So, what happened to all those swell kids who were “down” with the revolution back in the 1960s? They grew up, and now they’ve grown old. Out went the love beads, bellbottoms, and acid trips (cheaper than cruises to Bimini). Most of those fist-pumping, LBJ and Nixon hating, protesting kids swapped central casting hippie costumes for suits and desk jobs.

Yet while you can take the kid out of the revolution, you can’t take the revolution out of the kid.  Or the geriatric. Ask Bernard and Hillary about that.

The irony is ripe to near rotting.  Leftism, very much premised on youth back in the heady 60s, very much about ousting the old white guys in politics -- Republican and Democrat -- is today in the wrinkled hands of two Social Security eligible pols, the old white gal, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the old white guy, Bernard “Bern” Sanders. Well, the reds have always preached about cradle to grave.

Hill and Bern each want to lay claim to their party’s presidential nomination next year. Beyond that, the presidency. Both will shortly begin beating the stuffing out of each other. Both are reds, though per the spin, Bern is the purer red. 

Hill, goes the critique, is the compromised of the two. A crony capitalist underbelly afflicts William Jefferson Clinton’s 40-year bride… a grubby acquisitiveness -- and not just for power to make the world more compassionate, fairer, and equal -- is an itch Hill must scratch. Shakedowns -- err, speeches -- have made Bill and Hill mucho rich reds. Influence-peddling was added to the Clintons’ portfolio when Hill served as O’s secretary of state.                        

The fiction circulating among 73-year-old Bern’s fans is that he’s got a pure, youthful socialist heart. The seediness of day-to-day politics -- Bern’s held elective offices since 1981 -- doesn’t touch him. He never swallows principles to cut deals. He’s virginal, politically. The left never tires of mythmaking; its entire worldview is built on myths. Bern is currently a myth manufactured by the left that’s dutifully reported by the MSM. 

Bern’s getting a free ride. His warts and all are mostly under wraps. The nearing 68-year-old Hill is under fire for doing something convenient with her State Department emails. The convenience was doubtlessly aimed at eluding culpability. Shucks, in that Arkansas old white guy Democrat fashion, Hill and Bill are perpetually eluding culpability.

But Bern’s free ride will end, sure as there was a hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag.  Frontrunners are targets. If not leading Hill now, Bern is getting mighty close to acquiring the frontrunner tag. Soon -- very soon -- we’ll start hearing and reading things about Bern that will tarnish his pristine reputation. Moses will be exposed as having clay feet.

In fact, the scuttlebutt is that Hill’s campaign has deployed opposition researchers to Vermont to dig around about Bern’s lengthy past. This from the Vermont publication, Seven Days, dated July 1, 2015, and headlined: “Has Clinton Dispatched Oppo Researchers to UVM's Sanders Archive?” 

Librarians at the University of Vermont's special collections say interest is spiking in the "Bernard Sanders papers" -- 30 boxes of meticulously organized material documenting Sanders' eight years as mayor of Burlington.

Then this:

Last Thursday, two casually dressed twentysomethings were spotted combing through the Sanders files and decades-old Vermont newspapers. As they were on their way out the door at the end of the day, Seven Days asked what they were doing.

"No comment," said one of the young men, dressed in a T-shirt and flannel. "No comment."

The reporter’s suspicion: the guys were Clinton operatives.

You can bet your Norman Thomas bobble-head that Hill’s peeps are everywhere necessary to excavate anything that will yellow Bern’s snowy reputation. Not that reputation-tarnishing will matter to Bern’s true believers, many of whom are inexplicably young folk. Delusion is yet another device used by leftists to deflect hard realities. The young are particularly prone to delusion. 

It’s curious that in a culture so wed to the adolescent, so adverse to aging, so insistent that the old not only can, but should, be young in appearance (at heart runs second), the Democrats leading candidates look like a dowdy grandma and a Burlington corner grocer, circa 1950 -- you know, the curmudgeonly “Old Mister Overalls” or some such. 

Curious still that socialism, which spent much of the 20th Century attempting to convince the proletariat that it was progressive, futuristic, forward-looking -- bursting with vim, vigor, and vitality -- has devolved into dystopia. 

Racial tensions flare or explode where brotherhood is supposed to rein. Many among the proletariat get by on part-time jobs or unemployment checks. Washington government lists with gargantuan debt, and piles up more daily, threatening eventual capsize. Well-heeled bureaucrats ceaselessly act to expand their mandates while eating out the nation’s substance. Pols-turned-lobbyists and consultants get rich quick. The nation’s borders are comprised, intentionally flooded with job-stealing and welfare-subsisting illegals. National security is given short shrift.   

That, in part, is socialism -- i.e., progressivism -- in practice today. It’s the left’s version of the decline of the Roman Empire, not some uplifting of humanity and society to ever-greater heights. Where’s the perfection of the human, so ballyhooed in the left’s heyday?  Where’s the glorious future, once rhapsodized among lefties? Hmm?      

Socialism -- under whatever guise -- is, in fact, old, tired, creaky, squalid, and failed. Where, pray tell, is its death panel?

In the meanwhile, two geezer socialists vie to lead the party of doubled-down failed socialism into the 2016 presidential elections. Another of their ilk, Joe Biden (age 72), a preening buffoon with a mean streak, is mulling entry, presumably to rescue the Democrats from a politically hobbled Hill and Bern the Pure, but surely to simply aggrandize himself. Deeper in the wings lurks Liz Warren, a proud faux Native American and another “democratic” socialist. She’s a spry 66. Martin O’Malley (he of Putin shirtless virility) is just 52 and an also-ran. Presumably, his relative youth is a disqualifier.    

Ageism in any of this? Only to leftists eager to vilify anyone who deviates an iota from the party line. Age and experience can bring wisdom. Wisdom has always been a scarce commodity -- more so today, however. Hill’s and Bern’s wisdom consists of clichés and lies; hence, it’s no wisdom at all.  Just the same old, same old -- meaning greater trouble for a troubled nation if either is elected president.