As another Thanksgiving is almost here, I am grateful for CO, COW and Laura Belveal, along with the entire CO nation for the chance to get to meet you – most only from a distance, but some in person in Denver last year. It has been great fun to have a place to rant and mock and celebrate and commune with a lot of smart, good-hearted people. In a society that sometimes seems to be losing its mind and its way, it’s a great consolation to know that you all are out there, fighting the good fight, thinking things through, and appreciating a good joke from time to time. God bless you all, and I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Having said all of that sincerely, let me now turn to the goat rodeo that was the Democrat debate this past week, which I haven’t had the chance to comment on because I was too busy skewering the insane impeachment three-ringer.
You know that a Dem debate was bad when even Saturday Night Live felt compelled to mock the candidates, and managed to do so through some actually insightful barbs. They’ll never savage a lefty pol the way they routinely do all right-wingers, but they got some shots in that cast light on some of the candidates’ real-life weaknesses. Woody Harrelson’s Biden was frank about the candidate’s gaffe-prone inanity, the guy who played Spartacus made him look almost as dumb as he is in real life, and the callow ‘tweener Mayor Pete in his communion suit had the ring of truth. The other minor candidates – Harris, Klobuchar, Steyer – came across as accurately vapid.
Kate McKinnon has Grandma Squanto and her energetic grandma/con artist/social justice warrior act down pat. And Larry David IS Bernie Sanders AS the 1000-year-old Socialist IN “Let Me Run Your Life, and Give me My Senior Citizen’s Discount, Part 2.”
The strangest part of the actual debates was how the candidates mostly didn’t tear into each other as if they were actually trying to defeat an opponent and win the nomination. In such a target-rich environment, where every candidate has such dramatic, obvious and mockable flaws, it’s baffling why not even the long-shot candidates were willing to throw caution to the wind and go all in. After all, what do they have to lose?
Is Kamala Harris afraid that her 0.7% support is going to plummet to 0.5% if she gets aggressive? Is Cory “I call myself Spartacus” Booker worried that he might lose his dignity? Does Andrew Yang risk having people notice that he’s a Dem candidate for president?
One of my favorite moments was Joey Gaffe’s amazingly tone-deaf answer about violence against women and sexual harassment. After a little boilerplate about how he’s written legislation to fix it, and how we must all change the culture, Biden said, and I swear I am not making this up, “We have to keep punching at it, and punching at it, and punching at it.” When the audience began to laugh at that insanely inappropriate figure of speech given the context, he noticed, and said, “No, I really mean it.”
We know, Joe. That’s what scares us.
Think about that answer! Someone asks how we should deal with violence and sexual harassment, and Biden’s response is that we need to beat the hell out of it, striking it over and over again.
I guess we can be thankful that he didn’t also directly address the second part of the question, about sexual harassment. Because you know that would have gone something like this:
“Well, we’ve got to let the issue know that we’re never going to stop pursuing it. Sometimes we’ll confront it head-on, walking up to it and grasping it firmly in both hands, and telling it that we won’t take no for an answer. Other times we may sneak up on it from behind, using the element of surprise. We need to let sexual harassment know that every breath it takes, every move it makes, we’ll be watching it. In conclusion, I guess my main message to sexual harassment is that, ‘We are coming for you, and we’re never going to stop. We’ll never stop texting, we’ll never stop calling. We know where you live, and where you work, and when your boyfriend is out of town. We’re going to counter your every move, and beat the pants off of you, until you know who’s boss. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to have a cigarette while I wait for my next question…. On an unrelated note, why is everyone looking at me like that?”
By the way, technically, THAT guy is still the front-runner. Which is why the Dems have more motivation than ever to try to impeach Trump, instead of just trying to beat him in the election.
Elizabeth Warren didn’t do unusually terribly in the debate, but she did manage to put her moccasin in it outside of the debate. #wemustneverstopmockingher. When an African-American woman and school choice advocate said that she’d read that Grandma Squanto sent her own kids to private schools, Warren corrected her, “No, I sent my kids to public schools.”
Warren must never have heard of the old adage, “Facts are stubborn things.” (Or however that is translated into Iroquois.) Because a little digging turned up that while her daughter – to protect her identity, I’m going to call her “Running Deer” — did go to public schools, her son – I’m going with “Samoset Warren” — did not. One of her poor campaign aides, when confronted with the question, said that Warren’s son did go to public schools “until the 5th grade.”
So I guess we are to conclude that maybe young Samoset dropped out of formal education after 5th grade to go on a vision quest into the Black Hills and get in touch with the Great Spirit’s path for his life? Or did he just go to an elite private school from 6th grade on?
