After the primaries this week, I was watching Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. I’ve reached an age where I’ve seen just about everything and very little surprises me. But I confess myself… well, let’s say appalled that any sentient creature above the level of a jellyfish would vote for either of these men for president.

Because I have leftist friends and relatives, I know there are some on the Left who have drained the Kool Aid to the very dregs. They tell me they only hope they can die before climate change turns the earth into Mad Max: Fury Road. They have their fingers crossed that Joe Biden will pick a high quality vice presidential candidate like – wait for it – Stacey Abrams! And until the moment the stock market tanked, they actually believed the incompetent Barack Obama was responsible for the Trump economy.

So yes, I’ve witnessed with my own weary eyes the toxic effects of reading The New York Times as if it were still a newspaper. I’ve seen what that stuff can do to the human mind and it’s not pretty.

But Bernie Sanders? Joe Biden? Really? I know better than to think human stupidity has a bottom. All the same: appalled.

Sanders, at this point, looks like an unindicted co-conspirator in the Rosenberg case. He’s a radical visionary with his eyes on the far horizon – only it’s a horizon forty years behind him, back when all his ideas failed. As I write this, Bernie seems to be contemplating pulling out of the race. Still. The people who cheered him on must be the same young people who are still crowding the bars and beaches, saying, “Dude, I’m not letting this stupid flu thing get in the way of the party.”

As for Biden, he looks like the 1950’s neighbor who waves to you from his driveway before climbing into his Nash Rambler so he can pretend to go to a job he was fired from three weeks ago. Dazed and dead inside after a political life empty of principle, he really should be sitting in a rocker wistfully wondering where the time went. It would be touching to watch his wife gently leading him offstage when he forgets where he is, if only I didn’t hear reporters and other Democrat propagandists saying things like, “When I look at Joe, I see a president.” It’s a shocking con.

People keep asking how the field narrowed to these two old white men. It’s simple. They are perfect symbols of a party without a single new idea.

And the moral flea circus we call American journalism is right there with them.

The Chinese flu is an unprecedented bad news event in my lifetime – a life that has witnessed major assassinations, nationwide riots, 9/11, and that YouTube song about it being Friday. It took a minute, but Trump – somehow still alert and elastic – has adapted to the crisis. But not the press. From them, the same old hate just keeps on coming.

Trump seems so far to have done what can be done in these situations. The tests were slow, but the fault was with the very regulatory system he has tried to diminish. And he said a few flippant things at the beginning, but he’s Trump, so what? His decisive move to shut down travel from China saved lives while the media complained, and he seems to have good experts to whom he’s listening. And Vice President Mensch has lived up to his name, or at least the name I call him.

But the press continues to lie about Trump shamelessly. He called the virus a hoax. [Narrator: He didn’t.] He told the states to go it alone. [Nope.] He’s racist because he calls it the Chinese flu. [It comes from China and the Chinese let it spread before they told anyone and then tried to blame it on us.] And this isn’t fake news from some crap lunatic outlet like CNN or NBC. This stuff has been in the Times and The Washington Post – which then also run stories accusing Trump of dishonesty without even seeing the irony.

It won’t stop, but it really should. It’s disgraceful at a time when we need our leaders to lead and our reporters to report. I’m not saying they can’t criticize or disagree with the man. I’m not even saying they have to like him.

But after all the warnings that Trump would seize on any disaster to morph himself into Hitler (he hasn’t), after all the attacks on his border policy (which turns out to be just good sense), after all the fretting about his xenophobia (which was not xenophobia at all but wisdom about the errors of globalism), it’s time for the news bosses to either find a cure for Trump Derangement Syndrome or force the infected to shelter in place.

After that, they can simply apologize to the president, and move on.