The Incredible Aftermath of Biden’s Stepping Down (posted 7/22/24)

Well, I certainly picked an event-filled week to go off the grid – or at least semi-off the grid – for a week’s trip up north to see my family.  I haven’t even gotten a chance to keep up on the CO site (!) though I dipped in from time to time.

I didn’t see any of the GOP convention live, although I saw a lot of clips and highlights, and I’ve had a chance to listen to a week’s worth of my top 4 political podcasts during my 17-hour drive home, so I think I’ve got a pretty good sense of the goings-on. 

Of course the latest bombshell is that Biden’s campaign is now officially as defunct as his neural synapses have been for, oh, call it at least 4 years now. 

We’ll all be dissecting the total upheaval in the campaign for a while, but I’ve got at least a few fragmented, end-of-a-long-drive thoughts from off the top of my head:

First, there are a lot more Joe Biden jokes I’ve half composed that will now go to waste.  I’d been looking forward to seeing how many variations of “settle it at the battle box” I could work into future columns.  (Early contenders were “butter box” and “bottle box,” but “bullet box” would have had to wait.  Because: too soon.) 

I did have one brainstorm that can still work, though.  You know how they put together those “In Memoriam” segments every year at the Oscars, honoring the Hollywood types who have died in the past year? 

I thought that I could create one of those for Biden, and get some tech wizard in CO nation to hack into the convention site in Chicago and play it on the big screen during the convention. 

Just a taste: a black screen appears as “Adagio for Strings” plays mournfully, then a black-and-white montage of Biden falling up mobile airport stairs and over sandbags and off of bicycles, and wandering around stages and shaking hands with ghosts goes on for a few minutes.  At the end the camera moves through a cemetery, finally coming to rest on a tombstone with “Joseph Robinette Biden, 1843-2024” carved on it.  Below that, the epitaph: “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up,” Barack Obama    

It would have been funnier right before Joe made his “speech” accepting the nomination, but I think it can still work.

I know Joe is in for the ridiculously unearned hagiography treatment at the convention.  He’ll be hailed as a Washington-esque figure, praised for voluntarily giving up the campaign as a moving act of self-sacrifice on behalf of a grateful nation. 

Rather than the truth: he’s always been a small-time grifter who bumbled into the WH after a rigged primary and a hiding-in-the-basement rigged campaign in 2020, and was preparing to stumble in again, courtesy of MSM malfeasance and a scorched-earth lawfare campaign against Trump.  Until he forgot to take his special blend of Red Bull, amphetamines and lion testosterone extract before the debate, and accidentally revealed to us the centenarian behind the curtain.

And then the polls went south and the money spigot was closed, and suddenly all of his co-grifters were hustling him to the door and handing him his hat and a one-way ticket to Palookaville. 

Or at least Malarkey-ville.  

But before he goes, they’ll give him a send-off at the convention.  And how funny would it be if he was sitting there on the edge of falling asleep when my pirate “In Memoriam” presentation started playing all over the hall?

Good times.

Anyway… (as Joe might say)… we’re now facing a whole new election, and we need to keep pouring it on, and taking nothing for granted.  My modest proposal would be to spend the bulk of Elon’s $45 million per month on an army of lawyers and poll watchers in all of the battleground states – I’ve been reliably informed that that’s where they keep the battle boxes – to do everything possible to stop the steal this time.  

I’m really glad that Biden endorsed Que Mala (#neverunderestimateJoe’sability…), because that choice has got to have the smartest Dem pols pulling their hair out.  She’s the only person in this hemisphere with lower poll ratings than Joe, and I’m sure the power-brokers didn’t want to go through the humiliating process of lying for and then knifing Joey Gaffes in public, just to replace him with someone almost as likely to lose as he was!

And it warmed my heart to see the beginnings of a painful lefty-on-lefty civil war breaking out almost immediately. 

On one side are the pols and celebrities who immediately jumped on the Que Mala bandwagon: Slick Willy and the Pantsuit; super-villain Soros; Juicy Booty and the Squad (worst bar band ever!); Grandma Squanto Warren; Ken-Doll Newsom; plus professional pretendians including DeNiro, Middler, Ruffalo, etc. 

Even Jim Clyburn – who five minutes ago was “Ridin’ with Biden” is now all, “Scare us with Harris.”   

On the other side is the Obamas, Schumer, Jeffries, the NY Times Editorial Board, and Imhotep “Aiieee! The mummy lives!  Kill it with fire!” Pelosi.  And, presumably, all suitably Machiavellian Dems, who can’t believe their co-religionists actually want to replace the Mumbler with the Cackler.  (Worst Batman villains ever!)

Hopefully this will shape up as the political equivalent of the Iran-Iraq war, in which both sides are so awful that we can just hope for protracted fighting and lots of casualties all around. 

Can you remember a wilder campaign season ever?  One month ago Biden was cruising toward a coronation convention; we were wondering whether he would really show up for any debates; the only assassination attempts on Trump were aimed at his character, and none of us had ever heard of Butler, PA.  Trump didn’t have a running mate, SCOTUS hadn’t ruled on immunity or nuked Jack Smith’s appointment, and nobody knew that the head of the Secret Service was a DEI incompetent, or worse.   

And all of this has changed in what feels like the blink of an eye! 

I guess Que Mala was right. 

There really is a great significance to the passage of time!

Hamas delenda est!

Thoughts on the Aftermath of Trump’s Near-Assassination (posted 7/15/24)

The firehose of news since Saturday’s failed assassination attempt has been disorienting.  It’s hard for me to even remember how different the world and the political landscape looked only three weeks ago.  Biden’s debate collapse and the resulting firestorm of unprecedented chaos on the left completely upended what had already felt like a volatile, crucial, turning-point election.  

