Month: July 2024

I don’t want to beat the dead horse/prez of last weeks’ debate too much longer.  On the other hand, the fallout continues to amaze and amuse. 

I can’t believe that some lefties actually thought it would be helpful to Biden to point out that he’s pretty functional from 10:00 – 4:00 each day!  First because I don’t think “pretty functional” means what they think it means.

Second, the obvious: can we coordinate with China, Russia, Iran, Hamas etc. to make sure that they instigate any future crises between the hours of 10 and 4, Eastern Standard Time? 

In fact, if it’s convenient, can they please schedule any future attacks to take place no later than 3:00 p.m. Eastern?  That way, our intrepid leader will be able to devote a full hour to his response before he falls asleep in his soup.

Talk about lowering the bar!  Would you be happy with your cable company if you got a signal from 10-4 each day?  With your utility company if you had electricity from 10-4 each day?  Your plumber if he could only fix a toilet one fourth of the time?  Your paid protestor if she could only hold up a catastrophically stupid sign and chant idiotic slogans for a quarter of the day?

And yet that’s supposed to be a positive talking point for the “leader” of the free world? 

Biden’s biggest problem – other than what will happen if a cadaver dog gets within smelling distance of him, and an international incident ensues – is that to the extent there was some small way to mitigate perceptions of his physical and mental infirmity before last Thursday, that opportunity has now left the building.

I mean, when it became too difficult for him to make it up a normal set of airplane stairs, they shifted to a smaller set of airplane stairs.  But now we’ve seen “(Not a) Dr.” Jill guide him down three shallow steps after the debate, and he looked like a Wallenda trying to stay on a tightrope over an active volcano!

There is no airplane that sits close enough to the ground to require only three steps to get into it.  And for Brandon, three steps is two steps too many!

But I am glad to see that after five days of sturm und drang, the miserable Dems seem to be leaning toward keeping Joe in the race, just because the other options might be as perilous as trying to drag him across the finish line.  As ridiculously unlikely as that seems!

This is about as close as you can get to a truly lose-lose situation, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving party!

On a different note, one thing that we’ve learned over the last 7 years is that we should all be skeptical of experts.  Especially when they deliver their judgments in a pompous, self-righteous tone, we might want to consider mocking their pontifications until and unless they prove the merits of their arguments. 

Aristotle knew this, as one of his logical fallacies was the “appeal to authority” – don’t judge the merits of an argument, but the supposed merits of the people making it.  For example, this policy is obviously right because the king is advancing it, or this theological point is correct because the Pope says so. 

Or Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, because 51 respected, beyond-reproach former intelligence bigshots say so. 

Well, as CO mentioned last week, we now have another example that proves Aristotle right again.  (Seriously, that guy has been proven right as many times as I have, which is pretty impressive for a guy who never had a regular column on the Cautious Optimism site!)

Last week we learned that 16 top “economic experts” – they’ve all got Nobel prizes! – have definitively concluded that Trump’s economic plans will make inflation worse.  In fact, they released an open letter last Thursday, praising Joe Biden’s economic prowess, and endorsing him for president.

For those of you scoring at home, this happened just a few hours before Joey Gaffes stumbled onto the debate stage and did his eerily accurate impression of the Wicked Witch of the West.  (“My cognitive abilities are melting…melting…”)

Now you might think that a bunch of brainiacs like this could have noticed that Biden is a feeble old guy with a bunch of ideas that are even feebler.  (I hereby create a new word.)  Or that he’s been president for the longest 42 months in our nation’s history, during which he executed his policies, and took inflation from the 1.5% he inherited from Trump, to a high of 9%, and an average of around 5.5%.

(Even though I don’t have a Nobel in Economics – don’t get me started: the whole damned thing is just a popularity contest! – I just did a few back-of-the-envelope calculations that suggest that both 9% and 5.5% are in fact higher than 1.5%.  You can Google it.)

But that’s the past.  Maybe these whiz kids know something we don’t know about the future.

