Tag: joe-biden

A Few Thoughts on Pardons and Polling (posted 12/6/24)

The Hunter Biden pardon, while aggravating, has not bothered me as much as it otherwise would have, for several reasons that many have commented on.  First, it wasn’t exactly surprising to any of us who aren’t gullible partisan Democrats.

If all of CO Nation had been in a bar on Sunday night – and what a glorious event that would be! – and I got up on a table and said, “Hey, does everybody remember how Joe Biden has insisted for months that he has given his word as a Biden that he would never ever pardon Hunter no matter what, cross his heart and hope to die?  Well he just issued a pardon for Hunter.”

The instantaneous roar from everyone in the crowd of, “UNEXPECTEDLY!” would have produced a sonic wave strong enough to knock me off my feet. 

Second, a bright side of the Hunter pardon is that it represents one more devastating shot at the Democrats’ crumbling credibility.  It not only makes Joey Gaffes look even worse on his way out the door (which I wouldn’t have thought possible, at this point), but it also re-humiliates all the elite Dems and talking heads who lied on his behalf, from “he’s sharp as a tack” to “his refusal to pardon his son shows how much Democrats revere the rule of law, unlike lawless Orange Hitler.”    

More importantly, it gives Trump carte blanche to start tossing out pardons like Que Mala serving up steaming bowls of word goulash. Because any Dem stupid enough to start objecting vociferously is going to get Hunter thrown back in his face.  (And nobody wants that.  Ask any of the hookers to whom that has happened.)

And Trump needn’t come across as just getting even; he could draw substantive and useful distinctions between the way Biden and the Dems weaponized the legal system, and what he’s going to do. 

The law was used against him to turn non-crimes into misdemeanors, and then turn those misdemeanors into felonies, and then those felonies into crimes against humanity.  Democrats tried to jail him for keeping White House documents after he left office, but fought any attempts to even charge Hillary and Joe Biden for more severe instances of the same behavior.

Democrat Attorneys-General Eric Holder and Merrick Garland, and IRS official Lois Lerner were all found in contempt of Congress, and none of them suffered any consequences, while the Democrats jailed Peter Navarro and Steven Bannon for the same infraction.  Etc. and etc.

I hope that on Day 1 Trump pardons every non-violent January 6th protestor (i.e. the vast majority of them), as well as any non-violent abortion protestors.  More controversially, I’d like to see him pardon Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd.

That one might be too big of a distraction as he’s trying to get started, because it would inflame millions of low-information voters who have been lied to by the grifters in charge for the last 4 years.  But that case has always been outrageous.  It was a textbook example of a trial that required a change of venue, and in which evidence was tainted by corruption.  (Starting with the Medical Examiner’s initial finding that Floyd’s death was caused by a combination of lethal levels of drugs in his system and the serious damage that had been done to his heart by his life-long drug use.  Political pressure led him to later change his findings to mostly blame Chauvin.)

As I am writing this, the Daniel Penny verdict has not come down yet, but if the NY jury finds him guilty in the death of Jordan Neely, Trump should immediately pardon him, too.  That one wouldn’t be as controversial as Chauvin, because even the majority of New Yorkers know what a travesty that trial has been.

In fact, pardoning Penny would be win-win for Trump, giving him both the chance to right an obvious wrong, and also achieve a political win by sending citizens AND criminals the message that law and order is back. 

I can see him giving a press conference in NYC with Mayor Eric Adams (who is now talking tough on both crime and immigration) standing behind him.  “I love NYC and New Yorkers too much to watch them suffer what’s coming their way if their insane, far-left politicians continue to inflict this kind of helplessness on them.  In fact, anyone who intervenes as a Good Samaritan is going to get a pardon from me if convicted, so start fighting back, because my White House has got your back!”

Trump could hurt himself by obsessing over relitigating the 2020 election and his legal cases, as justified as that would be.  But he could avoid that, and help his administration’s strong start by clearly looking forward, starting with clearing the decks of past victims of the Biden era corruption. 

The second topic on my mind today is the state of political polling. 

You may remember that back in September, I commented on the way Kamala’s team started having her do a lot of interviews after she had ducked them for many weeks.  I said that I could only imagine one reason why: her campaign must have had internal polling showing that she was in much worse shape – and almost certainly losing – than all of the mountains of public polls that showed the election as tied, or with her having a slight lead.  

Otherwise, an obviously vulnerable candidate who was almost certain to implode in even the softest of interviews would have kept hiding and tried to run out the clock.

But now her Senior Advisor David Plouffe (and others, off the record) has admitted that their internal polling never showed her in the lead, particularly in the battleground states. Sure, that proves me right, and justifies the many who have been calling me Nostra-marticus. 

Okay, maybe not “many.”  Because I just made that up.  But I’m hoping it catches on, just the way that I hope “Nostra-dumb-ass” catches on to describe smug doofus Allan Lichtman and his “13 keys.”

But that’s not my main point.

How did her campaign have accurate polling info, when almost the entirety of the rest of the polling world did not?  The public polls weren’t wildly off – the majority did show Trump with a slight, up to 2-point lead, and he ended up winning the popular vote nationwide by around 1.7, even though he swept the battleground states, mostly narrowly.  But I’m wondering about the nature of her internal polls, and also whether the Trump campaign had the same info.

I completely understand “push polling,” i.e. inauthentic polls that play with word choice or demographic sampling in order to produce a favored result: our candidate is ahead, her positions are popular, and she’s got momentum and is winning, so get on the bandwagon.

But there are legitimate pollsters too, and their survival in the marketplace is tied to their ability to get it right as accurately and often as they can.  

That’s why the infamous Ann Selzer Iowa poll – showing Kamala winning the state by 3 points, rather than losing by 13, as she eventually did – was such an odd outlier.  She had previously earned a reputation as the “gold standard” among Iowa polls, and I was really confused by her final, wildly wrong poll.

Until it was revealed after the election that months earlier she had told the Des Moines Register that she was planning to retire after this election.  Which leads to a plausible explanation of why a respected pollster would destroy her own future business prospects by putting out a wildly inaccurate poll that would logically help the Dems and hurt the GOP: she wasn’t planning to be in business in the future.

One thing this election points out: relying on a Real Clear Politics-style aggregation of all polls is a dicey proposition.  Not because RCP isn’t a solid site which offers a great amount of detail for political junkies, but because the people running the site apparently don’t have an accurate way of gauging the honesty, competence or reliability of various polling outfits. 

The rationale for a RealClearPolitics aggregation approach is the appeal to the “wisdom of crowds” idea: when you average data from all across the spectrum, you will get the best approximation of truth.  But the “wisdom of crowds” assumes that the people in the crowd are doing their best to get the right answer, while many in the polling organizations are biased partisans, often looking – consciously or not – to confirm their own priors. 

You can see that in the aggregation.  Rasmussen, AtlasIntel and a handful of others showed Trump with a narrow but stubborn lead, and ended up very close to the final results. But the following polls all showed Harris winning, with similarly narrow but stubborn leads: Ipsos (Harris +2), NPR/PBS/Marist (+4), Forbes (+2), Yahoo (+1) and Morning Consult (+2).

Adding those consistently biased polls to your data pool necessarily means that the aggregation will be skewed.

Ironically – or not – the wisdom of crowds idea was completely vindicated by the betting markets – which consistently showed Trump winning by between a little and a lot.  And that makes sense, because betting markets – while supposedly not scientific, or based on meticulously gathered and analyzed polling data – do recreate the ideal crowd envisioned by the “wisdom of crowds” idea.

They all have their own money on the line, and are thus incentivized purely by the desire to get it right, absent all other considerations of political bias or any rooting interests. 

My conclusion is that we need polls to gauge the state of a race, but the polls that have been wrong in the past should pay a steep price. 

If a car-maker’s vehicles kept blowing up, and a restaurant’s food kept making customers sick, and one of Hunter’s hookers kept giving him the clap – assuming he didn’t already have it. Which… c’mon – we would stop patronizing all of them.

And that about sums up the lefty pollsters’ recent performance: they keep blowing up, making us sick, and giving us STDs.

This year marks the third election in a row where most of the national polls significantly under-estimated Trump’s support across the board.  In a fair world, those polls would be disregarded in the future until they’ve been right for as many cycles as they have now been wrong. 

Which means that we should take NPR, Ipsos, Morning Consult and the rest seriously ONLY in 2040 at the earliest, and then only if they get ’28, ‘32 and ’36 correct!

Hamas delenda est!

Lots to Be Thankful For, + My Trump Inauguration Speech (posted 11/27/24)

So I was reading the online site Space.com today – as one normally does most Tuesdays – and I came across an intriguing article titled, “A super-Earth beyond Mars would have made Earth nearly uninhabitable.”  The article discussed the implications of recently published research by my daughter, whom the article referred to as a “planetary scientist.”

She’s not technically a “planetary scientist” yet – she graduates in a few weeks with two degrees, in Planetary Science, and Astronomy and Astrophysics, and is applying to start a PhD program in the fall – but she’s the first author on a journal article already.

Also, my older daughter Katie is fully recovered from her surgery last month, and back at work saving lives as a pediatric nurse.  (Thanks again for all your prayers and good wishes.)  And Cassie the Wonder Dog is lying on the floor beside my desk as I write this, radiating canine faithfulness.

Thus ends the “Bragging Dad” section of the column.

As we all prepare for another Thanksgiving, this one seems especially sweet to me.  Everywhere I look, I see evidence that God exists, and He loves us.

And I’m not just talking about my smoke-show wife, smarty-pants daughters and the Gators upsetting LSU and Ole Miss in recent weeks.

I’m talking about bourbon, and ice cream, and scotch, and literature, and music, and beer, and modern anesthetics.  (I’ve getting a root canal next week, and thanks to numbing shots and sweet, sweet oxycodone, I’m not worried about it at all.)  I’m talking about football, both college and pro. (Did I mention that the Gators are bowl eligible, despite having the toughest schedule in the country this year?) (Did I mention the Chicago Bears?  Okay, I did not. But wait ‘til next year!)

I’m talking about living in the greatest country in the world, based on a Judeo-Christian moral foundation that safeguards our rights.  I can worship freely, and speak my mind, and defend myself and my family against violent d-bags – using my constitutionally protected handguns and shotguns.

I’m talking about a nation which has allowed human flourishing in so many areas, including amazing technological advances.   From air conditioning (I don’t know how people settled Florida without it… or why!) to airplanes to cars to computers, we now have access to the greatest products of human creativity.

I’m talking about video and audio recordings of amazing music – not just classical, bluegrass, country, pop and rock, but eccentric, riveting styles from around the world, including Gregorian chants, Mongolian throat singing (check out the Hu Band’s bizarrely hypnotic “Wolf Totem”), and a Georgian Orthodox priest and a young girl singing The Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, which I can’t watch without choking up.

