Tag: joe-biden

Some Thoughts & Advice on Debates (posted 9/16/24)

Over the weekend I gathered some more good news stories, but I’m going to hold off on those and post them in a Wednesday column, because I’ve had the more serious subjects of debates on my mind.

As I started drafting a “debate” column, however, it kept getting longer.  And since the only repeated quibble about my columns is that they are too long – you know who you are, and how dare you! – I’ve decided to give you one column per day for today, Tuesday and Wednesday.

I know: it’s like Christmas in September!  And you’re welcome.

To start with an example of why this column got too long and must be broken up: I can’t even get into my thoughts on debates without first quickly pointing out the funniest story of last week, which happened when A-WOLz was giving what seems to have become his usual stump speech – no substance, no policy, lots of Trump-smearing and pseudo-“I’m a Midwestern dad/coach/military hero” blather. 

But in the middle of the dishonest boilerplate, he made the most Freudian of all Freudian slips.  (That’s when you say one thing but mean your mother.)

He started telling a positive story about Kamala, but instead of describing her as a “young prosecutor,” he called her a “young prostituter.” 

I’d give that reference a “chef’s kiss” of approval, but that sounds like it could be a veiled reference to Que Mala’s Willie Brown days.  And because I’m not up on my California leftist sexual slang, I’m going to leave that one alone.

But it’s still funny!  And before you can say it, I know: let’s not act like children.

Okay, on to debates – both last week’s, and in general.

I’m very happy that five days later, the shameful tongue-bath that the MSM gave to Que Mala has done her no good, and may even have hurt her.  The over-the-top leftist moderators’ bias did not gain her any of the independents she needs, and even though Trump displayed some of his less pleasant attributes, his essential Trumpiness – for good and ill – has been so baked in that it doesn’t seem to have hurt him at all.   

Kamala’s empty and evasive answers have not gone unnoticed, either.  Perhaps the most explosive post-debate development is the report from an alleged ABC whistleblower that Kamala had the questions given to her before the debate.  That is shocking to me!

Not because the idea of corrupt leftist media types cheating for the Democrats is shocking – does anybody remember Donna Brazile giving Cankles McPantsuit the questions before the debate in 2016?

No, what’s shocking is that she could have performed like THAT, even though she had the questions beforehand!  The first question was, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

I wrote about her 330-word verbal dumpster-fire of an answer a couple of columns ago.  I pointed out how awful it was, and how she never came within 100 nautical miles of answering that rote question, which she should have been able to anticipate anyway.

But if she was GIVEN that specific question ahead of time, and had a week of intense “debate camp” to prepare, and THAT was still the best she could do?!  Sweet, merciful crap!

In tomorrow’s column I’m going to throw out some ways I think Trump can and should negotiate conditions for another debate with Kamala, because no GOP candidate should ever do a 3-on-1 cluster-schtup like last Tuesday’s “debate” again!    

But since CO posted a great question yesterday – “Which candidate needs a second debate more and why?” – that elicited thoughtful and varied responses, I thought I’d first give my answer.

And remember that while you obviously have a God-given right to disagree with me, you’re just going to make yourself look ridiculous.  So c’mon, man. 

(Why do I kid?  That’s right: because I love!)

While it might be too strong to say that Trump NEEDS a second debate more than the Cackler does, and he does need to negotiate conditions for a second debate carefully, he should definitely do a second debate.   

Because this election is way too close, with polls in nearly all the battleground states within the margins of error. There are some reasons to believe that Trump is doing better than the polls are showing – his numbers were underestimated in pre-election polls in both 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing better with blacks, Hispanics and independents than any Republican (including him in ’16 and ’20) has ever done, which should mean that he’s leading overall.

But there are also reasons to believe that Que Mala will do better than her polls indicate, primarily because of the depth of the Trump hatred that will motivate the other side to vote no matter what, and the well-known Dem fraud efforts (ballot harvesting, resisting voter ID, hinky drop box and vote by mail usage, etc.). 

We all know that Trump needs to win by enough to exceed the margin of Democrat fraud, and as close as this looks now, I’m not at all confident that he’s ahead by that much. 

So he should debate her again, for two types of reasons why – the first pragmatic, and the second philosophical. 

Let’s look at the pragmatic ones first: Kamala was as good as she could be in that debate; Trump can do much better than he did in that debate; and the moderator (if any) will be MUCH better than Muir and Davis.   

1. Kamala did as well as she possibly could… and she still wasn’t good!  Even with the moderators running interference, her vague and rambling answers left her vulnerable, time and time again.

In fact, most voters have no idea that Kamala did a solo interview with a local Philly ABC anchor on Friday.  It was a pre-recorded softball-fest with a sympathetic MSM lackey, and she STILL screwed it up.

She even repeated her first gaffe from the Tuesday debate; when the reporter asked, “What are your specific plans to bring down prices?” she launched a verbal death march of an answer with, “I grew up a middle class kid…”

You would think that after a presidential candidate went all this time without giving a press conference or a solo interview, this sit-down would have been heavily covered everywhere.  But it got nearly zero MSM attention, and for the obvious reason: she completely blew it.  (I know, but let’s not act like children.)

The more voters get to know her, the fewer votes she’s going to get, so she’s going to do as few interviews as possible. And when her best chance is to hide, and a debate with Trump involves total exposure, he should debate her, and hammer her if she won’t.       

2. Trump can do much better than he did in the first debate. While his first 20 minutes and closing statement were solid, he did pretty poorly in between, and I believe that he can learn from a painful lesson that is this fresh: don’t take the bait and get distracted, and stick to the specific facts on the issues!  (Melania should attend, and if he brings up crowd sizes or Haitians eating cats, she should walk on stage and kick him in the groin!)

On this point, he’s also got a great template to follow, provided to him by his strong VP choice.

I’ve been very happy to see the way JD Vance has handled himself over the last month.  He’s given over a dozen media interviews to MSM hacks, and he’s “won” every one of them, to one degree or another, by doing exactly what I’ve been talking about.  He doesn’t take their bait, but calls them out on the bias and distortion in their questions, and then doggedly advances his arguments.

His interview with Dana Bash yesterday was a great example.  If you haven’t seen it, you should watch.  (But make sure you’ve got an empty stomach, because she is absolutely nauseating.)  She “pulled a David Muir” – which sounds like a double-entendre, but I don’t know gay slang, and I don’t mean it that way – spending a ton of time talking up the “Haitians are not eating cats!” angle, coming back to it repeatedly, and making herself look totally obnoxious to anyone who’s not an all-in, far leftist.

JD parried her efforts well, doing the minimal amount of defending the constituent reports, and pivoting constantly back to the substance of the immigration issue, which Dana desperately did NOT want to talk about.  

Because the elephant in the room re: Springfield is the horrible results of the flood of illegal immigrants there.  And no, I’m not suggesting that the Haitians are eating elephants now! 

But only because there is no zoo in Springfield.

HA! 