If only we had some empirical way to test their confident prognostication.  If only they had gone on record before, giving us inflation predictions against which we can judge their trustworthiness now.  If only—

Oh, wait.  They did that.  Thirteen of them did exactly that, by predicting the results of Biden’s policies on inflation, back when he first took office as a callow youth of 112.

Annnnnnndddddd… it turns out that they are about as accurate as AOC fulfilling a drink order. 

[[AOC (in a Boston pub, a few years back): “Okay, I’ve got one Margarita, one Harvey Wallbanger, two Old-fashioneds and an Irish car bomb.” 

Five confused customers: “Um, we ordered five beers.  If your booty wasn’t so juicy – your words, not ours – you would be getting zero tip.”]]

Those “experts” released a similar open letter in 2021 assuring us all that Brandon’s “Build Back Better” plan (he called it “Bilge Buck Badger,” according to a beleaguered transcriptionist at the time) would – and I am not making this quote up – “ease longer-term inflationary pressures.” 

Yes.  Spending an extra $3 trillion was just bound to ease inflation.  And so it did, “easing” it from a sky-high 1.5% alllllll the way down to… 9%.  Brilliant!

And now these geniuses, in a move that always worked at late-night camp-outs, have turned off the lights, turned on a flashlight under their double-chins, and warned about the eeevilllll Donald Trump! 

Speaking of which, did you notice that during Biden’s skirmish with the teleprompter about the latest SCOTUS ruling yesterday, the usual cadaverous pallor of his skin was suddenly transformed to orange?

It’s finally come to this: his handlers are desperate enough to figure that if they can’t out-perform Trump, maybe they should copy him.  And they tried to turn Dark Brandon into Orange Brandon.

Well it’s not going to work, buddy.  We’ve already got Orange Hitler.

But Orange Moe Howard is still available, and he seems like a lot better fit for you.

Hamas delenda est!

We have gathered here, first, to mark what looks like the death of Biden’s campaign.

Watching the left’s reactions to his debate self-immolation has been as entertaining as you’d expect.  Just a few months ago, Joe Scarborough bloviated that, “This version of Biden – intellectually, analytically – is the best Biden ever!”  (And “F” you if you don’t agree!)

On Friday morning Scarborough looked like he had just watched the litter of cats that he’d raised and bottle-fed from birth get run over by a giant riding mower in front of his wife and children.  All he could do was mutter about how surprised he was by Biden’s performance, and how he needs to go.     

Lefty actor Michael Ian Black (Who?) from that one show you never saw, had this great quote: “What sucks is, if you listen to Biden’s WORDS, they’re great. But there’s not enough breath left in him for the words to reach your ears.”

Yeah, that’s the ticket!  His words were GREAT!  Words like “mumphlpanditurgg,” “shughelfup,” “zzzzz,” and “six handicap!” 

Good lord!

The transcript of everything he said at the debate would read like a movie scene we’ve all watched: The fourth male lead – stricken by dengue fever, German shrapnel, or an arrow shot by Liz Warren’s war party (#neverstopmocking) – writhes in a medium close-up and rambles incoherently as a nurse wipes a wet cloth over his brow, until he suddenly stiffens, opens his eyes wide and says, “Pa!  Is that you, Pa?  I did my best!  I did… my… gurgrlelelughhhhhhhh.”

And yes, Joe Biden actually said that last word, at minute 24, shortly after muttering that no soldiers died on his watch.

A few days before the debate, one MSM empty head said, “So Biden can’t walk so well.  Neither could FDR.”  Which is a good comparison… if you’re a thoroughly corrupt liar.  Say what you will about FDR, but at least he could conduct fireside chats until late in his presidency.

The closest Biden could come would be a fireside shat!    (Boom!  Low-brow poop joke when you least expect it!)

One of the funniest news bites I came across was that Rob “Meathead” Reiner co-hosted a Hollywood “watch party” for the debate.  Then, after two days of what the Breitbart story called “conspicuous silence” – HA! – he finally tweeted about the debate, admitting that it had been “a disaster” for Biden.

