The following things are, I believe, all true:

• I will vote for Bernie Sanders if he is the Democratic nominee for President. I will do this cheerfully, with a spring in my step and a song in my heart, and there is nothing on this planet or in the heavens that can prevent me from voting against the shitgibbon next November short of my own death.
• I would prefer nearly every other serious Democratic candidate currently running to be the nominee. I might end up choosing Bernie over Biden at this point, honestly.
• While I am not a fan of Sanders, I bear the man no actual ill will. I’m happy for him to remain in the Senate for as long as he’s able, and I’m grateful for his role in bringing the more leftward elements of the Democratic party more to the forefront.
• I’m glad he’s recovering and out of the hospital.
• He is 78 years old, will be 79 when inaugurated, just had a heart attack, had two stents put in, and his campaign lied about it for three days.
• That is not as catastrophic of a medical disaster as it would have been even ten or fifteen years ago. My mother and my father-in-law both have stents in various parts of their bodies. It’s a fairly simple procedure, as these things go.
• He needs to drop out anyway, and everyone who knows him and loves him needs to be telling him this until he listens.

I’m genuinely sorry to have to be saying this right now, despite the fact that I have gleefully called for Sanders to drop out of the Presidential race more than once in the past, and fully expected to be doing so several months into the future. But I was expecting for some votes to have been cast before we reached this point. I don’t like the idea that the guy needs to drop out so that the race doesn’t literally kill him. But this is it. It’s enough. He’d be the oldest President ever inaugurated, and it’s the toughest job on the damn planet, and a 78-year-old man who just had a heart attack and whose campaign’s first instinct was to hide from it is not up to the job. I am aware that one of my preferred candidates is 70, and believe me, I wish she were a decade or so younger. But this guy is five years older than the monster in the White House is now, and that guy’s visibly falling apart on a daily basis, and I’d expect Bernie to actually pay attention were he to become President.

It’s time for Bernie Sanders to withdraw gracefully from the race, before his body betrays him again and he has to do so under less voluntary circumstances.