Before I get started, you may remember that last week I had the brainstorm of cutting in some of Joe Biden’s last-debate “Come on”s into the Beatles’ “Please please me.” Well, CO nation came through – hat trip to Brian, who sent me this short MP4 version of Biden singing a Beatles chorus with the Fab 4, which I’ve posted on this page, under the title, “Beatles-Biden.”
If you’ve seen some of Joey Gaffes’ recent word salad incident, you can probably guess that he’d also do a great job with other nonsense excerpts, such as “I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.”
On a more serious note, I really don’t know what to think about this election.
As much as I don’t trust the polls to not tilt left to some degree, I also don’t want to delude myself by just dismissing them out of hand. (They were largely right in 2018, 2014 and 2012, and they were just outside of the margin of error even in 2016.) If they show a 2-3 point lead for Biden in any given state, I can see Trump picking that one up. If they show Biden up by 7-8, I can’t feel sanguine about that state.
On the other hand, there are so many reasons that argue against believing that Biden will win. The gigantic, frenzied Trump rallies vs. the handful of goofballs parked in a defunct drive-in movie theatre in their insane-political-bumper-sticker-plastered Priuses. Larger-than-usual support for Trump from blacks and Hispanics. Joey Gaffe’s “Weekend at Biden’s” somnambulant performances on the stump. (Have you noticed that Biden has not been seen on an actual stump? That’s because the difficulty involved in distinguishing the stump from the candidate.)
Not to mention the “shy Trump voters.” Who are logically shy about their vote, given the Dems’ nationwide orgy of violence, vandalism and bullying of anyone who disagrees with them.
So I don’t know what to expect tomorrow, and I’m more than a little depressed that this election could even be close. Many conservatives like me were afraid that Trump was a lifelong Dem and not a committed student of conservative principles, and I’ve been thrilled to see how wrong I was, at least about his governance. He’s gotten more conservative goals done – tax and regulation cuts, originalist judges, a little on the wall at least, a booming economy, our embassy moved to Jerusalem, reversing foreign policy blunders of Obama and those before him, droning terrorists, etc.
He’s blown out the budget, but every president on both sides has done that, and the worst of the deficits have come because of the pandemic – and I can’t picture a scenario in which any president would have held the line any better, or spent less.
For centrists and reasonable lefties (I know: all 14 of them), he certainly has not turned out to be the extremist or power-hungry autocrat whom they said they feared. Surely you can only call someone an orange Hitler for so long before he’s either got to start rounding up some Jews and dissidents, or you have to realize that you were wildly wrong.
Beyond all that, the left has been so terrible this year that I can’t believe a majority of Americans will vote for them. The left has either explicitly or tacitly condoned violent, America-hating race riots for almost 6 months now. They have leapt at the chance to micro-manage the lives of everyone with the misfortune to live in one of the blue cities or states that they run.
The latest example comes from Gavin Newsom, certain to make the podium in the “Worst Governor in America” competition. (And that’s knowing that Cuomo, Whitmer, and the “Round Mound of No Economic Rebound” Pritzker from Illinois are also in the mix!)
Newsom recently came out with idiotic lefty rules for Thanksgiving that are almost too bizarre to be believed: Everyone must have their Thanksgiving meal outside, and the gathering may last no more than 2 hours. He prefers that there be no singing or shouting, but if you must do that, he says to do it quietly. (I’m waiting for Gavin to issue some instructions on how one can shout quietly, the numbskull.)
The good news is that he will grudgingly allow you to go inside to use the bathroom… but only if it is sanitized frequently.
Thank God for our moral betters telling me how to celebrate Thanksgiving. Because traditionally I like to just step away from the patio table, defecate in the front yard, wipe myself with a festive pine bough (carefully!), and then sit down again and pour some gravy through the mask that Newsom wants me to wear.
If the American people really vote for these guys, I am tempted to start going around to every house with a Biden sign and “celebrate Thanksgiving” in their front yard, Newsom-style!
So I don’t have any bold predictions for this election-eve column. Instead, I’m going to examine an example of how NOT to approach a high-stakes, alarming election like this one.
Let me introduce to you (if you haven’t already seen this story) a lovely little leftist lass (alliteration for the win, Alex!) known on TikTok as “Erleepen.” This little ghoul relates a tale through a series of note cards that she holds up to the camera:
“My 55 year-old conservative dad has never voted Democrat in his life. He’s dying of Aplastic Anemia. We’ve had some intense exchanges about him voting for Trump this year, which has been painful, since we’ll almost certainly lose him in the next few weeks/months. He has 6 daughters who love him dearly.”