And then Trump comes with an inch of being murdered, and all hell breaks loose. 

As usual, the CO site has been a good place to come to sort it all out.  CO has offered insightful and wry posts, the COSE has said what many of us were thinking, and the reactions of CO nation have run the gamut, giving voice to all of the conflicting emotions that we’re all cycling through.

For me, the surreal feeling on Saturday was compounded because I am toward the end of reading the true story of another assassination attempt on another American president – one I should have known about, but didn’t.  

The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington, by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch tells the story of a plot that unfolded in the late spring and summer of 1776, during the run-up to the British navy arriving in force in NYC for the first big battle of the Revolutionary War. 

NY Governor William Tryon and NYC mayor David Matthews were both enemies of Washington and the revolution, and they funded and led the plot.  (Just as today, NY and NYC have been plagued by terrible governors and mayors, apparently.)  The conspiracy was widespread, and involved many loyalist citizens, some Continental soldiers, and most shockingly, Washington’s own housekeeper and a small number of his own elite force of “life guards.”  (Basically, our new nation’s first iteration of what would one day become our secret service protection teams.)

Watching the story of an unfolding assassination attempt in real time, nearly 250 years later, was very strange.  Even with all of the obvious differences between our colonial beginnings and today, the sense of fate turning on the smallest of issues – a shooter inexplicably getting so close to a president, a fortuitus turn of a head – and disaster narrowly averted echoes from that tumultuous time to this.

Washington’s religious views could be semi-opaque at times, but he always spoke of Providence guiding him through the war years, and never so much as during the summer of 1776.  And it’s easy for me to see that same Providence at work this weekend.

I’ve still got a lot of negative emotions to work through.  After years of lies, demonization and Hitler/Trump comparisons, we don’t hate the media enough, for example.  I’m appalled by the hypocrisy of the left, as they turned on a dime from throwing everything but the kitchen sink at us, to lecturing us about our need to “lower the temperature.” 

But I’m going to do my best to focus on the many positive things to come out of this weekend, starting with the immense relief and actual joy that comes from surviving such a shockingly close call.   I’ve always loved Churchill’s quote to the effect that, “Nothing is more exhilarating than being shot at without result.”

But today I think he was only half right.  Because for Trump and for us, that quote must be revised: “Nothing is more exhilarating than being shot at and losing only the tip of your ear instead of your life!”

Even now, thinking of what might have happened, of how close we came to disaster, takes your breath away.  Today, I’m the biggest fan of Providence – or as I call it, “Pater, Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus”– of any roving correspondents you know.

But for me, it’s not just a deep and abiding gratitude that is warming my heart.  Because as another philosopher (first name: Conan) once noted, some of the finer things in life are also, “To crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their press-titutes.” (I have paraphrased, loosely.)

I’m not thinking of the good and decent Democrats in this country – and there are many out there, and we need to remember that.  Those people have to be grateful that Trump survived, even as they recognize the political boost his close call will give him.

But it’s not those decent Dems I’m thinking about.  It’s the creepy, hysterical, malevolent and Machiavellian Dems I’m thinking about.  And I am imagining with great schadenfreude their frustration and impotent fury today. 

Because really: they spied on him, they launched conspiracies against him, they rigged the 2020 election to get rid of him.  Then they saw him coming back, so they deployed transparently illegitimate and corrupt lawfare cases against him, and they even got 34 bogus convictions that will be overturned after the election is over.

And the more they smeared and fought dirty against him, the better his polls got.  Then their candidate reveals his own fragility and dementia – and their own shameful, years-long coverup of same – at the 11th hour, sending them scrambling to find a desperate, last-minute solution that involves stumbling through a political-landmine-filled landscape.

And then, on a sunny Saturday, they hear the breaking news: somebody has shot Trump!  And it sounds like it was a head shot!  Maybe their decades of devotion to Satan and all of his dark ministers throughout the hoary underworld (including Slick Willy, Anthony Weiner and Hunter, and their consorts in the whore-y overworld) are finally going to pay off, and their great Orange nemesis will be neutralized at last!

Annnnndddd… it turns out the bullet grazed his ear, and he popped right back up, gave the fist-pump heard around the world, and within 30 minutes the first of a million memes appeared to troll his leftist haters.  (My favorite so far: Trump’s mugshot superimposed over the words, “Missed me, b*tch!”)

Oh, the sweetness of it all.  Their most hated foe cheated fate by an inch, literally.  And in a way that makes the most perfect, campaign-bolstering photo op in human history! 

If the bullet had missed him, the commie conspiracy theorists would have denied that any bullets were fired, or at least that any of them had come within a mile of him.  He was never in any real danger, and he’s lying about the whole thing, which he probably staged!

But no. The bullet dramatically grazed his ear. Which, as Uncle Jesus would have it – sorry, I mean “as Providence would have it” — is filled with blood vessels, which can produce a lot of blood without threatening someone’s life the way a sliced femoral artery or jugular would.  But the blood can produce an amazing, visceral picture.

Did I mention that as the inevitable photos were being snapped, there was an American flag right behind him?! 

So you’ve got a white guy with light-colored hair, bleeding dramatic, scarlet blood, under a perfect blue sky, framed beneath Old Glory, rippling in the wind!   

How upset were the deranged goons at the New York Times at that image?  They digitally removed the flag from their photo.  I’m not making that up!  They photoshopped their own picture to make it less iconic.

