We’ve got a Speaker, Gaetz and Bowman are Still Dopes, & a Canadian Pol Eats an Apple and Whips a Hack Journalist (posted 11/3/23)

Now that I’m back home and into the normal swing of things again, I’m going to briefly mention a few stories that I hadn’t gotten to, before moving on. 

First, I really like what I’m seeing out of Mike Johnson as Speaker so far.  His first official move was a hat-trick:

–he supported Israel (which is manifestly the right thing to do)

–he put up a stand-alone bill that split the aid to Israel off from yet more aid to Ukraine (which I don’t think is necessarily wrong, but which requires much more scrutiny)

–and he proposed a perfect way to “pay for” it (nothing in DC is truly paid for by anyone other than taxpayers) by taking the unspent cash that was earmarked to hire 87,000 more locusts – er, IRS agents – to harry and harass said taxpayers. 

To top that off, he got a dozen Dems who aren’t insane enough to have “I love Hamas” tramp-stamps to sign onto the bill.  So now the Dems in the narrowly divided Senate will have to go on the record by either passing the bill or passively aiding Hamas.

And when an aide wakes the Cadaver in Chief (He’s joined the choir invisible!) and reads the now-bipartisan bill to him, Biden will face a dilemma:

“Do I do the right and popularly supported thing, even though it gives the GOP a win and angers the jihadi, Jew-hating, pro-atrocity wing of my party, or do I…  do I…  you know.  You know the thing.  What was I…….. Anyway…”   

But I still don’t care for Matt Gaetz, who is very lucky that the bonehead GOP’s three-week rake-stomping contest ended with them accidentally making what so far looks like a good pick for Speaker. 

IMHO, it was the height of hubris for Gaetz – who has a mixed record on conservative issues – to let his personal pique at McCarthy lead him to overthrow a reasonably effective GOP speaker in a narrowly divided House with no plan or alternative speaker in mind to replace him. 

Whoa!  Before any of my more always-Trumpy comrades throw rocks at me, I ask you to remember two facts:

1. Gaetz voted with 100% of the Democrats and against 96% of the Republicans on that issue.  (As bad as many in the GOP can be and often are, they have NEVER collectively been as terrible as the wretched hive of scum and villainy that makes up 100% of the Dems in congress.)

2. McCarthy was Trump’s hand-picked choice for Speaker, getting his full-throated endorsement earlier this very year.  So unless you’re suggesting that Trump would disloyally throw his former ally under the bus, or that he exhibited poor judgment in an endorsement—

Oh, wait.

The only other thing that I wish would have come out of the speaker fight was raising the bar on the number of GOP votes required to throw a speaker out.  It’s a recipe for continuing chaos to allow only a tiny rump caucus of 4% of GOP members to topple a Speaker.  If you can’t get at least a quarter or a third of your party to support you (and your Democrat allies) in an overthrow, you need to think twice.

This time it was supposedly 5 “conservatives” who took down the speaker.  (I’m not buying it, especially since the most conservative members, including Roy and Massie among others, voted to keep McCarthy.)  But we all know that there are way more than 5 mushy GOP moderates in the House. 

Do we REALLY want to give a tiny number of those people the ability to throw out our Speaker anytime they get mad about anything at all?        

Second, Jamaal Bowman took a plea and paid a fine for pulling a fire alarm in a lame attempt to stop a House vote.  Sure, that’s a ridiculously lenient punishment for trying to disrupt the legitimate functions of the congress, which the left has been telling us since 1/6/21 constitutes high treason and insurrection, and is thus worthy of years in prison.

But we can see to it that this incident will eternally besmirch his reputation. 

Now Bowman has joined the ignominious ranks of Democrats whose obituaries will begin by referring to a solitary moment in their lives of such sublime stupidity and/or dishonesty that they will be a laughingstock forever.

He takes his place beside Hank Johnson (D-uh), the dope who feared that adding more personnel to our military base in Guam might make the island tip over,

…and Eric Swalwell, the idiot who fell for Fang Fang the Chi-Com who promised to love him long time,

…and Liz Warren, the winner of “Miss Cherokee Cheekbones of 1976” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Third, a Canadian member of Parliament (and, God willing, the future replacement for Black-face Trudeau) with the ridiculous name Pierre Poilievre provided a textbook example of how to wrong-foot a simpering, bad-faith, leftist “journalist.”

