biden – Martin Simpson

More SOTU Thoughts, Rare Good News out of Cali, & RuPaul Gets Schooled in Virtue Signaling (posted 3/11/24)

This might have to be a three-column week for me, because the pace of odd political stories is increasing. So here goes.

Because I have a weak stomach, I limited my live exposure to Biden’s State of the Union speech, but I’ve read some more excerpts and coverage, and have a few more thoughts.

To start, I don’t know why any Supreme Court justices still come to the SOTU. Only six of the nine showed up this time, but that’s still six too many. There may have been a reason for the highest court to be on hand for the SOTU back in the day, but ever since Obama lied about a recent ruling and insulted them to their faces in 2010, they should have all stopped attending.

When Biden brought up abortion, he addressed them directly, and – unexpectedly! – both angrily and incomprehensibly. This is a transcript, which I only wish I were making up: “With all due respect, justices, women are not without electric–…electoral power, excuse me, without electoral or political power. You’re about to realize zzhh ow mush (which I think was supposed to be “just how much”)…

I put the ellipses in at the end because it seems like Biden stopped there, and that’s not a grammatical end to a sentence.

I actually do like prefacing a statement with “with all due respect,” because what follows is inevitably never respectful. Which makes the point pretty artfully: I’m going to treat this next point about someone with all the respect it is rightfully due, which is none at all.

I’m going to try to start working that phrase into my columns more often.

Biden used that phrase in his typically hostile way, but he showed that he doesn’t even know how to threaten correctly. His point seemed to be that since women have so much electoral power, the justices will regret opposing them – even though judges are supposed to interpret the law, not react to political power – before he ends with what he wants to be an ominous warning about the electoral consequences of taking a supposedly unpopular position.

Does he think SCOTUS judges are elected? Because if so… yikes!

Thankfully, all of the justices gave him the stink eye – even the three far-left ones – and the awkwardness of insulting people who are restrained by decorum from punching back cannot have played well with anyone who’s not already a hateful far-left loon.

Especially since the Dems played to their stereotype throughout the night. In a speech full of lies, they weren’t perturbed at all. But the one time when Biden accidentally told the truth – calling Laken Riley’s murderer “an illegal” – they became outraged!

And then Biden, because his spine is made of melting ice cream, apologized for calling an illegal alien murderer “illegal.”

Also, is everybody else as confused as I am about his comments about “Lincoln” Riley?

I don’t mean the part about how he couldn’t get her name right, even when he was surrounded by people with big buttons with her name on them.

I mean what he said next: “But how many thousands of people being killed by illegals?”

What? That’s not a sentence, and it doesn’t make sense.

It could mean something like, “How about all the many others who are being killed by illegals? Why don’t we say their names?” And if that’s what he meant, more power to him! Let’s start publicizing the names and stories of ALL the innocent Americans robbed, raped or killed by the millions of unvetted illegals the left’s open border is responsible for.

Or it could mean, “There AREN’T thousands of others being killed by illegals.” In which case, the entire sentient world cries, “Malarky!” And let’s loose the hounds of fact-checking.

All that being said, I do see two positives that came out of the SOTU:

1. Biden missed a great chance to get his speech off on a good foot: a bunch of pro-Hamas protestors block his car on the way there and he didn’t run them over. He should remember that at the end of your life (which for him came around 3 years ago), it’s not the things that you did that you regret, so much as the things you didn’t do.

And he didn’t order his driver to run over those Hamas-holes.

That would have been such a win-win! Every normal American would cheer as the hateful little narcissists went careening off (or under) the car. Plus, Biden couldn’t get in any trouble for any deaths or injuries, because his attorneys could use the precedent of the Hur defense: you can’t charge this guy, because he’s obviously out of his gourd!

2. The MSM and Dem hacks (but I repeat myself) have been out touting his SOTU like crazy, pointing to a positive reaction to the speech in polls. (Though as a columnist on RedState pointed out, it was the smallest positive rating of any SOTU since they started being rated.) They’re able to do so because the bar had been set so low that Biden managed to trip and fall forward over the metaphorical sandbag of the super-low expectations.

Which is great for us, because as I’ve said before, our best hope is that Biden does just well enough to stay in the race, and not get swapped out for anyone with higher ratings than him. (And there’s only one person in the solar system who is NOT in that category, and her name rhymes with Shamala Sharris.)

On another topic, beleaguered California has at least gotten a little bit of good news this past week: two of the most egregious leftist pols in the country – and that is saying something – both lost primary contests this week. Horrible whitey-hater Barbara Lee and staff-abusing dim bulb Katie Porter both went down to highly entertaining defeats on Tuesday.