The terrible daughter then smiles as she shows a card announcing that “yesterday” her dad “was so excited to tell me he’d just voted for Biden/Harris 2020!”
‘Erleepen’ says her father told her that he voted Biden – apparently casting aside his own political beliefs in the process – because “it matters to my girls and my girls matter to me.”
The video ends with a call to arms: “Vote for the guy who respects women! If my very Republican dad can…So. Can. You.”
I’m not going to comment on the case she makes for Biden.
Well, except to say that calling him “the guy who respects women??!” C’mon, man!
If we ever get back to working in person, and I ever came into my office and saw a half dozen female colleagues and employs in a group, and if I then went around that group and alternately sniffed their hair, rubbed their shoulders, and gave them the Biden “up-the-skirt high-five,” do you know what sentence would appear in NONE of their testimony at the emergency HR meeting that would immediately be called?
“I think we can all agree that Martin REALLY respects women!”
But other than that, I’m not going to comment on the case that she makes.
Instead I’m going to comment on how badly she is missing the point of life, and of politics.
I’m a bit of a political junkie, as most of you are. But my interest in politics takes a back seat to many other areas of life: my religion, my family, my work, my virtual family at the CO site, sports, good fiction, Wonder Dog ownership, etc. and etc.
In fact, politics only means anything to me because of the way it impacts many more important areas of life. Since I value my rights to speak and to worship and to defend myself and my family with a gun, and since I’m fond of my country and running my own life, I would like to see no Democrats in a position of national power for the next century or so, at least.
I would also like to be left alone by a bunch of micro-managing statists who hate my guts because of my skin color and my gender and my political beliefs. And also, for all I know, for my rapier wit, animal magnetism, and catlike grace.
For all of those reasons and more, if Biden does win tomorrow, I’m going to have some dark days for a while. But not too dark, and not for too long. Because life is too short to make politics the center of it.
But life is never shorter than when a loved one is dying. And to spend that precious time browbeating your dying dad about politics? Are you kidding me?!
Longtime readers of this column will know that my world-class dad died in December of 2014. (I’ve written and re-run a tribute to him, which you can find in a Father’s Day column from this last June at Martinsimpsonwriting.com, if you are interested.) Dad had cancer, and when we found out in August that a surgery hadn’t worked, and the cancer has metastasized, I made sure that I spent as much time with him as possible.
I had a T-R teaching schedule in north central Florida, and every Thursday after class I loaded Cassie the Wonder Dog into the minivan and drove up to mom and dad’s house south of Nashville, returning to Florida on Monday evening so I could teach again. In November, when he was finally in the homestretch, my colleagues at work pitched in to handle my classes so that I could stay in TN with him and mom, and just do my grading from a distance.
Those months with dad were a great gift. All of us are dying, but we all knew that dad’s days were truly numbered, and that made each of them precious to us. Although we always had a great relationship, he and I spent more time together in his last 4 months than we had in the past 12 years. We talked about God, and what he wanted my sister and I to do to make sure that mom was looked after and taken care of. We watched DVDs of the sermons he missed because he couldn’t make it to church, along with some football games, and Jeopardy. We played cards and we told jokes, and he held court with a steady stream of visitors from all eras of his life, but mostly his church friends from Tennessee.
I took a video camera, and during those last months I recorded about 4 hours of him reminiscing and telling stories about his childhood and family and life.
You know what we did NOT talk about, and what we never would have talked about in those circumstances, in a million years? WHO HE WAS SUPPOSED TO VOTE FOR! (Cue Sam Kinison if he were a hospice worker: OH! OOOOHHHHH!)
I can’t even imagine bothering my dying dad about politics, under any circumstances. But to strong arm him into voting for Joe friending Biden??!!
What could that sad woman have possibly said to her poor father? “Hey dad, you and Joe Biden really have a lot in common! I mean, he’s almost dead, and you’re almost dead, right? And he’s called a lid on his campaign, and you’ve called a lid on your life. And with your morphine drip, you often don’t know where you are, or what year it is, either!”
“And you know how mom used to always call you a racist rapist, and then haunt you with that horrible, braying laugh of hers? Joe’s got that, too!”
Ugh.
I really hope that her dad just humored his small-minded daughter, and voted for Trump anyway. And I think we should pray for her soul.
And also that she is very, very disappointed on election day.
Get out there and vote, people!
Martin Simpson 