We can read great writing – from Dante, Milton and Shakespeare to Hemingway, Chandler, Frost and C.S. Lewis – all at our fingertips.  We can access great drama and comedy, and documentaries and movies on any subject, whenever we want.  I can watch Victor Davis Hanson, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman and Adam Carolla whenever I’m in the mood.

And the computer allows us to “meet” people and form communities in ways never before possible.  Communities like our very own CO nation, which has been for me a source of information, entertainment and even joy, as I hope it has been for you.  We’ve celebrated cultural and political good news together – and commiserated through bad news – over the last eight years.           

And as this year moves toward its end, we’ve got so much more to celebrate.  This election has renewed and fed our badly dented optimism about the country’s near future, and filled us with gratitude for the opportunities in front of us, and relief over the bullets we dodged on November 6th. 

It’s also given us more than a little bit of invigorating schadenfreude at the much-deserved dose of karmic whoop-ass and whirlwind-reaping received by some people who needed their ears boxed and their course corrected.  As do we all, from time to time.   

This Thanksgiving and Christmas will be extra happy, because we know that in January our nation will begin to undo the damage done over the last decade and more, and reorient ourselves to what has made our country great.  I am looking forward to this inauguration more than any other in my lifetime.

On Monday I wrote about how I’d love to see Trump troll the left by being sworn in on a copy of Project 2025.  And because I am basically a child trapped in a man’s body, that started me fantasizing about the inaugural address I’d like to see Trump deliver.     

Am I saying that my version ranks up there with Lincoln’s second inaugural, and should therefore be carved on the walls of the future Trump Memorial in DC? 

To quote a failed presidential candidate whose name escapes me, “I’m saying we should have that conversation.”

So as my Thanksgiving gift to you, here’s the speech that I’d load into Trump’s teleprompter on January 20th:

“First let me thank the citizens in the battleground states, which I swept in an unprecedented way.  Never been done before!  Nobody has ever seen anything like it.  Certainly not the pollsters, who are very stupid people, let’s admit it.

The “Blue Wall,” they called it!  They were right about it being a wall, but they got the color wrong.  They got it wrong!  Because we built a fantastic Red Wall.  We won the popular vote, we built a red wall, and soon we’ll build a big, beautiful border wall!  You’re all going to love it, believe me.

I’d also like to thank my beautiful wife Melania.  She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?  She came here the right way – LEGALLY! – and she gave me my gigantic, genetically superior son, Barron. 

And my other children too, from my other wives, each one younger and more beautiful than the last.  People are always asking me, “Sir, how did all of your children turn out so great?  They’re all so successful, not a loser in the bunch.  None of them took bags of illegal cash from corrupt countries, or recorded themselves snorting meth with hookers, like some other presidential offspring we could mention.”

But I say, “No!  You shouldn’t talk about other people that way, even if they did leave cocaine lying all over the White House.”  Especially not today, which is a fantastic day.  Maybe the best day ever, since it marks our turning away from the horrible failures of my low-IQ predecessors, and toward the amazing dawn of making America great again!  

I’d like to begin my second term with a gesture of bipartisanship, by agreeing to two of the Democrats’ main proposals over the last several years.  Therefore, I am going to grant their frequently and passionately repeated requests to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, starting now.  I will begin immediately pushing all of my policies through, on all fronts, with at least 50 votes in the Senate, using JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote whenever needed.” 

“Secondly, I hereby agree to an 18-year maximum tenure on the Supreme Court.  Sadly, that means that Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts will be forced to retire this year.  I will immediately nominate strict constructionist/originalists to replace each of them, and ram them through the Senate confirmation process.  It also means that Justices Sotomayor and Kagan will be forcibly retired during 2027 and 2028 respectively, and I will appoint their replacements as well.  Doing so will ensure that when I leave office, we will have a solid court with an 8-1 conservative majority, and for most of the next 15 years, 7 of those will be my appointees.

During his second term, JD Vance will appoint replacements for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett.  Then Ivanka – the first female president – will appoint Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s replacement in 2040.  Then, of course, Barron will succeed Ivanka after his election when he turns 35 years old, in 2041.

Now if you will all join me in the White House, we’ll be enjoying a state dinner catered by McDonalds.  My Democrat friends can pile into the back of the line of Trump garbage trucks parked on Pennsylvania Avenue for the drive to dinner.

God bless you, and God bless America!”

Have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving, CO Nation!

The Democrats’ Double-Standard on Cabinet Picks (posted 11/25/24)

Okay, now God is testing me.  Because there are too many stories in the news for just one man to possibly cover.  And even though I have the strength of 10 men, there is – tragically – only one of me.  

So today I have to postpone talking about many hilarious stories. 

Stories such as Rob “Meathead” Reiner checking himself into a “facility” to try to cope with his post-election, TDS-induced blues.  (Which I am not making up.)

Or the story of one of the assistants to Alvin Bragg – the slimy New York DA who divides his time between trying to jail Trump for crimes against humanity and making sure that as many dangerous illegals flood the streets of NYC as possible – gets mugged by… wait for it… a many-times-deported illegal!  (Also not making this up.)

Or the story of a Chicago Democrat who has tracked down the biggest disaster in his crumbling city: racist traffic cameras.  (Not made up.)

Or the story of the dimwits on the View being so unhinged that they had to read 5 legal corrections about slanderous comments they’d made – in just one week! (You can’t make that up.)

Or the story about the TDS-suffering actress (Rachel Zegler) who has been struggling to turn Disney’s big-budget “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” into “Woke Snow Brown and One Little Person plus Six Normal-Sized People.”  Disney spent the last year re-shooting after disastrous preliminary screenings and Zegler’s equally disastrously off-putting woke comments, only to have Zegler unleash another post-election tirade to the effect of, “I hate our potential audience, and hope none of them come to see this film!”  (Disney wishes that one was made up.) 

I hope to be able to come back and revisit some of these stories in all of their hilarious detail. But today I’d like to focus on another story: the gratifyingly quick roll-out of Trump’s picks for key posts in his administration.

Of course the Democrat leadership and the MSM talking heads – but I repeat myself – are trashing most of them, and vowing to oppose their confirmation.  Which will have the same effect as stamping their little feet and holding their breath, except for being less entertaining.   

If you have lefty friends who start railing about Trump’s picks, ask them this question: “How many of Biden’s political picks can you even name?”  Sure, they’ll probably remember Que Mala.  (Did you know that she was raised in the middle class, and contrary to public opinion, did NOT fall out of a coconut tree?) But after that, not so much.

To the extent that they recall anyone, it will usually be due to some scandal.  For example, who was that bald freak with the super-red lipstick and all of the stolen ladies’ luggage?  Or the military guy with the weird “dress-like-a-dog” fetish?  Ooh, or that dude who dressed like a homely woman going to the worst-ever costume party as Captain Kangaroo?    

When your lefty friend can’t name any Biden choices, humor them by naming those people, and then ask how impressive they’ve been.  For example, the Transportation Secretary is Mayor Pete.  He has no background in transportation at all, no degree in any related field, but during his confirmation he talked about how he’s always liked trains.  Seriously. 

The real reason he was hired was because he was in the primaries, and he’s gay.  So the obvious thing to do was to give the gay guy who likes choo choo trains a cabinet position.  And then look the other way when he takes maternity leave to rest up and recover from the enormous physical strain of not giving birth to the baby that he didn’t conceive, carry or deliver.  Because spoiler alert, even the most effeminate of dudes can’t have babies.    

Oh, and also, nevermind about that deadly train wreck in Ohio that he dropped the ball on.

Go down the list.  Merrick Garland is a corrupt, partisan hack, and would easily be the worst attorney general in the last 40 years, if Obama hadn’t picked Eric “Steadman the Wingman” Holder and Loretta Lynch, thus making a competitive medal-stand for the “Worst AG” finals.

Secretary of Defense is Lloyd Austin, who was in office during Biden’s unbelievably botched flight from Afghanistan, and who disappeared for several weeks to get surgery without telling anyone.

Secretary of State is Antony Blinken, who has never met a foreign conflict he can’t make worse, including giving aid and comfort to Hamas and constantly trying to bully Israel.  And so on. 

Meanwhile, Trump picks RFK Jr. to lead HHS, and the left loses their Schiff.  I recently read Maureen Callahan’s new book on the Kennedys and their treatment of women, so no Kennedy is great in my book.  But RFK has been very involved in health and nutrition issues, was right about the dangers of big pharma and Fauci’s vax mandates, and is not the anti-vax loon the Dems are claiming he is.

Still, the lefties are howling, “He’s not even a doctor, and has no formal medical training at all!”  I was just about to predict that next they’ll be banging their well-worn credentialism drum, boasting about how all recent Democrat presidents picked only docs who went to prestigious Ivy-League med schools.  

So I looked it up.  And let me ask you: of the last 6 HHS heads appointed by Democrat presidents, how many of them do you think got their medical degrees from one of those top schools? 

Would you believe zero?  In fact, would you believe that they earned zero medical degrees among them, at ANY school? 

That’s right.  Jimmy Carter appointed 2 lawyers for that post.  Clinton picked Donna Shalala (a poli-sci PhD); Obama chose Kathleen Sebelius (BA and MA in non-medical fields) and Sylvia Burwell (2 BAs in non-medical fields).  And Biden (RIP) appointed Xavier Becerra, a lawyer who doesn’t know a rectal thermometer from a regular one.   

So the Dems can zip it on RFK Jr., even though they won’t. 

As they won’t about the rest of Trump’s picks, who are generally very strong, and capable of bringing much-needed changes to their various posts.

However, I do think that Trump has made at least one lousy pick so far (not counting Gaetz), and that’s his choice of Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Labor Secretary.  I saw that CO linked to a story about her yesterday, which tells me that most of you know the basics about her background.

For the record, I’m not against private sector unions. But I agree with FDR and the influential early union bosses who didn’t think there should be public sector unions, since by definition they bargain with their own allies against the taxpayers.  (E.g. Chicago unions put Chicago mayors in office, getting sweetheart deals from the mayors who are then indebted to them, and they stick taxpayers with the bill.)

You don’t have to look very closely to know that DeRemer is not on the conservative side.  She’s one of only 3 House Republicans to vote for the PRO Act, a Big Labor bill that originated in California (strike 1) and pushed to get rid of secret ballot votes in union elections (strike 2), in favor of so-called “card-check” procedures that allow corrupt union bosses to intimidate their members into voting their way (strike 3). 

