Before I get started, thank you all so much for your kind words and prayers for Katie! She is continuing to improve, if not as quickly as we’d all like.
I’ve learned something new about surgeries and the human body. It turns out that after intestinal surgery, your bowel needs to “wake up” before you can eat solid food and get everything going again. Apparently every patient is different in this respect, and generally speaking, the more the surgeons had to handle your intestines and work on them, the longer it takes to get to the post-surgery “waking up” part.
Katie said that her surgeons “pulled out and handled my entire bowel before throwing it back in,” which is why she’s not yet been able to start eating normally again.
I didn’t appreciate her word choice there – I would prefer “…before lovingly and gently putting it back in place” over “throwing it back in” – but she has been decreasing her pain meds and moving around more. We’re just waiting for everything to wake up.
So now I’ve learned that my daughter has at least one flaw: a drowsy bowel. (And no, if you’re thinking of starting a garage band and are looking for a name, I do not recommend “Katie and the Drowsy Bowels.” Even though it does sound sort of cool.)
Speaking of drowsy bowels – I know: very graceful transition – how about that Joe Biden? Even though he’s shuffled off this mortal coil, he’s still keeping his unblemished “wrong about every foreign policy decision he’s ever made” losing streak.
This time he’s very concerned that Israel has been taking down terrorists like Ted Kennedy knocking down rum-and-Cokes at an open bar. He once again called for the Israelis to grant the terrorists a cease-fire. You know, like the ones we gave Hitler in April of 1945, and the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that August.
Biden has perversely made Trump’s prediction from 2015 come true: In his eyes the Jews are doing too well lately, and he’s saying, “No! Please! We’re tired of winning. It’s too much winning!”
Within a couple of days of Hassan Nasrallah’s death – reportedly via many 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs – the IDF also took out Nasrallah’s brother-in-law, as well as hitting another building where Hashem Safieddine, who is now presumed but not confirmed dead.
Hashem – his friends called him “Hash,” which is what he hopefully looks like now – was a cousin of Nasrallah’s, and one of the senior leaders most likely to be his successor. Which appears to be a temp position, now that Netanyahu is ignoring Joey Gaffes, and is busily engaged in a carnival game of “whack-a-turban” with the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah.
It is darkly comic to see hapless Antony Blinken trying to negotiate with what one news report called “the remnants of Hezbollah.” Who could he possibly even be talking to? I doubt that anybody who was anyone in Hezbollah’s higher ranks is still answering his phone, even assuming his answering hand is still attached to his body!
Which means that Blinken is likely standing around near a mosque, talking to the first Tom, Dick or Achmed who will give him the time of day. That’s what Biden’s vaunted diplomatic strategy has come to: the lead guitarist for the unknown band “Ablinken” (I’m not making that up), “negotiating” with a slow-witted, one-handed assistant goat-wrangler who is now the highest-ranking surviving member of Hezbo terrorist union Local 157.
I love it! A few months ago, Netanyahu was fighting for his political life. Now he’s Michael Corleone, settling all the family business as he attends his nephew’s bris.
Mohammed “Moe” Green gets shot through his glasses by IDF commandos. The Mossad traps Hezbo’s top drone guy in a revolving door and then beeps the exploding pager in his pocket. Shin Bet catches Abdul Tattaglia in bed with a goat and machine-guns them both.
Two Israeli soldiers dressed like Muslim Virtue Police gun down Bilal Barzini on the steps of a Sharia Court-house .
Nasrallah himself (played by Abe Vigoda in a keffiyeh), when confronted by a senior IDF commander, says, “Tell Bibi it was only business. Jihadi business. Can you get me off the hook? For old times’ sake?” And the commander says, “Can’t do it, Hassan.” And then leaves the building right before the bunker buster hits.
And now the weird beards running Iran are apparently as imbecilic as the former leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, because they fired 180 missiles into Israel, hitting very little, but giving the Israelis the justification (as though they didn’t already have it) to go simultaneously high-tech and Old Testament on their evil arses.
I can’t wait to see what Israel does next. But if I were working at an Iranian nuclear facility or missile battery, I’d consider calling in sick, like Carlo when Sonny was set up for the toll booth massacre.
One other positive development was the reaction of many Lebanese and Syrians when the Jews whacked Nasrallah: they were passing out candies and celebrating in the streets! I’m sure that doesn’t mean that all of those people are enlightened Jeffersonian democrats and philosemites. They might just be a different brand of Muslim, glad because some of the “bad” Muslims got the crotch-detonating pager treatment.
But still, I was reminded of the mobs of Gazans celebrating on October 7th. They were celebrating and spitting on the corpses of poor Jewish girls whom their horrible co-religionists had raped and murdered, and then paraded through their streets. So good riddance to them, and good luck to the Syrians and Lebanese.