But he still stuck to his guns – and yes, his guns are less reliable than the one Alec Baldwin used on that movie set, and no, it’s not “too soon” for that joke (Because: Alec Baldwin) – calling Biden “a good, decent man.”  Then he said a bunch of stuff about how Trump is orange Hitler and the world is coming to an end and blah blah blah.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t paying attention anymore, because I was savoring the image of Meathead and a bunch of rich Hollywood leftists – and no, they weren’t necessarily ALL addicts, trust-fund kids or pederasts; probably just a majority of them – sitting around a glitzy fundraiser, and slowly deflating as they watched their hero decomposing on stage. 

I picture Babs Streisand, DeNiro and Meathead, with party hats on their heads and noisemakers in their mouths, all hyped up for the big event.  And then Brandon staggers out and mumbles his way through his first several servings of word salad.  Cut back to the celebs, their jaws dropping in horror, and their noisemakers falling onto their laps.    

The schadenfreude cherry on top of that exploding poison sundae is that the “party” was supposed to be a Biden fundraiser!  Rumors that after “Dr.” Jill helped Joe painfully down the longest three stairs you’ve ever seen in your life at the end of the debacle, the Hollywood elite raised 4 dollars and an expired Blockbuster rental coupon, have not been confirmed.     

The general tone of the MSM aftermath was half Monty Python (“This president is no more.  He’s ceased to be.  He’s gone on to meet his Maker.  THIS… is a late president!”) and half Shakespeare (We come not to praise Joe Biden, but to bury him.)  And wholly delicious. 

By the way, I just re-watched that classic Python dead parrot sketch, and saw a detail that I’d forgotten, and which ties it in perfectly with the Biden debacle.  As the scene opens, John Cleese  (carrying the dead parrot in a cage) calls the clearly male store clerk “Miss.” 

When the guy says, “What do you mean, Miss?” Cleese looks at him in momentary confusion, and then says, “Oh I’m sorry, I have a cold.”

And just like that, a benevolent God has given me another moment of bliss.  Because I must have seen that clip a hundred times, but the experience of watching it today included two more tie-ins to our present, bizarre moment: gender confusion, and somebody making a blatant mistake and blaming it on a cold! 

If only Joey Gaffes had thought of that. 

Oh wait…

At some level, I do feel bad for Biden’s self-humiliation.  On the other hand, think how bad it would be for him if he had lived to see it!

But for the corrupt national Dems and the MSM stooges who have been foisting Biden on us like a bunch of mad-scientist taxidermists for four years, I have no pity.  You built this Frankenstein’s monster, you shot him full of amphetamines and kept re-starting his heart with the crash pads, and now you own him. 

However, I think we all need to do our part to try to keep Joe in the race.  In fact, I’m urging all of you to stop avoiding pollsters like the plague. (The natural reaction of all conservatives, and of most smart people generally.)  If anyone calls you or emails with a request to give political feedback, take the opportunity.

Tell them that you love what Biden’s doing, and you’re offended by those who would suggest that our great Democrat standard bearer should step down.  You’re behind him 100%, and he needs to keep fighting until he wins in November! 

Then hang up quickly, before you either burst out laughing, or begin audibly retching. 

My second requiem is for Biden’s Gaza Pier.  As I wrote last month, the pier was built – for only a third of a billion dollars! – to get desperately needed food into Hamas-istan.  It was open for about a week before moderate seas damaged it.  It was towed to Israel, fixed, then deployed again.

Annnnddddd… some breezy conditions and a bad weather forecast forced its removal.  When it was finally deployed again, another bad weather forecast meant that more American resources were spent on dismantling it.  Again!

News reports now suggest that it will likely not be put back in place.  Because it proved to be a stupid, stupid, stupid idea.  (I’m reading between the lines on that last part.) 

On the bright side, during the few days when it was in place, it did allow delivery of a few tons of food…which was immediately stolen by Hamas, then sold to desperate Gazans to raise money for more Jew-killing stuff.   