Lee had left her long-time House seat to run for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat. You may remember Feinstein from the way she spent her last months on earth under her daughter’s conservatorship, because she was non compos mentis — and yet well enough to be a Democrat US Senator.

Great job, California voters!

At 75, Lee was clearly too old to run again, and yet she did so anyway.

I’m sorry. My crack staff is telling me that it’s not her age, but her IQ that is 75. Sorry about that.

Her age is 77. So, yeah. Too old to run for office. (We’re making an exception for Trump, but only because he’s 27 years younger than his opponent.)

Katie Porter was running for the same Senate office.

You may remember her for sitting in front of a white board full of gibberish and speaking nonsense, or perhaps for abusing her staff the way Hillary did Bill, when behind closed doors and after the newest young secretary burst out of Bill’s office, running away at full speed and furiously rubbing her bottom.

Well, in a race in which the top two contenders go into a run-off, Babs Lee came in fourth, and Katie Porter came in third. And in even better news, Republican Steve Garvey came in second.

The bad news is that he’s up against Adam Schiff, and it’s California. So Pencil-Neck will almost certainly be the new Senator from CA, and Californians will continue to get what they’ve voted for, good and hard.

Still, we need to take good news wherever we can find it in those big blue states, and at least we had the pleasure of watching two horrible leftists leave their House seats and then get humiliated in their attempt at the Senate.

Speaking of arrogant lefties getting what’s coming to them, even if you appreciate normalcy, you probably have heard of RuPaul, who is a famous drag queen. You know, the same way Liz Warren is a famous drag Indian. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

On March 4^th, RuPaul announced that he had launched an online bookstore called Allstora, which will NOT ban books, in protest against conservatives’ rabid desire to ban books. Even though conservatives have not been trying to ban books, which would involve trying to stop a book from being published.

No, conservatives are just weirdos who don’t want taxpayer money being spent on gay – or straight! – porn for school libraries. Unbelievably enough, they really don’t want their kids reading any books that include graphic details about how to sexually service creepy older people.

Even though, with all due respect, that describes the first several chapters of Que Mala’s political autobiography.

Anyway, RuPaul tooted his own horn (and I don’t know gay slang, so if that’s a euphemism, I apologize) by saying that his fabulous new bookstore would be “a marketplace for all books and all stories.”

Annnnndddd… within one day of being opened, RuPaul’s bookstore started getting hit by an avalanche of protests and requests to “ban” books. But break out your sad trombone – again, that sounds like it could be gay slang, so mea culpa? – because it turns out that all of those protests came from… wait for it… “progressive” book banners!

Unexpectedly!

And a few days later, RuPaul tucked his tail between his legs (sorry for that mental image) and caved, agreeing to put scary red warnings on books by conservatives, and even agreeing to remove some books by some firebrand conservatives such as Elon Musk.

Who, as you might have noticed, is not even a conservative.

So great job, self-styled “defenders of democratic values.” You’ve made the point obviously clear: the intolerant people who want to dictate what others read are… leftists!

Hamas delenda est!

The SOTU Speech, & What We Should Do Between Now & November (posted 3/8/24)

Well, there’s an hour and twenty minutes that I’ll never get back.

Oh, who am I kidding? I popped in and out of the SOTU for maybe a total of 10 minutes, my rule being that as soon as my gag reflex threatened to kick in and offload some of the bourbon (mmmm, brownest of the brown liquors) that I had been consuming – as fragments I have shored against my ruin – I tuned out until the urge to purge receded.

(That’s right, trenchant references to Lionel Hutz and T.S. Eliot in the same sentence! Suck it, other columnists who dare not attempt such a rhetorical stretch!)

While I’m tooting my own horn, I posted a column on Wednesday featuring my imagining of Joe Biden preparing for a speaking engagement. If you haven’t seen it, scroll back to Wednesday afternoon’s posts, and give it a quick read. I’ll wait….

I know: it wasn’t super-hard to predict, but did I nail it or what? The confusion, the slurring, the physical stiffness. The ridiculous shrinkflation issue. And I knew he’d be screwing up names – I had him calling Rocky Balboa “Rocky Road” and the Cookie Monster the “Cake Moose” – but I didn’t get the square on the Biden Bingo card for “Lincoln Riley.”

(Which is pretty funny. One Republican whips the Dems and frees their slaves 160 years ago, and he’s still living in their heads rent-free!)

If I missed anything, it was by under-estimating the amount of sustained anger Biden was capable of; I expected a few bursts of “get off my lawn,” quickly trailing off into Cocaine Mitch-esque short-duration catatonia.