(And that is why I’m cut out to be a harmless smart-ass, sniping from the comfortable environs of stately Simpson manor, and not a major-party political candidate.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

The main point of the story – which is horrible for the Dems and Que Mala, because it is entirely their fault, and incredibly unpopular throughout the country – is the cascading catastrophe caused by millions of illegals: hundreds of billions redirected from services for American citizens, increased crime, strains on schools and hospitals, etc.   

The best way to distract from that obvious truth is the “Trump’s racist cat-eating Haitians slur” talking point.  So Dana did her repulsive best to continually try to sell what JD wasn’t buying.  

But Vance knows that there is more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.  (By the way, rumors that “More Than One Way to Skin a Cat” is the title of the best-selling cookbook in Port au Prince have NOT been confirmed.  So stop spreading them, people!)  And he beat her at her own game, and made her corrupt favoritism obvious.

3. The first moderators have been roundly lambasted by everyone, including many on the left, and EVERYONE not on the left!  Trump should be able to hold out for a better moderator — ask for Brit Hume and then Joe Rogan, and settle for Megyn Kelly maybe? – or even just a time-keeper who enforces time limits without interjecting otherwise.  But whoever he gets will be on notice that s/he can’t afford to repeat the level of corruption of Muir and Davis.

And even if they tried, the entire audience will be hyper-aware of that this time, and Trump can have some responses holstered and ready if they start going down that road again.

One suggestion, for the first time they show blatant bias: “I think it would make things easier if you just joined Kamala at her podium, so everyone in the audience knows where we stand.”

He could also be primed to respond to any of Kamala’s rote lies – fine people, bloodbath – if she’s desperate and stupid enough to use them again.  Just do the Reagan-esque, “There you go again,” and calmly point out the specific facts.    

Bottom line: Trump is a much better candidate than she is, and his track record is light years better than hers.  He’s an inconsistent debater, but she’s a consistently fragile and terrible debater.  And the optics of her challenging him to a debate that he refuses creates a lose-lose situation: it contradicts the reality that Que Mala is fearful and in over her head, and undermines Trump’s core brand as a bold fighter.

With this election still as tight as it is, I think it would be political malpractice for him to not take Kamala on in another debate.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss a couple of philosophical reasons Trump should debate her again, and suggest ways that he can negotiate a rematch that circumvents the pitfalls of recent debate formats.  

Hamas delenda est!

My Grades for the Debate (posted 9/12/24)

I’ll admit up front that I could only watch a few minutes live.  Because: blood pressure.  After it was over, I checked in on the coverage on the CO page and the Daily Wire, which is probably not the best way to process a debate, because it involves having your reactions mediated through the initial reactions of others. 

But over the last 24 hours I’ve watched nearly all of it, in smaller doses.  I say “nearly” because: blood pressure, still. 

But honestly, I’m so disgusted by Kamala and her MSM enablers – and so worried that the election is even close, and fearful of the horrible consequences should she win – that I couldn’t stand to watch more than the first few minutes live. 

If you’re a close reader, you will perceive my immediate post-debate frame of mind from the adjectives in the last sentence:  disgusted, worried, fearful.  I won’t be in that mode for long – I’m a toxic Midwestern male who was raised right, so I don’t do “fearful” and “worried” as a default setting – but this felt like an opportunity missed.

So I spent the actual debate hours as follows: I prayed for the country for a few minutes, then threw myself back into an “organizing my home office” project that I’ve been working on, and then watched the first half of the Lions/Rams Sunday night football game that I had DVR’ed.

I also spent part of the next 24 hours doing something that I find therapeutic when I need to burn off frustrated energy: working out.  I’m not a fanatical fitness person, but for the last six months I’ve been eating healthier and doing a daily free weights and pushup routine, and I tripled my routine after the debate. 

I may be fighting off increasing frustration over the election and our country’s future, but at least I’m starting to get some pecs out of it.  So I’ve got that going for me. 

Anyway, because my profession hard-wired me to give grades, I thought I’d grade the three debate participants: Que Mala, Trump, and the MSM. 

I’ve taken my grading system from Harvey Mansfield, a temperamentally conservative and actually great Harvard professor.  A few decades ago, Mansfield acknowledged the ubiquity of grade inflation – over 90% of grades at Harvard were “A”s – by giving his students two grades in his classes. 

He recognized that since all other Harvard profs were giving inflated grades, it wouldn’t be fair for him to give the authentic, actual grade that he believed students had earned, thus lowering their GPA.  (And likely ensuring that nobody would be taking his classes in the future!) 

So he started giving two grades: one inflated grade (which would appear on their transcripts, and was commensurate with other Harvard grades) and one “legitimate” grade, i.e. what he – with his old-fashioned, high standards! – believed the paper had actually earned.

So here are my debate grades:    

Kamala – her adusted grade (i.e. reflecting what semi-informed people who get their news from the MSM would give it) is a B.  Her legitimate (“Mansfield”) grade is a D-. 

She is an annoying liar, and she could no more get a passing grade than speak in an authentic black accent. (“Ah, ah say they-uh, Ya bettuh thank uh union membuh!”)  And she repeatedly gave her patented word salad answers to evade questions.  Example, from the FIRST MINUTE:  “Is the country better off now than it was 4 years ago?”   Legitimate answer: either yes or no, and here’s why. 

Que Mala’s answer?  It began with, “So, I was raised as a middle class kid….” And went on for – I Schiff you not – 330 words!  

For comparison, the Gettysburg Address is 275 words. 

I’ve read the Gettysburg Address.  I’ve taught the Gettysburg Address.  And Que Mala’s stream of consciousness rambling about her hardscrabble early years being born to two PhDs and raised on the mean streets of Berkeley and Montreal is no Gettysburg Address!

By the way, that moment was a missed opportunity for Trump.  As soon as the moderators came back to him after Kamala’s rambling answer, he could have said a variation of his line with Biden: “I don’t know what she just said, and I’m not sure that she does either.  But one thing is clear: she did not come close to answering your question, and we all know why.  You’re obviously not better off than you were 4 years ago, and Kamala and Biden are the reason.” 

I don’t know how many truly undecided voters are still out there, but if they exist, they had to see how dishonest and evasive Kamala was, and how annoying.  But she still gets the inflated B because, with the terrible moderators’ corrupt help, she managed to tone down her existential awfulness for 90 minutes and appear to be just an untalented, mediocre liar, instead of the worst politician of this century. 

Trump – his adjusted grade (recognizing that the MSM did everything they could to adjust it downward, as they always do) is a C.  His legitimate (“Mansfield”) grade is a B-. 

On substance and legitimate points, he won hands down, because he said a lot of true things (compared to Kamala, who said zero true things).  But those points were diluted by too frequent distractions.

He made some good points – he’s the first GOP pol I’ve ever seen nail a lefty with a pointed debate question on abortion (“Would you allow abortion at 7 months?”) – and landed some good jabs within sometimes over-long answers. 

A strong point was his closing statement, which should have also been his opening statement, and many statements in between: she’s in power now, she’s tied to Biden’s terrible policies, and every promise she’s making now is something she could have done over the last 4 years. 

His low points were the lack of message discipline, which even most of his supporters are wary of, IMHO.  Kamala threw out every bit of BS that she could to try to rattle him, repeating proven hoaxes (very fine people, J6 was worse than the Holocaust, etc.), and he took the bait way too often.  Frustrating!