In domestic news, I was thrilled with J.D. Vance’s debate performance! He did everything I’d wished that Trump would do in his debate: kept his cool, stuck to specifics, and parried every attack on Trump by citing his record, and then reminding viewers of Kamala’s record. He also came across as empathetic, sensitive and positive, thus giving himself the best chance to persuade any female voters who are still persuadable.
Walz was better than Kamala – the lowest of low bars – but was still bumbling and gaffe-prone. Even viewers who were only passing through an airport and didn’t hear him call himself a knucklehead – fact check: true! – got a visual of his bug-eyed awkwardness.
The moderators were once again biased hacks, though not as thoroughly awful as David Muir and Linsey Davis. I’m more convinced than ever that I was right in my columns a couple of weeks ago: future debate moderators should just be time-keepers, and stay out of the way.
It’s infuriating to see some “journalist” cutting off the candidates with comments like, “I want to move on” and “There’s a lot more to get to.” We don’t care what you want, Teleprompter Reader. No one’s voting for you, and you’re not the candidates’ parents!
They once again fact-checked the GOP candidate, even though they had agreed not to fact-check either side, and their “fact check” was once again wrong. When Vance called the Haitians in Springfield “illegal immigrants,” Margaret Brennan jumped in to misleadingly condescend: “Just to clarify for our viewers, [the Haitians in Springfield] have legal status.”
Vance handled it perfectly. As soon as he started to correct her, both moderators interrupted him and tried to move on, but he wouldn’t let them. He kept speaking until they had to momentarily shut up. He pointed out that they had broken their promise not to do fact checks, and then accurately destroyed the faux fact check.
He correctly said that the Haitians came illegally, and then used the CBP-1 application to file an asylum claim and then, “be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.” As he pointed out how different that was from going through the legal immigration process, the moderators realized he’d just pantsed them on live tv, and frantically cut his mike.
Perfect!
I don’t know where this race stands, because there are contradictory polls everywhere, and the average of all polling shows the race tied. That’s a depressing thought, but my gut instinct is to guess that Trump’s at least a little ahead. Though it’s only a guess, I will cite two bits of evidence.
First, Kamala has been her terrible self in a series of recent interviews. Her rambling, word-goulash answers (“word salad” is a too healthy and positive metaphor for the verbal dog’s breakfasts that she has been serving up) aren’t getting any better.
You can always tell when she learns a new word or phrase, because she immediately starts beating it into the ground. We all know “see what could be, unburdened by what has been,” and “in terms of…” and “dreams, aspirations and ambitions.” Last week someone gave her a notecard with the word “holistic” on it, and she went on a compulsive, Tourette’s-like seizure of holistically holistic holisticality.
In her recent talk to a bunch of athletes – huh? – she rolled out one of her old favorites, which she must think makes her sound tough: “I eat ‘no’ for breakfast!”
And Willie Brown for lunch.
Okay, that was beneath me. Withdrawn.
By the way, I am pleasantly surprised that her handlers have been putting Que Mala out there as much as they have over the last couple of weeks. They have to know how terrible she is at speaking, and they’ve gotten her into a dead heat by hiding her completely.
In fact, my main argument for Trump debating her again was that she otherwise won’t say another word in public between now and election day, thus hiding her total vacuity in a way that she wouldn’t have been able to in a debate. But she’s actually been fielding some pitched softballs in interviews, and somehow still managing to miss the balls and hit herself in the head with the bat.
And I know what you’re thinking when you heard ‘softballs’: “Ooh, Martin’s going to talk about Doug Emhoff now.”
And I am. But not until my Monday column. (Consider yourself teased.)
The only rational reason I can think of for the Dems putting her out there is that they must have some internal polling that shows that Trump is ahead of her.
Which brings me to my second and last point: the cross tabs in the polling don’t make sense.
Nearly all polls show the overall race within the margin of error, but they also show Trump doing substantially better than he did in the past with important sub-groups of voters. For example, he trailed Biden in 2020 among Hispanics by 34 points, but is only down to Kamala with them by 14.
The same goes for a lot of groups: blacks, young people, independents, etc. In every case, Trump is doing markedly better with each sub-group than he did in 2016 or 2020, yet he’s supposed to be in a dead heat with the electorate as a whole.
He was never going to get votes from hard-left Dems. (Fun fact: after the Biden self-immolation/train-wreck debate in June, 20% of viewers said that BIDEN WON! Those people are un-freakin’-reachable.) But he certainly hasn’t lost any of his base.
So either the internals are accurate and Trump is ahead overall, or the internals are all wrong and the overall race is really tied. Either way, the left is going to try to cheat, so we need to get out our vote and aggressively poll watch.
The bottom line: I won’t be able to relax until Katie is home and fully recovered, and Trump has won the election.
And I’m praying for both!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 