To recap: Biden spent almost $300 million – money which could have purchased huge packs of desperately needed flamethrowing robot dogs to release on the Democrat convention in Chicago! – on a boondoggle that lasted six weeks, and provided zero supplies to the alleged civilians it was intended to serve.

So let’s lower the Stars and Stripes to half staff for the passing of yet another brilliant Democrat foreign policy boondoggle.  Pointless pier, we hardly knew ye!

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mark the political passing of Jamaal Bowman, who got gloriously hammered in a Dem primary in the Bronx just last week.   You may remember Bowman as the token male member of the Squad, or as the rabid Jew-hater who denied the gang rapes that Hamas thugs recorded themselves committing, or as the moron who thinks you pull a fire alarm to open a door.

But he’s so much more than that!  In fact, if he’s not everything that’s wrong with the Democrat party, he’s emblematic of most of it: fraudulent credentials, racial arsonist, unimpressive and unserious and dishonest right down to the bone. 

He holds an Ed Doctorate – the same degree that notorious elder-abuser “Dr.” Jill Biden has.  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather share a degree with Dr. Kevorkian or Dr. Mengele than with those two. (Okay, that was a bit much.  I retract the analogy.  But just barely.)

He put his degree (in his case, his “duh-gree”) to work by founding the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, where he curated a “Wall of Honor” that featured black people he thought students should look up to.  People like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury and Tim Scott.

HA!  I kid!  Bowman’s ideas of praiseworthy black people included loony anti-Semite congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (so dumb she lost her seat to Hank “Guam is capsizing!” Johnson), and the husband-and-wife team of radical murderers Mutulu and Assata Shakur (parents of Tupac, who died young of terrible parenting). 

Bowman was also a leading advocate against standardized testing.  When I looked into the quality of Bowman’s Cornerstone Academy, I found out that it was a mess.       

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Out of all New York schools – which are totally controlled by Dems, and thus pretty lousy – Bowman’s school ranked in the bottom 13%.  His students would likely be pretty dissatisfied with that.  Except that only 24% of them scored as minimally proficient in math, so they have no idea what that means. 

So it’s great to watch Bowman go.  But it was even better to watch the way he went out, with a hilariously cringy (and futile) get-out-the-vote rally featuring AOC, who bounced on stage to a vulgar Cardi B song, waving her fists and hollering like a hype man at a rap concert. 

Okay, I couldn’t decipher the lyrics of the Cardi B song – I’m not her target demographic, being an old Caucasian guy with great musical taste – but since all of her songs are vulgar, I’m sure this one was too.

Unfortunately for AOC, she chose to speak rather than twerk the whole time.  Because her juicy booty (her words, not mine) is her strong suit (yes, I’m too classy to say “her best asset”), and speaking logically is decidedly NOT, she missed that opportunity.

Then Bowman took the stage, and tried to out-stupid AOC, which is no mean feat.  But he might have succeeded, dancing around and screaming out some “F” bombs.  At one point he picked up a stool and shook it over his head for some reason, swearing and ranting like a black “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, only with less dignity.  (You’re welcome for the timely pro wrestling reference from 30 years ago.)

Then “professional useless person” Bernie Sanders (hat tip to Ben Shapiro) wandered up and did his commie schtick.   

It was telling that their big rally – with three “top draws” among the Democratic left (talk about damning with faint praise!) – in their deep-blue Bronx home, drew a pathetically small crowd. The MSM feeds were cropped just to show the first few rows of people in front of the stage… because a wider angle would have shown a lot of empty grass.

When AOC first jumped on stage, she did the ol’ “cup your hand behind your ear” routine to get the crowd to roar, saying, “I can’t hear you!”  To which someone nearby could have said conversationally (because there was no reason to shout), “That’s because there are very few of us here.”

The optics raised painful comparisons to Trump’s giant rally in the Bronx just a few weeks back.  Yes, that ultimately doesn’t mean much in the Bronx, which hasn’t voted Red since Imhotep Pelosi was a young girl in the Valley of the Kings.