But whatever drug cocktail they’re giving Brandon to keep him upright for 81 consecutive minutes must be some strong stuff. So good for him.

I mentioned several years ago that I’d prefer that we get rid of the SOTU entirely. It’s always an insufferable cavalcade of imbecility and phoniness: a laundry list of your stuff (which is all great!) and the other party’s stuff (they’re wrong about everything!), followed by ridiculous promises that no one thinks that you’ll keep.

And ooh, there’s a couple of guys/gals/children/oldsters in the crowd whom I’d like to use as political props! I’ll point to them and ask them to stand up, unless they’re in a wheelchair or paralyzed as a result of one of the other party’s stupid and destructive policies. Then I’ll scold the other side for paralyzing their sorry arses.

Bah!

As in most things, we should handle the SOTU the way the Founders did: write your message in a short document – we’ve bought a new batch of muskets, we’re accepting bids to build a few federal buildings, there’s a boll weevil problem in Mississippi, but the sorghum crop is coming along nicely – hand it to a guy on a horse, and slap the horse’s rear end to send him off to carry it to be read in the House.

Beyond that, I didn’t find a lot worth commenting on. Of course Biden lied and dissembled and argued in bad faith, as I think most people expected him to. I don’t think that anything he said will be remembered for long, as much as his affect, which was 100% angry old man.

In that sense, it reminded me a lot of his Reichstag speech in September of 2022, minus the ominous red lighting and the two Marines flanking him, wishing they didn’t have to be there.

I don’t know how that behavior is not a huge political mistake for Biden. His poll numbers are bad, and his best asset is Trump’s high negatives among independents and moderates. So he should be trying to go all kinder and friendlier, to draw the moderates to him. To the extent that he attacks Trump, his tone should be more in sorrow than in anger.

Instead, he’s scolding the nation, calling everybody who has ever considered voting for Trump unpatriotic fascist deplorables. And he’s shaking his bony fist and hollering like Grandpa Simpson. “In my day, we got 20 hectares to the hogshead, and that was good enough for us! Also, we really fixed the Kaiser’s wagon! No joke!”

If I had the Trump team’s ear, I would say that in the wake of this speech, I think we should do 4 things:

1. Set up a website with a daily updated count of crimes committed and costs imposed by illegals. (Make it like the debt clock that some pols used to put up, when they pretended that either they or we were troubled by our rising national debt.)

Keep a tally of the total number of crimes, along with highlighting the worst of the worst. Also give numbers on how much we’ve been spending on their schooling, healthcare, prison, welfare benefits, etc.

We’d have to handle it carefully, with many statements about “not all illegals” (aggravating as those are), because we alienate winnable voters if we attack all immigrants, or defuse the blame and take it off the open border policies that are causing all this chaos.

2. Try to get Trump to take as low a profile as possible, and keep the spotlight on Biden and his policies.

3. Focus on get-out-the-vote efforts, and stop telling people to NOT vote by mail and/or early! (Dammit!) The Dems are great at that, and they will be again, and if we don’t fight fire with fire, we are going to under-perform in November.

4. Start preparing for Biden’s replacement nominee, because I’m increasingly certain that he will not be the nominee in November. His poll numbers are too low already, and they’ve got nowhere to go but stagnant or down. And his physical and mental deterioration are too obvious to be hidden, even by the dedicated gaslighting asshats – or yes, asslighting gas hats – in the MSM and Democrat party.

The national Dem coven – er, brain trust – can see this just as well as we can. If you and I are getting more confident that if Trump can manage to even minimally control himself, he’ll win against Biden in November, the Dems know that too.

So they’re going to switch him out, most likely in the summer or at the convention in August. And when that happens, Trump instantly goes from being the younger guy with the lower negatives in the race to the old guy with the highest negatives.

Therefore, our best course is to keep hitting not only Biden, but the entire far-left Democrat establishment and their terrible policies. (“It’s not just Biden’s open border, it’s the Dems’ open border; it’s not just Bidenflation and Bidenomics, it’s the economic results of Dem policies.”)

That way, when the Dems swap Biden out, we won’t be totally wrong-footed. We can just slam the desperate, unprecedented, flop-sweat-infused decision to switch candidates at the 11^th hour – and also slam the racist and sexist Dem party for pushing Que Mala aside too! – and quickly pivot to targeting the entire Dem party:

“Changing the frontman for your horrific policies won’t make any difference in the outcome. Ken Doll Newsom is just Biden with a pulse.” Or “Big Mike Obama is just Biden with linebacker shoulders.” Or “Hillary Clinton is just Biden with cankles and a terminal case of Resting Beeyotch Face.”

