The Coronavirus isn’t the only thing that’s spreading.

Hysterical leftists can’t let go of the delusion that Donald Trump is president because of sinister machinations by unspecified Russians -- the same Russians that Sleepy Joe Biden believes are messing with his electioneering. 

Biden -- who got badly clipped in the Iowa caucuses by Bernie Sanders, told “Face the Nation” that “The Russians don’t want me to be the nominee…” because “they like Bernie,” the Fidel-snuggler from Vermont.

Channeling his best third person Tricky Dick, Biden added:

"They spent a lot of money on bots on Facebook and they've been taken down saying Biden is a bad guy. They don't want Biden running… No one's helping me to try to get the nomination."

But the Russians apparently changed their minds. Bernie got clipped on Tuesday, losing badly to Sleepy Joe -- who sometimes seems to forget that it’s 2020, not 1920. People don’t play phonographs for their kids anymore -- and Russia hasn’t been the Soviet Union for going on 30 years.

Blaming this -- blaming everything -- on the Russians is becoming a kind of lunatic default for the coming-apart-at-the-wheels left; a comforting explanation for political failure in 2016 and, far worse, pushback on the cultural front. The left doesn’t want to believe that Americans are becoming tired of Wokeness, of being accused by hysterics of phobias (homo, Islamo, you-name-it-o) as a technique to shout down disagreement by literally shouting.

This condition was first diagnosed in 1876 by French physician Jean-Martin Charcot who named it -- literally -- after women’s reproductive equipment. His patient, a teenage girl named Louise Augustine Gleizes, had been committed to the Salpetriere hospital for women due to serial fits and hallucinations about swarms of black, demonic rats. 

In 2020 she would be working at MSNBC.

Today, it’s old men like Biden -- and older men like Sanders -- who suffer from hysteria, triggered by swarms of real people wearing MAGA hats. They literally cannot accept that tens of millions of Americans reject their message of perpetual grievance, failure, and despair; that they are hurtling toward another electoral loss nine months from now.

How can it be?

It must be the Russians!

Of course, there’s not only no evidence it is the Russians -- it’s hard to see how it could be the Russians.

The hysterical allegations leveled against Trump by not-just-Biden and not-just-Bernie but the entirety of the leftist Greek Chorus is that -- somehow -- Boris Badinov (i.e., Vladimir Putin) did what Democrats actually have done in the past -- jimmy the votes. As in West Virginia back in 1960.

And against their own in 2016.

The Kennedy campaign poured so much money into the '60 West Virginia Primary that Jack Kennedy publicly said, "I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy; Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide."

There were also allegations of outright voter fraud, including corpses voting and the living voting twice.

Bernie is bitter about 2016 because he was denied the nomination last time -- not by Trump. And not by the Russians.

But by Hillary -- who used her leverage to deny Bernie what the Russians couldn’t: The nomination he was supposed to have gotten then -- and may get now. Because of the voters, this time.

Because the Russians can’t jimmy the votes -- the way Hillary did, in favor of herself over Bernie, as became infamously public when former DNC Chair Donna Brazile came forward with allegations that the Clinton Machine rigged the Dem's nominating process back in 2016. Or at least, tilted the table in favor of Hillary's nomination, by giving control over internal decisions such as the hiring of key DNC staffers.

"I found proof (of nomination monkey-business) and it broke my heart," she said.

A stark contrast to the hysterical allegations about Russians.

They don’t have access, for one -- and no one (even the hysterics on the left) has alleged that they did. Posting memes on Facebook isn't the same thing as tampering with the ballot box -- a conflation that Democrats have been trying to sell since the lost the 2016 presidential race.

We now live in an era of perpetual hysteria where the boogeymen of the media's psychosis leads the evening news. 

Don't expect the 2020 election cycle to alter this trend. 

A.J. Rice is CEO of Publius PR, a premier communications firm in Washington D.C. Rice is a brand manager, star-whisperer and auteur media influencer, who has produced or promoted Laura Ingraham, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Monica Crowley, Charles Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz, Roger L. Simon, Steve Hilton, Victor Davis Hanson, and many others. Find out more at publiuspr.com.