This joke has its origins in the days when Soviet leadership was a series of men in their seventies who kept dying on the job.

It has acquired a certain acuity in today’s America where the leaders are a series of unpopular men approaching their eighties.

There is a widespread “Is He Dead Yet?” meme that’s the contemporary direct equivalent of the Soviet joke.

And Russia! Let's not forget the same holds there, for very good reasons. Particularly as they managed to be the leaders of the unpopular men leading America, and they're squandering what wealth Russia has in mad imperialism for purely ego reasons while also seeking to crash the US no matter what that does to the world economy. Pure table-flipping.

It's called the Swan Lake moment: Swan Lake on loop on the state media TV. That's what happens when everything is turmoil and nobody knows what will come next.

All I ask for are leaders born in the 1950s

We just had a chance at one born in the 1960s. People decided that they wanted someone born in the 1940s.

It refers specifically to Stalin.

And a time when the Chairmanship was not a revolving door, though it became more of one immediately afterward.

What's old is new again.