One face-palm example was her dig at his crowd sizes.  Like everything else, this was a lie – Kamala’s crowds are smaller and phony, made up largely of bussed-in astro turf Dem hacks and union members – and Trump’s aren’t.  But that’s beside the point: crowd size is an irrelevant metric. (If his crowd sizes vs. Biden’s in 2020 were dispositive, he would have won by 30 points, even accounting for vote rigging and fraud). 

So arguing about crowd size is not just a waste of time and a distraction, but it connects with one of Trump’s negatives: his ego.  We all know that the national Dems are pathological narcissists with ginormous egos themselves, but Trump wears his on his sleeve, and it does not attract independents that he needs, to say the least. 

His smart answer would have been that every time she tried to bait him, he should have given a Trump version of Reagan’s head shake and grin, and, “There you go again.”  Which he could follow with a 1-2 sentence specific slap down, before returning to his policy arguments. 

Something like, “I know you’d like to divert us with childish distractions, and if I had your horrible record and failed policies – open borders that are hurting Americans all over the country, high crime, high inflation, record debt – I’d want to change the subject, too!  But I’m not going to waste Americans’ time on such desperate ploys, while the country is suffering from the Biden-Harris mal-administration.”

You know that Trump’s team had to have been coaching him to not take the bait, and it’s aggravating that after 9 years in politics, he still can’t reliably do it.  But that being said, since everyone knows Trump so well by now, I don’t think that that will seriously hurt him. But it’s a missed opportunity in a limited-opportunity environment.

The MSM “moderators” – Inflated grade, F minus.  Legitimate grade, F to the infinity of all minuses.

It’s often been said that we don’t hate the media enough.  But after Tuesday night, I’m getting there.   And may God have mercy on their souls. 

David Muir was a dishonest, condescending hack, as was Linsey Davis.  (I won’t comment on the well-known advice about how you should never trust someone named “Linsey” with no “d” in her name.  But she definitely proved that truism.)  

They made CNN look reasonable, which I wouldn’t have believed possible.

They did for Kamala what Kamala did for Willie Brown.  And they left that stage with the same amount of dignity as she had when she left his office, straightening out her clothes as if everyone in the outer office didn’t know exactly how her “climb the political ladder” plan was going.

This is not hard, people: YOU CAN’T HAVE PLAYERS FROM THE OTHER TEAM BEING REFS!  OH!  OHHHHHHHH!

(Sorry about that.  My keyboard is now intermittently defaulting to the Sam Kinison filter, and I’m having a hard time controlling it.) 

The bogus and constant fact-checking of Trump and gentle head-patting for Kamala was pathetic.

One way to counter that, for our candidates in the future:  When the first fact-check comes up, hit them immediately: “There’s no time for me to fully rebut that statement in this real-time debate.  But – [Here you give a specific evidential claim] – and I encourage everyone to do their own research on this point, and you’ll see that I’ve got nothing to hide, and I am telling you the truth.  My campaign site will have all the evidence, with supporting references, by the time this debate is over.  And when you confirm that for yourself, I know that you’ll remember who was lying to you just now, and why.”

In any case, one reliable conservative move for the last several decades (it has worked since at least Nixon) is to attack the bias of the press, and Muir and Davis gave Trump such a target-rich environment.  I so wish he would have taken 30 seconds to point that out!

For example, when they had fact checked him for the fifth time – often in distorted ways, and sometimes just flat-out wrongly – he should have started one answer with, “I’m going to answer your question, but I just want to point out that you’ve now fact-checked me (use some air quotes around that phrase) four or five times, and you’ve let Kamala lie way more times than that without doing the same to her.  People see what you’re doing, which explains how little you are trusted by the public.  Anyway, on to your latest biased question…”

One more note: I admire a lot about Trump, and desperately want him to win, and my analysis here is a little unfair to him, in one sense.  I’ve got time to analyze, and can apply “esprit de l’escalier” – the “wit of the staircase,” i.e. good responses/comebacks that you only think of as you’re leaving a party. 

Even though Trump had to know that many of Kamala’s false attacks were coming when he got to the party, the extent of the moderators’ wrong-footing him – even compared to past bad examples! – made his job a lot harder than ours is now, after the fact.

I think the Daily Wire post-debate panel got it mostly right: While this was something of a wasted opportunity for Trump, they don’t think this is going to fundamentally change the election.  It’s tight, and it’s likely to remain tight, and this debate didn’t change anybody’s mind about Trump (his Trumpiness has been baked into the cake for a long time now), nor about Kamala. 

They thought that Trump clearly won the first 25 minutes of the debate and the final statements, but that Harris’ taunting him on crowd sizes started him into a bait-taking mistake, followed by Muir and Davis turning in the sleaziest performance in the history of media whore-dom.  (I am paraphrasing slightly.)  

I don’t believe that Kamala’s handlers will let her do another debate, even though her side called for that.  (Purely as a feint, IMHO, because it momentarily makes them look confident.)   She’s an extremely vulnerable candidate, because she’s transparently dishonest and cloying, and also a dullard.  The fact that she survived one debate – yes, with the assistance of horrifically corrupt moderators – is the high-water mark of her political career, and she’d have nowhere to go from there but down.

(And okay, feel free to insert a Willie Brown joke here if you must.)

My main hope is that our side highlights the many instances of partisan hackery and lies from the moderators and Kamala, and then moves on to disciplined attacks on her and Walz, and that enough undecided voters see that and take it to heart.

Trump has his flaws, but he’s also got virtues, and you can’t say the same about Kamala.  She is a poisonous and inauthentic grifter, and we need to spend every minute and dollar between now and November bringing that before the voters!

Hamas delenda est!

The MSM Tries to Cover for Kamala, Schumer Beclowns Himself, & Karma Gets An Anti-Semitic Olympian (posted 7/29/24)

Once again trying to keep up with the news last week was like trying to drink from a firehose. 

I know what you’re thinking: “If we didn’t know what a refined gentleman Martin is, that sounds like a setup for a hilarious Willie Brown joke.”  And maybe it is.  But as you know, that kind of thing is beneath me.  So let’s not act like children, people.

By the way, I just re-watched the two-minute clip from the debate when Trump and Biden talked about golf.  And for the rest of my life, whenever I’m feeling a little down, I will watch that clip and feel the healing balm of laughter.    

Trump’s advisors had obviously coached him up to not over-reacting or show too much irritation, and he did a pretty good job of maintaining a poker face throughout.  But the one thing that put him over the edge was hearing Biden say that he was a 6 handicap.

Trump’s expression – groaning and turning his head away – was comedy gold, followed immediately by Biden changing his handicap to an 8, while Trump shook his head and sarcastically said, “Yeah.  Never.” 

Then Trump gave the coup de grace: “I’ve seen your swing, Joe.  Let’s not act like children.”

I’ve used that line half a dozen times in the last month, including in a friendly argument with my wife.  She was reminding me that I’d promised to give Cassie the Wonder Dog a bath, and that she was not smelling so great.  Technically, she was right, but I could see that Cassie was offended.