Which is just an epic self-own, and a delicious echo of their shameful past as pro-Stalinist propagandists.  Just like Stalin used to crudely doctor pictures to “erase” comrades who had fallen out of favor, the NY Times is now doctoring photos to erase the American flag, which has never been too highly favored at the Times.

Especially when it looks great in a photo, and helps Trump. 

Note: I’m now on the road in TN to see mom and sis, and will be up in Illinois for several days to hang with the cousins, before heading back and spending some pre-birthday time with mom.  I probably won’t be writing a Friday column, unless I just can’t help it!

Hamas delenda est!

Trump Was Already President Once, + Lefties’ Insistence on Controlling Language (posted 7/10/24)

I’m not going to focus on Joe Biden in this column, as tempting as that is.  Because I am a well-raised Midwesterner, and have been taught not to speak ill of the dead.

Instead, I’d like to address what seems like the Left’s main strategy for this election: issuing dire warnings about the impending doomsday that will surely befall the nation if Trump wins in November.

When I heard the first Democrat or MSM empty head say that – I can’t remember who it was, since there have been so many – I thought it was the most desperate and stupid thing I’d ever heard.  Not just because it’s transparently false, but because it couldn’t possibly work.

During the 2016 campaign that was at least a plausible strategy.  Because of Trump’s wild, undisciplined talk and lack of a political track record, people could rightly worry about how he’d perform in office.  Would he really try to lock Hillary up?  Who knew?

Many conservatives shared my concerns that Trump might actually be a RINO in a fighter’s disguise.  He had been a lifelong Democrat, worked closely with and donated to Dems all over NY, was pro-choice, etc.  (Of course I was thrilled when he turned out to be mostly conservative, especially during his first three years in office and before the covid/Fauci problem hurt him.)

But now, after he served four years with very good results (again, excepting the unprecedented pandemic year), it doesn’t make sense to try to scare the voters with a hypothetical. There’s a reason that he got 11 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016!  People saw what he did, and they saw the results, and they liked most of it.

But the Dems can’t give it up.  DeNiro’s hysterical comment is typical: “If he ever gets elected, he will never leave!” 

He did get elected, you mook!  And he left! 

The example that has stuck in my mind came from Bill Maher, a reasonably smart, obnoxious lefty who has been at least intermittently sane this election cycle.  He’s very well-informed about politics, but he still has giant blind spots which demonstrate that he only follows lefty “news” sources, and thus is actually badly misinformed about many issues.

For example, Maher apparently believes that the small group of unarmed January 6th protestors were a serious insurrectionist threat, and that all of the protestors were violent would-be usurpers, all evidence to the contrary! 

When he did a show with Dave Rubin last year, he also insisted that Hillary never denied that Trump had won the election or called him an “illegitimate president” dozens and dozens of times.  I don’t think he was lying about that: he really did not know.

He must have gotten trolled about that enough that he now knows that she did that, which means that she is as much of an “election denier” as Trump is.  (And with much less justification!)

But just a few months ago, with Megyn Kelly, he was right back at it.  This time, he drew a big distinction that hinged on the word “concede,” arguing that Hillary conceded her election loss while Trump never did.  When Kelly brought up her dozens of “illegitimate prez” claims over the succeeding years, he dove right back in, insisting that the morning after the election Hillary conceded that Trump won.  And he repeatedly charged that Trump has never done so.

I guess you can say that there’s two ways to “concede” an election: verbally, and through your actions.  And I don’t understand anybody who values the former over the latter.  Many politicians insist that they were cheated, and that they actually won.  (I’m looking at you, Stacy Abrams.) 

Some of them might even have a case.  (I’m NOT looking at you, Stacy Abrams.)  But who cares what they say, as long as they leave?

I don’t mind that Abrams has insisted for years that she won the GA governor’s race.  In fact, it’s been pretty entertaining to watch.  But on inauguration day, she was at home eating a gallon of ice cream with a comically over-sized ladle (I’m guessing), watching Kemp take the oath of office.  

The same applies to 2016.  Hillary verbally conceded one time, the morning after the election, and then she spent the last 8 years taking it back, and insisting that she won.  Good.  That makes me smile, every time. 

Trump never said the words, “I lost,” because in his heart (and in many, many people’s opinion) it’s not true.  But after telling people to peacefully protest and mounting a legal but ineffective court challenge, he left office. 

That seems to mean nothing to Maher.  When Kelly pointed out that Trump left office, he repeatedly returned to the mantra of “he never conceded!”

 It’s a weird mental and verbal tic that I’ve noticed a lot of lefties have: insisting that people SAY what they demand, regardless of their actions.  You see it in many contexts. 

For example, when the left was pushing for gay marriage, conservatives and moderates offered a compromise: let’s grant gay people all the legal rights of marriage, but just call it a “civil union.” 

Activists had pointed out the unfair treatment of gay partners – they sometimes couldn’t be admitted as “family” to hospitals when a partner was dying, they couldn’t automatically inherit or get the same tax benefits as a spouse did, etc.  Establishing legal civil unions would remedy all of those concerns, but without applying the verbiage of “marriage,” which had for time immemorial been applied only to male/female relationships.

And that was unacceptable to the left.

The same is true of all of the insane battles over pronouns.  You can be a hulking dude with a full beard and an erection, and call yourself Suzie Snowflake for all we care.  But you can’t force people to call you a woman, and address you as “she.” 

This isn’t just a trivial linguistic quirk, but a core distinguishing attribute of the quasi-totalitarian left, IMO.  It’s not enough for them to be given equal rights or tolerance.  We must be forced to submit and acknowledge the rightness of their position.  Thus you get the giant guy in a dress in a convenience store, sounding like James Earl Jones, when a harried clerk called him “sir”: “It’s ma’am.  It’s MA’AM!”

