contribution to a retirement fund, or lifetime health insurance” to donors.

These merchantilist suggestions have gotten traction. A 2012 poll found that 55% of Americans now believe that selling your organs ought to be legal.

And maybe they’re right. But it’s easy to imagine how the commodification of body parts could corrupt an already flawed system. Do we want to live in a nation where the unemployed resort to auctioning off pieces of themselves to stave off foreclosure?

There’s not much we can do to reduce demand for organs. So let’s focus on the supply side of the equation.

Efforts to guilt Americans into donating voluntarily are failing those 18 Americans a day. But not every healthy person who refuses to sign a donor card is heartless. I know because I’m one of them. I refuse to endorse a system that rewards the rich at the expense of the poor. If the system were more transparent, and treated everyone equally, there’d be more donors.

However, the system being what it is, that’s not going to happen.

Which brings us to the government’s role. I don’t understand why organ donation isn’t mandatory. Why isn’t every corpse harvested for all of its usable organs?

It isn’t a property-rights issue. You don’t own your corpse. Neither does your family. If it did, they could leave your body to rot in the backyard. Laws dictate how to properly dispose of a dead person.

There have been baby steps toward mandatory donation. In 2010 a New York assemblyman introduced a “presumed consent” bill that would have automatically enrolled all New Yorkers as organ donors unless they opted out (analogous to the federal “do not call” list for people who don’t want to get telephone solicitations). Two dozen other nations have similar laws. The bill failed.

If the government can save 18 people a day by harvesting every available organ, why doesn’t it pass a law making it so?

The blogger Stewart Lindsey expresses the most passionate, coherent and logical argument I can find against mandatory organ donation: “If I OPT to donate my liver, kidneys, heart or any other worthwhile organ at the time of my death, I will make that decision known. Don’t we have enough intrusion from the government into our personal lives already? If they can dictate whether or not you should be an organ donor, how much longer before they will be making the choices of where you can live, where you can work, go to church or school, who you can marry, what stores you can shop in and ultimately, how long should you be allowed to live, before your organs are no longer a viable option for harvesting!”

As a student of history, I am sympathetic to slippery slope arguments. And as I wrote above, I despise the way that the current health care system prioritizes wealthy Americans over the less fortunate. But when you boil it down, Lindsey’s argument is purely emotional. It’s my liver, and you can pry it out of my cold, dead carcass…or not.

Anyway, our top government officials don’t care about those concerns.

In the end, it comes down to the power of superstition.

When we die, we cease to exist in every way. Our bodies decompose. Only idiots believe in God, the Devil, Heaven, Hell, an afterlife. Whether your body is harvested for organs, eaten by cannibals, or minced to fertilize topsoil, you will never know the difference. Anyway, no major American religion teaches that what happens to your corpse affects your destiny in the hereafter.

Between our smart phones and amazing technology that allows our government to spy on our every digital moment, citizens of the United States of America feel that they live in an incredibly modern society. But not in our hearts, not in our souls, and certainly not in our brains.

About 2.5 million Americans die every year. Most are burned or planted in the ground, completely wasted. Vast numbers of them rot away, their bodies containing potentially life-saving organs, left intact — or embalmed — for only one reason: politicians are too cowardly to challenge the ancient idea that there is something sacred in a hunk of flesh.

(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. Go there to join the Ted Rall Subscription Service and receive all of Ted’s cartoons and columns by email.)

COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL

Pre-Old Blues

Paul Ryan says he won’t reduce Social Security or Medicare benefits if the Republicans win–at least not for people who are currently elderly. What about people under 55 years old–the pre-old? How are they supposed to avoid a future of dumpster-diving?

css.php