So I said, “Honey, I’ve seen your swing.  Let’s not act like children.”  And it worked perfectly.  Karen was completely confused, and I laughed and put out my fist, and Cassie gave me a paw bump and trotted out of the room at my side. 

That’s the closest I’ve come in 35 years to winning a marital argument.  So thank you, President Trump.

Anyway, the Obamas endorsed Kamala on Friday, so now the die has been cast, the Rubicon has been crossed, and the pooch has been screwed.  

I don’t think that even the Democrat party could flip-flop again if her numbers go south, and try to switch in a new candidate at the convention.  So we can all now officially train our fire on Que Mala.  (By which I mean, we can all now tell the truth about her.)

We still need to stay focused, because she starts with an enormous propaganda machine and a mountain of cash in her corner, and the MSM will lie to sell her as outrageously as they lied to sell Biden.  But between her own awkward incompetence and being saddled with Biden’s terrible record, she is clearly beatable. 

In the meantime, her “honeymoon” is providing some dark humor, as we watch the MSM beclown themselves with one blatant lie after another: 

“She wasn’t a DEI pick!” (Even though Biden himself said that she was.)

“She wasn’t the border czar!”  (Even though we can post dozens of MSM headlines saying she was, and we can watch the séance with Joe Biden when he gave her the responsibility for the border.) 

“She’s an exciting, dynamic leader, who has earned her way to the top!”  (<cough> Willie Brown <cough>)

The best and cringiest moment came from poor Chuck Schumer – a hollowed-out husk of a man at this point, though I’m not sure that he was ever much more than that – rolling out her announcement.

In a performance worthy of a “Worst Actor in a Political Farce” nomination, Schumer mimicked enthusiasm, while reading a groan-worthy and unconvincing script, which I swear I am not making up:

“President Biden’s selfless decision has given the Democratic Party the opportunity to unite behind a new nominee.  (Here he began pumping his fists very unconvincingly.) And boy oh boy, are we enthusiastic!” 

Yes.  Biden’s “selfless” “decision.”  You know, like when the Godfather had Luca Brasi hold a gun to that band leader’s head and told him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract. 

And the bandleader said, “I have selflessly decided to sign this contract.”

Also, nobody in all of human history who was actually enthusiastic has ever had to say, “Boy oh boy, are we enthusiastic!”

Then Schumer said, “So now that the process has played out from the grassroots bottom up…”

Yes.  Because nothing says “grassroots, bottom-up campaign” like a political puppet having a series of closed-door meetings with party bosses and big donors over 36 hours and then emerging as “the people’s choice!”  

“…we are here today to throw our support being Vice President KAMALA HARRIS!” 

And then he actually clapped.  All by himself.  In a room presumably full of Dem party hacks and journalists.  (But I repeat myself.)

After an excruciating several seconds of sad, one-man applause, Schumer dropped his hands and acknowledged the toxic-level of cringe, saying, “I’m clapping.  You don’t have to.”  When the crowd laughed at Schumer’s awkwardness, he finally said, “It’s a happy day.  What can I say?”

How about, “Please accept my deepest apologies for the mortifyingly dishonest kabuki theater I’ve just engaged in.  I’ve shamed myself, my party, and my family.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I will retire from public life forever.” 

But nope.  He just stood there in a room full of spineless sycophants, who couldn’t even bring themselves to sycophant. 

I wish I could have been there, because you know what I would have called out. “We’ve seen your candidate, Chuck.  Let’s not act like children!”

But Schumer had still not hit rock bottom, because two minutes later, before turning the microphone over to Hakeem Jeffries, he made one more attempt to use some flailing arm gestures and faux-rousing rhetoric to elicit some reaction from a captive audience who appeared to be as dead as Joe Biden:

“Today…we begin our next chapter, and it will be our best yet!  Vice President Harris will beat Donald Trump, and [awkward fist pumping with each emphatic word] Become. The. Next. President. Of. The. United. States. Of. America!”

Then he actually looking pleadingly toward the first row, waving his hand back and forth, and plaintively saying, “Applause?”  When not a single person responded, he quickly said, “Hakeem,” and stepped aside, looking like the picture you’d see in a dictionary beside the words, “flop sweat.”   

Ouch!  Tough room, Chuck!

If this bunch of lackeys and sell-outs can’t even be tased into some fake applause, the next four months are going to be entertaining.

There are a lot of good-news stories that I wanted to talk about, but this column is already getting a little long, so I’ll save those for a Wednesday column, and choose just one schadenfreude-tastic story to end with.

This one happened at the Olympics, where a Muslim athlete from Tajikistan named Emomali was matched against an Israeli in a judo competition.  And you’ll never believe it, but the Muslim was a big a-hole to the Jewish guy.

Unexpectedly!

Emomali won the match, and afterward he snubbed the protocol of shaking the Israeli’s hand. Instead, he stalked off, saying, “Allahu Akbar” and giving the Islamic “finger of Tawheed” gesture, which is making a fist with only the index finger raised, symbolizing the Islamic belief that, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” 

And then, because God exists, and He is hilarious, Emomali next faced a Japanese guy, who picked him up and slammed him backwards onto the mat.  When Emomali reached his left arm out to try to break his fall, it bent in a direction it wasn’t supposed to, leaving it dislocated, and Emomali crying in pain on the mat.

I couldn’t help but think of Shane Gillis’ hilarious impression of Trump’s news conference announcing the death of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi: “We could hear him crying.  I said, Abu, don’t cry.  ‘Crybaby Baghdadi,’ that’s what we were all calling him.”

Meanwhile, Emomali’s defeated Israeli opponent advanced to the next round, because the Algerian Muslim who had been scheduled to fight him forfeited the match, rather than compete against a Jew.  (Unexpectedly.)     

If I could go back in time and see only one Olympic event, it would have to be Emomali doing his impression of a backward-bending chicken leg on the mat. 

Oh no, wait.  I’d go to the 1976 Olympics, and find Bruce Jenner, and say, “Bruce, I’m from the future, and I’ve got to warn you about a terrible, terrible decision you’re going to make in about 40 years!”

But if I could go back in time and see two Olympics, my second choice would be to pop back to this weekend to see Emomali going, “Allahu Ak-OW! OW! OW!”

And as he was being taken off on a stretcher, I’d show him the “Finger of Simpson,” which is very similar to the “Finger of Tawheed.”

Except that it does not involve the index finger.

Then I’d say…

Hamas delenda est!

For One Shining Moment, the Press Does their Job… and a Dem Prez Instantly Falls (posted 7/26/24)

Well, tomorrow will be one month since the most decisive debate since Lincoln-Douglas. 

Before anyone accuses me of exaggeration – you might think that we all remember Lincoln as the guy who beat the Democrats and freed their slaves, while Douglas has faded from history – I have to point out that Douglas was able to complete a series of debates during which he spoke for many hours without worrying audiences that he had shuffled off this mortal coil.

Joe Biden STARTED the debate by shuffling into the room in a manner that suggested he may have left his mortal coil in the green room.  From there he didn’t just make some gaffes, or have some bad moments, or lose badly.

