I'm writing a function to flag and label stale dates (older than 6 months) in a report.

i.e. 

```
def isStale(lineItemDate):
    if delta > 180:
        return " Stale"
    else:
        return ""
# where delta subtracts my lineItemDate from today in days

```

Trouble is, my raw data (lineItemDate) comes as a string: "Sep 5, 2020", so I'll need to convert that to something "datey" AND is comparable to whatever comes out of timedelta(days=180) which appears to be "2019-09-08 11:33:54.978144".

Each technique I try ends up with a bunch of lines of conversion for each date to compare. I'm trying to pare it down to a few lines.

Not sure why this won't pick up single digit days:

```
print(datetime.strptime("Sep 5, 2019", '%b %-d, %Y')))

ValueError("'%s' is a bad directive in format '%s'" % 
ValueError: '-' is a bad directive in format '%b %-d, %Y'

```

Ultimately, is there an elegant way of comparing these two date elements so I can flag old ones?