Tag: news

My good mood throughout the month of January continues today, when Que Mala will have to grit her teeth and preside over the certification of the election of Donald J. Trump (the “J” is for “Joke’s on you, sleazy Dems”), a ceremony I expect to be blissfully cackle-free. 

It’s supposed to be snowing in DC tomorrow, which could provide a great visual backdrop, since falling snow often lends drama and beauty to an event.  (As those of you who have been well-raised may remember from Wilbur Marshall returning a fumble for a touchdown in blowing snow when the Bears beat the Rams for the NFC Championship on January 12^th, 1986.  Obviously.)

I’d love to see Trump and his entourage re-create Jimmy Stewart’s ecstatic jog through snowy Bedford Falls at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.  He’d come down the capitol steps doing that ridiculous Trump dance, then shout at the over-sized buildings lining the streets.  “Hello, Department of Whatever! Get ready for budget cuts!” before stopping outside of Schumer’s office and banging on the window.  “Happy Certification Day, Mr. Potter!  I mean, Mr. Schumer!”

And then he’d get to the White House Oval Office (because Biden wandered off and left the door open), where everybody would pile in around him.  JD, Elon, Melania, the whole crowd.  And then someone’s phone would ring, and JD’s daughter would say, “Teacher says, every time a bell rings, Hunter snorts a line of coke off a hooker’s behind.”

Okay, that got away from me there at the end.  But you get the idea: everything is looking up!

However, even amidst the joy of the long-overdue departure of Biden and the Bidenettes, ol’ Brandon is doing everything he can to quash my good mood.   

For example, I’m a lot less happy about the Presidential Medal of Freedom I’ve got hanging in my closet, now that Joey Gaffes has started handing out them to people he thinks deserve them.  (I already put my Nobel Peace Prize in a shoebox when Yassar Arafat won one.  And don’t get me started on the voting irregularities involved in the People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive contest!  Sure Clooney looked okay in 2006, and Hugh Jackman in ’08.  And I get it, Chris Hemsworth was Thor.  But for me to get bumped down to runner-up not once, not twice, but thrice?!  Bah!)

Where was I?  Oh yeah.    

Biden handed out more of the awards last week, and sure, not all of them went to bad people.  I mean, Michael J. Fox and Magic Johnson are okay, and Denzel Washington is great.

But consider these “winners” who have received the award from Biden’s cold, dead hands:  Cecile Richards (Planned Parenthood boss who presided over 3 million abortions during her tenure); Lionel Messi (pro soccer player); Hillary Clinton (sexual-harassment-enabler and hideous shrew); Bill Nye (propagandist for non-scientific drivel); and George Soros (real-life Bond villain and vile hater of democracy and all things good). 

I know what you’re thinking, because I’m thinking it too.  How low can Biden go?  A pro SOCCER player?!

HA!  I kid.  But if I told you that I’ve made a list of 5 reprobates, and the LEAST objectionable one on the list was a pro soccer player, you’d know how bad that list is.

But let’s not get caught up in the malicious thrashings of the Biden administration’s death throes.  Let’s look at just a few of the good things we can expect to see starting January 20^th:

1. A clear message is going out to all hostile nations that there’s a new sheriff in the White House.  There is a specific way I’d like that message sent, but I know it’s not going to happen.  Still, picture this scenario:

Xi Jinping is having a birthday party for one of his granddaughters in Beijing, and one of the balloons gets loose and floats upward.  The girl cries out, and Xi starts to reassure her that he’ll get her another balloon.

But before he can, a drone rises from behind a nearby treeline, and a brief chatter of machine gun fire pops the balloon.  Everybody scatters, and Xi’s security knocks him to the ground and covers him, as his cell phone rings.  He answers it. 

“Hello Xi, this is President Trump.  Let me explain what just happened.  That was our drone that shot down what I’m sure you’re about to tell me was your granddaughter’s balloon. And maybe it was.  But the last time you launched a balloon, the very stupid man who used to be our president let it float all the way across our country, spying the whole time.  Well those days are over, my diminutive friend.”

“I’m announcing a new policy right now.  I call it my ‘Shoot Down All the Chinese Balloons’ Policy, and it’s going to be fantastic.  People are already saying it’s the best balloon policy they’ve ever heard of.  The people love Trump, and they love this new policy.”

“Also, I’ve heard that you’ve gotten very angry when some of your people pointed out that you look like Winnie the Pooh.  So I’m going to call you Winnie the Ping from now on.  Or possibly Winnie Ji Ping.  I’ll run it by JD and Melania, and let you know.”

“In the meantime, no more balloons, Winnie.  I mean it.” 

And, scene.