Maher’s position is essentially the same.  It doesn’t matter that there’s a ton of evidence that the 2020 election was at the least rigged, or that Trump had good reason for believing so, or that he voluntarily left office.  He must say the words.  He must be FORCED to say the words!

And somehow Maher and many on the left feel like they are the put-upon victims, and Trump is the authoritarian bully and threat.  What must it be like to live in that kind of distortion field every day of your life?

To sum up:

A man is not a woman, and you can’t make us say that.

“Ze” and “Zir” are not pronouns, and you can’t make us say them. 

Trump was already president, and he wasn’t Orange Hitler, and the country did just fine, and you can’t scare us with your hysterical warnings about what didn’t happen before, and won’t happen again.

Hamas delenda est!

Are Trump’s “Lies” Like Leftist Lies? (posted 7/8/24)

As I am writing this well after midnight on Sunday, it looks like Biden is going to be forced out of the race.  Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon.  

The Biden family and their closest hangers-on have circled the wagons, but the howling mob of feckless media and Liz Warrens are firing more and more arrows their way. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

And on the inside they’ve got… non-Dr. Jill (“The patient is fine, everything’s fine.  He answered all the questions!”)  Oh, and also Hunter.  Which isn’t great, because when you’re surrounded by aggressive opponents you need crack shots, not crack heads.

Meanwhile, the hypocritical chutzpah of the MSM knows no bounds.  Two small-time radio hosts are in trouble because they admitted that within the last week, Biden’s team sent them pre-arranged questions to ask Biden during radio interviews.  One of the hosts was fired, and the media is in a huff, shocked – Shocked, I tells ya! – that “journalists” would collude with a Democrat candidate!

(Remember that time when CNN hack Donna Brazile admitted to giving Hillary the debate questions beforehand?  And you can watch her right now on ABC News!)

Another good example is this Breitbart headline from Saturday: “Hollywood Donors Rage at Katzenberg for Convincing Them Biden Wasn’t Too Old to Run.”

CONVINCING them!

The sub-head is even better: “People Are Pissed, They Feel Betrayed”

Yes!  Katzenberg pulled the wool over their eyes and convinced them, and now they feel betrayed. 

I can see it now.  They’re all sitting around a long table in a conference room, yelling in righteous anger:

“You told us that Biden was the best Biden ever, and that he was in great shape and at the top of his game.  We held debate-viewing parties expected him to show up with a towering intellect and rapier wit, as well as the youthful virility and animal magnetism of a Martin Simpson-esque figure!  And out totters the Crypt Keeper?  You betrayed us!”

They’re a bunch of image-obsessed people in an image-conscious business, yet they want us to believe that they never noticed Biden’s physical decrepitude and mental infirmity over the last four years?  The evidence was all around them, piled as high as human excrement in the streets of San Francisco, but they somehow managed to overlook it.

Even when it came in the form of Robert Hur’s sobering report, and the transcripts that backed it up. Hur testified about the evidence that Biden was guilty of retaining and disclosing classified materials, and that he was only refraining from charging Biden because he thought that a jury might resist convicting because Biden lacked “mens rea,” Latin for “guilty mind.” 

This legal concept involves the diminished capacity of a defendant, and is sometimes paraphrased in our system along the lines of, “Did/does the defendant understand that he was doing something wrong when he committed the crime?”

But everyone with functioning eyes – including those Hollywood liars – could see that Biden lacks “mens rea.”  Along with “mens vivi” (a living mind) and “mens muneris” (a functioning mind).

Even more troubling, during his meeting with the Pope, he also lacked a “mens room.”  (HA!)

It’s gotten so bad that even Rob Reiner is out.  After still defending Biden last week, Reiner put out a tweet yesterday calling for Biden to step down.  My favorite part of the tweet is the first sentence: “It’s time to stop f***ing around.” 

NOW, Rob?  You’ve been “F-ing” around on this planet for 77 years, and NOW it’s time to stop? (I can hear Archie saying it now, “Stifle yourself, Meathead!”

When you’ve lost Meathead, it’s really Joe-ver.

The Biden team’s only argument about the debacle that has gotten any traction – by which I mean the MSM has taken it up and repeated it shamelessly – is that Trump lied so, SO much during the debate.  Which is infuriating, in the context in which every understandable word out of Biden’s mouth was dishonest.

Sure, Trump tells lies.  Like all politicians, and like all of us.  But from the first days of his administration, I’ve been aggravated by the mismatch between the way the MSM talks about Trump’s “lies” vs. Democrat lies. 

Most of Trump’s lies are exaggerations (his inauguration had the biggest crowd in the history of earth, he had the safest border in the history of the country), or half-truths (nobody thought Roe was a good decision), and many of them are about petty/trivial issues (Does anybody believe that his WH accurately reported his weight, or that he just won a non-senior club golf championship?)

A lot of his “lies” are bombastic generalizations of an accurate statement.  (Saying “we had the best environmental numbers ever,” isn’t checkable; saying “everybody in the world respected us” cannot be literally true, etc.)

And many of Trump’s lies are actually Democrat lies about what he said.  He didn’t tell people to inject bleach to fight covid, he didn’t call Nazis “very fine people,” etc.

Compare those to the lies told by Dems that the MSM never seems to notice. 

Obama rammed through a partisan health care plan impacting 1/6th of the economy on two monumental lies: if you like your doctor and your health plan, you can keep both under Obamacare. 

