After a week when I mostly didn’t pay attention to the news, I dipped into a few web sites this evening, and found some stories that provided food for thought.
First up was some Iowa polling and the latest on the Dem presidential race. One of the themes is how awful most of the candidates are doing, which I guess is inevitable when there are two dozen candidates. And they’re Democrats. And the terribleness of their ideas is only exceeded by the terribleness of their personalities.
The uptake is that Biden still has a considerable lead, and that there are only three main contenders: Bernie, Grandma Squanto and Mayor Pete, in descending order. (Although, doesn’t it feel like any order in which you list their names is descending order?) Skateboarding Doofus spoke to a mostly empty church in Iowa, and his 15 minutes of fame now seem to have started about 22 minutes ago.
I think that Biden’s sizeable lead is more a commentary on the weakness of the field than any indication of his electoral greatness. The guy’s been around for decades, and he’s crashed and burned in previous attempts. He only stops sniffing women’s hair for long enough to plagiarize. And he only stops plagiarizing for long enough to spit out a gaffe or two that must then be cleaned up by his spokespeople.
He’s a glad-handing BS artist, and the Dems who absolutely detest Trump for those qualities are going to pick Biden for their candidate?
But worse than that, how would you like to be one of the Dems who is losing… to Joe Biden!? That’s like adding insult to injury, and then injuring you again. And then pouring salt into the wound of that second injury. And then making fun of your mother, while poking your original injury with a stick.
I’ve got to say that I’m surprised that Grandma Squanto is still in the top tier. (And yes, that is the most ironically self-satirizing use of the phrase “top tier” you will ever hear.) I thought that she was electorally dead long ago. (But you know her favorite saying: “Better red(skin) than dead!” #wemustneverstopmockingher)
After her tussle last week with that goofy black radio personality who calls himself “Charlemagne tha God,” I’m surprised she can show her (pale) face in public again.
And think about this: not only is she losing to Biden, but she got outfought in a battle of wits against a guy who spells “the” as “t-h-a.” Yikes!
Maybe the funniest statistic I saw is that the bottom 9 Dem candidates all garnered 0% in the latest poll.
Which is the same percentage of the Democrat primary vote that I’m getting. And I’ve spent zero dollars on my campaign, and given zero speeches. And my campaign slogan is: “Democrats: Terrible policies, terrible people. Vote Trump.”
Speaking of Trump – I often find myself wishing that he’d only say about half of the things that he says. But man, that other half can be pretty great!
My latest favorite came in response to London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, who I think would feel right at home with our own HJTs (hateful jihadi twins Omar and Tlaib). As so often with Trump, the other guy threw the first punch. Before Trump got to England, Khan took time out of his busy schedule of not stopping jihadi knife attacks in London to pen an anti-Trump editorial that included the sentiment that “It’s un-British to roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump.”
Because when you’re trying to get a fix on whether something is super-British or not, you skip past the guys named Winston or Nigel or James Bond and ask a guy named “Sadiq.”
Trump responded that Khan is “the twin” of NYC mayor Reinhardt Di Blasio, “only shorter.”
In Khan’s defense, a president taking that kind of shot is pretty much the definition of “punching down.”
But in Trump’s defense, how else are you going to punch a guy like Sadiq “Keebler Elf” Khan, except down? Have you seen the size of that guy? (By the way, if you’re keeping score at home, my favorite Coleridge poem is – you guessed it – “Keebler Khan.” That Coleridge was ahead of his time.)
I’m not sure about the cost/benefit calculation of Trump’s instinct to constantly punch back at all attackers, large and small. I know that most conservatives have been so starved for a candidate who will fight back that we can’t help but love him for it. But I also know that a lot of voters dislike it, and see him as a bully.
For those people, when a London mayor insults Trump and he responds, it starts to look like a Dinklage and Goliath situation. (Boom!)
To make that story even more laughable, the intrepid investigative “journalists” at NPR (by all means, let’s force taxpayers to subsidize those hacks) really outdid themselves on this story. When they heard that Trump said that Khan was, “half the height” of Di Blasio, they leapt into action.
In an interview, NPR reporter Frank Langfitt said, “One difference, Trump said, between the two mayors, he said that Khan is only half the height of de Blasio.” Then he dropped the bombshell, which I swear I am not making up: “That’s not true. Mayor Khan is 5 foot 6.”
You just know that NPR threw all of their resources into nailing down that story. A three-reporter team established that Di Blasio is 6’ 5” while the Editor-in-Chief turned to their most valuable source – Wikipedia – to discover that Khan is 5’6”.
Then, amidst the clacking of an abacus, a white board was filled with formulae:
“half of 6’5” is around 3 feet.” (“around” gets crossed out, replaced with “a little more than”)
“5’6” is taller than 3 feet”
“Are you sure?”
“Somebody check that!”
“There’s NO TIME TO CHECK! We need to go to press with this immediately!”
Great job, NPR! You may have missed stories like Bill Clinton raping one aide and assaulting many others, and Obama using the IRS against his political enemies, and Hillary paying for a false Russian dossier to accuse Trump of working with Russians.
But when the chips were down and the fate of a nation was on the line, you broke the “5’6 is more than half of 6’5” story wide open!
Look for NPR’s next blockbuster story in October: “Trump says he could ‘eat a horse,’ yet our investigation shows that he only had a salad! Impeach him!”
Finally, in the “Martacus Moral Equivalency Round-up,” I have two stories for you.
Last week the Democrat-dominated New York state assembly passed a bill outlawing the declawing of cats, which legislators called “brutal.” They noted that it causes pain for the cat, and is done only for the owners’ convenience, to prevent cats from scratching furniture.
(For the record, I agree with that bill. We have three cats, and although none of them are at the level of greatness achieved by Cassie the Wonder Dog (obviously), I love them, and the scratched-up furniture in our house demonstrates our commitment on this issue.)
The second story involves our always-stable friends at PETA, who celebrated “World Oceans Day” by releasing a video in defense of oysters, noting that, “Bivalves are animals that deserve our consideration and should never be eaten or used in any other way.”
The video highlights the damage that evil, oyster-eating humans do to the mollusk-American community, pointing out that, “Their shells are torn open and their bodies are cut up,” and that, “Oysters can sense danger and hide inside their shells.”
PETA also used the occasion to throw in a little extra nagging about those who like to fish or eat fish, reminding us that, “Fish are sentient individuals who feel pain.”
So to recap, our leftist moral betters want you to know that you should never de-claw a cat out of a selfish desire for convenience or couch-preservation, and that oysters should not be torn from their shells or cut up, and that fish feel pain, so you can’t catch them.
Also, you’re a patriarchal, fascist pig if you object to aborting human babies minutes before they are born.
Because they aren’t the kind of higher life forms that have claws or have to be torn from their shells, and they can’t feel pain the way, say, a catfish does.
Got it?
Martin Simpson 