2.  Before the election I wrote a policy wish list for Trump, and it included getting rid of birthright citizenship.   Since the election he’s brought that topic up, so I’m hoping he’s got some lawyers studying it and coming up with a plan as we speak.

3. I’d also like to see him mandate the use of E-verify in all states by all employers, using whatever means at hand to enforce it.  This is a federal service that’s been around for almost 30 years; employers can use it to verify a job applicant’s legal status to work in the US.  Right now only 10 states have made it universal and mandatory, while 11 others require it only from government contractors.  Trump should require it in all 50 states. 

According to Gateway Pundit, a 2016 study found that illegal immigration rates fell by as much as 50% in the states that require all employers to use e-verify.  The current estimate is that around 75% of illegals are in the labor force, and if they are forced out of jobs, they’ll self-deport, as over a million did in the 2008 recession. 

Incentives shape behavior, and the ability to work here incentivizes illegal immigration. I’m no lawyer, but I think Trump can use incentives to deploy e-verify nationwide.  I’d use the model the Feds did with the 55 mph speed limit: states who wouldn’t enforce the limit received no federal highway funds.

I’m hoping Trump takes that approach with sanctuary cities and states, and with e-verify: if you won’t cooperate on enforcement, we’ll redirect some of your social spending money to bring in Tom Homan to do the job you’re refusing to do.  And if you try to stop him, he’ll arrest and charge you. 

I’ve got some more ideas, which I’ll post later in the week. Tren de Aragua delenda est!

I know that the start of a new year is actually just a date on the calendar, without any magical significance of its own.  And I know that we can always, at any time of year, pause and take stock of what has gone well or poorly in the past, and resolve to make changes in behavior and direction accordingly. But it feels more natural to do all of that at the beginning of January.  

And this year more than most, I’m savoring a real feeling of renewal.  I’m looking forward to the new year in ways that I haven’t since the darkness of the Biden term descended upon us like a plague of morose fatalism mixed with the constant, dull ache of societal dissolution, accompanied by gastric distress and existential angst.

It seemed like every time I turned around, there was a demented old man shaking his fist and screaming at me as he repeatedly tripped over things that are normally un-trip-over-able. And homely men pretending to be homelier women at that time of the month. And a dyspeptic old white lady pretending to be a Cherokee princess (#evenin2025wemustneverstopmockingher), and Nancy Pelosi (#Aiiee!themummywalksamongstus).

And always, ALWAYS – from KJP and the legacy media and every national Dem (except sometimes Fetterman) – the lying about everything, which insulted our intelligence and challenged our gag reflexes. 

And now, all of that is set to go into remission for a while, and I couldn’t be happier. 

In fact, I’ve probably watched 30 hours of online videos of various lefty talking heads gloating before the election about how Que Mala was going to stomp Trump and all of his evil minions, and then whining and crying in the glorious aftermath.  And not just because it is great fun.

Okay, mostly because it is great fun.  To watch the arrogant get humbled, the certain get confounded, and the hateful get Hillary-slapped by reality?  That feels so good that it just might cure cancer. 

And because I love Shakespeare and all edifying drama, I often watch those videos thinking of one of our great thespian’s greatest filmed moments (Arnold as Conan, of course), when asked what is best in life: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their men who identify as women.”     

But beyond offering hours of schadenfreude-tastic good times, those videos have reminded me of a more serious point, too.  Because those videos demonstrate the baffling inability of so many reasonably intelligent people to answer the two questions that they seem desperate to answer:     

Why did Kamala lose, and why were we so wrong about that outcome?

The many partial answers are as painful as they are obvious: Que Mala was a terrible candidate.  Biden/Harris’ policies were far-left, and therefore produced terrible results.  (Unexpectedly!)  Most Americans don’t want open borders, and the crime, costs and chaos that come with them.  Most Americans know that chromosomes exist, and that putting on some ruby slippers and clicking your heels three times while making a wish doesn’t change that.

I could go on.  So I will.

Most Americans saw through the leftist gaslighting on virtually every subject for four years.  They also remember that Trump was president already, and that he wasn’t a Hitlerian fascist who destroyed the world.

Almost Biden’s entire cabinet and administration – and this goes double for his celebrity endorsers – had SFPI (Simpson Face Punchability Index™) numbers that would tempt the most Quaker-adjacent pacifists among us to wade in and start handing out naps like Mike Tyson at the height of his powers.

Also, like Jacob Marley at the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Joe Biden was dead to begin with.

And yet, even with that gigantic Bingo card full of winning answers staring them right in the face, most of the leftists who are trying to figure out why Que Mala lost – with the partial exceptions of Van Jones and Bill Maher, and maybe a handful of others – are failing completely. 