The repeated Democrat lies about the Russian hoax hampered Trump’s administration for years.  The Hunter laptop Russian disinformation lie may have changed the outcome of the close election in 2020.  Constant lies about race – cops kill tens of thousands of unarmed, innocent blacks every year; the 1619 project; there is institutional racism everywhere – have poisoned race relations.

And the MSM lie that is unraveling right now – that Joe Biden is a mentally and physically healthy man capable of being a competent president – has to be the most consequential lie of the last decade, at least.

This double standard has always been aggravating, but a comment I heard on a podcast over the weekend really crystallized the issue for me.

Regular readers know that I am a language nerd.  Connotations of different words can be crucial, and I really value searching until you find just the right word.   As a fan of the late, great Norm MacDonald and other great comedians, I see this in comedy as much as in politics.

I’m thinking of an old Chris Rock bit in which he heard someone say that Biggie Smalls and Tupac were “assassinated.”  Rock said – and if you know his stuff, you can hear him spitting out each word — “JFK was assassinated.  Martin Luther King was assassinated.  Them [N words] got SHOT!”    

I thought about that bit yesterday when I heard a disillusioned liberal on Joe Rogan’s show going off on what hypocrites Dems are for calling Trump a liar while they excuse all of Biden’s lies.  He said that Biden is a total liar, while Trump is just a “bullshi**er.”

That clicked.  It’s the right word.

I think Trump is much more than that; he can actually be a very strong communicator.  (During and after the 2016 election, Scott Adams wrote some very insightful analysis about this strength of Trump’s, and how the arrogant left had missed it.)  

But he definitely mixes in a lot of a salesman’s puffery.  And his loose and undisciplined way of speaking often gives his enemies ammunition, as when he uses schoolyard insults, or threatened to put Hillary in jail if he won.

On the other hand, which is worse: sarcastically threatening to be a “dictator for a day” and joking about locking up his opponents, while not doing it?  Or actually behaving like a quasi-dictator?

(As Obama did when, after admitting dozens of times that he cannot lawfully change immigration laws on his own, did just that.  Or as Biden did when he tried to force millions of Americans to take an untested vaccine, stuck the public with billions of unconstitutionally “forgiven” student loans, and unilaterally opened our borders.)

I can hear Chris Rock saying it in my head:

“Trump might be a bullshi**er.  But those guys are LIARS!”

Hamas delenda est!

Zogby’s Wacky Plan, and Why Biden Must Stay in the Race (posted 7/5/24)

I hope everybody in CO nation had a good Independence Day!

It was a very low-key one here; my wife and I walked to the nearby campus where they have fireworks on the 3rd.  We were planning to drive to a nearby small town and see the fireworks there on the 4th, but after I spent a day on a carpentry project and my wife was feeling a little under the weather, we stayed in and watched the fireworks from NYC and DC on tv.

I also recorded a two-part bio of Reagan, because I’m nostalgic for the days when we had a solid, competent president.  I’m going to watch that after I post this column, and remember better days.

I’ve always loved the Fourth, and after a lifetime of only seeing small town fireworks – which are just fine by me, generally – Karen and I talked about going up to DC to see next year’s fireworks on the Mall.  If Trump wins in November, we’ve decided we’re going to be on the Mall a year from today, and check that item off our bucket list.

If Biden or his replacement wins, the idea of going to DC is a little too dispiriting to contemplate right now.  But in the meantime, I’m finding humor where I can, which means that I’m enjoying the Democrat disarray while it lasts.

Just looking at random headlines must be horrifying – and deservedly so – for those knuckleheads.    In the middle of a spate of stories of big blue city papers calling for Joey Gaffes to step down, I saw an editorial out of Atlanta saying that “it’s time for Biden to pass the torch.”

Really?  Everybody knows that that guy couldn’t hold onto a torch, let alone pass it.  Even if he could, would you want fire anywhere near him?  He already walks like Frankenstein.  Do you remember how Frankenstein reacted to torches and fire?

Even scarier?  The White House on Wednesday declared that Que Mala Harris is “the future of the Democratic party.” 

Yikes!  Their present is the most decrepit guy from the most decrepit wing of the nursing home, and their future is cackling inanity.  No bueno.

More hilarity comes from a different corner, in the form of new strategy from James Zogby, leftist brother of pollster John Zogby.  If you haven’t heard of James, two facts about him will tell you all you need to know: he worked on Jesse Jackson’s campaigns for president in the 1980s, and commie fossil Bernie Sanders picked him to work on the Democratic Party’s platform in 2016

Now, after what sounds like a lifetime of bad political choices, James has sent a memo to DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison about how to potentially go about replacing Biden, and it’s a beautiful political Rube Goldberg scheme. 

It would have Biden announcing that he’s not seeking re-election (good luck with that!) and then praising Que Mala but NOT naming her as his successor (seriously, good luck!)  “This would kick off a one-month process, during which presidential hopefuls would vie for the support of the DNC’s voting members. Those participating would need the support of 40 voting members to become an official DNC candidate.”

In other words, he’s proposing to shove crack-head Hunter and non-Dr. Jill aside and pry Joe Biden’s cold, dead hands off the presidency, then knife the first non-white, non-male VP, and then retreat to a smoke-filled room from which party bosses would emerge with a candidate whom no voter had a hand in choosing.

Because: Democracy!

It would be just like Tammany Hall, only with pot smoke replacing the cigar smoke in the room where the nefarious deals were being made. 

The kicker – which I could not make up, even with my fertile imagination – is that Zogby is pitching these corrupt, secretive machinations as follows: “The central idea is to create a process that is open, transparent, and energizing, while, at the same time, legitimate and democratic.”