He was so metaphysically awful that after 90 minutes, the entire nation decided that he cannot run for president anymore.  That, my friends, is one terrible debate performance.

We’ve learned many things in the last, tumultuous month: A cognitively disabled man can be president for three and a half years.  A gentle, 3-degree slope on a roof makes it impossible for a secret service agent to get onto it.   No matter what you may have heard, Que Mala was NOT the Border Czar.  (I guess because technically she was the “Border Czarina?” Gendered Russian grammar for the win!)

But for me, the most eye-opening experience was getting just a brief glimpse of what our political landscape would look like if the press actually did their job on a regular basis.  Because holy moly, did they ever destroy Joey Gaffes in record time! 

And they didn’t do it via dirty tricks or biased coverage.  They simply started telling the truth and asking tough but fair questions.  For a couple of weeks!  And Biden’s 120-year career in politics was over, just like that.

Can you imagine if the MSM had done that to Bill Clinton?  “We’ve noticed that despite the fact that you’re a huge feminist hero, every intern who walks out of your office either has mussed up hair, messed up lipstick, or is rubbing her rear end.  What’s up with that?  Also, you clearly perjured yourself under oath, and since losing your law license over that means that you’ve been declared too unethical to be a lawyer – who knew there was such a thing? – how are you ethical enough to be a president?”

Or Hillary Clinton?  “We’re going to doggedly stay on your Rose Law Firm scandal and your impossibly successful cattle trading returns until we get to the bottom of them.  (We’ve noticed that your only even tangential connection to cattle is that you both have cloven hooves.) Also, your setting up a secret server and calling a meeting at which you ordered your minions to smash all of their Blackberries with hammers only makes sense as evidence of your staggering corruption and devotion to evading responsibility for blatantly illegal actions, and we’re going to expose those completely.”

Or Barack Obama?  “How could you listen to Jeremiah Wright’s whitey-hating, anti-American sermons for 20 years – and take the title of your first autobiography (which you definitely did not write yourself) from one of those racist screeds – and not notice what a malevolent loon he obviously is?  Also, wasn’t setting up a fake Greek Temple in Denver to give a speech from, and then claiming that your getting the nomination was ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal’ super narcissistic?”

“And by the way, you never met your African dad until adulthood, and were raised by your white mom and white grandparents in Kansas, Indonesia and Hawaii, surrounded by white people, Hawaiians and Indonesians.  Doesn’t that make you about as culturally black as Liz Warren is ethnically red?”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Years ago I remember reading a pollster’s estimate that one-sided leftist bias in MSM campaign coverage produces an approximate 8-to-10-point swing favoring Democratic presidential candidates, and that’s always seemed about right.  But the last month has proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Remember: with the MSM covering for Joe Biden, he had 36 years in the US Senate, 8 years as Vice President, and one term as President.  But when the media turned on him and started reporting honestly, he was forced out of politics in a fortnight!

Which brings us to Biden’s unsatisfying speech on Wednesday night.

Not counting the aforementioned sudden bout of media honesty, there were only three, obviously true reasons why Biden stepped down.   And spoiler alert: Biden and all national Dems are allergic to obvious truths (see: men can’t be women; Hunter’s laptop was Hunter’s laptop; the border is not secure, etc.). 

So guess who avoided those true reasons like a Jewish vegan avoiding a pork chop wrapped in bacon?

The first two true reasons are: 1. Joe’s been cognitively and physically deteriorating at a frightening rate, and 2. Polls show that he was going to lose badly to Trump. 

We all know that the Democrat elite didn’t give a damn about the first one, because they’ve known about it for years.  They ran Joe in 2020 primarily by keeping him in his basement, for crying out loud.  And everyone who had never been within ten miles of Biden still knew that he was cognitively challenged – comedians were doing accurate impressions of his shuffling and mumbling, and there were ubiquitous internet “greatest gaffes” compilations of his addled and awkward bumblings back in 2019.

Yet somehow Biden insiders – from his sapphic Kewpie-doll spokeswoman to his cabinet officials to his own family – claim that they had no idea of the infirmity that even primitive tribesmen living as remotely as the cannibals who ate ol’ Uncle Appetizer Biden knew about!  

So the Dem elite clearly knew about his manifest infirmities and unfitness to serve, and they just as clearly didn’t care.   But they definitely cared about the second factor – his likely defeat by Trump – because they are power-hungry, soulless Machiavellians who would sell their own mothers into Willie Brown’s harem to retain their power.

So Joe had a tough task in his Wednesday night “speech.”  He had to explain a momentous decision that had only three possible explanations – I can’t control my thoughts or my bowels; I was going to get my butt kicked by Orange Hitler; or my fellow Dems are a bunch of faithless snakes who went all “et tu, Brute?” on my wrinkly old arse – without actually admitting any of those obvious truths.

He did about as well as he could with that… which was not so much.

He basically gave a stump speech about what a great president he was, touting all of his made-up accomplishments (“I lowered drug prices! I beat Medicare! I took a shot of cancer to the moon!”), taking credit for the inevitable economic improvements after the artificially imposed covid recession, and ignoring everything he actually did.

So it’s no wonder that his speech made no sense.  His message boiled down to, “I’ve been such a tremendous, super-successful president… that the best thing I can do for my party and the country is to get out of the race.”

What better way was there for Joe Biden to go out?  After starting his long, incoherence-filled political career in 1973, he left on one final note of complete incoherence.

Well done, Joe.  Please accept this final poem, composed in your honor, from Dylan Thomas, me, and all of CO nation:

Do not go gentle into that political night,

Old age should slur and stutter at close of campaign;

Rage, rage, against Obama and Que Mala!

Hamas delenda est!

I Can’t Believe What the Dems Are Doing with Kamala (posted 7/24/24)

I’ve been lied to.  

Because I’ve been told that our tech overlords know everything about us, and that they’re spying on us through our cellphones, and maybe our fridges, and possibly our toasters. You can’t so much as mention that a certain Democrat pol has a ten-cent head and a juicy booty – her words, not mine (I mean, the juicy booty part.  I figured out that she’s got a ten-cent head all on my own, when she started to talk) – without your phone and computer being bombarded with pics of a Kardashian.

Or Emily Ratajkowski, whom I don’t even know.  (Well, I know NOW.)       

Anyway, those shadowy tech wizards are supposedly curating our entire lives, and feeding us only info that we already agree with or want to receive.

And yet I’ve already received two fund-raising ads in my feed just today, both of them from Que Mala Harris!  So I’ve definitely been lied to about our tech eavesdroppers’ ability to read our minds, because I’ve got to be the least likely person in this solar system to contribute to the campaign of Little Miss Cackle-nator.

However, it was fun to watch her ad, if only to imagine how many takes it took to finish it, and what her first take must have sounded like. 

“For only ten dollars, you can make a difference in getting me elected.  Just ten dollars.  Which is an amount of dollars. Ah-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha HA!  Right?  Each dollar can be exchanged for a dollar’s worth of goods or services.  Goods like electric school buses, and power points full of Venn diagrams.  Ah-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha HA!  And services like hiring a bunch of child actors to sit around and listen to my blathering about space and the moon, and act like I’m saying something substantive.

