Election 2020: Biden’s Bid Is Doomed

“Joe Biden has led Democratic polls since day one,” Dan McCarthy ­observes in Spectator USA. But there are plenty of reasons why “you should still bet against” the former vice president “getting the nomination or getting into the White House.” The biggest problem? His age and its effects on his mental acuity. At 76, he is showing signs of senescence “more than Bernie Sanders (77) or Donald Trump (73)” are. And those infamous gaffes of his “are increasingly worrying,” because they just “keep coming.” The question is: “How many will it take before voters seriously question his competence?” True, Biden’s name recognition is tremendous, but voters are “surely remembering the Biden of the Obama years,” not today’s iteration. Bottom line: “Should he make it past the primaries, he won’t seem like a pair of safe hands with which to restore America to ‘normal.’ ”

Media watch: Bob Novak’s Journalism Lessons

Columnist Bob Novak, who died 10 years ago this month, got a lot of bad press during the George W. Bush presidency, recalls Timothy Carney in The Washington Examiner. It was the result of a “you’re either with us or against us” culture that Novak flouted by taking lines that “irked” the powers that be. With his opposition to the Iraq War, for example, Novak raised the constant ire of the Republican National Committee. Yet Novak’s spirit of skepticism is what’s needed now more than ever. He preached journalistic independence “not only of the GOP, but also of the conservative movement.” The columnist reported heavily and dug up “what some people wanted buried.” Now, 10 years since Novak’s death, Carney “misses him.” His loss is “not just to those of us who knew and loved him, but to all of journalism.”

Foreign desk: How Europe Scapegoats Putin

Europe has a bevy of problems, and liberals are convinced it’s “all the Russians’ fault,” Robin Simcox snarks at The American Spectator. Witness the rise of populism in Sweden, which The New York Times recently blamed on “an international disinformation machine” stoking “anti-immigrant passions” at the behest of the Kremlin. But it wasn’t Vladimir Putin who forced Sweden’s liberal political class to take in 163,000 asylum seekers in 2015, the population “equivalent of the US taking 5.2 million,” per Simcox. The result has been growing insecurity and social incohesion, including an uptick in shootings, arson attacks and the use of hand grenades on the hitherto-peaceful streets of the Nordic country. Blaming Moscow for these troubles, Simcox concludes, is to give Sweden’s and Europe’s “failing political class an undeserved easy out.”

Culture critic: The New Anti-Natal Obsession

A Canadian newspaper recently asked if it is wrong for people to reproduce amid climate change. Such outlandish musing shows that “we are ­already in the … throes of a moral relativism that will destroy us if we let it,” Libby Emmons frets at The Post Millennial. It’s a “maddeningly myopic view.” After all, “what use is the environment to humanity without ­humanity itself? A lifestyle that will not sustain human life should not be considered sustainable.” Anti-natal ideology has been around for a long time, to be sure, but with the media’s climate-change push, it has gained more prominence than ever before. “Climate-change activists,” concludes Emmons, “are so sure of the impending judgment day that they’ve lost sight of what it is we’re preserving and conserving the world for.”

Campus beat: Secular Colleges Are Anything But

“All secular colleges and universities instruct students in religious doctrine and instill religious values in them,” writes Jeremiah Poff in The College Fix, in a profile of theologian Chad Pecknold. But the religion that’s on offer on the quad today isn’t one of the monotheistic faiths like Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Rather, it’s “a form of pantheism” in which certain “holy grails — think LGBTQ and abortion rights — are sacrosanct.” Like the ancient varieties of pantheism, this new version “insists that ­everything is divine,” especially sexually transgressive mores and modes of life. How do we know we’re dealing with a campus religion? Just challenge “one of the [pantheistic] holy ideas,” Pecknold tells Poff, and “you will wear the scarlet letter.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board