Good lord!  It’s amazing that Zogby’s pants aren’t as engulfed in flames as Biden would be if he  tried to pass an actual torch to Que Mala!

Listen, James, you dopes had a ready-made “process that is open, transparent… legitimate and democratic.”  [Engage Sam Kinison filter:] It’s called “a PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY!! OH! OHHHH!! [End Kinison filter.]  And rather than letting it play out in legitimate ways, you corruptly rigged it, for the third straight time!   

When it looked like scary, radical great-great-grandpa Bernie might beat Cankles McPantsuit in 2016, the DNC rigged the outcome in her favor.  Then in 2020, when Bernie once again looked capable of beating Biden (in a far-left great-great-grandpa face-off), you rigged it for Biden. 

Thus we got the last four years of the Visiting Angels presidency.  (They’re America’s choice in home care!)

And just a few months ago – because you figured that since you’ve gotten the MSM to go along with your hiding of Biden’s dementia since 2020, why not stick with it? – you rigged your own primary AGAIN!  You wouldn’t allow any actual primary contest or debates, and you even set the rules so that any votes for RFK would not be counted.

And NOW, just because your emperor’s new clothes have been revealed as non-existent, you’d like to pull out an 11th-hour “legitimate, democratic” process?

Guess what, James?  You all are as naked as Brandon is.  And NOBODY wants to see that! 

I, for one, stand with our Cadaver in Chief.  He has the delegates, and thus the nomination, and I think he should cling to his office like grim death, if you’ll excuse the expression. 

You hang in there, Joe Biden!  You didn’t come this far – and live through a jail sentence with Nelson Mandela, and long nights on the road in your 18-wheeler, and a fierce battle with Corn Pop, not to mention your narrow escape from the ferocious cannibals who got ol’ uncle Appetizer – just to quit now!

With non-Dr. Jill behind you, and Hunter with his hand out, and Que Mala at your side, you’re just the guy to take on Orange Hitler!  Don’t believe the polls, and don’t listen to John Zogby.  Make your feckless party dance with the one who brung ‘em!

But don’t actually dance.  For the love of God, don’t try to dance.  In fact, just stay in the White House, take plenty of naps, and have Jill stop by right before Matlock, to tell you how well you’re doing.

Because you’re doing great, and you’re the candidate the Democrats deserve, so don’t you quit!

I’ll be back on Monday with several good news stories, including some analysis of the recent SCOTUS decisions that are causing wailing and gnashing of teeth in all the right lefty circles.

Hamas delenda est!

More Debate Fallout, & 16 Nobel Economists are Full of It (posted 7/3/24)

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!

Three Political Requiems: Biden’s Campaign, His Gaza Pier, and Jamaal Bowman’s Comical Last Hurrah (posted 7/1/24)

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!

Post-Debate: Dems & MSM Should Pay a Price for Lying about the Shape Biden was in (posted 6/28/24)

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 8th, (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!

PWFEs Threaten Dem Electoral Success, & in Florida, Hostage Taking Doesn’t Pay (posted 6/21/24)

Before I get started, I want to thank readers for the kind comments on “my visit with mom” column on Monday.  I feel a little sheepish at the remarks on what a good son I am though, for two reasons.

First, we’re lucky that mom’s personality has not changed, as I’ve seen happen with some Alzheimer’s patients, whose demeanor deteriorates as the condition progresses.  But mom is still her adorable self, so I’d have to be a Hunter-Biden-level d-bag to not love her back and treat her well!

(Regular readers may remember a story that sums up mom, from after a small stroke she had last year.  She was still unsteady on her feet when she came home, so Rhonda told her that she was going to sleep in her bed with her the first night, in case she needed to get up in the middle of the night.  Mom was a little confused, but said, “Okay.”  Then, a minute later, she asked, “Did you have a bad dream?”

That’s our mom, crushing it at motherhood, whether at 25 or 85!)

Second, my sister and her husband live with mom, and have since they sold their house and mom sold hers shortly after dad died.  They bought a house together, and they’ve been with her full-time, so they deserve the real credit for helping her and caring for her.  To the extent that that can be a burden – and it is often one of the joys of life, too – they have come through.

So I feel lucky to be able to stay with her as often as I can, both to give them some time away and to spend precious time with mom.  But I also feel a bit like a divorced, non-custodial dad: I get to be the “fun one” who takes the kid to Disney (pre-grooming, pre-leftist Disney) and buys her presents and then leaves the day-to-day work to the custodial parent.

Still, I didn’t get a chance to respond to the comments on Monday’s column, and I do appreciate them.

And now, onto the usual shenanigans…

As in many past elections, the Democrats’ chief obstacle this November is going to be PWFE.  Which, of course, stands for “People With Functioning Eyes.”

It’s a time-honored tradition for the Dems to be selling some version of “believe what we tell you, and not your lying eyes.” 

Remember when Bill Clinton would be doing a campaign photo op at a BBQ restaurant, and he’d be proclaiming how much he loved CAW CAW and he didn’t have sex with “that woman,” but you’d notice that as he was talking, he was squeezing the butt of the nearest waitress?

Or when they told us that Obama was a post-racial Light-Bringer, but you noticed that he was a smirking narcissist who hated whitey? 

Or when they told you John Kerry had gravitas, and that Pelosi was a canny operator, and that Liz Warren was an Ojibwe Princess? 

But you noticed that Kerry was one of those tree-people from Lord of the Rings, and Nancy Pelosi was the mummified remains of Nancy Pelosi, and Liz Warren was as white as the lead singer of an Edgar Winter cover band performing a Pat Boone medley in a hockey arena in Stockholm? 