Anyway, your 10 dollars – a number that is not as big as Russia, or as small as Ukraine, and comes somewhere in between 9 and 11, which are also very numerical terms, right? (cackle cackle cackle) – can make a difference in November.  Which is the 11th month of the year, and one more month than the amount of dollars that I am asking you to send.”

I’m thinking that that’s the part of the first take when several of the tech crew loudly face-palmed themselves, one Dem pollster vomited on his shoes, another sat down mumbling, “We are beyond f**ked,” and the director yelled, “Cut!  Is Joe still around here somewhere?”

You might be asking, “Martin, I thought you asked us yesterday not to criticize or make fun of Que Mala until after the Dem convention, when she would presumably be locked in as the nominee?  And yet now here you are, eviscerating her in the hilariously genius-like way that we’ve all come to know and love.  What gives?”

Well, for some idiotic reason known only to God – you may remember Him as the Guy who moved Trump’s head out of the way of that bullet – the Dems seemed to have fallen in line behind Harris.  (And no, this is not the time for a Willie Brown joke.  In the words of a great future president, “Let’s not be children.”)

I really don’t get it.  The smart thing would have been for them to say a lot of supportive comments about Kamala (as honest as all the things they were saying about Biden being vigorous and super compos mentis 10 minutes ago), but leave the door open for a nomination battle at their convention. 

Then, after three weeks of Kamala assuming the role of president-in-waiting and making public appearances everywhere, they could see what her polls looked like.  And if the polls look like we all pretty much know they will, the Dem power brokers could rig the convention to put someone else in place.  

That’s what I thought they would do, when I noted 24 hours ago that some big leftist names were splitting into two camps re: whether Kamala should get the nod.

I guess they could still do that. But they are all signing off on her candidacy now, which will make them look much more bumbling and desperate if they reverse themselves again, after they crowned her as the nominee a day after Joe shuffled off his mortal coil, wearing his big ol’ waffle-stomper, shufflin’ shoes. 

Seriously.  They lied about what great shape Joe was in for four years, then he exposed them by breathing his last breath during the debate.  So then they jump on the Kamala bandwagon – and again I must remind you that I am far too dignified to make the Willie Brown joke that we’re all thinking of right now – and when her poll numbers look as bad as Joey Gaffes’, they’re going to push her aside and sub in ANOTHER Dem politician?!

Does that process – bailing from Plan A to Plan B and then to Plan C in a few weeks – suggest stability and competence on the left?  Or does it look like the live re-enactment of the old joke about four guys in a plane that’s going down because it’s overloaded?

(You may remember it from the pub scene in American Werewolf in London: When they realize that somebody needs to jump out to save the rest, the Brit says, “God save the Queen!” and jumps.  When the plane is still too heavy, the Frenchman says, “Vive la France!” and jumps.  When that doesn’t help, the Texan says, “Remember the Alamo!”… and chucks out the Mexican.)

But it looks like the Dems are going with her, so what do I know?  Still, just to be safe, if any of you are contacted by a pollster in the next three or four weeks, please say that you’re all-in for Harris, and you give her five stars, or two enthusiastic thumbs up, or multiple bedazzled Venn diagrams.  Whatever it takes.

By the way, it’s a huge red flag that her first official act – for the last time, I’m not talking about THAT “act” with Willie Brown, so get your minds out of the gutter – was deciding to snub Bibi Netanyahu.  That’s going to play well in Dearborn, with the ululating, “death to America” crowd, and with the Squad/jihadi caucus in the House, but elsewhere? 

Great job, Que Mala.    

Big Biden donor John Morgan might have said it best – by the way, hang your head in shame for giving that decrepit grifter money, John – when he claimed that, “Joe’s endorsement of Kamala is his f**k you to all who pushed him out. Be careful what you wish for.”  

If that’s true, I’ve got to say something that I never thought I would, seriously and without my tongue in my cheek: Great job, Joe! That’s a sweet move on your way out the door, because it gives all the lying hypocrites who stabbed you in the back a perfect dose of karmic justice. 

Don’t get me wrong, Joe: you’re all a bunch of political scorpions in an identity-politics bottle, and you all deserve each other, and the electoral disaster that I pray is about to descend upon your party.  Still, why should the rest of those rats be able to escape from the sinking ship they just tossed you off? 

But look at the bright side.  When Trump debates Que Mala and she opens up a whole word salad bar, you will be able to enjoy watching him re-use one of the lines that helped end your campaign: “I really don’t know what [she] said at the end of that sentence.  I don’t think [she] knows what [she] said either.”     

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or at least Malarkey-ville.  

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

Good times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess Que Mala was right. 

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

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONVINCING them!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That clicked.  It’s the right word.

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

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

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

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

I can hear Chris Rock saying it in my head:

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

Hamas delenda est!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because: Democracy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

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

I don’t want to beat the dead horse/prez of last weeks’ debate too much longer.  On the other hand, the fallout continues to amaze and amuse. 

I can’t believe that some lefties actually thought it would be helpful to Biden to point out that he’s pretty functional from 10:00 – 4:00 each day!  First because I don’t think “pretty functional” means what they think it means.

Second, the obvious: can we coordinate with China, Russia, Iran, Hamas etc. to make sure that they instigate any future crises between the hours of 10 and 4, Eastern Standard Time? 

In fact, if it’s convenient, can they please schedule any future attacks to take place no later than 3:00 p.m. Eastern?  That way, our intrepid leader will be able to devote a full hour to his response before he falls asleep in his soup.

Talk about lowering the bar!  Would you be happy with your cable company if you got a signal from 10-4 each day?  With your utility company if you had electricity from 10-4 each day?  Your plumber if he could only fix a toilet one fourth of the time?  Your paid protestor if she could only hold up a catastrophically stupid sign and chant idiotic slogans for a quarter of the day?

And yet that’s supposed to be a positive talking point for the “leader” of the free world? 

Biden’s biggest problem – other than what will happen if a cadaver dog gets within smelling distance of him, and an international incident ensues – is that to the extent there was some small way to mitigate perceptions of his physical and mental infirmity before last Thursday, that opportunity has now left the building.

I mean, when it became too difficult for him to make it up a normal set of airplane stairs, they shifted to a smaller set of airplane stairs.  But now we’ve seen “(Not a) Dr.” Jill guide him down three shallow steps after the debate, and he looked like a Wallenda trying to stay on a tightrope over an active volcano!

There is no airplane that sits close enough to the ground to require only three steps to get into it.  And for Brandon, three steps is two steps too many!

But I am glad to see that after five days of sturm und drang, the miserable Dems seem to be leaning toward keeping Joe in the race, just because the other options might be as perilous as trying to drag him across the finish line.  As ridiculously unlikely as that seems!

This is about as close as you can get to a truly lose-lose situation, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving party!

On a different note, one thing that we’ve learned over the last 7 years is that we should all be skeptical of experts.  Especially when they deliver their judgments in a pompous, self-righteous tone, we might want to consider mocking their pontifications until and unless they prove the merits of their arguments. 

