Liberals are already positioning for Bernie Sanders to take Hillary’s place as the Democratic presidential candidate.

H.A. Goodman, the liberal columnist published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Salon and elsewhere writes in the Huffington Post that he and other liberals are going to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Why? Because they really want Bernie Sanders to be their candidate, and they believe only Bernie can beat Trump.

They don’t seem to be able to bring themselves to vote for a candidate so obviously in the pockets of Wall Street and so dishonest she can’t even tell the truth when it would benefit her.

Oddly, Hillary’s latest health scare is simultaneously downplayed by the liberal mainstream press and generating a great deal of cheerleading for Bernie.

Reporter David Shuster tweeted Sunday evening that due to Hillary’s pneumonia, Democratic party operatives told him an emergency meeting by the Democratic National Committee is being considered to replace Hillary.

As Shuster noted, this is “unchartered political territory,” by which he likely meant “uncharted.”

Surprisingly, liberals themselves are occasionally citing Hillary’s unprosecuted high crimes and misdemeanors as further reasons to replace her with another candidate.

Amid video of Secret Service carrying a collapsed Hillary into a security van, Cokie Roberts said on Monday’s NPR “Morning Edition,” “The fact that it comes now, when the polls are tightening and Democrats are already saying that Hillary was the only candidate who could not beat Trump and it is taking her off of the campaign trail, canceling her trip to California — it has them very nervously beginning to whisper about having her step aside and finding another candidate.”

Trump is responding like a gentleman, hoping she recovers quickly, while liberals debate who would be the better replacement: Bernie or Biden.

Tim Kaine, the easily forgettable Vice President candidate, isn’t even mentioned as an aside. He isn’t a factor.

In a nationwide poll conducted in March for Bloomberg Politics, only 35 percent of respondents had a negative view of Biden compared with 41 percent with a negative impression of Bernie.

Biden’s favorability rating in that same poll was 57 percent, compared with 52 percent for Sanders.

Huffington Post has Joe Biden’s latest favorability rating of 51 percent.

Biden would likely have greater appeal to moderates, despite the fact that, according to the Pew Research Center, 38 percent of Americans use negative terms to describe the vice president, such as “goofy and a buffoon.”

Bernie evokes the words, “old” and “socialist.”

Still, both are held in much higher esteem than “Crooked Hillary.”

Now that “The Great Hillary Ill Health Conspiracy” has been revealed as “The Great Hillary Ill Health Cover-up,” the game to replace Hillary is afoot.

Still, she would have to resign from the race for that to happen.

In the unlikely event she would choose the good of the country over being a history book entry, the replacement candidate would then be chosen by the Democratic National Committee with no specific process, except that Tim Kaine would still be the vice presidential candidate if he is not chosen to replace Hillary.

There would undoubtedly be lobbying, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Joe Biden and his team worked the phones to lock him in as the choice for Obama’s vice president.

Bernie doesn’t have the insider connections Joe has.

Still, Hillary would have to step down as the candidate.

Voluntarily.

That doesn’t sound likely from someone who campaigns in close quarters with unsuspecting supporters on a New York City sidewalk with a contagious infection like bacterial or viral pneumonia, including a little girl who ran up to Hillary for a hug and a few million microbes.

Rick Jensen is Delaware’s conservative talk show host on WDEL. Email him at rick@wdel.com.