(#wemustneverstopmockingallofthem)

Those were your pesky functioning eyes, making trouble for the Dems.

But this year, the PWFE are a threat to the leftist narrative on more fronts than usual.   

This cycle, they’re telling you that crime is actually down, but you’re watching that report on CNN in your hospital room, because you can’t change the channel, because you’re in a full-body cast, because you forgot to run serpentine to your car in a parking lot, and were thus set upon by a bunch of criminals who beat you to within an inch of your life.

They’re telling you that inflation is under control and that Bidenomics is working, but you’re at a diner eating a breakfast that you had to take out a HELOC to pay for, and you’re looking at the prices at the gas station across the street and wondering if there is a skateboarding commute in your future.

They’re telling you that the border is secure, but as you channel surf, you keep seeing what you think is a panoramic scene of an endless column of weary Jews trudging out of Egypt in The Ten Commandments.  But then you look closer, and see that it’s Arizona, and there are zero Jews in the crowd.  In fact, many of them are demanding iPhones and debit cards in Spanish, and others are muttering about “death to the infidels.”

And the guys who jumped you in the parking lot were speaking every language BUT English, and one of them was wearing an “I [heart] MS-13!” t-shirt.

They’re even telling you that their plans to spend billions on wiping out homelessness are working wonderfully.  But you can’t help but notice that Go-pro video of the streets of every blue city looks like a cross between footage from Revenge of the Living Dead and a casting call for extras to play the close friends/meth-y hookers in an upcoming biopic about Hunter Biden.    

But perhaps the Dems’ biggest challenge with PWFE during this election year involves their candidate for president.  Whom, your functioning eyes are telling you, appears to be possibly dead.

Or at least dead-adjacent.

Lefty hacks have been trying to counter that accurate impression of Biden’s public deterioration.  Their first talking points were that whatever Joe looks like in public, behind closed doors the guy is sharp as a tack.  You should see him!  He speaks five languages, knows all the state capitals, the guy is aces!

But even sycophantic lefty late-night hosts ridiculed that idea, and they had to give it up.

So now the brain-trust at the DNC has come up with the most ridiculous gaslighting effort ever, focused around their newly coined phrase “cheap fakes,” which they use to describe video of Biden that evil Republicans have somehow manipulated to make him look bad.

Of course, the term is a variation on “deep fakes,” which are actually a thing.  It turns out that if some tech geek/evil sorcerer has a sample of someone’s voice and image, they can create a fraudulent video of that person appearing to do or say offensive things.  (I’m not sure how computers work.) 

I fully expect them to unleash such fake videos of Trump as an October surprise.  Sure, they will later turn out to be fakes, but not until after the election, when they hope it will be too late to undo the damage.  (Just like the bogus 34 “felony convictions” will certainly be overturned… after the election.)

But while deep fakes are real, and troubling, “cheap fakes” don’t exist.  And pretending that they do is incredible stupid, even for a party with AOC in it. 

They tried to suggest that the GOP has edited or cut video of Biden to give the false impression that he’s a doddering old man.  But everyone has copies of entire videos, and they immediately played them – unedited – in what turned out to be full-color, panoramic, high-def Doddervision™.   

By now, the Dem talking heads can’t even offer a rationale for what they’re saying.  The sapphic Kewpie-doll spokesperson just shakes her curls and waves her arms and repeats, “Those videos don’t show what the bad-faith GOP says they show.”

Disturbing cartoon character James Carville grimaces and sneers and says, “Come ahwne son, yuh can’t bleeve them rotten Reepublic-uns and their lahs about Joe Biden! He’s fit as a fiddle, and they-uh goin’ round sayin’ he old and feeble?  That dog won’t hunt! They just a bunch of lah-ers, thas whut they are.  Joe Biden cud go f’teen rounds with Mike Tyson any day and twice on Sundy, ah’ll tell you whut!  These ain’t the droids you lookin’ fur!”

And then you watch the video, and notice that Biden has the stiff gait (and giant shoes) of Frankenstein’s monster, and the vacant stare of Frankenstein’s monster, and the youthful vigor of Imhotep Pelosi.

And the verbal dexterity of Frankenstein’s monster.

It’s desperate, and it’s not going to work.  Because of PWFE.

Let me end on a more positive note, with a story from my regular category called “Celebration of Excellence.”

This one happened in Florida in February, and you can find it on the great website of the ex-cop who calls himself Donut Operator.  It’s the story of a recidivist criminal in Fort Myers – his mugshot looks like the rare combination of aggressive-looking and pot smoker – who decided to rob a bank in what Donut rightly calls “the least f**king around state in the country.”

This guy’s bank caper doesn’t go well – unexpectedly! – and he ends up facing a dozen cops in flak vests.  He’s got a knife and is holding two hostages, and pulls them very close, and stands between them.

While one cop talks to the Biden-voting (I’m guessing) perp and tries to get him to give up, a sniper uses a fellow cop as a tripod to balance his gun on, just in case.  (Belt and suspenders, people.)  Unfortunately, the criminal is wedged between the hostages, and there’s a computer monitor in the sniper’s line of fire.

But a computer monitor, for that sniper, is just like the truth for a leftist. 

Irrelevant.   

So when the bad guy puts the knife against his female hostage’s throat, the sniper puts a round through the computer monitor.  And then, microseconds later, through the bad guy’s forehead, just above and between his eyes. 

Annnndddd… down goes bad guy!  Down goes bad guy!

Weirdly, the computer still had a functioning blue screen… with a neat bullet hole in the middle of it. 

Florida gave the sniper an award for that shot – see the “least-f**king-around state” comment above – and the hostages were unharmed.