Except that Trump shouldn’t be able to draw thousands of excited people in the Bronx, and AOC should be able to bring out at least a thousand, just from those who want to hear her brand of socialist crazy and get a glimpse of her juicy booty in person.  (Do I have to keep saying it?  “Her words, not mine.”)

To those who say it doesn’t matter that one Dem instead of another gets that seat, I offer a version of WF Buckley’s dictum: if there can only be a Dem representing a deep blue district, it should be the least insane Dem available.

Or as the Babylon Bee said, in the Bronx, “Hamas lost a House seat to the Dems.” 

Hamas delenda est!

Wow.  What does one say after last night?

Over the last several days, I’d written up a few ideas for today’s column, figuring that I’d include them alongside some debate reaction.  But now I think I’ll save them for a future column, because I’m sure that this debate is going to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

Oxygen which Joe Biden desperately needed during the debate, apparently.  Because that guy came out more cadaverous than usual, which is truly saying something!    

What happened to the drug cocktail his team has had him on in previous outings?  I figured he’d start out a little hot and a little punchy, and then his energy level would drop off precipitously after 30 minutes or so.

But apparently the chemists and necromancers at the DNC mixed up the prescription bottles backstage.  Instead of filling Joe’s pre-debate syringe with cocaine-infused Red Bull — advertising tagline: “It puts the high OCTane in Octagenarian!” – they gave him 3 ml of “medically induced coma.”

After the first two minutes, I already couldn’t believe my eyes.  His voice was weak and wavering right out of the gate, and he made one mistake after another.  He tried to hit Trump on Afghanistan (!), which is Biden’s first glaring scandal that sent his poll numbers into a tailspin from which they’ve never recovered.

He said he “beat Medicare,” claimed that there are “a thousand trillionaires in America,” talked about women raping their sisters, and muttered his way to the end of one sentence about the border, giving Trump his best one-liner of the night, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence.  I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

I can’t believe that Biden even went back to the old lie that Trump had called Nazis at Charlottesville “very fine people.”  Especially since left-wing “fact-checking” site Snopes just published a high-profile admission (a few days ago!) that Trump was NOT talking about Nazis or white supremacists.  Meaning that everybody who pays even passing attention to politics knows that Biden was lying.

He even lied about small and insignificant things (as is his wont), claiming that as Vice President he had a golf handicap of 6.  Trump had fun with that, and for good reason.

For comparison, I am several decades younger than Joe Biden, and have been hacking my way around golf courses on and off for many years.  I average around 3-4 pars per round, and can drive the ball reasonably well, though my short game feels like a punishment from an angry Old Testament God.

And not to brag, but I can make a nearly full turn on the ball, I can walk on a fairway without wearing clown shoes to keep me from face-planting, and I have never soiled myself on a fairway or a green.  (What happens in the rough, stays in the rough.) And I never go off into a fugue state in which I stare blankly into the distance until a friend has to lead me back to the clubhouse.

And I’m around a 16 handicap! 

The idea that in his early 70s, Joe Biden was a 6 handicap is less believable than that he whipped Corn Pop with a candlestick in the conservatory, then finished at the top of his law school class, before having high tea with Nelson Mandela at Selma.

Trump made the same point (“I’ve seen your swing.”), before saying, “Let’s not be children.”

When you’ve allowed Donald Trump to take the high ground as the adult in the room, you have lost the debate!

It got so bad that halfway through, Biden mouthpieces claimed that Biden had a cold!  Which is as desperate as it gets, since any real illness would have been disclosed before the debate, even if only to lower expectations.

I’m sure that announcement created a clear mental picture for savvy viewers.  When your own flaks watch the first ten minutes of your “performance” and then leap up and rush to the nearest computers and microphones, you don’t want to hear them say, “He’s got a cold!  And long covid, and short ebola, and mid-range pleurisy!  And possibly mesothelioma!  Plus the studio lights have triggered his light sensitivity, and also his peanut allergy, for some reason.”  

The spin afterwards was even worse, if that’s possible.

Most post-debate spin rooms produce rote propaganda as predictable as the sunrise over Liz Warren’s tribal hunting grounds (#neverstopmocking): “Our candidate knocked it out of the park, especially when he made point 1, 2 or 3, and our opponent made one mistake after another.”