She’s also a big favorite of one of the worst people in the country, teachers’ union boss Randi Weingarten, who cheered Trump’s pick of DeRemer.  You don’t have to be Socrates to understand that when your worst enemies are celebrating one of your choices, that was a bad choice.

On the other hand, there’s no reason to over-react.  If DeRemer were to get confirmed, and she tried to pull any underhanded tricks to undermine Trump’s agenda at the behest of Weingarten or her minions, I’m confident that Trump would fire her in a minute. 

But why put yourself in that position in the first place? 

Regular readers know that I was a DeSantis guy – and still admire him and think he’d make a great president – but that I’ve voted for Trump three times, and I’m ecstatic that he won, and can’t wait until January.  His overall picks are great, and I’ve never looked forward to a presidential term like I’m looking forward to this one!

That being said, I’m a conservative, and wherever MAGA overlaps with conservatism, I’m super-duper-ultra-MAGA.  Where it doesn’t, Trump is still my guy, but I’ll support efforts to get him to steer his course back toward conservatism.    

Having said that, I’d like to pose an uncomfortable thesis to CO nation about DeRemer: If you had looked at her background last week, you’d say that she was a deep-state, RINO corrupticrat in the pockets of the sleazy, student-neglecting teachers’ unions.  And you’d be right. 

But after Trump has picked her, and you hear me cogently point out her Weingarten-y-ness, are you tempted to get your back up and call me a RINO (which is blasphemy, as Dr. Allan Lichtman could tell you!), and deny that she’s a bad pick? 

I think we need to aggressively support Trump against the bad-faith attacks of the Left.  But when he’s wrong about something, we need to be able to say that and debate it, without triggering internecine battles that make us look like the Democrats who are tearing themselves apart right now.  

Okay, rather than end on that down note, I’d like to give Trump his due as an amazing troller; his McDonalds and garbage truck stunts were great, and a perfect counter-move to Kamala’s inauthentic and over-cautious timidity.

I hope he continues trolling the left right up until inauguration day.  In fact, I’d love to see him get up to take the oath of office, but at the last minute tell the crowd that instead of putting his hand on the King James Bible, he’d like to be sworn in with his personal copy of Project 2025, which he will begin implementing immediately afterward.

And then do the goofy Trump dance when Imhotep Pelosi loses her dentures and Chuck Schumer has a heart attack.

I’d also like to see him follow Sherry Meyers’ advice and announce a surprise cabinet pick: Grandma Squanto Warren to head up the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

#wemustneverstopmockingher

Hamas delenda est!

Good News out of Cali, Mika & Joe Beclown Themselves, & Josh Shapiro Hurts Himself (posted 11/20/24)

As we celebrate a fortnight since the election that may have saved America, more good news continues to ripple through the land, like aftershocks from the most pleasurable earthquake ever. 

For example, I’d overlooked the good election news out of California, which shouldn’t be that easy to do, since there’s generally not that much of it.  But it’s worth remembering that CA took a turn toward Trump, just as the other big blue states did, even though it makes for a good news/bad news story.

Over the last several decades, CA Dems had voted in a bunch of soft-on-crime numbskulls to carry out soft-on-crime policies, which was bad news.  Then they reaped what they had sown – spikes in shoplifting, car theft, robberies, assaults and other assorted violence – which was good news, since they got what they voted for… good and hard.

Then two weeks ago they partially reversed course, which is very good news.  Voters tossed out crime-enabling bonehead San Francisco mayor London Breed, as well as crime-embracing Soros puppet and cartoon villain LA District Attorney George Gascon, who lost by over 20 points.

Oakland’s Mayor Sheng Thao spent her time in office defying the stereotype that Asians are smart. News reports called her “a far-left progressive who just a few years back supported slashing the police budget, reimagining what policing should look like, and investing in unarmed ‘violence interrupters’.”

I love that term!  By “violence interrupters” she meant well-meaning social worker types, but Oakland residents probably knew them by a more common-sense term: “bullet-absorbing good-for-nothings.” 

(“Violence interrupter” would be a better name for a shotgun, or maybe a WWII bomber.  You point the former at a Biden voter who’s attacking you, or you fly the latter over Hiroshima – post-Pearl Harbor, Rape of Nanking and Bataan Death March – and boom!  Violence interrupted.)

Anyway, Sheng Thao got the heave ho on November 5th. 

So did Prop 47, the brilliant “Please Feel Free to Shoplift up to $950 Worth At a Time” law that Californians passed ten years ago.  On Tuesday they replaced that with Prop 36, the “Never Mind – Shoplifting’s Illegal Again” law. 

Sadly, my old home state of Illinois is still governed by J.B. Pritzker (D-irigible), and he’s not done with the stupidity yet.  A few days after Trump’s victory, Pritzker doubled down on his trans fanaticism.  He’s already required that boys who say they’re girls can play on girls’ sports teams and use their bathrooms, and he’s used Medicaid funding to pay for horrific gender surgeries on minors.

Most people are assuming that Trump will not allow Medicaid funds to continue being misused in that way.  However, even though Illinois is broke and getting broker, Governor Goodyear is declaring Illinois essentially a sanctuary state for gender-confused people looking to carve themselves up.  I’m guessing that he’ll be putting Illinois taxpayers on the hook for those surgeries from now on.

I’m no psychiatrist, but I will humbly suggest that it is much easier, psychologically speaking, for a governor to be okay with mentally distressed guys cutting off their junk if he has not seen his own junk in decades. 

#putdownthatgiantturkeyleg

#pushawayfromthetable

Meanwhile, lefty media types are roasting Morning Joe and Mika, after they went to Berchtesgaden – which Whoopi assures me is German for “Mar-a-Lago” – for a meeting with Trump.   

I don’t know if you all are history buffs, but not since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact have I seen commies so eager to meet with a Nazi before.

Their decision to obsequiously seek an audience with Trump after they’ve spent years calling him a fascistic, dictatorial, Hitlerian, existential threat to America perfectly illustrates the bind that the leftists have put themselves in. 

They know he’s not Hitler.  But now he’s going to spend four years not just being NOT Hitler, but being a veritable un-Hitler.  In fact, he’ll be 99% less Hitler-y than Joe Biden and Obama and Merrick Garland and Imhotep Pelosi and most of the top Dems have been for the past 4-12 years.   

And boy, will that make the leftist elites look increasingly dishonest and/or hysterical!  Thankfully, the internet is forever, and we’ve got hundreds of hours of their apocalyptic posturing that we’ll be able to hang around their necks like a Pritzker-sized albatross with a Hitler mustache.     

Speaking of albatrosses around hypocritical Democrats’ necks – and how’s that for a seamless transition? – the creepy attempt to steal the Pennsylvania Senate seat should come back to haunt Josh Shapiro. 

Shapiro had been about the only Democrat who came through this Schiff-show of an election with his reputation untarnished.  Most of the others looked like either evil schemers (“Joe Biden is sharp as a tack, and Trump is Orange Hitler who called white supremacists ‘fine people’.”) or complete morons (“We’ve got a billion dollars, the public doesn’t care about inflation or the border, and every voter does what Queen Latifah and Bruce Springsteen tell them to!”)

But Shapiro had dodged a bullet by not being picked by the Cackler to be her partner on the political Hindenburg that was her campaign.  And he had the great advantage of being compared to Tampon Tim as Harris/Walz exploded and plunged to the ground. 

People said that Shapiro was popular in PA and would have won the state for Harris, and that he was smarter than Walz (duh!).  He also got some victim points – which is like bitcoin for leftists – because he’d been passed over because of anti-Semitism.

Overall, he had navigated the 2024 disaster and come out without a scratch.

Until now.  Because after the PA election was called for McCormick, Bob Casey went old-school Democrat, and started cheating with both hands and in plain sight.  When the vote count had clearly gone against him, he refused to concede.  (Remember when that was election denying, and treason, and disqualifying, and Not Who We Are?)

As things got more desperate, a panel of three Democrat officials openly admitted that they were counting illegitimate ballots – ones without signatures, dates or security envelopes, as the state’s laws clearly require – in blatant violation of a recent PA State Supreme Court ruling.    

One sleaze ball county commissioner said, in front of cameras, “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country.  People violate laws anytime they want.  So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention.”

Democrat officials in several other counties went along with the same illegal strategy, and counted more illegal ballots.  The totals in the reports I read suggest that around 1,000 – 2,000 such ballots were involved.    

The optics of this cheating are obviously terrible for the Dems, especially since they impeached Trump – and Fani Willis has tried to jail him – for what they falsely claim is the exact type of cheating they are now doing, in broad daylight!     

And throughout all of this, Josh Shapiro has stood by silently, giving his tacit approval to Casey’s sordid machinations. 

Forget for the moment how morally wrong Shapiro’s behavior is, and consider how weapons-grade stupid it is!  Casey is trailing by around 26,000 votes, so there’s zero chance that there are enough illegal votes to change the outcome.  And it’s not like Casey’s seat would tip the balance in the Senate anyway!  It’s the 53rd GOP seat, and is therefore only marginally helpful.    

But beyond that, during such a long, nasty campaign, one of the few advantages the Dems had over Trump was that many voters thought they respect “our sacred democracy” more than Machiavellian Trump does.

And now Shapiro has squandered that by acting like a corrupt machine politician – an old-timey NYC Tammany Hall grifter, or a sleazy Chicago alderman winning with the cemetery vote! 

I’ve written before about the terrible bench the Dems have for the 2028 presidential race.  Everyone who ran in the 2020 primary is tainted. 

Mayor Pete disgraced himself with the maternity leave and train derailment; Bernie is 112 years old; Grandma Squanto is a laughingstock because of her vaudeville red-face routine (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and the rest were beaten by the ghost of Joe Biden.

Their governors (Hochul, Whitmer, Ken-Doll, Pritzker) are horrific, their senators are pathetic, and AOC has nothing going for her but a juicy booty (her words, not mine). 

The only nationally known Dem left standing on 11/6 was Josh Shapiro, and now he’s beclowned and besmirched himself.

How bad off are the Democrats today?  The first post-election poll of Dem voters asking who they’d support in 2028 came out yesterday.  Only 6 people made the list, and the bottom 5 only got between 4% – 8% each.

The clear front runner, at a dominating 41%?  I swear to you I am not making this up…

Kamala freaking Harris!

Now if you’ll excuse me, the dopamine and laughter are making me light-headed, so I have to lie down.       

Hamas delenda est!

More Delicious Fall-Out From the Election (posted 11/8/24)

I feel like we are all close enough by now that I can start this column out on a personal note. 

I have been blessed to live a life in which I’ve had more than my share of great weeks.  There was the week I closed on and married my wife – a woman so far out of my league that I still have to look up at her through a telescope, like Lord Nelson scanning the horizon from the deck of his flagship in the late 17th century.

