This has been another Dickensian week: it’s been the best of times, and the worst of times.
Let’s start with the best:
1.Brian Stelter – have I mentioned that he looks like a giant, dishonest, human thumb? – is out at CNN.
There’s been some kind of a management shake-up over there, and apparently it involved bringing in someone who could decipher ratings. That poor sap then had to start the next monthly meeting by breaking the news that they were getting beaten by the North Korean Soccer channel, C-SPAN 8, and the Watching Paint Dry Network.
This is one of those times when I wish my column had video excerpts and sound bites, because we could all use a montage of Stelter’s lowlights, possibly with a Benny Hill soundtrack playing underneath it.
Laughably wrong predictions (“This is the beginning of the end for Trump!” parts 1-289), egregious lies, slavish adherence to banal leftist talking points, an utter lack of charisma and the capacity for intelligent thought – Stelter had it all!
And who can forget his crowning achievement: his Sisyphean efforts to turn third-rate con man and first-rate publicity hound Michael Avenatti into a serious presidential contender! Stelter gave the aging-pornstar-exploiter one rhetorical tongue bath after another.
My favorite Stelter quote from an Avenatti interview was when he unleashed this bit of circular “logic”: “One reason I’m taking you seriously as a contender is because of your presence on cable news.”
Never have the initials “BS” – as in, “that slanted story is a bunch of Brian Stelter!” — fit someone so well.
Godspeed on your journey into an obscurity even more obscure than hosting a CNN show, you doughy Thumbkin!
2. We won’t have Liz Cheney to kick around anymore either, after her well-deserved loss in the Wyoming primary.
And she didn’t just lose, she got destroyed! After getting 70% of the vote just two years ago, she managed to lose by 37 points.
To give you an idea of how bad that is, I only got 29% fewer votes than Cheney, and I am a terrible fundraiser, have never been to Wyoming, and was not running. Not to mention those disqualifying sex scandals in my youth!
Cheney’s concession speech was a big serving of schadenfreude a la mode, as she demonstrated that even a colossally lopsided rejection could not dent her arrogant self-image. She compared herself to Lincoln and Grant, and portrayed herself as a martyr to truth-telling about Trump, rather than as a self-serving egotist who betrayed her constituents’ trust and sided with a far-left show trial that is a much greater threat to our democracy than anything Donald Trump has done.
There are two obnoxious women named Liz in national politics, and both of them pretended to be red (#wemustneverstopmockingGrandmaSquanto). On Tuesday, the red staters in Wyoming got rid of one of those phonies.
And just to prove that the leftist talking heads have learned nothing from their self-beclowning during the “Avenatti for President” debacle, a bunch of them immediately jumped on the “Liz Cheney for President” bandwagon.
I must once again quote Proverbs: “As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly.”
3. Joe Biden (RIP) continues to make a fool of himself in entertaining ways.
At the signing ceremony for his inflation-supercharging disaster of a bill, he demonstrated yet again what the leftists mean by “following the science.”
He walked into the room with a mask on, then removed it, then coughed into his hand, and then shook everyone’s hand with his skeletal, octogenarian-covid-infested hand.
A week earlier, he was onstage with Schumer, Pelosi, and two other Dems I didn’t recognize. Schumer made some comments, and then turned to shake hands with each of the dopes on the dais. He shook Biden’s hand first, then moved to the guy to Biden’s right, then stepped past Biden to shake Pelosi’s and the other woman’s hand.
As Schumer turned back to the podium to say something vacuous, Biden held his hand out expectantly, and then looked equal parts confused and miffed when Schumer ignored him.
Watch the video, and there’s only one conclusion possible: Biden instantly forgot that he’d just shaken Schumer’s hand, and looked miffed when – in Brandon’s dementia-riddled mind – Schumer skipped shaking his hand.
I timed it, and the elapsed time between Biden’s handshake and when he put his hand out again was 4 seconds.
And this comes as part of a pattern of instances in which he finishes some comments, then turns and sticks out his hand when there is no one there to shake with.
Normally, watching a person’s mind failing and humiliating him would be cause for compassion and pity. But Biden has been such a consistently mean-spirited and mendacious hack, his problems now seem like karma.
But of course it was the worst of times, too.
As soon as we start to laugh at Biden’s miserable performances, the laughter catches in our throat: he’s wasting money and letting illegals flood in and burdening our economy, and with each passing day he’s going more damage to our country.
And he’s not going to live long enough to suffer for what he’s doing to us, and we’re going to have to pick up the pieces.
Another ominous sign of the times was the corrupt left in CA successfully scuttling the recall against crime-supporting, Soros-funded DA George Gascon.
After enough long-suffering Californians gathered 715,000 signatures on a recall petition, it looked like Gascon would suffer the same fate as his fellow crime-loving leftist ideologue Chesa Boudin, who was tossed from his job several months ago.
But that was before the evil engines of Dem machine politics got cranked up and running. Gascon’s victims needed around 570K signatures to force the recall, and they came in with 145K more than that.
But as the left has learned from their patron saints Lenin and Stalin, it’s not who votes, it’s who COUNTS the votes.
And the vote-counters retreated behind closed doors, and then came back out with a farcical result: just under 200K signatures were found to be invalid.
That’s an invalidation rate of around 27%! For comparison, during the 2020 election, CA election officials found that less than 1% of mail-in ballots were invalid.
Did you get that? When the Dems needed all of the fraud-susceptible mail-in ballots possible in 2020, almost no ballots were tossed out.
But when those same corrupticrats needed to save their toxic, criminal-friendly DA, they miraculously “found” bad signatures at a rate 2700% higher!
The only silver linings in this story are that the fraud is so blatant and obvious that any reasonable people can see through it (though not in CA, where reasonable people are thin on the ground), and that there is some kind of poetic justice in the leftist CA voters getting what they voted for… good and hard!
The rest of us need to do our best to insulate ourselves from the self-inflicted wounds that the blue states are creating for themselves, though.
I’m thinking maybe some kind of a wall…
Avenatti/Liz Cheney 2024!
Martin Simpson 