What Biden Might Say in a Lucid Interview (Bumped)

 RACHEL MADDOW: Um, your open borders policy is gutting you in the polls, sir.

BIDEN: Damn the polls! Outliers, Rachel. My gut tells me 96% of registered voters are OK with my invitation to the world’s poor to come to America and share in our bounty at their expense. And they accept the suffering I’ve inflicted on them in pursuit of a permanent Democratic majority, which we’ll have once we’ve fast-tracked citizenship for the refugees.

MADDOW: It’s not just the border, sir. The right, and some on the left, are saying you’ve gone too far in squandering our prosperity to achieve economic parity.

BIDEN: I need to get in the faces of the doubters and say, “You don’t get it, Buddy. I’m on your side. Rogan, Beck, Levin, Coulter, Musk, Hannity and the rest of the loony right are deliberately misrepresenting me. I’m not interested in redistributing wealth. I want to destroy it. The only way Americans will understand government is not the answer is to make it the answer. To paraphrase Marx, the sweetest sound of all is the crumbling of your countrymen’s certainties.

 MADDOW: Karl Marx?

BIDEN: Groucho. Look, Rachel-- civilizations are like people: they’re born, reach maturity , age, then die. One thing great cultures have in common before they become terminal: abundance. Look around you. Our country is so rich its poor are obese.

MADDOW: I think I understand, sir. Before you were elected, Americans were fat and happy, oblivious to history bearing down on them like a bullet train. Now we’re all spooked--we’re wondering if the economy’s going to implode, if North Korea will lob a nuke at Manhattan, if the Houthis will take out one of our carriers, or if you’ll set up a Palestinian enclave in the heartland.

BIDEN: Exactly. Uncertainty and fear are our friends. To weather the existential crisis we face, stave off the long, slow slide into oblivion, perhaps even emerge from the experience revitalized, we must become hungry and fearful, like the least of the nations that envy us now. As the sage opined, “Strive to be one of the many; being one of the few, eschew.”

 MADDOW: Gesundheit, sir.

 BIDEN: It was a quotation, Rachel. Master Po, “Kung Fu.”

MADDOW: So, you’re promoting a nanny state to wreck the economy in order to spark a new American Revolution?

BIDEN: Essentially, yes. In the Forestry service, they call it a “controlled burn.” Devastation, but from the ashes, growth. Couple hundred years, we take our place on the world stage again, stronger than ever.

MADDOW: You are a visionary, sir. But extremists in both parties will make trouble for you.

BIDEN: What happens, happens. “In dreams begin prosecutions.”

MADDOW: Um, F. Scott Fitzgerald?

 BIDEN: Jack Smith.