There were the weeks in 1997 and 2002 when my daughters were born, and the week in 2013 when Cassie the Wonder Dog joined our family.  Not to mention the fourth week of January 1986, when the greatest NFL team in history (Da Bears) won the Super Bowl.

But this week isn’t even over yet, and it’s already edged out the Bears, the Wonder Dog, and one of the daughters’ birth.  (Never mind which one, because that would hurt her feelings.) (And yes, of course, I’m kidding!)

I have spent the last two days scanning the internet and flipping through channels, savoring the greatest election of my lifetime, and I haven’t even scratched the surface yet.  I’m awash in dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, along with just the right amount of bourbon. 

I’m actually whistling to myself, like a dwarf in a Disney movie! 

In fact, I’m having physiological reactions that are probably not healthy, if they last too long.  My hilarious, over-performing brain has been competing for precious blood supply with other parts of my body, and my brain is not entirely winning, to the extent that I am experiencing intermittent difficulties in just maintaining consciousness.

Perhaps I’ve said too much. 

By the way, after I mentioned several songs that were my soundtrack for the election night and early morning, CO nation member Bruce Townshend (for whom I would much more happily yell, “Brrrruuuuuce!” than I would for Springsteen these days) suggested that I provide a soundtrack for each column that I write. 

While I’m not sure I can sustain that, I know the song that’s become an earworm over my last 36 hours.  It’s the theme song from the greatest of all live-action puppet movies, Team America: World Police.  It first popped into my head when I heard that Bibi Netanyahu quickly called Trump with congratulations, and I immediately thought about what the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas must have thought when they found out that Trump is coming back.

Use Duckduckgo.com (not commie Google) to find that theme song, and prepare to meld your thoughts with mine.  Language alert though: it’s a cheerfully and childishly vulgar song, and if “F” bombs are beyond the pale for you, please don’t listen!   

I have been giddily watching leftist celebrities melting down since the election.  Jimmy Kimmel’s tearful reaction was especially delicious, with perfect tones of whiny, emotional narcissism throughout. (He’s more of a woman than Melania Trump is, and that’s neither an insult to her nor a compliment to him!)

He ran through a list of people for whom election night “was a terrible night,” including women, hard-working immigrants, healthcare workers, scientists, free speech fans, poor people, the middle class, seniors, etc.  Of course he didn’t mention whether the immigrants are here illegally or not, and he laughably suggested that free speech is more welcomed among his Soviet-style censoring friends than it will be under Trump and Elon.   

And his complete lack of self-awareness is clear when he frets over the poor and middle class, both of whom voted for Trump in greater numbers than ever before.

He ends perfectly: It was a terrible night for those who voted against Trump (finally, an accurate one!), and, “It was also a bad night for everyone who voted for him.  You just don’t realize it yet.”

Got that?  You – meaning the majority of the country now – are so stupid that you don’t even realize what a terrible mistake you’ve made.  Jimmy knows better, and you’ve really let him down.

Joy(less) Reid made a similarly idiotic point, saying that Kamala “ran a flawless campaign.” Her evidence?  “Queen Latifah never endorses candidates, but she did this time.”  Kamala lined up “all kinds of celebrity endorsements.” 

Yes she did.  And as we’ve all heard our whole lives, “As goes Queen Latifah, so goes the nation.”  

Yet somehow, all of that celebrity preaching – Springsteen’s caterwauling, the Avengers’ lame repartee, Bill Maher’s nasal condescension – didn’t work with regular people. 

Unexpectedly!

We’ve disappointed them all, from DeNiro, Streisand and Oprah to Michael Moore, Taylor Swift, and the harpies on the View, etc. and etc. 

“How are we ever going to get through this?” you are not asking.  Because just like me, you know that you will somehow manage to persevere in spite of the crushing disappointment we’ve inflicted on our leftist betters. 

Sorry: BECAUSE of that disappointment, not “in spite of” it.

Probably my favorite backfiring leftist outreach came from actress Julia Roberts.  She did the voice-over for a creepy ad recommending that clever, secretly Kamala-loving wives lie to their slow-witted Trump-supporting husbands, telling the hubbies that they’d voted for Trump when they’d actually voted for the Cackler.

Since everyone knows that the keys to a healthy marriage are deceiving your spouse and voting for vapid idiots, you’ll be shocked to learn that Roberts has gone through a long series of high-profile break-ups and one divorce, and is now married to a guy she messed around with when he was married to someone else.

Man, I hope that dude just voted for Trump while wearing a “White Dudes for Kamala” button!  

The drama-queen leftist politicians have been as much fun to watch as the leftist celebrities. Illinois Governor Pritzker (D-irigible) had a tough-guy warning for Trump.  “I’m a happy eater.  So you come for my comically oversized turkey leg, you [have to] come through me!”

Which I found pretty confusing.  I mean, I don’t know why—

Oh, hang on.  I got that quote wrong.  He actually said, “I’m a happy warrior,” and, “You come for my people, you come through me!” 

Which sounds more logical, but less true.  Does he think Trump is threatening the suffering people of Illinois, or that he’s ‘coming for them’?” 

Though I’ll grant you one thing: if Trump wants to get at Illinois residents and to do so he has to “go through” Pritzker, he’s going to need some sort of an armored vehicle – preferably with a sturdy cow-catcher mounted on the front of it – to get through the Round Mound of Unsound (policy).

I am especially loving watching the top Dems and their camps pointing fingers and blaming each other.  It’s often said that there’s no way to fix a problem until you’ve correctly diagnosed what caused it.  If that’s true, the Dems better prepare for a lot more losing in the near future. 

Because after watching more hours of MSNBC and CNN in the last two days than I have in the previous several years, I don’t see anybody learning any lessons over there!

Many of them are blaming Joe Biden, either for running for a second term at all, or for staying in there so late.  And of course they’ve got a point, since he deteriorated frightfully by the middle of his term.  But they’re all acting like the Democrat machine and party base were blameless in that situation.

It’s not like Biden descended from heaven, and they all had no choice in the matter!  Everyone could plainly see his infirmity and his “cuckoo fried chicken” mental state in 2020. 

But since Bernie scares any voters who aren’t far-left commies, and the rest of their bench looked like a bunch of dysfunctional rejects from a bottom-dwelling triple-AAA farm club, they anointed Joey Gaffes as the party nominee, then shoved him into the basement and later managed to drag him out and across the finish line that November.

Then, after his first two disastrous years – with the opened border; the wasteful geyser of trillions shoved out the door on far-left boondoggles; the bloody mess of the nightmarish Afghanistan pull-out; the screaming rant in front of Independence Hall set-dressed as the 1930s Reichstag; the raging inflation and the monumental civil rights violation of useless forced masking and vaxing – you idiots let him run again, without a primary!      

Many are blaming Que Mala, and of course they have a point too: she is metaphysically terrible, as everybody saw when she got zero primary votes and dropped out early in 2019.  When Joe picked her explicitly because she checked a few DEI boxes, they got what they deserved: a meritless DEI candidate.

Then when Joe’s decay accelerated before and during the midterms in 2022, they could have opened their party up to a traditional primary – as people who pretend to believe in “our sacred democracy” are supposed to do.  But they didn’t do that. 

In fact, they screwed the couple of people who tried to challenge his Posthumous Excellency.  They changed rules so that any votes that went to another candidate in a primary would automatically go to Biden.  As people who pretend to believe in “our sacred democracy” would NEVER do.

They boxed out Marianne “Cray-Cray Crystal Lady” Williamson, and sabotaged RFK Jr. like a bunch of cowardly Sirhan Sirhans.  The way a party which pretends to believe in “our sacred democracy” would NEVER do. 

Thus causing one more layer of sweet irony, when a spurned RFK Jr. joined forces with Trump, and possibly added enough disenfranchised Dem voters to Trump’s total that it may have made a difference in the final result! 

For once, a Kennedy got to kill his would-be political assassins!  (Too soon?)

So they used every dirty trick possible to prevent a democratic primary and crowned Joey Gaffes.  And then he did an amazing Dana Carvey impression in the debate, and panic ensued.

But even THEN, the Dems could have scrambled to put on a “shotgun primary.”  But no.  They had a DEI hire right there, and one of the many reasons that you should never hire somebody for DEI reasons is that it’s nearly impossible to ever FIRE any such person. 

So they ended up in a hilarious dilemma.  They had stuck themselves with Biden, and when he shuffled off this mortal coil, they stuck themselves with Que Mala. 

And now they’re mad at Biden for being so Biden-y, and Que Mala for being so Mala, and they’re pointing fingers at anyone other than themselves.

More please!   

Hamas delenda est!

Some Mockery, Followed by Election Predictions (posted 11/4/24)

At the end of this column, I’m going to provide – probably foolishly – my predictions for the election.  But first, it’s been several days since my last column, so there are many stories deserving mockery: 

Immediately prior to this weekend, Joe Biden damaged the Harris/Walz ticket twice.  He deflated Kamala’s hysterical prediction that Trump will one day put his enemies in jail by saying that “we should lock [Trump] up!” and he defanged the no-name comedian’s “Puerto Ricans are garbage” gaffe by calling half the country “garbage.”

The story was that Que Mala’s campaign had demanded that he not speak in public until after the election.  So I love to picture their consternation when an intern ran into the war room shouting, “Biden has put a foot in his mouth again!”

Biden Hack 1: Oh no, what did he say this time?

Intern: What?  No.  He didn’t put HIS foot in his mouth.  He put a baby’s foot in his mouth, at a Halloween party at the White House.

Hack 1: Gross!  But… (looking around at the other flunkies who have sold their souls to Satan)… that’s better, isn’t it?  I mean, he didn’t say anything to screw us, right?

Hack 2: I guess.  Chewing on babies’ feet is crazy, but everyone knows he’s crazy by now.  I think we dodged that bullet.

Hack 1: Whew!  Okay, let’s get back to our plans to cheat and steal the vote in battleground states.

Three…hours…lay-tair…

Intern (breathlessly bursting through the door): Biden escaped the White House—

Hack 1: What?  How?  Tell me he didn’t eat a baby!

Intern (shaking his head and catching his breath):  No.  He somehow snuck onto a plane to Philly.

Hack 1: Not Pennsylvania!  (looking around the table)  Who was supposed to be watching him?

Hack 3 (looking at his shoes):  Hunter.

Hack 1: Are you Schiffing me?  You’re fired!  (Hack 3 sadly stands, picks up his notepad and Vape pen and shuffles toward the door.)  Is it too late to divert the flight?  Possibly to Greenland?

Intern: No, he landed 40 minutes ago.