Etc.

There you have it. Please print this column out, hand it to a mounted GOP party official, and tell him to get it to Mar-A-Lago, stat. Then slap the rear end of his horse to get him started.

But first, look carefully to be sure that no Dem congresswomen are around. Because if the horse’s flanks look too juicy (not my words)… that might not be a horse.

Finally, in my Wednesday column I suggested a Secret Service code name for Biden (“Flat Line”), because I often amuse myself by thinking up code names for various administration figures. For example:

Que Mala: “Word Salad”

Jill Biden: “Juco”

Liz Warren: “Edgar Winter” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Janet Yellen: “Keebler”

Merrick Garland: “Bullet Dodged”

So as we move into the weekend, let me invite all of you in CO Nation to share your secret service code names for prominent Dems, or Republicans, for that matter.

Hamas delenda est!

Schadenfreude Stories of the Week (posted 2/26/24)

Today I’ve got a lot of feel-good stories of leftists receiving their just desserts, but I want to start with a case study of how putting on ideological blinders can make you stupid. It involves Bill Maher.

If you’ve seen his HBO show or stand-up specials, you know that Maher can be an obnoxious and condescending leftist. But he’s also a smart guy who often sees through woke idiocy and calls it out, willingly taking criticism for doing so. His old show Politically Incorrect (1993-2002) often lived up to its name, when it wasn’t (ironically) being politically correct.

But even though I think he’s earned the incredibly rare description of “intermittently insightful leftist,” his politics cause him to have some shocking blind spots. A while ago, for example, Dave Rubin was his guest when Maher was berating Trump for being an “election denier.”

When Rubin pointed out that Cankles Clinton had spent much of Trump’s term blaming various conspiracies for her loss and calling Trump an “illegitimate president,” Maher was shocked at the idea, and blatantly denied that she’d ever said that.

How can you explain such a ridiculous statement from someone who has made his living by being hyper-aware of political bias, other than to call it an act of self-inflicted ignorance?

Last week he did it again. He had Ann Colter on, and he started a discussion of the shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ parade by saying, “We don’t know who did this shooting, by the way.”

Colter drily said, “We have some idea.” Maher said, “What?” and she said, “If it were a white man shooting, we’d know.”

Maher insisted, “We don’t know,” and when Colter gave recent examples of non-white shooters being underplayed, Maher was incredulous. “You think they’re repressing that reporting?”

After a little more back and forth, Colter confidently said, “The longer they go without telling you, it’s not a white male.”

Maher responded by rolling his eyes and sarcastically saying, “We don’t know… [but] you know, because you have special powers.”

Annnnddddd… it turns out (after several more days of MSM obfuscation) that the shooters are black.

Unexpectedly!

If I’m reading Maher correctly, I think he could actually pass a lie detector test on that question: he authentically seems to be unaware of the obvious and consistent bias in virtually all MSM reporting on race, and especially on crime!

How can that be? One of the oldest political jokes I know has to do with a typical MSM headline announcing an imminent extinction-level event: “World Ends Tomorrow: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.”

Similarly, every crime story either becomes the object of obsessive focus and exaggeration or is ignored, depending on the race or politics of the perps and victims. Jussie Smollett’s risible hoax about Trump fans in Chicago nearly lynching him is the biggest story in the country… until the truth becomes clear, and the media slinks away.

Violent thugs like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and George Floyd die in the process of committing more crimes, and they are transfigured from recidivist criminals into saints and martyrs.

Meanwhile white kids like the Covington Catholic schoolboys are confronted at the Lincoln Memorial by an aggressive American Indian weirdo (rumors that he is Liz Warren’s brother have not been confirmed, but still, #wemustneverstopmockingher), and they stay calm. So the media smear them as entitled white aggressors harassing a morally pure “person of color.”

Or how about Kyle Rittenhouse, the racist vigilante who went on a killing spree against innocent black civil rights protestors? Except that he’s not racist, and not a vigilante, and the guys he shot were all white sex offenders who attacked him, and deserved every bullet he fired in self-defense.

I could go on and on, but I don’t have to, because we all know the truth.

Except for Bill Maher, apparently.

It’s really depressing to recognize how many of our fellow citizens – and voters! – really believe the propaganda the media has been feeding them. But it’s especially so when a guy as smart as Maher, and who has a high profile job that entails obsessively following national politics, is totally blind to the most basic realities of American politics in 2024!