If you answered the former, you may be smart enough to run for the Dem nomination.
So what do we know about Elizabeth Warren’s life story? She is an Indian maiden, raised on the various crab dish recipes from her native Oklahoma, who got zero affirmative action advantage from her Native heritage in her pursuit of a teaching gig at Harvard, and who was fired from an early teaching job by a patriarchal sexist pig because she was pregnant. Also, her son Samoset went to public schools, where he was undoubtably mocked and bullied because of his dark skin and his buckskin clothing and bear-claw jewelry.
In conclusion, #wemustneverneverneverstopmockingher.
In a move that should be beneath me – but really, not that much is beneath me, if I see a joke in there somewhere – I’ve actually been enjoying the speculation about the jam that Mummified-American Nancy Pelosi has gotten herself into by letting the impeachment hearings go this far. If the Dems don’t actually have an impeachment vote in the House, they’ll be tacitly admitting how disastrous the attempt was; their base will be 28% more livid than usual, and Trump will pound them about their failed impeachment from here until election day.
If they do hold an impeachment vote, they will manage to impeach, but almost certainly with less Dem votes than they had going in – which most non-partisan observers will see as at least a quasi-indictment of their goofy hearings.
And then comes what might be a great karmic comeuppance, if the GOP boneheads in the senate don’t manage to blow it: a real impeachment trial, with the Chinless Cartoon Turtle in charge. And you know that Cocaine Mitch is going to turn this into an exercise in political water torture for the Dems. He won’t have to do anything under-handed or cut any ethical corners, the way Schiff did. He can just conduct a fair and transparent trial, which will be devastating to the Dems.
To determine whether Trump was justified in thinking that the Ukrainian government was corrupt, Mitch will have to call Biden’s son, and that can’t go well for the sibling’s-widow-jumper. Either he testifies, and has to explain how a dope like him could legitimately be worth 50 large per month as a Ukrainian energy consultant. Or he pleads the Fifth, and sits there sweating like a sex worker in church while some GOP lawyer asks questions like, “Can you find Ukraine on a map?” or “How many fingers am I holding up?”
Or, “Your dead brother’s wife? Really?! You couldn’t find a random waffle house waitress to cheat on your wife with?”
McConnell can also call all of the witnesses the Dems either didn’t call, or whose testimony they suppressed, which will both completely undermine the case Schiff tried to build, and reveal the sleaziness of the Dems’ phony outrage. Best of all, he can call the whistleblower, and reveal what everyone in Washington knows but won’t say: the guy is not an impartial patriot who just wanted to protect the country, but a Trump-hating lefty hack who colluding with Schiff and his hatchet men to get the whole mess started.
And then McConnell can put Schiff himself on the stand. That guy’s mewling, bug-eyed sweat act made him look like a serial killer, perpetually on the verge of breaking and telling the cops that the women’s bodies are buried in his mother’s dirt-floor basement – and that was when HE held the gavel! Can you imagine how it’s going to go when he’s in the dock?
If McConnell plays his cards right, he could wipe the floor with the bad-faith mooks on the other side. As an added bonus, he’ll tie-up the Dem presidential candidates/senators for weeks in a political bloodbath in DC, while they desperately want to be in Iowa and New Hampshire, pandering to primary voters with their grab-bag of unsustainable give-aways and appealing to their base instincts by inflaming their envy and hatred for their fellow countrymen.
Sweet merciful crap! If Nancy Pelosi was capable of making a human facial expression, I’ve got to think that she’d be looking pretty worried right about now.
Big picture: the Russia hoax didn’t work, and now the Ukraine molehill didn’t work. I can only speculate that the Dems are going through pseudo-scandals in alphabetical order.
So I guess that that means that they’ll be looking into phone calls to Uruguay next, with Zambia on deck, and Zimbabwe hopefully hitting clean-up.
The only person I can think of who had a week that was even close to as terrible as the congressional Dems’ – other than Jeffrey Epstein, who definitely did not kill himself – is Elon Musk, who staged a photo-op of a prototype truck that was supposed to be able to withstand a direct nuclear strike. Yet when an underling tossed a velvet-soft peach at it – underhand — its windows shattered. Twice.
The Dem impeachment hearings ended just like that. Except that if those hearings were a proto-type truck, their windows wouldn’t have just broken. The entire truck would have been spider-webbed by a series of lightning-fast cracks, and then splintered into a million shards. And just as those shards hit the ground, they would burst into flames. And then the resulting fireball would explode outwards, immolating all of the sleazy hack politicians within lying distance.
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!
Avenatti/Schiff 2020!
Martin Simpson 