Hacks 1-13 (minus #3):  F**k! S**t!!!

Intern: Secret Service scrambled, and had a car waiting for him on the runway.  But he walked right past it and wandered away.

Hack 2: Please god, tell me he walked into a spinning propeller!

Hack 4: Or he stumbled out onto an active runway and a landing jet smashed him!

Intern:  No.  Secret Service chased him down and got him into the car.  Then they took him to a press conference.

Hack 1: What?!  No!!  We said no talking!

Hack 2: What did he say?

Intern: Well, he talked about back when he was in Scranton.

Hack 4: Oh god.

Intern: And then he said… that… he wanted to smack Trump in the ass.

Hack (dropping his head onto the table): F***!  No!

Hack 2 (putting a hand on Hack 1’s shoulder): Wait a minute, hang on.  What did he say, exactly?

Hack 4: That might not be so bad, right?  All of our voters hate Trump so much, they might not even mind.

Intern: Well, his exact words were, “These are the kind of guys you like to smack in the ass!” Unquote.

Hack 1 (head still on the table): Great.  He said it about Trump AND his voters.  (Everyone around the table moans.)  How are we going to spin this?

A long, painful silence hangs in the air.  Finally, Hack 12 – from the far end of the table – says, “Maybe we could say there was an apostrophe in the sentence?”

Hack 1 (head still on the table):  You’re fired.  Get out. (Hack 12 picks up his vape pen and his crack pipe, and slowly exits.)

Hack 8:  Let’s just think about this for a minute.  He didn’t say he wants to KICK his ass, right?

Intern (shaking his head):  He said, “smack.”

Hack 8:  Good.  Kicking your ass is violent.  But “smacking” your ass is…

Hack 6:  Sexual assault?  We’re trying to get male votes, and Flat Line says he wants to smack the asses of half the country!  How’s that going to play in Peoria?

Hack 5: I wish it was AOC’s ass we were talking about.  That might get us a few male votes!

Hack 1 (lifting his head and slumping back into his chair):  Why would he be babbling about smacking AOC’s ass?  She’s on our side.

Hack 5 (defensively): Well, she’s got a juicy booty, right?  (All of the other hacks stare at him balefully, and he holds his hands up, palms out.)  Hey, her words, not mine!

Hack 1: But it wasn’t about AOC, was it?  It was about Trump and/or his supporters.  So where does that leave us?

Hack 2: I only see two options.

Hack 1 (looking at him for a moment, then sighing deeply, defeated):  Okay.  Raise your hand if you think we should say that the President’s comment was encouraging violence?  (Everybody looks at each other.  A few hands tentatively go up.)

Hack 1: Okay, now raise your hand if you think we should say that his comment was just meant to be homo-erotic?

And, scene.  

Meanwhile, Kamala diverted from a flight to Detroit on Saturday so that she could go to NYC and appear in the cold open of Saturday Night Live.  (On the bright side, the poor Detroit residents have suffered enough, and at least they were spared a Kamala speech!)  Because if there’s one thing she’s known for, it’s her deft comic touch. 

Annnnnnddddd… Yikes! That was one of the most awkward things I’ve ever seen in my life. 

And I’ve seen Grandma Squanto trying to drink a beer like a normal person, and Tim Walz trying to load a shotgun, and Donald Trump inviting several of Bill Clinton’s groping victims to his debate with Hillary, where Bill Clinton sat in the front row, sweating like a Que Mala in church. 

To top it all off, it turns out that the skit she did – she sat on one side of a “mirror” and talked to Kamala-imitator Maya Rudolph, as if she were having a dialogue with herself – had actually been done before. 

In 2015. 

By Donald Trump, talking to Jimmy Fallon, who was made up to look like Trump.

You can’t make this stuff up.  Kamala has been criticized for stealing Trump’s policy ideas, such as his “no tax on tips” proposal and his advocacy for a border wall.  So then she goes on SNL and… rips off the same skit he did 9 years ago!  And, as it happens, he was much funnier.

Unexpectedly!

Okay, I am reckless enough that I am going to make a few election predictions.  And that’s despite the fact that I did so before the 2022 elections, and was wildly optimistic, and wildly wrong. 

I thought that after the first two horrific years of the Biden administration, there would be a red wave, and I predicted something like 53/54 GOP Senate seats and a gain of around 34 House seats.  Instead, the Dems held the Senate, and we only picked up a handful of House seats, and then only because there were mini red waves in FL and NY. 

So I have a lousy track record at this.  But I’m not letting that stop me from trying again.

This time my gut tells me that Trump is going to win, but the polls make little sense to me, as they’re suggesting a lot of contradictory and counter-intuitive outcomes.

First, the “top line” of the polls – suggesting that every battle ground state is practically tied, as is the national popular vote – makes no sense in terms of those same polls’ cross-tabs.  How can Trump be way ahead of past races with blacks, Latinos, Jews, young people etc. – not ahead in terms of getting a majority, but ahead of the usual amount by which GOP candidates trail with those groups – and yet be tied overall?

Second, how can Trump seem to have so much momentum, and yet not be breaking away numerically? 

Even leftist Trump haters are admitting – through clenched teeth – that his McDonald’s and garbage man stunts have been wildly effective.  His appearance with Joe Rogan has gotten 40 million views and rave reviews.  And his surrogates – JD, RFK Jr., Elon, Tulsi – have been hitting one home run after another for the last several weeks.

Conversely, the large voter group of the PWFEs (People With Functioning Eyes) have seen Kamala doing terribly in every interview and speech.  Reliable leftist unions and newspapers that always endorse Dems have not endorsed her.  And her surrogates have been as bad as Trump’s have been good. 

Joe Biden and Bill Clinton are stomping on her every talking point. Walz is a skipping dipsh*t nightmare. Mark Cuban is insulting all of the female Trump voters, and Barack and Michelle are insulting all the male ones. 

3.  CO has been posting the betting odds, which my gut tells me are more reliable than most polling, since you know the people putting money on the line are at least honestly indicating what they expect to happen, as opposed to pollsters who are very often partisan and have skin in the game, either transparently or covertly.  And those show a 61/39 expectation of a Trump win.

4. Even more important, to me, is to watch what the various campaigns do, as opposed to what they say.  For example, when Kamala took ad money out of NC late last week to spend it elsewhere, that told me that her people believe that NC is a lost cause for them.  (That doesn’t mean they’re right, but it’s at least an honest indicator of what they really think – a super rare thing from any Democrat campaign!)

In that vein, I think a couple of huge indicators have not been talked about enough: in the last several weeks, Democrat Senate candidates in four important states – Baldwin in WI, Casey in PA, Slotkin in MI and Sherrod Brown in OH – have put out their own ads distancing themselves from Biden/Harris and touting agreements with Trump. 

In OH that makes sense, because it’s now a red state that Trump will win, but in WI, MI and PA?  Those are supposed to be razor’s edge states, and yet high-profile Dem senators are going to knife their own party to snuggle up to Trump?  And no other prominent Dems are trashing them over that?

That suggests that their own polling is showing that Harris will likely lose in their states, and they don’t want to be sucked down in her under-tow.  (Yes, okay, insert your own Willie Brown joke here.) 

Finally, there is good and bad news on the “Democrat cheating” front.  The bad news is that they’re still trying to cheat as much as they did before, with documented dirty tricks (and at least limited success) in GA, PA and other battleground states.  The good news is that the GOP has worked harder to counter that this time around, and has responded quickly and pushed back.  But there’s still a lot to worry about on that front. 

Having said all that, here are my best guesses:

President:  If pollsters are still generally underestimating Trump’s vote by even half as much as they did in 2016 and 2020 (i.e. from 3-5 points nationwide, and averaging around 2-4 in the battlegrounds), his narrow leads and/or ties in the battlegrounds could easily turn into a sweep that gets him around 325-330 in the electoral college. 

That’s my best-case scenario. Right now the RCP averages, with no toss-up states, gives him around 287, which is (please, please God!) my worst-case scenario.  I’m just praying that he wins the electoral college by enough votes that Dem cheating or legal challenges in any one state won’t be able to reverse the result!

Senate: I don’t see how we don’t at least take the Senate with 51 seats, given that WV and Montana both seem to be nearly certain pickups.  But if my sweep scenario above happens, Trump could have coat-tails that might pull narrow Senate underdogs in WI, MI, PA and OH across the finish line, for a total of 55 GOP Senate seats in my best-case scenario.

House: No idea.  RCP averages show 42 seats as “in play,” with the GOP currently holding 201 to the Dems’ 192 seats.  Their generic House preference is now 0.4% for the GOP, so if the GOP gets slightly more than half of those 42 seats, they’d have around 223ish seats to the Dems’ 212.  My best-case scenario in the event of a GOP good night might add a half-dozen seats to the GOP total.    

Okay, those are my guesses.  (And, let’s be honest, my prayers!)  Maybe you all could add your predictions to the comments?

If you haven’t already voted, please get out and vote on Tuesday!  A Trump win is essential, but winning by a large margin – and maybe even winning the popular vote – would greatly strengthen his ability to get a lot done in the next two years.

Hamas – and Harris/Walz – delenda est!

We Are Getting Swamped by Leftist Insanity (posted 10/30/24)

Two quick personal notes before I get back to the firehose of events: I talked with Katie this afternoon, and she is recuperating quickly, and hopes to be back at work (nursing and saving children’s lives!) around 11/8 or so. 

And my youngest called us today to say that she has been officially notified that a leading science journal has accepted her astrophysics article for publication shortly.  What is it about?  Well, it has, “Orbital Motion, Obliquity and Eccentricity” in the title.  So… I have no idea.  But I know that she wrote it with one of her professors, and she is getting “First Author” credit.  At age 22! 

I’m not saying that her writing prowess means that she’s taking after dear old dad, because my writing has never been described as containing “obliquity.” On the other hand, I get “eccentricity” a lot.  So I’ve got that going for me. 

Do you think I’m proud of my girls?

To quote DeNiro – the great actor, not the real-life malevolent moron, “Little bit.”

Okay, on to the news.  I have been struggling for over a week to get to the great news coming out of Israel, but the desperate Dems are giving me material that is too good to ignore.

For example, I just saw the entirety of Michelle Obama’s angry speech in Michigan, and it was worse than I thought.  Just off the top, I think I might see where Kamala got her phony accent idea, because Michelle must have said, “ya’ll” thirty or forty times. 

She was born and raised in Chicago, and has spent most of the last 8 years jetting between her mansions in Chicago, DC, Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii. 

Similarly, I was born and raised within 80 miles of Chicago.  And though I don’t have any mansions in far-flung places, I have been down to CO’s compound in Boca once, and that was pretty cool.  But even in my college town in the free state of Florida, you’ve got to go to one of the small surrounding towns to hear “ya’ll” on a regular basis.

