The Cautious Optimism Roving Correspondent for Affairs (and Stuff) – CORCA – is on the road, and posting a column late.
I’ve spent the last four days traveling to see an old grad school buddy in Phoenix, so I’ve only been able to catch bits and pieces of the news amid some cool desert hikes and taking a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West architectural studio/compound.
As I’ve been trying to keep up on Ukraine and rooting for the Ukrainians, I find myself looking back on the past year, partially with relief, despite the damage from a year of the Biden administration. As he took office, I was dreading the idea that he was going to get credit for all kinds of things that he didn’t deserve, especially since the sycophantic MSM couldn’t wait to be rid of Trump, and lavish praise on their guy.
And that’s how it should logically have gone. He had an amazing opportunity handed to him on a silver platter – vaccines that minimize covid hospitalizations and death, low inflation, a first-ever state of energy independence, and an economy that had been artificially repressed b/c of a pandemic, and so was poised for a barn-burning fiscal comeback.
It was a classic case of being born on third base and getting credit for having hit a triple. All Biden had to do was stand there like a barely animated corpse – his strong suit! — and not do anything to prevent the nascent rebound that was sure to happen.
But he could not pull that off. In the immortal words of Obama, saying the only wise thing he ever said, “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”
I’m a big enough man to admit that I did underestimate that, and I now stand corrected.
Not only did Joey Gaffes screw all of that up: he found new things to screw up. The loons on the far left of his party have given him one chance after another to have his own Sister Soulja moment – an opportunity to stand against their loopiest desires, and therefore put himself on the side of the vast majority of Americans.
They want to defund cops and release career criminals without bail while their own cities are being destroyed by those criminals. They want to support a dude swimming as a woman and crushing all of the actual women swimmers, which regular people (and a lot of his feminist base) reject. Even though these would be easy wins for a competent politician, Biden can’t take the W.
And even when he does something that most Americans would support – pulling out of Afghanistan – he finds the stupidest way possible to do it: he pulls out the soldiers while leaving the baggage train and civilians behind, and then begging our caveman enemies to allow them to get out.
And now, the call from the 1980s that Obama let go to voice mail has finally come through: Reagan’s warning about being firm with the Russians arrived. But Joe was weekending in Delaware, and when he got back to the White House, he mistook the phone for the remote control again, and during an attempt to put on Matlock, he erased all of his calls.
A day later, he told Putin that he’d be facing some super serious sanctions if he invaded Ukraine. I mean, if it was a big invasion. Obviously, if it was a minor incursion, there would be a strongly worded letter to follow.
So imagine his surprise when he woke up from a nap to see a scene on tv with a bunch of bombs falling and civilians running around screaming, “Давайте підемо Брендон.”
Which, as you Ukranian speakers know, means, “Let’s go Brandon!” in Ukranian
Continuing a trend that will not surprise anyone who has been paying attention to our European betters in the UN, the EU, the WHO, etc. the European elites have fared no better in preparing for Putin’s latest gambit than they did in preparing for covid, or an influx of third world immigrants, or panzers coming down through the Ardennes.
How can that be, you ask? After being outsmarted by Xi and rolled over by Hitler and driven into a fetal ball by the USSR, how could they not be ready for Putin’s old-school KGB tactics?
I think I may have found a clue, when I happened to catch a little top-shelf bloviating by a guy named Klaus Schwab.
Though he has the name of a Bond villain, Schwab is also the top dog at the World Economic Forum in Davos – which, I feel compelled to note, could probably stand in for a bunch of central-casting Bond villains sitting around a long table in high-backed chairs, scheming nefariously.
Schwab was doing a Zoom call interview – reports that he was stroking a creepy white cat the whole time are unconfirmed — while sitting in what looked like either his office or home office or library. I had to look twice at what was on one of the bookshelves behind him.
But, and I am not making this up, just over his left shoulder was a bust of mass-murdering commie sociopath V.I. Lenin!
How does that happen?! Schwab has to know that even if – deep in the hidden recesses of his shriveled little soul — he idolizes leftist, slave state dictators, you CAN’T let people know that. How does he even buy and display a bust of Lenin in his own private home, let alone leave it there for all the world to see when he’s about to be on camera?
I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to display his moral shortcomings to the world during a Zoom call any more egregiously than Jeffrey Toobin (D, CNN) did. But almost inconceivably, Schwab found a way!
I’d rather be caught on camera pulling a Toobin, with a bust of a busty woman’s bust on my bookcase, than to be posing in front of a bust of that bloodthirsty ghoul!
Finally, in this time of world-wide threats and stress and invasions and incursions, it’s sometimes nice to be reminded of the small, human-scale stories that really bring home the nature of the big political brains that we are going to be facing off against in November.
Which brings me to 32-year-old Oklahoma Democrat House candidate Abby Broyles. Ms. Broyles took time off from campaigning to attend a Valentine’s Day weekend sleepover for a bunch of middle-school girls.
I don’t know why.
While there, she became intoxicated – as I’m sure I would, were I forced to spend a Valentine’s Day sleepover with a bunch of middle-school girls – and allegedly “berated several of the children and vomited in a hamper.”
When the story first came out, Broyles denied it. But then video was released that showed her… you guessed it… berating several children and vomiting in a hamper.
In her defense, she also insulted one girl’s acne, disparaged another’s Hispanic ethnicity, and also vomited in one of the girls’ shoes.
Wait – that’s not a defense of her at all. In fact, those details only make things worse.
Nevermind.
I’ve heard the euphemistic saying, “vomiting on your shoes” before, usually connected to the idea of someone screwing up some task in an unbelievably bad way.
As in, “AOC tried to explain supply side economics, but that was a real ‘vomiting on your shoes’ situation.”
Or, “Joe Biden tried to answer a reasonable question in a press conference, and by the time he stuttered to a close, there was much vomit on many shoes.”
Or, “I was at LAX departures when I rounded a corner and bumped into Maxine Waters just as she was taking her mask off. Naturally, I vomited on my shoes.”
But this lady brought the cliché to life. And for that, I think she is a perfect choice to represent the Dems on the big ticket next time around. So…
Avenatti/Vomiting-into-Middle-Schoolers’-Shoes Lady 2024
Martin Simpson 