I’m afraid that creepy Juan Merchan helped the Dems dodge a bullet last week.
As I was making a few notes for today’s column several days ago, I was prepared to discuss what I think will be the three most important events – barring some unforeseen world catastrophe or October surprise – remaining in this election season: the Trump/Harris debate, the Vance/Walz debate, and the sentencing of Trump on September 16th in the bogus NY “34 felonies” case.
And then the corrupticrat judge Merchan postponed the sentencing until after the election. And just to prove that he is no more capable of shame than the Democrat hacks who have advanced the illegitimate lawfare cases against Trump, Merchan explained that he was doing so partly because he wanted to avoid the appearance of trying to influence the election.
You’re a little late for that, Juan.
Unfortunately, I think his decision was a smart one for the left, because they had painted themselves into a corner. They thought that hitting Trump with an avalanche of charges and then trumpeting his felon status would turn the people against him and guarantee Biden’s victory.
When that backfired, and rallied even non-Trumpies to his side, they had only three sentencing options, all of them bad. Merchan couldn’t give him no prison, because that would have infuriated the left, and implicitly admitted that the entire case was b.s. the whole time. (You can’t scream that someone is Hitler for years, then convict him at Nuremberg, and then sentence him to… a stern talking to and a letter to go into his permanent record.)
But by now everyone knows that sentencing him to prison would only re-infuriate his half of the electorate, make a martyr of him, and drive his polls upward.
The only other option would be to give him a deferred prison sentence, delaying his actual imprisonment until after the election and/or the appeals process was complete. That would have combined the worst effects of the other two options, enraging the left and hyper-motivating the right and independents.
So kicking the can down the road until after the election was the smartest course for Merchan, assuming that he’s a corrupt and dishonest partisan tool. Which he obviously is.
I just wish that the Trump team hadn’t asked Merchan to delay his sentencing, which gave him the fig leaf that made it easier to do so. The fact that the execrable Alvin Bragg did not oppose Trump’s request is more proof that the request inadvertently served the left’s agenda.
This was one time when I’d prefer to have seen the over-the-top combative Trump! He should have dared Merchan to make his day, and insisted that he be sentenced immediately on these phony, trumped-up charges, so that he could begin the appeals that Merchan and Bragg know will overturn this illegitimate verdict.
That leaves the debates.
I’ve been very happy with the way JD has been handling his many media interviews. He’s obviously smart and disciplined, and he has exposed and shot down one bad-faith, dishonest question after another. He’s also displayed an ability to avoid being distracted by the MSM hacks, and pivot back to the issues, and the obvious mistakes and flip-flops of Harris-Walz.
Walz, on the other hand, is even worse than my first impression of him. How does somebody spend literally decades lying about everything, and somehow not get any better at it? He was never in combat, he knew that his Guard unit was going to be called up to fight before he quit, he didn’t retire as a command sergeant major, he didn’t get his children through IVF.
If that guy told me that Liz Warren is a white lady, I might actually believe she’s a Cherokee. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
Also, I don’t trust a guy who’s two years younger than me and looks like he’s old enough to be my dad.
In his one interview with Que Mala, he showed why the campaign is hiding him as much as they’re hiding the Cackler. His non-answers were evasive and pathetic, and his transparently phony “Midwestern Dad” act makes my skin crawl.
I’ve seen the real thing. My dad was a midwestern dad. My grandparents and uncles were midwestern dads. I’m a midwestern dad, even though I’ve been transplanted to the Free State.
And if all of us were together having the cholesterol special at the Illini Lounge and Tim Walz came in and spent about three minutes there, my dad would elbow me and say, “Who’s the arrogant commie, and why is he wearing epaulets on a hoodie, and a whistle around his neck?”
So I’m looking forward to JD Vance wiping the floor with A-WOLz.
Que Mala is obviously a target-rich environment, too. I taught argument and debate for years, but if I was assigned to prepare her for the debate, I’d tell her to fake a heart attack, and then run the rest of her campaign from an ICU bed, while an aide explained that she can’t talk because she’s intubated.
She has a horrible record, and it’s indefensible. She has only one issue offering a polling advantage over Trump – abortion – and he’s blunted her attack by taking an inoffensive/mushy moderate position. He favors the three common exceptions (rape, incest, life of the mother) that make up 1% of abortions, and his SCOTUS judges have left the issue to the voters, rather than dictating a result, the way Roe did.
All she has is lies and distortions (which she can’t support), empty promises (which she could have carried out since 2021 but hasn’t), and ad hominem attacks (which she can’t spell).
So it all comes down to Trump, and whether we’ll see good Trump – aggressive but charming, focused, and disciplined – or bad Trump – distracted and susceptible to being baited.
We saw both in the last week. Trump’s address to the NY Economics Club on Thursday was great! He laid out a menu of policies that would “Make America Affordable Again,” with facts and examples that would appeal to economy nerds and regular kitchen-table Americans alike.
He hit all the relevant numbers – average increase in net worth and yearly income during his administration, and the erosion of both during Biden-Harris, along with the same pattern working out re: gas prices, groceries, interest rates, etc. Plus Elon Musk is coming on board to analyze ways to streamline federal bureaucracies!
Then we got an hour of bad Trump on Friday, when he gave a rambling press conference blasting E. Jean Carroll and several other accusers. He insulted one of his accusers’ looks, saying she “would not have been the chosen one,” and disparaged his own lawyers.
Obviously Carroll is a loon, and that entire case was a blatant miscarriage of justice, perpetrated by a corrupt NY leftist court system, starting with passing a Trump-targeting law to retroactively change the statute of limitations.
But we’re two months away from a crucial election, and every minute Trump spends on anything other than exposing and defeating Harris-Walz is a boost for the Democrats and a hindrance for Trump.
Please, Mr. President, I’m begging you, leave the lawfare to your lawyers, and focus on winning in November. Give us more of last Thursday, and less of last Friday!
Finally… boy, did Dick Cheney ever live up to his first name or what? To think that a guy I once admired, a guy who shot a lawyer in the face, has sunk to endorsing Que Mala!
I understand that many conservatives have their disagreements with Trump. I’m one of them, as regular readers know. I didn’t appreciate it when he sided with woke mega corp Disney, when he trashed DeSantis, praised evil leftist Stacy “M-1” Abrams over the GOP alternative in GA, etc.
But those are all trivial objections now. Trump is mostly conservative, and his first three years in office gave us the most conservative governance we’ve had since Reagan. And Harris-Walz (and Obama, Imhotep Pelosi and whoever else would be pulling their strings) are far-left disasters who would spend every day in office undermining every conservative principle that our country was founded on.
Given all that, we have a binary choice, and NO conservative of any stripe can possibly choose to support Harris-Walz! It’s not even close, and the Cheneys have shown themselves to be fools, knaves, and many other things I can’t write in a public forum because I’m a gentleman.
No matter how many lawyers you may shoot in the face in the future, you’re dead to me, Dick Cheney!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 