And I can assure you that nobody in Chicago – or Martha’s Vineyard or Hawaii – gets authentically folksy with the “ya’ll this” and the “ya’ll that.” 

Anyway, I’d already seen Michelle’s delusional contention that Trump hides from hostile interviews, while Kamala bravely faces them. But after that, she said that Kamala has been an extraordinary candidate, and – not making this up – “by every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready [to be president].”    

After I cleaned up after my spit-take at the screen, she gave her explanation for the only reason that Kamala isn’t running away with this race.  And you’ll never guess the culprit in a million years…  It’s sexist and racist men!

Oh, wait a minute.  I meant EVERY one of you will immediately and instinctively guess the culprit.

She spent five full minutes on the vulnerability involved in being a woman, from the emotional roller coaster of going through puberty, to “the complicated business” going on in an adult woman’s body, to the incredible stresses and joys of pregnancy.  In fact, she spoke as if she clearly knows what a woman is, and how women differ from men!

In which case, she urgently needs to share that groundbreaking information with her party, many members of which apparently cannot distinguish females from the 47 other genders that they believe exist.  (I’d suggest that she start with Ketanji Brown Jackson.)  

But she quickly moved on, following in the obnoxious footsteps of her small, petty husband, and started wagging her finger.  In an election in which Que Mala is desperately seeking votes from men, Obama addressed them directly… only to berate them.  She called them frustrated and angry – I can’t imagine why they would be! – and then blamed their rage for killing women, warning that their own women will become their collateral damage.    

She is as angry and obnoxious as her husband, and I totally believe the rumors that her Secret Service code name was “Scowling Wookie.”  

(Okay, I made that up.  But if I were the head of the Secret Service…)

Poor Kamala can’t catch a break.  She sends Michelle out there to appeal to men and Barack out there to appeal to black men, and Big Mike repels men and Barry race-shames black men.  But at least Joey Gaffes is in her corner.

Oh no, wait.  The only tiny silver lining the Dems got out of Trump’s MSG rally was the little-known comic who made the joke about Puerto Rico being an island of garbage.  Giddy with relief, the entire MSM sprinted to their fainting couches and their rage chairs and their tantrum tables, and started weeping and howling about the incredibly offensive comments.

“How could anyone talk about people so disrespectfully?!  Comparing humans to garbage is a dehumanizing crime against humanity right out of the Nazi playbook!  Trump will never be able to wipe away the stain of—”

What’s that?  While Kamala was away last night preparing for her big, “Word Goulash on the Ellipse” speech, Joe Biden gave his Visiting Angels caregiver the slip, and staggered in front of a camera to make a campaign call?

Well, that’s okay.  It’s not like he could distract from—  What’s that?  He said WHAT?!

Let’s go to the video, which I’ve cleaned up through the use of my patented Simpson Transcript De-Slur-ifier™ : “Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community… just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage?… The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

Cut to thousands of Democrat consultants and apparatchiks simultaneously face palming themselves so hard that it registered on the Richter scale.

Good lord, if Biden is actually sentient enough to know what he’s doing, I have gained a whole new respect for him.  After the way Que Mala and the Dem machine threw him under the bus, he has been playing 4-D chess, pulling one act of sabotage after another! 

When Kamala’s handlers try to distance her from Biden, he repeatedly grabs her in a bear hug.  When she tries to run away from the Afghanistan debacle and the border disaster, he says, “Guess what?  She’s my Afghanistan-planning Border Czarina. No joke!”  When she says that DeSantis is playing politics with a hurricane and whines that he wouldn’t take her calls, Biden wobbles out and says that RDS is doing a great job, and he has Biden’s number if he needs anything.

And now he goes full Grandpa Simpson, standing in the Rose Garden and shaking his fist at the sky, hollering, “Everybody who is voting for Trump is garbage!  GARBAGE, I TELLS YA!”

So the Obamas aren’t helping Kamala, and Joey Gaffes isn’t helping Kamala.  But do you know who is?

An anonymous factory worker in Saginaw, Michigan. 

On Monday, Kamala did a photo op tour of a business called Hemlock Semiconductors.  (Speaking of Hemlock, if I were head of the Secret Service, Kamala’s code would be “Verbal Poison.”) (Ooh!  Or better yet, “Lip Service.”) She walked around looking over various objects, trailed by two guys in suits and a guy in a hard hat who explained what she was looking at.   

And before you can ask: No, the MSM didn’t immediately go on air and call Harris’ visit to the factory a phony campaign stunt, as they did Trump’s stint at McDonalds.  Nobody breathlessly said, “We’ve done a fact check, and it turns out that Kamala doesn’t work in a semiconductor factory.  In fact, she’s never worked in any kind of factory!” 

Anyway, Kamala approached some metal rods on a table as the hard hat explained what they were.  She reached out toward the metal, asking if she could touch it, and hard hat quickly said, “Do not touch it!”  She stepped toward a table of the same material in a raw form and pointed to it, and the guy said, “Please do not touch any of the poly – it is very sharp.”

And she said, “And shiny!” And giggled. 

Sweet merciful crap!  I couldn’t help but think of the hilarious meme video of a little girl who sees a bear approaching her family’s deck.  She steps up to the deck and asks, “Can I pet that dawg?”  Her alarmed parents yank her arm back, and she repeats herself three times, more insistently each time.  “CAN I PET THAT DAWG?!”

If you haven’t seen that, search for “can I pet that dog?” and watch what might well be the intellectual equal of our VP.  Except that the little girl is super cute, and her southern accent is WAY more convincing than Kamala’s.

I found myself wishing that when Kamala said, “Can I grab that rod?  Can I grab that ROD?!” the hard hat guy had shrugged and said, “Sure!  It’s a bold move, Kamala.  Let’s see how that works out for you.”

But with the way Kamala has tried to shamelessly steal every Trump policy she can, I wouldn’t put it past her to cut herself on the rod, then smear some blood on her face and hold up a fist, yelling, “Fight, fight, fight!” 

I know this column is getting long – I’m trying to pace myself in this last week before the election! – but I can’t end without giving you a non-politics palate cleanser of a story that I bet you haven’t heard about.

This one goes in the “Unexpectedly” category, and comes to us from South Africa, where famed wildlife conservationist and snake handler Graham “Dingo” Dinkelman tragically died on Monday.  (By the way, if “Dingo Dinkelman” isn’t the name of a “morning zoo” AM DJ from the 1980s, I don’t know what is.) 

Often called “the South African Steve Irwin,” Dinkelman died after a month in the hospital following a car crash.

HA!  I kid.  He died after being bitten by a venomous snake.  UNEXPECTEDLY!

This story is easy to laugh about, even though – seriously – being a conservationist is a righteous job, and the guy was a husband and a father, and seemed like a brave and cool human.  His death is truly tragic.

But c’mon, man. When people are calling you the “Steve Irwin” of your country, and you know that Steve Irwin was killed by an animal, can you not connect a few dots and jump to the obvious conclusion?

The story about his death made it even worse.  This is a quote from his wife, which I swear I am not making up: “Dingo had a venomous snake bite which, unfortunately, due to his allergy to snake venom, sent him straight into anaphylactic shock.” 

Whoa, whoa.  Hang on.  Are you telling me that the guy who decided to spend his life handling venomous snakes… was ALLERGIC TO SNAKE VENOM?!  OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!

Sorry.  I just channeled my inner Sam Kinson there for a moment.

But really, are you Schiffing me? 

First, being “allergic” to snake venom doesn’t even make sense.  It’s not like some people have an AFFINITY for snake venom, is it?  I mean, are there guys out there going, “Oh yeah, I put snake venom in my coffee every morning, and it goes great with French Toast!  It actually lowers my cholesterol and also works like Viagra for me.  Love the stuff!”

Venom is not like one of those medications that work for some people and not others, or a food that some people can’t stand, but some like.  It’s right there in the name: venom! 

I’m going to put this in terms so simple that even AOC could understand: venom… is venomous!

Second, if at some point in your life you learn that you are allergic to snake venom, does that not change your choice of career just a bit?  You don’t see people with crippling fear of heights pursuing a lucrative career as window washers on skyscrapers, or people who are repulsed by lying becoming MSM journalists.

But Dingo was apparently one of those “steer into the skid” kind of guys.  So RIP Double-D, I guess.

All right, I promise to get to some great Israel news on Friday!

Hamas delenda est!

We Were Spared by the Latest Hurricane, But Kamala’s Interviews Did Cat 5 Damage to her Campaign (posted 10/11/24)

I’ll start today with a storm update.  Because Milton took a slight southern turn before landfall, our area in north central Florida got off easy, with winds just gusting into the weak tropical storm range, and less rain than had been forecast.  I never lost power, and with my wife and daughters out of state and my stalwart canine companion at my side, the storm was no more than a cozy night at home for me.

Even the storm-ravaged path across the state from Tampa to the Atlantic appears to have fared better than the worst-scenario forecasts, and although there are heartache and losses to contend with, the death count is much lower than we had feared.

As with past storms, Ron DeSantis continues to crush it in the “Great Governor” bidness.   He competently managed the pre-storm organization and warnings, and staged the resources to come in afterward and get power restoration and rescue missions underway quickly.  He also made a great statement re: any potential looters, which I roughly paraphrase as, “You loot, we shoot.”

And he sharply Hillary-slapped Que Mala’s pathetic attempt to play politics with the storm, and make herself look important.  She wanted to cosplay as a president and force him to drop everything to take her phone calls, and he rightly pointed out that he was busy, and that the only federal official that he should logically be talking to would be the president (if we had one) and a competent FEMA official (if we had one).

Speaking of Kamala, she’s had quite a week, hasn’t she?  She’s gone on what one media source called a “charm blitzkrieg” of media appearances.  Unfortunately for her, her efforts were about as charming as the original blitzkrieg in 1939.  (Carried out under false pretenses?  Check.  Leaving a trail of destruction in its wake?  Check.   Executed heartlessly but competently?  Yes and no.)

As I said in a previous column, I think the decision to have Kamala do a round of interviews – even if they are given to bootlicking leftist presstitutes – is strong evidence that her internal polling is looking lousy.  All competent leftist pols know how terrible she is at this, so things must be bad if they are risking it anyway.       

And holy cats, did she double and triple down on the banality and word goulash in all of her interviews!

The biggest one was the 60 Minutes shot with Bill Whitaker.  That one was bad enough even before we found out that the CBS hacks had heavily edited and “polished” what they showed.  (This practice followed the pattern the Dems used with Biden for the last several years: his ads and pre-taped appearances were always horrific, which meant that the unexpurgated outtakes must have been the rhetorical equivalent of a crime against humanity!)  