The biased hack rolled out the usual dishonest question-framing: many people say that you’re an extremist populist who is taking a page out of Donald Trump’s book, and appealing to voters’ emotions with ideological language, blah blah blah.   

But P-squared didn’t let him get away with any of it, challenging every bogus charge:

Hack Journalist (HJ): Many people say…

Double-P (DP): What people?

HJ: I don’t know, some people.

D-P: Well you asked the question, don’t you know who?

HJ: homina homina. They say you’re a populist—

D-P: What do you mean by that?

HJ: I guess that you use emotional language—

D-P: Like what?

HJ: I guess like “left wing” and “right wing”—

D-P: I never really talk about left and right.

HJ: Anyways, they say you’re taking a page out of Trump’s book—

D-P: What page?  Can you give me a page?

By the end, the poor jerk was left stuttering and staring at the ground, and when P-squared finally asked him exactly what his question was, all he had left was, “I guess, why should people vote for you?”

It was an “emperor has no clothes” moment for the interviewer, and the exposure was NOT a good look for him. 

And Pierre did it all while casually eating an apple! 

That doesn’t sound very impressive, but when you watch the video, it is incredibly cool.  He ate that apple the way tough guys in old movies used to smoke a cigarette: it simultaneously gave him something to do with his hands, and a way to demonstrate an insouciant disdain for his opponent.   (It reminded me of an old joke: “Don’t smoke, kids. …unless you want to look really, really cool!”)

The only thing the apple didn’t allow him to do was blow smoke in the guy’s face.  But I guess he could have finished the apple at the same time he finished off the “journalist,” and then beaned the guy in the head with the apple core. 

All of our candidates should study that video, and then start carrying an apple with them everywhere, waiting for the chance to rhetorically de-pants the first lefty smear-artist who tries to ambush them.    

Speaking of morally ugly self-exposure, it’s been instructive to see how completely academia has revealed itself to be a home to some really terrible, anti-Semitic terrorism enthusiasts and bigots.  From tearing down posters of kidnapped Jews to screaming genocidal slogans to attacking Jewish students on the streets and in libraries, the academic left has revealed their rotten core more effectively than a thousand conservative jeremiads could ever have done.

Regular readers will know that I retired from academia a year and a half ago, and look how it’s plummeted downhill since then!  I’m not saying that my leaving was the lynchpin moment that led to this academic catastrophe.  But I’m not saying my leaving was NOT the lynchpin moment, either. 

But either way, we should do our best to remember this month, and bring it up whenever a clot of professors start to lecture us on the sins of the West or the virtues of their blinkered multiculturalism.

October 7^th should be as shameful a day for them as National Fire Prevention Day is for Jamaal Bowman, or Indigenous People’s Day is for Lizzie Warren.  (#neverstopmocking!)

I’ll end on a happier note, as is my wont: in three of these United States, conservatives are on a roll.

In Florida, DeSantis (the most principled and consistently conservative governor and prez candidate) has won another court victory over the ACLU in his battle to ensure election integrity and fight voting fraud. 

In Wisconsin (according to a Gateway Pundit story you should check out), the GOP is pushing a raft of voting integrity measures: permanently banning illegal absentee ballot drop boxes; requiring proof of citizenship to vote; preventing partisan Clerks from illegally “curing” improperly cast absentee ballots; and removing nearly a half-million names of voters who have moved, died or are otherwise questionably registered to vote.

These are the kinds of arduous, unglamorous tasks required to root out the increased corruption in our recent election cycles, and every state and national GOP body should be pursuing them as hard as they can!  I hope that Trump will also use his bully pulpit to highlight and support these efforts, because complaining (justifiably) that the election was rigged last time is a hell of a lot less effective than actually doing something tangible to stop the steal next time!   

In fact, we’ve seen the results of that kind of work in Jeff Landry’s gubernatorial win in Louisiana.  Landry was widely expected to get a plurality but not a majority in the “jungle primary” there, requiring another runoff election.  But he won an absolute majority, giving the GOP a victory over the only Dem-held governor’s office in the deep south.

One factor was Trump’s endorsement of Landry, in a deep red state where that helps a lot more than it did in less-red states in the last several cycles.  Another factor was Landry’s strength as a candidate (unlike, say, Herschel Walker in GA, or Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano in PA).  Perhaps as important were smart GOP efforts (led by former Trump campaign officials) to both target voter research and ads, and encourage early voting the way the Dems have been doing in recent cycles. 

More please!   

Hamas delenda est!