Ugh. Enough with the bring-down stories. Let’s take a quick look at a few stories of lefty follies from the past week.

First up is our Cadaver in Chief. How bad has it gotten for Dems trying to find something positive to say about Joe Biden’s campaign?

This bad: When Biden was doing a photo op at a Mexican restaurant in Cali, several people inexplicably wanted to take a selfie with him. (My guess? They were each hoping to get the last pic with a US president before he died, the creepy vultures.)

As he was posing, he pushed a button on a customer’s phone to switch it to selfie mode. And the Biden campaign actually put this out as part of a statement: The customer was “surprised POTUS knew how to do that.” To which the Corn Pop Slayer responded, “After the last guy, the bar’s on the floor.”

I know: the campaign considered that shot at Trump a shining example of witty repartee. But they buried the lede by sliding right past the telling, hilarious detail: This is what it’s come to! When Joey gaffes manages to press the right button on a cell phone, a potential voter was surprised he could pull that off!

Look for the following puff-piece stories in coming days:

Voter in a public bathroom when Biden came in reports that Biden was able to use the urinal correctly. Voter shocked!
During a photo op at Denny’s, Biden ordered something close enough to barely be recognized as a “Grand Slam Breakfast.” Waitress flabbergasted!
Physician arrived at the White House in the morning to do a routine check of Biden’s vital signs, discovered that Biden had continued to carry out such autonomic functions as respiration and a semi-steady heartbeat overnight. Doctor stunned!

That’s our president, people.

Meanwhile, lefty media outlets continue to get blasted like Sonny Corleone at the toll booth in Godfather I.

I’ve already laughed about the closure of Jezebel and the Messenger, the firings of Brian Stelter, Fredo Cuomo and Don Lemon, and the job cuts at the LA Times, WAPO and CNN. Now we can add Vice Media to the list.

Vice was valued at almost $6 billion in 2017 – I’m assuming by socialist accountants who dusted their peyote with crystal meth whenever they did an audit – before they filed for bankruptcy and were sold last year for $350 million.

Now reports say that they’re trying to sell off a publishing business and fighting rumors that their entire site might disappear because they’re struggling to pay their monthly server bills.

Who would have thought that being dishonest partisan hacks and smearing half the country for years on end would end in tears?

Speaking of which, BuzzFeed is another media outlet that has been diligently searching for the alchemical recipe for turning malicious, dishonest socialism into profits. It bought an entertainment media brand called Complex for $300 million shortly before going public in December of 2021, and for the next year, its stock price hovered around $10 a share.

Its recent price is $21 dollars per share, which I would think is a good indicator of—

No, wait. I misread that. That’s supposed to be $.21 per share. As in 21 cents.

As in, you’re in the drive-through at McDonalds and they ask if you’d like to supersize your fries, and you say, “Yes, but I don’t have any more cash on me. Would you take three shares of BuzzFeed stock to make that a large fry?”

And the teenager in the paper hat would say, “No.”

So BuzzFeed announced more layoffs, and it just sold Complex for $108 million.

Now I’m just a simple country English professor, so I don’t claim to understand the complex world of high finance. But if our resident big financial brains – CO and Chris Silber – could help me out here…

Isn’t buying an asset for $300 million, and then selling it a few years late for $108 million what you’d call “buying high and selling low?”

And that’s not a good thing, right?

It’s not just behind-the-scenes lefty media types who are getting hit with the reality stick. Unfunny comedian Jimmy Kimmel has announced that he’ll likely be retiring at the end of his current contract.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that his ratings (and those of lefty scolds Colbert and the Daily Show et al) have crumbled, and ads on his show are bringing in 41% less than they were doing 4 years ago.

Maybe I was a little hasty in calling Kimmel “unfunny.” Because THAT is hilarious!

Finally, there are also some positive signs coming out of Gaza, where a Palestinian official is claiming that, “Hamas’ leadership is planning to remain in the besieged Gaza Strip and carry on their fight against Israel to the end.”

Sources suggest that three top Hamas leaders – one Mohammed (Deif), one Marwan (Issa), and top dog Yahya Sinwar, whom I am calling “Yahoo Serious” (look him up), because his name is equally stupid, and it amuses me – are all still in a part of Gaza that the IDF has not yet invaded.

They are supposedly determined to stay there and fight to the death.

Which means that this situation presents the terrorists and the good guys with a rare opportunity for bipartisanship. Since they want to die fighting, and we want them dead, this sounds like a win-win to me.

So here’s hoping those three stooges have the life expectancy of BuzzFeed, Vice Media, and Joe Biden.

Because as always…

Hamas delenda est!