Still, the bank robber did lose his life.  So we should all probably say a prayer…

for the computer monitor.

Hamas delenda est!

Hunter Convicted, Brihana Joy Gray Fired, Pro-Hamas Protestors are Inexplicably NOT Arrested at the White House (posted 6/12/24)

My posting today is a little later than usual because I’ve made the trek back up to Tennessee to spend a week with my mom, while my sister and her hubby take a vacation.  I was unable to bring my better half along, but Cassie the Wonder Dog is with me, and we’re going to savor the extra time with mom before she turns 86 next month.

She’s still hanging in there, and though the Alzheimers continues to take its slow toll, she’s still the world-class mom who raised my sister and I, and I’m going to make some more good memories with her this week, even if only one of us remembers them!

Speaking of slow erosion, how about the state of our nation, five months before the election?  

Everywhere I look there is more evidence that we don’t hate the media enough.

Exhibit A is Hunter’s conviction, which answered an intriguing rhetorical question: If you’re a Biden, exactly how guilty do you have to be in order for a Delaware jury to find you guilty?  The answer is breathtakingly, obviously guilty.

But you may have noticed that the MSM were immediately ready with a take on Hunter’s verdict that was so wrong that if the Olympics introduced a new triathlon combining point missing, false equivalence and mendacity, it would have easily won gold.

They painted Hunter as a victim, trivialized his gun charges while ignoring the even more serious, daddy-implicating crimes for which he wasn’t charged, and claimed that his conviction somehow proved that Trump is wrong to say that his own conviction was illegitimate.

Taking the last point first, the gulf between the two cases isn’t just apples and oranges, it’s artificial apples and real felonies.

If Trump’s disputed bookkeeping entries had been crimes (which they weren’t) they would have been misdemeanors, and the statute of limitations would have run out on them years ago.  But a corrupt DA and a corrupt judge used a tainted jury pool and even more tainted witnesses to magically create a raft of felonies out of air even thinner than Obama’s skin.

Conversely, Hunter flagrantly broke several gun laws.  And oddly enough, the same Dems who for 50 years have been screaming for tougher gun laws and enforcement now think we should let drug abusing gun nuts off with a slap on the wrist.  If they happen to be Bidens.

Even more oddly, the same establishment media who helped rig the last election by insisting that Hunter’s laptop was a Russian fake managed to ignore the biggest bombshell of the short trial: the FBI’s admission that it was Hunter’s all along.  

Exhibit B:  Ode to Joy

Last week the racist and antisemitic “journalist” Brihana Joy Gray finally got fired by leftist outfit The Hill, and like a thousand flowers in spring, the schadenfreude bloomed.  You probably don’t know who she is, because why would you? 

She’s the kind of charmer who spouts Hamas talking points and anti-American and anti-Semitic tropes (America is irredeemably racist, 9/11 happened partly because the US is too close to Israel, etc.).  So if you did know her, you’d think that since she’s an obnoxious, black female leftist, she must be un-fireable, right?

So did she.  In November of 2020 she tweeted, “Some people are so obviously mad that I can’t be fired.”

Then on 6/6/24… wait for it… she tweeted, “It finally happened. @thehill fired me.”

Immediately, the countdown to her trashing her ex-employer and playing the brave martyr card began.  3… 2… 1…  “There should be no doubt that The Hill, like every other corporate news media in America, suppresses speech.”

THERE it is!  Some meme-ster immediately dropped the hammer on her, posting a screen shot from a local news report.  At the top of the screen the words, “Quote From Man Stabbed.”  Below that, in quotation marks, “What are you gonna do, stab me?” 

The straw that broke the Jew-hater’s back came last week, when she was interviewing the sister of a young woman kidnapped and still being held by Hamas.  Gray kept trying to turn the interview toward criticizing the IDF and Netanyahu and Israel, while the woman kept turning the focus back to her poor sister.

As she made an impassioned plea for Gray to believe the Jewish women who have been abused by Hamas, Gray rolled her eyes and sighed with disgust, then cut her off abruptly.  “All right, thanks for joining.”

Stay classy, BJG! 

By the way, what is it with women named “Joy” being the most joyless humans on earth?  From Joy Behar to Joy Reid to Brihana Joy Gray, there is no joy amongst the Joys. 

Speaking of antisemitic freaks, did you see the pro-Hamas bigots launching an insurrection at the White House?  I remember when coup attempts like that would send hundreds of peaceful grandparents to jail pending trial for years at a time.  But apparently wearing a terrorist tablecloth on your head – you say Yasser, I say No Sir! – grants you immunity from treason charges.

The latest outrage took place on June 8th, when mobs of pro-terror loons surrounded the White House, threw smoke bombs and chanted hateful, non-rhyming chants.   Julio Rosas also reported from the scene that the protesters “formed a mob and chased U.S. Park Police and Secret Service out of Lafayette Square after officers apparently tried to arrest someone.” He noted that law enforcement was forced out of the park and retreated to “the boundaries of the protest.”

Which begs an obvious question: Are we all out of rubber bullets, belt-fed weapons and robot flamethrower dogs? 

Because I’ll bet those would work in this case, and I for one would pay handsomely to watch the Pay-Per-View of lightly toasted anti-semites fleeing for their lives, before being knocked to the ground, hit with fire extinguishers, and then cuffed and stuffed into windowless vans to take them to prison.

Also, one of the most prominent banners carried by the cowardly, masked Nazi-emulators featured a quote from “Al Qassam” (which means “Hamas” in terrorist),” Jihad of Victory or Martyrdom.” 

If that’s our choice, let’s go with Door #2. 

Hamas delenda est!