Let’s start with the bad. If you caught the press séance this past Thursday, I’m sure that you’re as troubled as I am about who is in charge of our government.
Sorry, “conference.” Press conference. Honest mistake.
Biden gave the kind of almost lifelike performance we’ve come to expect from him. For all foreign policy questions, he literally read his answers from a binder full of talking points. Remember when Romney had a binder full of women? Biden needed a binder full of hospice-care nurses.
When he wasn’t reading, he was bumbling his way through softball questions like they were Marco Pena fastballs thrown inside.
Okay, that’s probably a reference that well less than half of you will get. Marco Pena was a pitcher when I was in Little League. Despite the fact that at 11, he was only two years older than me, he had a full beard, and his heater traveled at a speed that I estimated at around Mach 2. So I decided to get closer to the plate, in an effort to make some contact as I repeatedly went down swinging.
On an unrelated note, my record of having 2 batting helmets cracked right off of my head in one Marseilles, Illinois Little League game still stands. And I barely have any cognitive deficits because of it, other than occasionally losing my train of thought.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Biden’s lethargic performance.
It was truly mortifying. When a “reporter” – and those sycophantic dopes are “reporters” the way that Cardi B is a “singer” – asked a 2-part question, Biden inevitably forgot the second part. Many times he drifted into an agonizingly long pause during the first part. Once I thought the taxidermist he travels with might send someone out with a small mirror, to hold it in front of his face and see if it fogged up.
But no such luck. The only thing foggy was his thinking.
Several times he trailed off in the middle of a response, then seemed to come back to himself, and said, “Anyway…” and then went on to the next question.
That’s not necessarily a damning verbal tic. If you’re in the middle of a long, convoluted story and lose your place, an “Anyway” is acceptable. For example:
“I took the first fastball high on the helmet, right over my left temple. After I got back up and confirmed that the ref was holding up 3 fingers, he noticed that the helmet had a 6-inch crack from front to back, and told me to take my base. Three innings later, I took a pitch right on the ear-hole of a new helmet, which cracked it vertically from the earhole to the crown. It was a little tougher to trot to first that time, because both of my pupils stayed fully dilated, I kept smelling burnt toast, and I was deaf in the left ear until Labor Day. Anyway…”
But Biden wasn’t doing that. He was getting lost in a two-sentence-fragment answer!
Soul-less stooge from CNN: “How do you plan to respond to the Trump-caused unpleasantness at the border?”
Biden’s ghost: “Borders… fine store. I support…business. Anyway…”
Stooge: “No, the Mexican border.”
Biden’s ghost: “Mexicans…fine people. That Frito guy… you know, you know the thing… the bandito. Anyway…”
And our terrible, terrible media continue to make us hate them even more. Anyone who watched that debacle knows what they saw, but the MSM insisted that Biden’s responses were “refreshing,” “normal,” and even “smart.”
Ugh. If either of my kids told me they were thinking about going into journalism, I’d shower them with brochures about the exciting opportunities available in the fields of petty theft or drug dealing.
That press conference made me look back nostalgically on last week, when all Biden did was fall up a set of stairs as he tried to get on an airplane. In fact, I realize that I missed two points when I wrote about that “Fred and Ginger” moment last week:
1.If there’s a better metaphor for Biden “winning” the presidency, I’ve never seen it. That guy started climbing the stairs to the WH, and he fell and fell and fell, and when the “votes” were “counted,” he was president.
2. Biden fell three separate times on his way up those stairs. Since some boxing rules mandate that getting knocked down three times in one round constitutes a win by the opponent on a TKO, I wonder if there’s any way we can give the contender the title of our Chief Executive?
I don’t know about you, but if at the beginning of the next presidential press conference the strains of “Hail to the Chief” were played and then – through the double doors at the end of that long hallway – a mobile staircase from the airport was wheeled toward the microphone, I would fall on my knees and weep with relief!
I think Biden’s dog had the right idea: who do we have to bite around here to be allowed to escape the ongoing dumpster fire in DC?
From the bad, we go to the good. Or at least a feel-good story.