Last night, for the first time in modern political history, the main topic coming out of the DEMOCRAT press was, “Should we force him off the ticket immediately, or wait until Monday?”

Holy cats!   

If this was a fight, they’d have stopped it in the middle of the first round.  If Biden was a racehorse, they would have dispatched him with a merciful rifle shot after he fell in the first turn and snapped all four fetlocks.   

As glad as I am that Biden’s collapse is finally too obvious for the MSM to hide, the problem now is that the debate happened early enough that the Dems will likely be able to push Joe aside and bring in someone else. 

In a column posted on March 8^th, (you can find it now on Martinsimpsonwriting.com) I predicted this result, and never has my prognosticating brilliance been more of a burden!   If this debate was the dam-break moment, and all of the polls turn decisively against Biden, I’m assuming the Dems will shortly begin the fraught process of finding another leftist for the top of their ticket.

I hope that we’ll respond in a few ways:

1. We should enjoy the sweet schadenfreude of watching leftist hacks squirming, panicking, and firing within their own tent.  Dumping Joe leaves them with Que Mala, who is the only human in this hemisphere with worse numbers than his.  So they can’t move her up to the top spot.

But she’s the VP because of her race and gender, and dumping her too should produce some angry black female leftists – a potent combination if ever there was one!  And if the Dems try to keep her as VP but move some pale, empty haircut (I’m looking at you, Ken-Doll Newsom) in front of her, that won’t help. 

Pass me the popcorn.

2. We should immediately start beefing up our oppo research files on whoever the likely replacements are.  The best thing the Dems have going for them is that many people still dislike Trump and are looking for an alternative, and if that alternative is not well known, they might be able to squeak through in November.  

3.  We have to hammer the obvious fact that the problem wasn’t Biden, but the national Dems who have been lying about him.  Last night he was terrible, but it was only a difference of degree, and not of kind, from his performances over his entire presidency beginning when they had him campaign from a basement four years ago.

They’ve insisted since 2020 that he’s mentally sharp and healthy as a horse.  When his infirmity has become even more obvious in recent months, they’ve taken one dishonest line after another:

• Behind closed doors he’s sharp as a tack.
• He just passed his physical with flying colors.
• Hur’s report finding that Biden is not competent to stand trial was a lying slur!
• He wasn’t wandering off at the G-7; he’s just fascinated by parachutes.
• Every fund-raising video he’s made for months has at least a dozen jump cuts to try to hide that they need that many takes to be assemble 30 seconds of usable footage.
• Those videos that factually show him doing and saying things are actually “cheap fakes!”
• As recently as last week, Dem spokes-weasels were insisting that Obama didn’t help him off-stage because he was “frozen” and confused at that fund raiser.

Those lies were always obvious to us, but the MSM tried their hardest to help the Dems hide the truth, as they hoped to whistle past the graveyard – and never has that metaphor been more apt! – and drag Joe’s carcass across the finish line – ditto – in November. 

Assuming that they sub him out, we should be ready with ads showing the voters that the problem wasn’t just Biden, or even primarily Biden, but the dishonest Dem hacks who have been perpetrating this “Weekend at Bernie’s” farce for four long years.

Just have an Eastwood-esque voice-over announcer say, “The Democrats have thrown Joe Biden under the bus, and are now saying that they’ve got a great new candidate for you.  They swear that s/he is fully capable of being the next president.

But that’s what they’ve been telling you about Joe Biden for the last four years.” 

Then play a montage of top Dems insisting that Joe is at the top of his game, interspersed with some of his “greatest hits” gaffe reel, ending with some of his worst flubs from the debate.

End with the Eastwood VO: “If they’ve been lying to you about Joe Biden, how can you trust what they’re saying about NEW CANDIDATE NAME now?”

Let’s enjoy their discomfort at being caught, but then pivot to make them pay over the next four months for their elder abuse and the Potemkin Presidency they’ve foisted on all of us! 

Hamas delenda est!