Aristotle knew this, as one of his logical fallacies was the “appeal to authority” – don’t judge the merits of an argument, but the supposed merits of the people making it.  For example, this policy is obviously right because the king is advancing it, or this theological point is correct because the Pope says so. 

Or Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, because 51 respected, beyond-reproach former intelligence bigshots say so. 

Well, as CO mentioned last week, we now have another example that proves Aristotle right again.  (Seriously, that guy has been proven right as many times as I have, which is pretty impressive for a guy who never had a regular column on the Cautious Optimism site!)

Last week we learned that 16 top “economic experts” – they’ve all got Nobel prizes! – have definitively concluded that Trump’s economic plans will make inflation worse.  In fact, they released an open letter last Thursday, praising Joe Biden’s economic prowess, and endorsing him for president.

For those of you scoring at home, this happened just a few hours before Joey Gaffes stumbled onto the debate stage and did his eerily accurate impression of the Wicked Witch of the West.  (“My cognitive abilities are melting…melting…”)

Now you might think that a bunch of brainiacs like this could have noticed that Biden is a feeble old guy with a bunch of ideas that are even feebler.  (I hereby create a new word.)  Or that he’s been president for the longest 42 months in our nation’s history, during which he executed his policies, and took inflation from the 1.5% he inherited from Trump, to a high of 9%, and an average of around 5.5%.

(Even though I don’t have a Nobel in Economics – don’t get me started: the whole damned thing is just a popularity contest! – I just did a few back-of-the-envelope calculations that suggest that both 9% and 5.5% are in fact higher than 1.5%.  You can Google it.)

But that’s the past.  Maybe these whiz kids know something we don’t know about the future.

If only we had some empirical way to test their confident prognostication.  If only they had gone on record before, giving us inflation predictions against which we can judge their trustworthiness now.  If only—

Oh, wait.  They did that.  Thirteen of them did exactly that, by predicting the results of Biden’s policies on inflation, back when he first took office as a callow youth of 112.

Annnnnnndddddd… it turns out that they are about as accurate as AOC fulfilling a drink order. 

[[AOC (in a Boston pub, a few years back): “Okay, I’ve got one Margarita, one Harvey Wallbanger, two Old-fashioneds and an Irish car bomb.” 

Five confused customers: “Um, we ordered five beers.  If your booty wasn’t so juicy – your words, not ours – you would be getting zero tip.”]]

Those “experts” released a similar open letter in 2021 assuring us all that Brandon’s “Build Back Better” plan (he called it “Bilge Buck Badger,” according to a beleaguered transcriptionist at the time) would – and I am not making this quote up – “ease longer-term inflationary pressures.” 

Yes.  Spending an extra $3 trillion was just bound to ease inflation.  And so it did, “easing” it from a sky-high 1.5% alllllll the way down to… 9%.  Brilliant!

And now these geniuses, in a move that always worked at late-night camp-outs, have turned off the lights, turned on a flashlight under their double-chins, and warned about the eeevilllll Donald Trump! 

Speaking of which, did you notice that during Biden’s skirmish with the teleprompter about the latest SCOTUS ruling yesterday, the usual cadaverous pallor of his skin was suddenly transformed to orange?

It’s finally come to this: his handlers are desperate enough to figure that if they can’t out-perform Trump, maybe they should copy him.  And they tried to turn Dark Brandon into Orange Brandon.

Well it’s not going to work, buddy.  We’ve already got Orange Hitler.

But Orange Moe Howard is still available, and he seems like a lot better fit for you.

Hamas delenda est!

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

We have gathered here, first, to mark what looks like the death of Biden’s campaign.

Watching the left’s reactions to his debate self-immolation has been as entertaining as you’d expect.  Just a few months ago, Joe Scarborough bloviated that, “This version of Biden – intellectually, analytically – is the best Biden ever!”  (And “F” you if you don’t agree!)

On Friday morning Scarborough looked like he had just watched the litter of cats that he’d raised and bottle-fed from birth get run over by a giant riding mower in front of his wife and children.  All he could do was mutter about how surprised he was by Biden’s performance, and how he needs to go.     

Lefty actor Michael Ian Black (Who?) from that one show you never saw, had this great quote: “What sucks is, if you listen to Biden’s WORDS, they’re great. But there’s not enough breath left in him for the words to reach your ears.”

Yeah, that’s the ticket!  His words were GREAT!  Words like “mumphlpanditurgg,” “shughelfup,” “zzzzz,” and “six handicap!” 

Good lord!

The transcript of everything he said at the debate would read like a movie scene we’ve all watched: The fourth male lead – stricken by dengue fever, German shrapnel, or an arrow shot by Liz Warren’s war party (#neverstopmocking) – writhes in a medium close-up and rambles incoherently as a nurse wipes a wet cloth over his brow, until he suddenly stiffens, opens his eyes wide and says, “Pa!  Is that you, Pa?  I did my best!  I did… my… gurgrlelelughhhhhhhh.”

And yes, Joe Biden actually said that last word, at minute 24, shortly after muttering that no soldiers died on his watch.

A few days before the debate, one MSM empty head said, “So Biden can’t walk so well.  Neither could FDR.”  Which is a good comparison… if you’re a thoroughly corrupt liar.  Say what you will about FDR, but at least he could conduct fireside chats until late in his presidency.

The closest Biden could come would be a fireside shat!    (Boom!  Low-brow poop joke when you least expect it!)

One of the funniest news bites I came across was that Rob “Meathead” Reiner co-hosted a Hollywood “watch party” for the debate.  Then, after two days of what the Breitbart story called “conspicuous silence” – HA! – he finally tweeted about the debate, admitting that it had been “a disaster” for Biden.

But he still stuck to his guns – and yes, his guns are less reliable than the one Alec Baldwin used on that movie set, and no, it’s not “too soon” for that joke (Because: Alec Baldwin) – calling Biden “a good, decent man.”  Then he said a bunch of stuff about how Trump is orange Hitler and the world is coming to an end and blah blah blah.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t paying attention anymore, because I was savoring the image of Meathead and a bunch of rich Hollywood leftists – and no, they weren’t necessarily ALL addicts, trust-fund kids or pederasts; probably just a majority of them – sitting around a glitzy fundraiser, and slowly deflating as they watched their hero decomposing on stage. 

I picture Babs Streisand, DeNiro and Meathead, with party hats on their heads and noisemakers in their mouths, all hyped up for the big event.  And then Brandon staggers out and mumbles his way through his first several servings of word salad.  Cut back to the celebs, their jaws dropping in horror, and their noisemakers falling onto their laps.    

The schadenfreude cherry on top of that exploding poison sundae is that the “party” was supposed to be a Biden fundraiser!  Rumors that after “Dr.” Jill helped Joe painfully down the longest three stairs you’ve ever seen in your life at the end of the debacle, the Hollywood elite raised 4 dollars and an expired Blockbuster rental coupon, have not been confirmed.     

The general tone of the MSM aftermath was half Monty Python (“This president is no more.  He’s ceased to be.  He’s gone on to meet his Maker.  THIS… is a late president!”) and half Shakespeare (We come not to praise Joe Biden, but to bury him.)  And wholly delicious. 