This one comes to us from Teen Vogue, a journal of ideas that I confess I have not kept up on as I should. So as part of my research for this story, I spent 14 seconds scanning the online front page of the latest issue.
What I discovered is that I am not their target demographic, since I didn’t recognize a single name in any of the stories, with the exception of Chadwick Boseman receiving a posthumous NAACP Image Award. And I only recognized his name because I saw it one time, and it stuck in my mind as the obvious winner of the “African-American man with the whitest first name in history” award.
A few of the headlines: “Elizabeth Olsen Debuted a Major Hair Transformation,” and “Demi Lovato Says She’s ‘Too Gay to Marry a Man Right Now’!”
And suddenly, I’m not sure how being gay works. Because if she is a woman, and is gay, why would she want to marry–. Ugh, nevermind. I’m not going to start down that rabbit hole.
And if “going down the rabbit hole” is now some kind of gay slang, I honestly meant no offense.
Anyway…
(See, Joe Biden? THAT’S how you deploy an appropriate “Anyway.”)
Anyway, intellectually speaking, Teen Vogue does not exactly read like the ombudsman’s minutes from a meeting of the Algonquin Round Table. And yet it aspires to a level of serious wokeness, spending a ton of editorial time on articles such as “Lizzo and Kamala Harris Talk about the Importance of Voting,” and “Ronald Reagan Sucked, Actually.” And therein lies the rub.
The hilarious, hilarious rub.
Because earlier this month, a woman named Alexi McCammond was about to rise to become the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue. And yes, that was the most sarcastic use of “rise” that you’re likely to see this year.
But unfortunately for 27-year-old Alexi – who, judging by the picture in the story, is cute as a bug’s ear –the 17-year-old Alexi had access to Twitter. Which means that she tweeted some comments that would offend somebody somewhere, assuming that somebody had a completely empty life, and/or wanted Alexi’s job.
Enter Christine Davitt, a little charmer who refers to herself as, and I quote, “a queer fat filipinx femme in Brooklyn.” So you know she’s just a barrel of laughs on a first date.
Cruelly enough, the Federalist piece about this story posted two large, side-by-side photos of cutie Alexi and… Christine. Before you can call that up, DON’T. I’ve already experienced the trauma from seeing this – I’d rank it just below taking a Marco Pena fastball in the ear hole, for those of you scoring at home – so there’s no reason for you to do so, too.
Suffice it to say: Disturbing haircut. Drawn-on, high-peaked eyebrows of a witch from a Disney cartoon. Ring piercing the front of her nose like you might see on an enraged bull in a Disney cartoon. (Also, though you can’t tell from the pic, probably as goofy as Goofy. From a Disney cartoon.)
To sum it up, I’d rather have a close encounter with Stephen King’s demon-possessed car named Christine, than with this Christine.
Anyway… (again! Boom!), you can probably guess the rest of the story. Christine digs up Alexi’s teenage tweets, and uses them to throw her under the bus. Alexi announces her resignation from the job she hadn’t yet started. Christine tweets in celebration.
But then comes the sweet, sweet karmic arse whooping. Because it turns out that in a 13-year-old tweet, Christine twice referred to a white friend as a “ni**a.” And for the record, the word in question is not “ninja.” A year later, she also used the non-ninja term in a joke tweet.
And I agree: THAT’S funny! Because Christine scrambled to make her Twitter private and hunkered down in the face of a fusillade of criticism. That was a week ago, and I can’t find any info on whether she’s resigned or been canned yet.
In these insane times, that situation might reflect the struggle to decide if the superpower of being a “fat, queer filipinx” – again, her words — can overcome the effects of also being a terrible, hypocritical creep of a human being.
Regardless, Christine is now learning the lesson that I hope all woke hypocrites soon get the chance to learn.
In the slightly edited words of German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller, “First they came for Dr. Suess, and since I wasn’t a children’s book writer, I did not speak out. Then they came for Mr. Potato Head, and because I was not a patriarchal, tuber-based plastic toy, I did not speak out. Then they came for the fat, queer filipinx-es – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Avenatti/Mobile Airport Staircase, 2024!
Martin Simpson 