OUR GERONTOCRACY.

The world's oldest valley girl is vice-president, and that puts the party of Silent Generation governance in a bad place.  "At 28 percent approval, say goodbye to Kamala Harris being Plan B to an aging Biden."  That makes it all the more important to keep the de jure president, who is in his late seventies, alive.

When President Joe Biden met with U.S. governors at the White House on Monday, he was the only one given a glass of water — lest anyone else remove their mask to take a drink.

The president was seated more than 10 feet from everyone, including Vice President Kamala Harris and members of his Cabinet.

A White House staffer who was wearing a surgical mask when Biden entered the room was quickly handed an N95 version.

The precautions aren't a good look.

It’s no surprise that unusual steps are taken to protect any president. But the strict precautions could also threaten to undercut the Biden administration’s own efforts to tell Americans — especially those who are vaccinated and boosted — that they can get on with something closer to their normal lives in the face of the omicron wave.

The de facto president, who is even older than the de jure president, favors those precautions. Deal with it.

Is it time to pass the torch to a new generation in the presidency?

The youngest gerontocrat, New York senator Chuck Schumer, who has been putting the country through hell, the better to stave off a primary challenge from the communist wing of his party, recently joined the brain-fart brigade in a recent speech where neither he nor his wordsmith recalled who Thurgood Marshall was.  His Republican counterpart, Indiana senator Mitch McConnell, got into some trouble for a less egregious brain fart, "African-Americans are voting in just as high a percentage as [all] Americans."  We're fine with "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" although the stress of stepping onto the Moon might be an order of magnitude or so greater than another stint in the well of the Senate.  But the omitted adjective is either "othering" or "Democrat freakout."  We could go for a trifecta and dust off Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, the president pro tempore of the Senate.  I need a nap, though.

Is it time to pass the torch to a new generation of leadership in the Senate?

The gerontocrat with the worst set of dentures since George Washington, California representative Nancy Pelosi, is going to stand for re-election.

NOW - Pelosi announces she is running for re-election.pic.twitter.com/n9uLc4zCi4

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 25, 2022

Leave the sound off and just watch the partials flop around.

Red State's Bonchie takes up the case for passing the torch.

Still, politics aside, there’s something deeply disturbing about an 81-year-old politician refusing to hand over power like this. Blame it on people living longer than they used to or something else entirely, but the American government has been turned into a quasi-oligarchy, where decrepit geriatrics rule the roost, enriching themselves, and serving until they kick the bucket.

That’s not healthy for our society, and it’s a trend that needs to stop. I don’t care what party you are from, I don’t want you in a high position of power if you are in your 80s. Retire and spend time with your grandkids like a normal, non-psychopath. The idea that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and the rest of the 80-plus crew are the best this nation has to offer strikes me as ludicrous. We can do better, America.

More ludicrous, dear reader, is the representative's rationale for seeking another term.

“When people ask me what are the three most important issues facing Congress, I always say the same thing: our children. Our children. Our children. Their health, their education, the housing and economic security of their families, a clean safe environment in which they can thrive, and the world at peace and where they are all welcome and in which they can reach their fulfillment. That is my life. Why I am in Congress. For the children. This is my story and this is my song.”

Which children would that be? The generations of children without fathers involved in their lives, thanks to the Great Society or no-fault divorce or Murphy Brown style attitudes on the part of woke wine women?  Those children might be limited to the Democrat-voting poverty pockets of the big cities.  Or might it be all children the past few years, being terrorized by Democrats and the teachers' unions, all to protect the gerontocrats from a case of Wuhan coronavirus?

Lacking evidence for masks is a sufficient reason to justify their removal — compulsion should not continue without reason — but this paucity is only half of the question. Without the positive case for masks, there is still the issue of what negative consequences they bring. Quite simply, face masks perpetrate real educational and emotional harm on students.

How bad is it for the kids?

The real toll is yet more insidious. A seminal paper in sociology stresses the importance of “weak-tie” relationships in emotional well-being. We need strong friendships and family ties, but equally important are the “weak ties” we have — the daily smile from our barista, a wave from our neighbor down the street. Students unmask and spend time with their friends outside of school — strong-tie relationships — but they miss out on the smiles and approving nods from teachers they don’t have and other students in the hallways. This regular interaction among distant acquaintances provides a sense of belonging and regularity to a person’s life. Without it, we get the sentiment among many teachers that there’s no feeling of “life” in school buildings.

The same phenomenon played out with school closures. An article in the Atlantic declared in October 2020 that schools were not super spreaders and yet many remained closed for an entire year regardless, inflicting untold academic and emotional harm on students. Equally so, the case against masking children has crumbled, but cloth coverings remain.

The policy solution here is really quite simple: End the mandates and take off the mask. Regardless, our public institutions are recalcitrant. This state of affairs — that such simplicity cannot manifest in reality, that public education refuses to “follow the science” — is perhaps the greatest argument in recent memory for cracking the calcified bureaucratic control over schools with school choice.

That, though, would be bad news for the Party of Government, as well as for the policies of the de facto president.

Is it time to pass the torch to a new generation of leadership in the House?