Whitaker actually asked her some legitimate questions, and several times – after she excreted a rambling stew of obfuscation – he followed up with a gently chiding, “Yes, but the question was X.”  He didn’t go after her as hard as he could have – or as hard as every MSM interviewer always goes after every conservative or GOP candidate or spokesperson – but the fact that he pushed at all was enough to pierce her wafer-thin veneer of non-idiocy.

He asked her repeatedly how she’d pay for her plans, and if she regretted opening the border and thus allowed a quadrupling of Trump’s number of illegals getting into the country, and why she’d changed her position on so many issues.  And each time he got a variation on the same response: a CAT-5 yammer storm.  (“People have hopes, dreams and ambitions; I was raised in the middle class; My background is in law enforcement.”)

The brainiacs on the View tried to go much easier on her.  (Unexpectedly!)  But even their softballs baffled her like a wicked splitter from Ohtani when he’s really feeling it.  Then Sunny Hostin asked her a question that she had to have expected: “Would you have done anything differently than President Biden during the last four years?”

Now every Dem pundit has been talking about this since they threw Biden under the bus and made Que Mala the candidate: she has to distance herself from Biden’s policies, whose popularity ratings fall somewhere between chlamydia and bestiality.  That’s a tricky tightrope to walk, but she absolutely MUST do it.

So how did Sophocles Harris start her disjointed mess of an answer?  “There is not a thing that comes to mind…”      

And at that moment, at Trump HQ, a top aide turned and yelled over his shoulder, “Cut that video, slap on an ‘I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message’ at the end, and air-drop it into heavy rotation in every battleground state immediately!”

When she taped an interview with the execrable Stephen Colbert later that same day, she still hadn’t come up with a passable answer for that question.  His variation on it was roughly, “How would you be a different president than Biden?”  And she started out with, “First of all, I’m not Joe Biden.”

And the entire land echoed with a million leftists simultaneously and violently face-palming themselves.

She also gave an interview to Howard Stern, for some reason.  On the upside, Stern is an unhinged, perverted crank, so he’s right in the sweet spot of her demographic.  On the downside, he recently said that he doesn’t just hate Trump, he hates anyone who votes for him.  In other words, he basically called half the country “deplorables.”  And you know how well that works in politics.

During the interview, Stern was a real voice of reason, claiming that “the sun’s literally going to go out” if Trump wins in November.  And if there is such a thing as a Pyrrhic compliment, he gave one to Kamala: “Yes, I’m voting for you, but I would also vote for that wall over there, rather than [Trump].” 

Ringing endorsement there, Howie: Kamala Harris and a wall would do an equally good job as  president.  I’ve got to give that one a grudging, “Fact check: true.”   

Finally, for the part of the electorate who finds Howard Stern too highbrow for their tastes, Kamala went on some sleazy sex podcast called “Call Her Daddy.”  I’d never heard of it – because I was raised right, and am not impressed by graphic vulgarity.  (Plus I’m old enough to admit that that kind of talk strikes me as extra gross coming from females.  Call me sexist if you must.) 

I could only think of two discussion topics that might make Kamala a good fit on that podcast: 1. The host could grill her on what techniques she used on Willie Brown to get her political career started in California. 2. They could talk about the many wonders of abortion.

They did talk about abortion a lot.  Because, surprise!  The sex podcaster with the sexual ethics of an alley cat in heat is a fervent abortion enthusiast.  (Unexpectedly!)

The low point was when the host asked her a set-up lefty question to the effect of, “Can you think of ANY law that restricts what men can do with their bodies?”  And the cackle appeared, along with the predictably brain-dead answer: NO! 

And for the thousandth time, I asked myself the question that is on everyone’s mind: How can this imbecile have any chance of getting elected president?!

No one should have to explain this, to anyone older than around 8, but here goes:  Laws regulating abortion aren’t aimed at restricting what women can do with their bodies—only the bodies of the baby they are carrying.  (Spoiler alert, for when you take 7th grade biology: a baby has different DNA from her mother, which is true about NO part of any mother’s body, ever, anywhere.) 

Besides, just about EVERY law restricts what men can do with their bodies!  A few target men exclusively or almost so (coercing participation in the draft during times of war; laws against rape, the vast majority of which apply primarily to men), but nearly all laws affect men as well as women. 

My fists are part of my body, and I cannot use them to punch irritating leftists in the face, no matter how much they may deserve it.  The same goes for my feet, my elbows and my knees.  And don’t get me started on my skull, which in addition to sheltering my national treasure of a brain, is excellent for delivering head-butts to deserving morons.

And yet, many laws prevent me from doing so, no matter how loudly I chant, “My forehead, my choice!” or “Keep your laws off of my cranium!”

White collar crimes are also done with the body – signing fraudulent checks, conning people with your mouth/voice – as are petty crimes like pickpocketing. 

And any crime with a jail sentence as a potential outcome – i.e. nearly all of them – necessarily restricts what men (and women) can do with their bodies, since it dictates where your body can reside, when you can exercise or eat and etc. 

So Kamala’s interviewers were sycophants, or dullards, or both.  And still she has gone 0-for-8 in interviews, demonstrating an uncommon knack for metaphorically screwing the rhetorical pooch in every situation.

We cannot allow this empty pantsuit of a candidate to get elected! 

One final note: Katie’s improvement has continued, and she will likely get out of the hospital this weekend. (Yes!)  Emily is safely in California for a short visit, and Karen and I will still be able to head to Maine and then Vermont on Sunday, to enjoy the company of some old friends, and of God’s creation, in the form of fall leaves around Lake Champlain.    

I won’t have a column on Monday, but I’ll be back at it when I get home.  Have a great weekend, everybody!

Hamas delenda est!

Israel Still on a Roll, + Advice for Trump (posted 9/23/24)

In my first two columns last week, I made a case for why Trump should try to take on Kamala in one more debate.  In my other three columns, I focused on Israel’s amazing technical feats, including blinding the Iranian ambassador with science (ear worm!), and converting thousands of Hezbo pagers into pocket-sized Elvis impersonators (“We’ll take your hand/ we’ll take your eye sight, too/For we’re Mossad/and we’ll have revenge on you!”)

Boom!  Double-ear-worm paragraph, right out of the box!

Oh, wait! 

“Last Tuesday, all the Hebrews seemed so far away,

Now it seems they’re in Beirut to stay,

Oh I regret…last Tuesday. 

Suddenly, I’m not half the thug I used to be.

All my friends are calling me Lefty,

That phony page, came suddenly.”

That’s an ear-worm stand-up triple to start the week.

The good news is that Israel is still on a roll.  No, they haven’t pulled off their next sneaky tech masterpiece yet – I’m betting on either exploding K-cups (the “k” is for “kaboom!”) or else chemically re-engineered breakfast cereal (in the bowl they look like normal Frosted Flakes, but add milk, annnnndddd… Shrapnel Flakes!) (“Theyyyyyrrrrrrrreeee Grape[shot]!”)

But they did execute a Friday airstrike (9/20/24) that collapsed a building in Beirut on 12 senior Hezbollah commanders.  How spoiled am I by the wizardry of Operation Pin-Point Pager on Tuesday? 

So spoiled that when I heard that the IDF flattened the Hezbollah Dirty Dozen in a conventional airstrike, I thought, “Borrrrrinnng!”

And just in case any CNN hacks are reading this, of the 12 ex-terrorists now being spit-roasted by Satan, one was named Abdul, but there was also one Abdullah, one Abu, two Husseins and three Hassans.

[engage Hans Landa filter] That’s a BINGO! [end Landa filter] 

And I didn’t even have to use the free space on my “Smashed Jihadis” bingo card. 

How would you like to be a terrorist Hezbollah member right now, even assuming you weren’t badly wounded last week?  You can’t call your fellow scumbags, you can’t page, you can’t text, you can’t radio.  And now you can’t talk in person! 

The best their propagandists could do over the weekend was to make the scary announcement that Hezbollah is now calling for “a new phase of battle!”

I’ll bet they are, since the last phase was the “Getting Your Cojones Blown Across the Lebanese Countryside” phase.  I should think they’d like to put that phase in the rear-view mirror.

Except that they can’t adjust the rear-view mirror, since their mirror-adjusting hand has been blown off.  And it wouldn’t do any good anyway, because during two-fer Tuesday, they lost both their hand and their eyes, and thus can’t use any kind of mirror. 

So that’s the good news. 

The bad news is that there has been no movement on the “Trump should debate Kamala” front, though I’m still holding out a faint hope.  I think she’d be stupid to debate Trump again, because she’s so vulnerable, and she may well win by hiding for 6 more weeks. 

But because I know that she could do so much worse than she did in the debate, and that Trump could do so much better than he did, I’m still hoping it could happen. 

Even if it doesn’t, I’ve still got some advice for Trump that would work well in a debate, and also in future interviews, since his interviews with MSM “journalists” are basically hostile debates anyway. 

I know I’m far from the only one to comment on this, but I’d love to see him make more specific claims, instead of defaulting to making bombastic/exaggerated claims, and vague ones – often at the same time.  Both of those allow his opponents easy opportunities to refute him.

The exaggerated claims can be discounted because they can be factually refuted.  Ex: “We’re winning by a lot,” (when he’s winning within the margin of error); “We had the best economy the world has ever seen,” (there are so many ways to measure that, and one indicator or another can always be cited to show stronger performance in some other historical period). 

In the debate he said (roughly) this about immigration: “Biden didn’t let in 10 million, like people say.  It’s more like 21 million.  In fact, I’m sure it’s more than that.” 

As is often the case with Trump, he’s far closer to right than the Dems are.  If they’re admitting that 10 million have come in, you know there are a ton who got in without being caught or counted, and they’ve got every incentive to keep their estimate on the low end. 

But if Trump is going to cite a stat, he needs to back it up with a source… and it’s never a good idea to undermine your own statistic!  “It’s more like 21 million… it’s probably way more than that?”  Which is it?  It looks like you’re just picking a number out of your AOC, and that’s not a good look.

The histrionic claims are mistakes too, because they cannot be fact-checked or supported, and because he throws out so many that it’s easy for many persuadable voters to start discounting everything he says. 

Consider the impact of this example:

Kamala says she’s going to do everything possible to bring down inflation.  (And yes, it’s a lie, and she’s the one who caused it, and etc.)

Option A: Trump responds with, “Under Biden-Harris, inflation exploded!  No one had ever seen anything like it.  I left them perfect inflation and the best interest rates in 100 years, and they blew both through the roof.  People didn’t think such a thing was possible, but they did it.  They destroyed the economy with their skyrocketing inflation and interest rates.”

