MICHAEL WALSH: Good-Bye to All That.

And here we are. Despite the polls, which at this point only offer a choice between two superannuated, erratic geriatrics, the voting public understands that neither Trump nor Biden is the way forward. Both are running in large part on resentment of the other, and of the nearly — nearly — 50 percent of Americans who, at the moment, support them. But there is a near-zero chance that either man will be on the ballot in November of 2024 when the only poll that matters takes place. (Ask Hillary Clinton if she disagrees.) Biden is visibly crumbling before everybody’s eyes, while Trump’s King Lear imitation on his vanity social-media platform, Truth Social, has become a national embarrassment.

Further, the increasingly surly Biden’s performance in office is the best argument against returning him to power, while Trump’s disgraceful final year in office, which includes both turning the country over to the sinister Tony Fauci and summoning the demons of January 6 to challenge an election even his closet advisers later admitted under oath they knew was lost, disqualifies him from another turn in the Oval Office.

But, as they used to say in Vietnam, embrace the suck. With neither octogenarian (Trump would be 82 at the close of a hypothetical second term) in the race, the way would be clear for a long-overdue changing of the Boomer and even pre-Boomer guard that has long dominated U.S. politics. A Trump- and Biden-free election opens up vast new vistas for a rapidly changing country, allowing frank if not always friendly discussion about today’s particularly thorny problems, including the untrammeled invasion across the southern border, the rolling back of Critical Theory and all its unholy spawns, and returning the libertine genie of “non-binary” sexuality to its bottle and burying it at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

The removal of Trump and Biden from the lists would also immediately make clear the stark distinctions between the parties, unencumbered by their outsized, media-fueled personalities. On the left, the death of modern Liberalism, which began with the McGovern campaign of 1972, would be laid bare, and the “woke” minority exposed for the malignant civilization-killers they are. On the right, the post-presidential poison of Trumpism would dissipate into the atmosphere, to be replaced by a fair contest among Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence (representing some form of Trumpism minus Trump), and perhaps even Glenn Youngkin, currently lurking in plain sight.

As Andrew McCarthy notes: Democrats’ 2024 Plan Is Working to Perfection. “Former president Trump has a nine-point lead over President Joe Biden in a recent Washington Post/ABC poll! Yeah, right. So skewed in Trump’s favor is this survey, it’s hilarious — at least until it dawns on you that this nonsense was put out by reliable media-Democratic-complex organs, in the undoubted calculation that Republicans would crow, ‘See? Trump must be the nominee!’ As night follows day, Republicans have fallen for it — as if we inhabit a world where it is fathomable that the deeply unpopular Trump has a nearly double-digit lead over the incumbent president. What could get it to 20 points? Another Capitol riot?”