By the way, I just re-watched that classic Python dead parrot sketch, and saw a detail that I’d forgotten, and which ties it in perfectly with the Biden debacle.  As the scene opens, John Cleese  (carrying the dead parrot in a cage) calls the clearly male store clerk “Miss.” 

When the guy says, “What do you mean, Miss?” Cleese looks at him in momentary confusion, and then says, “Oh I’m sorry, I have a cold.”

And just like that, a benevolent God has given me another moment of bliss.  Because I must have seen that clip a hundred times, but the experience of watching it today included two more tie-ins to our present, bizarre moment: gender confusion, and somebody making a blatant mistake and blaming it on a cold! 

If only Joey Gaffes had thought of that. 

Oh wait…

At some level, I do feel bad for Biden’s self-humiliation.  On the other hand, think how bad it would be for him if he had lived to see it!

But for the corrupt national Dems and the MSM stooges who have been foisting Biden on us like a bunch of mad-scientist taxidermists for four years, I have no pity.  You built this Frankenstein’s monster, you shot him full of amphetamines and kept re-starting his heart with the crash pads, and now you own him. 

However, I think we all need to do our part to try to keep Joe in the race.  In fact, I’m urging all of you to stop avoiding pollsters like the plague. (The natural reaction of all conservatives, and of most smart people generally.)  If anyone calls you or emails with a request to give political feedback, take the opportunity.

Tell them that you love what Biden’s doing, and you’re offended by those who would suggest that our great Democrat standard bearer should step down.  You’re behind him 100%, and he needs to keep fighting until he wins in November! 

Then hang up quickly, before you either burst out laughing, or begin audibly retching. 

My second requiem is for Biden’s Gaza Pier.  As I wrote last month, the pier was built – for only a third of a billion dollars! – to get desperately needed food into Hamas-istan.  It was open for about a week before moderate seas damaged it.  It was towed to Israel, fixed, then deployed again.

Annnnddddd… some breezy conditions and a bad weather forecast forced its removal.  When it was finally deployed again, another bad weather forecast meant that more American resources were spent on dismantling it.  Again!

News reports now suggest that it will likely not be put back in place.  Because it proved to be a stupid, stupid, stupid idea.  (I’m reading between the lines on that last part.) 

On the bright side, during the few days when it was in place, it did allow delivery of a few tons of food…which was immediately stolen by Hamas, then sold to desperate Gazans to raise money for more Jew-killing stuff.   

To recap: Biden spent almost $300 million – money which could have purchased huge packs of desperately needed flamethrowing robot dogs to release on the Democrat convention in Chicago! – on a boondoggle that lasted six weeks, and provided zero supplies to the alleged civilians it was intended to serve.

So let’s lower the Stars and Stripes to half staff for the passing of yet another brilliant Democrat foreign policy boondoggle.  Pointless pier, we hardly knew ye!

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mark the political passing of Jamaal Bowman, who got gloriously hammered in a Dem primary in the Bronx just last week.   You may remember Bowman as the token male member of the Squad, or as the rabid Jew-hater who denied the gang rapes that Hamas thugs recorded themselves committing, or as the moron who thinks you pull a fire alarm to open a door.

But he’s so much more than that!  In fact, if he’s not everything that’s wrong with the Democrat party, he’s emblematic of most of it: fraudulent credentials, racial arsonist, unimpressive and unserious and dishonest right down to the bone. 

He holds an Ed Doctorate – the same degree that notorious elder-abuser “Dr.” Jill Biden has.  I don’t know about you, but I’d rather share a degree with Dr. Kevorkian or Dr. Mengele than with those two. (Okay, that was a bit much.  I retract the analogy.  But just barely.)

He put his degree (in his case, his “duh-gree”) to work by founding the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, where he curated a “Wall of Honor” that featured black people he thought students should look up to.  People like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury and Tim Scott.

HA!  I kid!  Bowman’s ideas of praiseworthy black people included loony anti-Semite congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (so dumb she lost her seat to Hank “Guam is capsizing!” Johnson), and the husband-and-wife team of radical murderers Mutulu and Assata Shakur (parents of Tupac, who died young of terrible parenting). 

Bowman was also a leading advocate against standardized testing.  When I looked into the quality of Bowman’s Cornerstone Academy, I found out that it was a mess.       

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Out of all New York schools – which are totally controlled by Dems, and thus pretty lousy – Bowman’s school ranked in the bottom 13%.  His students would likely be pretty dissatisfied with that.  Except that only 24% of them scored as minimally proficient in math, so they have no idea what that means. 

So it’s great to watch Bowman go.  But it was even better to watch the way he went out, with a hilariously cringy (and futile) get-out-the-vote rally featuring AOC, who bounced on stage to a vulgar Cardi B song, waving her fists and hollering like a hype man at a rap concert. 

Okay, I couldn’t decipher the lyrics of the Cardi B song – I’m not her target demographic, being an old Caucasian guy with great musical taste – but since all of her songs are vulgar, I’m sure this one was too.

Unfortunately for AOC, she chose to speak rather than twerk the whole time.  Because her juicy booty (her words, not mine) is her strong suit (yes, I’m too classy to say “her best asset”), and speaking logically is decidedly NOT, she missed that opportunity.

Then Bowman took the stage, and tried to out-stupid AOC, which is no mean feat.  But he might have succeeded, dancing around and screaming out some “F” bombs.  At one point he picked up a stool and shook it over his head for some reason, swearing and ranting like a black “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, only with less dignity.  (You’re welcome for the timely pro wrestling reference from 30 years ago.)

Then “professional useless person” Bernie Sanders (hat tip to Ben Shapiro) wandered up and did his commie schtick.   

It was telling that their big rally – with three “top draws” among the Democratic left (talk about damning with faint praise!) – in their deep-blue Bronx home, drew a pathetically small crowd. The MSM feeds were cropped just to show the first few rows of people in front of the stage… because a wider angle would have shown a lot of empty grass.

When AOC first jumped on stage, she did the ol’ “cup your hand behind your ear” routine to get the crowd to roar, saying, “I can’t hear you!”  To which someone nearby could have said conversationally (because there was no reason to shout), “That’s because there are very few of us here.”

The optics raised painful comparisons to Trump’s giant rally in the Bronx just a few weeks back.  Yes, that ultimately doesn’t mean much in the Bronx, which hasn’t voted Red since Imhotep Pelosi was a young girl in the Valley of the Kings.

Except that Trump shouldn’t be able to draw thousands of excited people in the Bronx, and AOC should be able to bring out at least a thousand, just from those who want to hear her brand of socialist crazy and get a glimpse of her juicy booty in person.  (Do I have to keep saying it?  “Her words, not mine.”)

To those who say it doesn’t matter that one Dem instead of another gets that seat, I offer a version of WF Buckley’s dictum: if there can only be a Dem representing a deep blue district, it should be the least insane Dem available.

Or as the Babylon Bee said, in the Bronx, “Hamas lost a House seat to the Dems.” 

Hamas delenda est!