Yes, Trump’s basic point is true.  But by not giving any numbers at all, and piling bombast upon bombast, he makes it too easy for anyone not already in his camp to either tune him out or disbelieve him.

Option B: “The day I left office, inflation was 1.4%, and it had averaged under 2% for my entire term.  Biden-Harris and a Democrat congress pushed through $4.7 trillion in extra borrowed money in the mis-named ‘Covid Relief Bill’ and the ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’ and within 16 months inflation had exploded to a peak of 9%.  Today it’s still 2.7%, which is almost double what she inherited from me!  That shocking inflation spike forced the Fed to raise interest rates; when I left office the 30-year mortgage rate was 2.65%.  Today it’s over 6%, meaning that a $220K mortgage that used to cost you $778 per month now costs you $1297!”

It’s easy to refute glittering generalities, but how can she (or some MSM hack) refute or distract from statistics like those?  I guess she could say that he’s making up those numbers, and she doesn’t believe him, but that’s only setting herself up to get pantsed, when he comes back with, “The interest rate numbers are from the Federal Reserve, and the inflation rates come from X government agency.  If you don’t accept those numbers, what numbers would you cite instead, and from what source?”

Trump has a great story to tell, and the Dems and the MSM – but I repeat myself – are doing everything they can to keep him from telling it.  He spent too much of the middle of the first debate helping them. 

He’s been doing better at many events since then, and I’m really hoping he takes one more shot at her in a debate, and uses the opportunity to tell his story, and destroy hers.

If she chickens out, he should hammer her on that in every speech and appearance.  And then he should treat the MSM drones who interview him as if they are nothing more than a platoon of little Que Malas.

Because they are.

Hamas delenda est!

More Thoughts and Suggestions for Debates (posted 9/17/24)

After reading the comments on my column yesterday, I see that some CO-ers either think that Trump shouldn’t debate again because he’s winning without it, or because of the bad debate format he’d be stuck with. 

I hope that he’s winning, but I haven’t seen convincing evidence that he is winning by enough to overcome the margin of Democrat fraud.  And if there’s a straightforward way for him to widen his lead on her – which I argued yesterday he can very likely do in a second debate – I think it’s foolish to not take the fight to her.

Not to mention that it shows too little faith in Trump, and too much faith in Kamala, IMHO!  

Several of you also argued that Kamala will never agree to anything like a fair debate format.  I’ve got some suggestions about that below, but you may be right about that. 

But if so, it’s still a win/win for Trump to try to set up a second debate: he wins if he gets another chance to show the truth about Kamala in a debate, and he wins if he offers to debate and she runs away.

But even if none of my pragmatic reasons for a second debate have swayed you, I think there is an important philosophical reason that we should make the case for robust debates, and this applies to this election and future ones.

As much as people forget this, in a democratic republic, politicians are our employees.  Campaigns are a long series of job application tests, and debates are job interviews. 

Debates aren’t perfect, of course, and are a flawed mechanism to demonstrate who deserves our votes.  Often charisma can count for more than demonstrating a mastery of policy and the ability to govern, and too often both of those can be at least temporarily defeated by a near-sociopathic ability to shamelessly and convincingly lie.

But can you name a better mechanism? 

Stump speeches can be useful, but they’re canned and controlled, and usually not even written by the candidate.  Ads can be very effective, especially when they reinforce impressions that people already have about a candidate or policy, but they’re often even less honest than politicians!  Fundraising can gauge a candidate’s breadth and depth of support, but provides no direct evidence of his/her merit.

The closest option we have to a debate, in terms of preserving the Founders’ idea of legitimately informing voters, is a town hall.  And of course a town hall can be a format for a debate.  But it also suffers some of the weaknesses of debates, in that it is susceptible to using ringers in the audience to steer the proceedings.    

I’m glad that Trump has done a lot of town halls, but the issue is Kamala.  She hasn’t done any, and there’s no reason to believe that she will ever do one, unless it’s totally rigged in her favor.  Which brings me back to the importance of a second debate: it’s Trump’s best (and possibly only) chance to expose her truthfully to the American people.

The elephant in the room (if the Haitians haven’t eaten it yet) (I kid the Haitians!) is that our current system of debates sucks.

To fix our debate system – as with fixing anything that has become dysfunctional – we must first identify why and how it has gone wrong.  I see three main reasons:

1. Moderators have a self-interest in using their bias to favor their preferred candidates in the rules, and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for the last several decades. 

2. Moderators have a self-interest in making themselves the center of attention. (When a Candy Crowley or David Muir type says something like, “I’m going to fact check you, because I don’t think you’re right about that,” or “I want to move on to another topic,” the only correct response is, “Who gives a damn what YOU think?”  And also, “Suck it, Trebek.”)      

3. Candidates have a self-interest in only debating if and when it helps them. 

The third reason presents a difficult challenge, but there are many ways to straightforwardly fix the first two, either by choosing the moderators objectively, or by minimizing the moderator’s role to near-invisibility.

Ben Shapiro cited an interesting Jewish model for choosing good judges/mediators of disputes: each side picks their own, and then those two choose a third. The resulting three-judge panel embodies the kind of checks and balances that our Founders initiated.

Other options could be to use a pair of moderators, one chosen by each side, or to schedule two debates, one format and location chosen by each of the participants.  But I would prefer the other choice: shrink the role of the moderator to a time-keeper and nothing else.

During my decades of teaching debate and argumentation, I saw that that can work just fine.  I learned that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, because we have existing, time-tested debate templates that we can adapt and tweak as necessary. 

There are various good models – going all the way back to the Greeks, and more recently being used in law schools, and in academic forensics competitions.  Uncle Aristotle – and two millenia of smart people after him – offered a good basic partition still used today, in which each competitor gets a chunk of time to do two basic things: “confirmation” (advancing your own argument) and “refutation” (addressing/refuting your opponent’s argument).   

Some models offer debaters the chance to choose the topics – sometimes by mutual pre-arrangement – while others offer a list of main topics to be covered, with time allotted for confirmation and refutation on each topic.  A block of time for a closing statement is almost universal. 

CO mentioned that he saw a talk by Douglas Murray last week, and I love that guy.  (Murray I mean, though I love CO too of course.  Because to know him is to love him.) Murray would have a black belt in debate, if there were such a thing.

Everybody in CO nation should look up the Munk debates – they’re held in Canada, of all places – and watch the one from June, in which Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff took on Gideon Levy and the execrable Mehdi Hassan on the subject of anti-zionism vs. anti-semitism.  The twist to the Munk debates is that the audience votes for who they thought won the debate immediately afterwards.  (Murray and his partner stomped their opponents, winning 66-34.) 

Trigger warning: if you watch last Tuesday’s pathetic ABC debate and then immediately watch a substantive, enlightening Munk debate, you might get the bends.  (You may also notice that in the Munk debates, the moderator is invisible.)

While the moderator issue is easily solved, the candidate issue is trickier.  I think we should require our candidates to have at least 2 – preferably 3 – presidential debates, and 1 VP debate, as had been the practice since the late 80s, until 2020.  (The Commission on Presidential Debates, who ran that system, was biased and did a mediocre job, but that could be solved by the alternative ways to choose moderators listed above.)

The trend for the last two election cycles has been for candidates at every level to strategically refuse to debate when they thought it helped them, and I hate that trend.  I’ve discussed how I think our debate system needs reform, but I’m a conservative because I want to conserve the traditions that made this nation great, and one of those traditions for a self-governing republic is debate.

I was pissed in 2020 when the Dems ran a basement campaign for Biden, using covid as an excuse to hide him from the public as much as they could.  They obviously did so to lie about his policies and the shape he was in, but he did do two debates with Trump. 

When I found out in 2022 that dimwit AZ Dem governor Katie Hobbs was flat-out refusing to have even one debate with Kari Lake, I was disgusted.  The trend continued with Fetterman only agreeing to one debate with Dr. Oz, and that one so late that a ton of early voting had already been done.  The extent of Fetterman’s brain damage revealed in that debate illustrated the folly of exempting candidates from debating. 

I’m going to anger many always-Trumpers now.  You know that I’m all-in for him, and will be ecstatic if he wins and devastated if he loses (to the point that my wife is worried about me if Que Mala wins!).  But I hate that Trump refused to debate in the primaries.  The debate is a job interview, and I don’t think you should be considered for the job if you blow off the interview. 

I know: Trump had already had the job, so it wasn’t like he hadn’t been interviewed before.  And seeing the way his polls took off when the Dems started indicting him on BS charges, I’m sure that he would have mowed through DeSantis and the rest just like he did in 2016.  But I still wish he would have showed up and fought and won, rather than taking what felt like a negotiated forfeit.

In a Machiavellian sense, of course, Trump was smart to skip the debates.  So were Katie Hobbs and John Fetterman, and so was the Hidin’ Biden strategy in 2020.  They took the most self-serving path, and they won.

But there’s a reason that “Machiavellian” is not a compliment.  The diluted moral taint accompanying it often carries karmic payback.  If Biden had been smart, he would have refused to debate Trump this year, and he’d still be the candidate.  And if he hadn’t deteriorated so badly, there’s a reasonable chance he could have squeaked through again. 

We would all be howling about that, and for good reason. Trump would have been howling too, but with no justification.  How could he demand that Biden debate him – because the voters deserve it, or it’s not fair to duck a debate? – when he refused to debate in the primaries? 

Trump correctly calculated that he had nothing to gain by debating in the primaries, so he didn’t.  But if you defended that choice, you can’t complain if either Biden or Kamala had refused to debate Trump in the general. In fact, they had much more justification for that self-serving choice than Trump did!  He was a clear front-runner, and had showed he could defeat all comers in 2016, while Biden and Kamala are both fragile frauds, and likely to get their lyin’ arses whipped by him in a debate.    

Okay, now that I’ve enraged everyone (!), let me close by reassuring you all that I know that Trump’s flaws are tiny and his virtues gigantic, when compared to Que Mala and A-WOLz, and he has to win in November! 

But I hope he does decide to at least try to arrange a second debate, hopefully with a modified format, different moderator system, or etc.  I think JD is going to wipe the floor with Walz, and I know that Trump might well win without a second debate.  But I’ve got faith that he can crush and expose Kamala in a second round, and that doing so is his best path to opening up the kind of lead that all the leftist cheating in the world won’t be able to overcome in November!

And looking forward – after Trump begins his second term (please God!) in January – I hope we can start working hard to come up with a debate format and schedule to implement for future elections. 

Because giving up on the prospect of ever having fair and substantive debates again is the farthest thing from a bunch of hardy Ameri-cans being cautiously optimistic that I can think of!

Hamas delenda est!