In my first two columns last week, I made a case for why Trump should try to take on Kamala in one more debate. In my other three columns, I focused on Israel’s amazing technical feats, including blinding the Iranian ambassador with science (ear worm!), and converting thousands of Hezbo pagers into pocket-sized Elvis impersonators (“We’ll take your hand/ we’ll take your eye sight, too/For we’re Mossad/and we’ll have revenge on you!”)
Boom! Double-ear-worm paragraph, right out of the box!
Oh, wait!
“Last Tuesday, all the Hebrews seemed so far away,
Now it seems they’re in Beirut to stay,
Oh I regret…last Tuesday.
Suddenly, I’m not half the thug I used to be.
All my friends are calling me Lefty,
That phony page, came suddenly.”
That’s an ear-worm stand-up triple to start the week.
The good news is that Israel is still on a roll. No, they haven’t pulled off their next sneaky tech masterpiece yet – I’m betting on either exploding K-cups (the “k” is for “kaboom!”) or else chemically re-engineered breakfast cereal (in the bowl they look like normal Frosted Flakes, but add milk, annnnndddd… Shrapnel Flakes!) (“Theyyyyyrrrrrrrreeee Grape[shot]!”)
But they did execute a Friday airstrike (9/20/24) that collapsed a building in Beirut on 12 senior Hezbollah commanders. How spoiled am I by the wizardry of Operation Pin-Point Pager on Tuesday?
So spoiled that when I heard that the IDF flattened the Hezbollah Dirty Dozen in a conventional airstrike, I thought, “Borrrrrinnng!”
And just in case any CNN hacks are reading this, of the 12 ex-terrorists now being spit-roasted by Satan, one was named Abdul, but there was also one Abdullah, one Abu, two Husseins and three Hassans.
[engage Hans Landa filter] That’s a BINGO! [end Landa filter]
And I didn’t even have to use the free space on my “Smashed Jihadis” bingo card.
How would you like to be a terrorist Hezbollah member right now, even assuming you weren’t badly wounded last week? You can’t call your fellow scumbags, you can’t page, you can’t text, you can’t radio. And now you can’t talk in person!
The best their propagandists could do over the weekend was to make the scary announcement that Hezbollah is now calling for “a new phase of battle!”
I’ll bet they are, since the last phase was the “Getting Your Cojones Blown Across the Lebanese Countryside” phase. I should think they’d like to put that phase in the rear-view mirror.
Except that they can’t adjust the rear-view mirror, since their mirror-adjusting hand has been blown off. And it wouldn’t do any good anyway, because during two-fer Tuesday, they lost both their hand and their eyes, and thus can’t use any kind of mirror.
So that’s the good news.
The bad news is that there has been no movement on the “Trump should debate Kamala” front, though I’m still holding out a faint hope. I think she’d be stupid to debate Trump again, because she’s so vulnerable, and she may well win by hiding for 6 more weeks.
But because I know that she could do so much worse than she did in the debate, and that Trump could do so much better than he did, I’m still hoping it could happen.
Even if it doesn’t, I’ve still got some advice for Trump that would work well in a debate, and also in future interviews, since his interviews with MSM “journalists” are basically hostile debates anyway.
I know I’m far from the only one to comment on this, but I’d love to see him make more specific claims, instead of defaulting to making bombastic/exaggerated claims, and vague ones – often at the same time. Both of those allow his opponents easy opportunities to refute him.
The exaggerated claims can be discounted because they can be factually refuted. Ex: “We’re winning by a lot,” (when he’s winning within the margin of error); “We had the best economy the world has ever seen,” (there are so many ways to measure that, and one indicator or another can always be cited to show stronger performance in some other historical period).
In the debate he said (roughly) this about immigration: “Biden didn’t let in 10 million, like people say. It’s more like 21 million. In fact, I’m sure it’s more than that.”
As is often the case with Trump, he’s far closer to right than the Dems are. If they’re admitting that 10 million have come in, you know there are a ton who got in without being caught or counted, and they’ve got every incentive to keep their estimate on the low end.
But if Trump is going to cite a stat, he needs to back it up with a source… and it’s never a good idea to undermine your own statistic! “It’s more like 21 million… it’s probably way more than that?” Which is it? It looks like you’re just picking a number out of your AOC, and that’s not a good look.
The histrionic claims are mistakes too, because they cannot be fact-checked or supported, and because he throws out so many that it’s easy for many persuadable voters to start discounting everything he says.
Consider the impact of this example:
Kamala says she’s going to do everything possible to bring down inflation. (And yes, it’s a lie, and she’s the one who caused it, and etc.)
Option A: Trump responds with, “Under Biden-Harris, inflation exploded! No one had ever seen anything like it. I left them perfect inflation and the best interest rates in 100 years, and they blew both through the roof. People didn’t think such a thing was possible, but they did it. They destroyed the economy with their skyrocketing inflation and interest rates.”
Yes, Trump’s basic point is true. But by not giving any numbers at all, and piling bombast upon bombast, he makes it too easy for anyone not already in his camp to either tune him out or disbelieve him.
Option B: “The day I left office, inflation was 1.4%, and it had averaged under 2% for my entire term. Biden-Harris and a Democrat congress pushed through $4.7 trillion in extra borrowed money in the mis-named ‘Covid Relief Bill’ and the ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’ and within 16 months inflation had exploded to a peak of 9%. Today it’s still 2.7%, which is almost double what she inherited from me! That shocking inflation spike forced the Fed to raise interest rates; when I left office the 30-year mortgage rate was 2.65%. Today it’s over 6%, meaning that a $220K mortgage that used to cost you $778 per month now costs you $1297!”
It’s easy to refute glittering generalities, but how can she (or some MSM hack) refute or distract from statistics like those? I guess she could say that he’s making up those numbers, and she doesn’t believe him, but that’s only setting herself up to get pantsed, when he comes back with, “The interest rate numbers are from the Federal Reserve, and the inflation rates come from X government agency. If you don’t accept those numbers, what numbers would you cite instead, and from what source?”
Trump has a great story to tell, and the Dems and the MSM – but I repeat myself – are doing everything they can to keep him from telling it. He spent too much of the middle of the first debate helping them.
He’s been doing better at many events since then, and I’m really hoping he takes one more shot at her in a debate, and uses the opportunity to tell his story, and destroy hers.
If she chickens out, he should hammer her on that in every speech and appearance. And then he should treat the MSM drones who interview him as if they are nothing more than a platoon of little Que Malas.
Because they are.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 