Because they cannot resist the most powerful force in human psychology: the comforting balm of self-flattering answers that demonize your opponents, while holding yourself blameless.

Rather than acknowledging what a black hole of spineless vapidity Kamala was, they blamed the sexism and racism of American voters for rejecting her.  (How do they explain why Trump was on track to beat Biden even more lopsidedly, despite Brandon’s corpse-y pallor and maleness?  They don’t.)

Rather than admitting that the open-border disaster was ongoing and obvious, they insisted that the border was secure, and anyone objecting was racist.

Rather than admitting that the “Inflation Reduction Act” produced skyrocketing inflation, they said that Trump had left Biden an economic mess (with his 1.5% inflation).

They cheered, “You go, girl!” when ranny-tay “f*male” Olympians were winning pole vault competitions without using a pole.

Their mental blinders are so restrictive that they can’t see who Trump really is, or who conservatives are, or who they themselves are.

I’ll cite one specific example: a NYT op-ed this week from eccentric bloviating oddball James Carville.  (I remember Rush calling him “Snake Head” 30 years ago, and at age 80, Carville has only gotten Snake-Headier.  The man is difficult to look at.  Although I’ve got to admit that that thick gumbo accent of his is kind of fun.)     

Carville says that in his pre-election certainty that Trump would lose, he forgot his own message from the Clinton days, that “it’s the economy, stupid.”  That over-simplification already overlooks so much else that was obviously at play this year (the border, weakness abroad, lefty disdain for traditional America, wokeness, etc.), but he doesn’t even see his pet issue clearly. 

He brags that inflation is “subsiding,” gliding right past the fact that things cost almost 25% more now than they did four years ago, and that even though inflation has dropped from 9 to 3%, that’s still twice as high as when Trump left office. 

Instead, he focuses on a common self-flattering explanation: “perception [of the economy] is everything,” and the Dems “have flat-out lost the economic narrative.”  No, Sneaky Snake, you guys didn’t lose the economic “narrative” – you damaged the economy!

It’s an argument that crops up over and over again: “our policies are great, but people just don’t understand how great they are.”  Which means that either the people are too stupid to recognize your superior ideas (simultaneously flattering to you, and insulting to the people), or the evil conservatives have fooled them (through misinformation, disinformation, or possibly hypnosis). 

Either way, the voters and the GOP are deeply flawed, but the Dems are just fine the way they are. 

Carville is equally wrong about the Dems’ negative focus on Trump – which Carville himself was hissing and frothing about until around 9:00 on election night.  But now he says that the voters didn’t care about Trump’s “indictments…[or his] anti-democratic impulses.” 

Again, the only interpretation of that issue that will make Serpent-Boy and his political co-religionists feel good about themselves is to assume that the indictments, convictions and Trump’s “fascism” have all been substantiated, and the voters are morally deficient enough to be unbothered by them.  

After eight decades on the planet, Carville apparently still cannot conceive of something that most average people instinctively know: the lawfare, indictments and convictions against Trump were transparently illegitimate, and the Dems are the ones who have been “anti-democratic.”

Trump is no more a fascist than AOC is a Mensa member, or Jussie Smollett is a victim, or James Carville is a warm-blooded mammal. 

Here’s the rub, though, as Shakespeare said. (Or was it Arnold?) It’s easy for me to mock the lefties for having this preening, self-justifying arrogance, especially after the blessed electoral butt-kicking that they just received.

But the truth is that this tendency is a part of the human condition, and we fall into it too.  If we don’t always do it all of the time, we all do it some of the time, and we are all susceptible to it most of the time. 

If I don’t get the promotion, the boss is an idiot.  If I try day-trading stocks and lose my shirt, the market is corrupt.  If a few students give me bad teaching evaluations, it must be because they are dullards who don’t appreciate hilarious genius professors.  If a woman turns me down for a date (this never happened, but I’m saying hypothetically), she must be a lesbian.

Sometimes those assumptions are true.  After all, there are bad bosses, crooked businesses, dimwitted students and lesbians in the world. 

But it’s also possible that we’re wrong.  And when we are, we need to recognize it, and avoid the self-flattering – and self-defeating – posture the lefties have adopted since 11/5.  The red flag to look for?  If every single thing that happens – in our personal life, career, or politics – 100% confirms our priors, we’ve taken a wrong turn. 

As the Dems stagger into 2025, they are providing us with an invaluable example.  They’re learning all the wrong lessons, and studiously avoiding looking at what they’ve done wrong, and how it has led them to their sorry current state. 

Let’s resolve that in this new year, we will learn from the mistakes they’re repeating.  Because doing that is a lot less painful than learning from our own mistakes.

And, sure, a lot more entertaining, too. 

Hamas delenda est!

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!

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!