GRUMPY OLD MEN 3: Sanders and Bloomberg take the American Jewish feud public.
Lovers of the silver screen will recall that Walther Matthau and Jack Lemmon vehicle from 1993, in which the lifelong rivalry between two tetchy geezers is galvanized by their competition for the ultimate prize — ultimate, that is, in the sense of their last chance — the affections of the attractive retiree (Ann-Margret). Helpless addicts of the silver screen will recall the follow-up from 1995, Grumpy Old Men 2 which, like Bernie Sanders’s current attempt to rerun the 2016 campaign, repeated the same jokes, only at higher volume.
True lovers of the silver screen, and masochistic devotees of mass democracy, will now see Grumpy Old Men 3. This time our pair of petty pensioners will be cursing and kvetching in Las Vegas as they compete for the affections of a beauty long past its prime: the Democratic party. Will Mike confirm the rumors that he’s even nastier than Bernie is rumored to be? Will Bernie’s heart and bladder go the distance? Will Mike run down their neighbor Joe, who’s taken up residence in the middle of the street?
The real drama in the Mike and Bernie show is that the communal feuding of American Jews is going public. You could call this a nightmare scenario, were it not already the reality of the politics of the American Jewish institutions among which both Bernie and Mike should be numbered. American Jews are almost unanimously pro-Israel, but their would-be leaders are, like most politicians, far more polarized, in this case over Israel.
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