These are genuinely weird times, politically speaking. Normally, it’s the opposition party that counts down the days until the end of the other guy’s presidency. Remember those countdown clocks for Donald Trump? These days, though, it’s the Democrats in power who can’t wait to be done with a colossal embarrassment of their own making: the outlandishly, uproariously bad presidency of Joe Biden.

No wonder the leftist intelligentsia has been so fixated on Russia and Ukraine: It takes their minds off the reality that they’re walking around with “Kick Me” signs on their backsides. And just think: These thin-skinned, power-mad Democrats still have three more years of suffering ahead of them — three more years of lasting damage to the brand that just a few years ago boasted cool, young, cognitively capable Barack Obama as its standard-bearer.

This, then, is the political prison that the Democrats find themselves in — and it’s a prison of their own making. Every single one of those Democrat power brokers knew Joe Biden was losing it cognitively, but they propped him up and pushed his candidacy forward nonetheless. Why? Because it was all they had short of a Bernie Sanders curb-stomping at the feet of Donald Trump’s size 12 Oxfords.

Three more years. Of Scranton Joe Biden. That is, unless they can somehow get rid of him beforehand.

We ponder this because we wonder what was behind the New York Times’s 24th-paragraph concession about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s MacBook. Better 17 months late than never, we suppose, but why now? It’s not as if the Times can recover its reputation. As columnist Joy Pullmann writes: “[The Times] is pulling what propaganda experts call a ‘limited hangout.’ That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.”

So Biden is corrupt. This we already knew. Now what? And again: Why now? Pullmann continues:

Why would The New York Times do this — and Facebook and Twitter not ban this information release just like they did before? Well, one explanation is hierarchy reinforcement. As I wrote Monday, like forcing their “minions” to wear face masks, the ridiculously belated laptop confirmation also equals the ruling class “flexing their power to say things they won’t allow their political opponents to say.”

There’s another explanation, though. It’s that Joe Biden is no longer useful to the ruling class. After being used to win an election, he’s now making it impossible for them to credibly foist on Americans the idea that his party could win another one with him on their masthead. The donkey is showing through the lion skin, and so they need a new donkey.

A new donkey. But who might that be? Normally, an aging president might somehow be ushered gracefully and tactfully off the stage, thereby clearing the way for a younger, stronger, more vibrant, more cognitively capable successor. But in Biden’s urgency to pander to women and blacks, he painted himself into an identity-politics corner. And the result was a decidedly not-ready-for-primetime Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Bay Area progressive vice president of Jamaican-Indian descent who grew up in Canada and whose ancestors were slaveowners.

Or, as columnist Byron York calls her, “The Democrats’ Kamala Harris problem.” He writes: “It’s hard to exaggerate how odd the Biden-Harris situation is for Democrats. A first-term president is expected to run for reelection. No president wants to be a lame duck in his first years in office. And yet that is where Biden could be headed. And that shines an especially intense light on the question of succession, and the first in line: a very unpopular, very problematic Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Three more years of Joe Biden. In a way, it lends new and urgent meaning to “the significance of the passage of time.”