Let’s start with the good news. On Thursday we removed Cassie’s cone of shame, and if the resulting 3 minutes of joyful gamboling didn’t melt your heart, that organ would have to have been as calcified and insensate as Imhotep Pelosi’s botoxed facial muscles, or Bill Clinton’s conscience.
I then took Cassie up to TN to visit my mom, sister, brother-in-law, and Cassie’s two dog-cousins, Edgar (“Eddie”) and Raven. (Yes, my sister loves her some Edgar Allan Poe!) They’ve got a huge yard, much of which is fenced in, and can be reached by means of a wooden, dog-width ramp that runs from their second-story deck down into the yard.
If there’s a better way to start a bracingly cold morning than drinking a cup of coffee in the free state of Tennessee while watching those three dogs racing up and down that ramp and then chasing each other around the yard with reckless abandon, I don’t know what it is.
And now to the bad news. Joe Biden (RIP) gave a two-hour press conference, and in doing so, answered the question of the day: “Why don’t the corpse-wranglers in the White House allow Joey Gaffes to give more two-hour press conferences?”
A better question might be, “Why don’t we give 6-year-olds caffeinated drinks spiked with methamphetamine, and then give them the keys to SUVs and allow them to do donuts in a parking lot crammed full of other hyped-up children and puppies? And oh yeah, the 6-year-old drivers have dementia, for some reason.”
By now, you’ve all seen the same press conference excerpts I have. Because no matter how much we all want to, we can’t look away.
In a field rich with contenders, here are my low-lights from Brandon’s Big Adventure:
1.It’s hard not to start with the incoherent ramblings on Russia that boiled down to, “Let me hold your coat, Vlad, while you enjoy your minor incursion into Ukraine.”
Hacky Psaki tried to clean that up the next day, but the duplicitous Ginger Snap didn’t do much better than her boss. She insisted that Biden didn’t mean what he clearly said, and that, “Our allies know where the president stands.”
Yes, they do. That’s why the head honcho of the Ukraine posted a quick video statement/plea for help during which he looked like the twitchy, paranoid South Park character Tweek, while in the background government officials were throwing themselves out of windows or trying to strangle themselves with lamp cords.
2. Biden is really not good with rhetorical questions, as he proved when he got fed up with the mildest of critical questions about his manifestly disastrous first year: “Can you think of any other president that has done as much in one year? Name one for me. I’m serious. You guys talk about how nothing has happened. I don’t think there’s been much on any incoming president’s plate that’s been a bigger menu than the plate I had given to me.”
First, a plate is not a menu. Second, no waiter ever gave you a menu on a plate. They bring you the menu first. Then you order the food. Then they take the menu away from you, and THEN – and follow closely here – they bring you the food.
On a plate.
Second, that’s not how rhetorical questions are supposed to work. Can we name a president with a better first year than yours?
YES! ALL of them! And I’m including the guy who caught pneumonia at his inaugural speech and died within a month.
In fact, my 8th grade class president had a better first year than yours. And she was unable to keep ANY of her campaign promises: We didn’t get a longer recess, or a ban on meatloaf from the school menu, or new bleachers at the gym to replace the rickety old ones. And our school fight song was not changed to Foghat’s “Slow Ride.”
And yet, compared to you, Susie was a cross between Metternich, Disraeli, and Pitt the Elder!
3. Not content with posing one laughably counter-productive rhetorical question, Biden teed up another one. Trying to deflect from his lack of achievements, Biden snarled, “Think about this: What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.”
To which all Republicans, most independents and even many face-palming Dems yelled at their tvs, “A secure border! Throwing criminals in jail! The second amendment! Eliminating vax and mask mandates! Standing up to Putin and the Chicoms! Less inflation, lower gas prices, banning dudes from women’s bathrooms and swimming competitions, firing Fauci…”
Before they all ran out of oxygen and passed out, less than halfway through the obvious answers to Biden’s idiotic question.
4. Biden even managed to undermine the Dems’ great article of faith: it is a treasonous attack on democracy to question the legitimacy of an election! (Never mind that Hillary did that for four years after she lost, and Stacy Abrams still pretends to be the governor of Georgia, and many Dems still say that Gore beat Bush…)
When reporters gave Biden several chances to dig out of his claim that unless his vote-fraud-enabling bill is passed, future elections will be illegitimate, he seemed unable to even understand the question. Twice he went back to discussing 2020, and reporters had to remind him that the question was about the 2022 midterms. Which are in the future.
Even then, he insisted on doing what he condemned Trump for having done, but went much further. It was terrible for Trump to have questioned an election that included many fishy incidents (in Philly, Atlanta, WI, AZ, etc.), but it’s just fine for Joey Gaffes to pre-emptively claim that FUTURE elections will be illegitimate, before they’ve even happened!
D’oh!
On my drive back home from TN, I listened to Andrew Klavan’s latest podcast, during which he used a great analogy for the Democrats’ current blindness to their situation, comparing it to what pilots call a “graveyard spin.”
I got my pilot’s license about 18 years ago, and trained in and flew several planes before selling my part of a Cessna 182 a few years ago. Spin recovery was the scariest part of flight training, and doing it “under the hood” (i.e. with no visual references) was the toughest, because it required you to trust your instruments over your own senses.
In the early stages of a spin, you might be banking at a 30 degree angle, but your senses tell you that you’re flying straight and level. So you continue along as the bank angle increases, until you enter a spin, and finally a graveyard spin, from which you can’t recover.
Klavan’s analogy is perfect: Biden and the true-believing, hard-core leftist Dems’ senses are lying to them. They think that defunding cops won’t increase crime, and printing trillions of dollars won’t increase inflation, and smearing all whites as racists won’t produce push-back, and pretending men are women isn’t crazy.
They’ve spent the last 12 months in an increasingly steep bank, but they think their wings are level. They’re under the hood – if by “under the hood” you mean “experiencing a cranial-rectal inversion” – and they’re not interested in what the instruments are trying to tell them.
Everything’s fine. Biden’s had the best first year of any president ever. This inflation is transitory, and Que Mala is historic, and Mayor Pete’s doing a great job with the supply chain. The fifth booster is going to make covid go away forever. Manchin and Sinema are going to come around if we just attack them more.
And it’s not just Joe. Pelosi actually said this commie gobbledy gook (I miss Norm!) last week: “Here’s the thing, I say to my members on a regular basis when we gather in caucus … I’ve said to them, under this roof figuratively or actually, is the greatest collection of intellect, integrity, and imagination for doing the right thing for the American people.”
They’re in a graveyard spin with their hands over their ears and their eyes tightly closed, and they’re going to corkscrew into the ground in November.
It’s been a long 4 years and it’s only been 52 weeks.
Avenatti/Susie the 8th Grader, 2024!
Martin Simpson 