Politics – Page 17 – Martin Simpson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But can you name a better mechanism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!

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!

I Assess the State of the Race, and Get a Few Rib Kicks in on Dick Cheney (posted 9/9/24)

I’m afraid that creepy Juan Merchan helped the Dems dodge a bullet last week.

As I was making a few notes for today’s column several days ago, I was prepared to discuss what I think will be the three most important events – barring some unforeseen world catastrophe or October surprise – remaining in this election season: the Trump/Harris debate, the Vance/Walz debate, and the sentencing of Trump on September 16^th in the bogus NY “34 felonies” case.

And then the corrupticrat judge Merchan postponed the sentencing until after the election. And just to prove that he is no more capable of shame than the Democrat hacks who have advanced the illegitimate lawfare cases against Trump, Merchan explained that he was doing so partly because he wanted to avoid the appearance of trying to influence the election.

You’re a little late for that, Juan.

Unfortunately, I think his decision was a smart one for the left, because they had painted themselves into a corner. They thought that hitting Trump with an avalanche of charges and then trumpeting his felon status would turn the people against him and guarantee Biden’s victory.

When that backfired, and rallied even non-Trumpies to his side, they had only three sentencing options, all of them bad. Merchan couldn’t give him no prison, because that would have infuriated the left, and implicitly admitted that the entire case was b.s. the whole time. (You can’t scream that someone is Hitler for years, then convict him at Nuremberg, and then sentence him to… a stern talking to and a letter to go into his permanent record.)

But by now everyone knows that sentencing him to prison would only re-infuriate his half of the electorate, make a martyr of him, and drive his polls upward.

The only other option would be to give him a deferred prison sentence, delaying his actual imprisonment until after the election and/or the appeals process was complete. That would have combined the worst effects of the other two options, enraging the left and hyper-motivating the right and independents.

So kicking the can down the road until after the election was the smartest course for Merchan, assuming that he’s a corrupt and dishonest partisan tool. Which he obviously is.

I just wish that the Trump team hadn’t asked Merchan to delay his sentencing, which gave him the fig leaf that made it easier to do so. The fact that the execrable Alvin Bragg did not oppose Trump’s request is more proof that the request inadvertently served the left’s agenda.

This was one time when I’d prefer to have seen the over-the-top combative Trump! He should have dared Merchan to make his day, and insisted that he be sentenced immediately on these phony, trumped-up charges, so that he could begin the appeals that Merchan and Bragg know will overturn this illegitimate verdict.

That leaves the debates.

I’ve been very happy with the way JD has been handling his many media interviews. He’s obviously smart and disciplined, and he has exposed and shot down one bad-faith, dishonest question after another. He’s also displayed an ability to avoid being distracted by the MSM hacks, and pivot back to the issues, and the obvious mistakes and flip-flops of Harris-Walz.

Walz, on the other hand, is even worse than my first impression of him. How does somebody spend literally decades lying about everything, and somehow not get any better at it? He was never in combat, he knew that his Guard unit was going to be called up to fight before he quit, he didn’t retire as a command sergeant major, he didn’t get his children through IVF.

If that guy told me that Liz Warren is a white lady, I might actually believe she’s a Cherokee. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Also, I don’t trust a guy who’s two years younger than me and looks like he’s old enough to be my dad.

In his one interview with Que Mala, he showed why the campaign is hiding him as much as they’re hiding the Cackler. His non-answers were evasive and pathetic, and his transparently phony “Midwestern Dad” act makes my skin crawl.

I’ve seen the real thing. My dad was a midwestern dad. My grandparents and uncles were midwestern dads. I’m a midwestern dad, even though I’ve been transplanted to the Free State.

And if all of us were together having the cholesterol special at the Illini Lounge and Tim Walz came in and spent about three minutes there, my dad would elbow me and say, “Who’s the arrogant commie, and why is he wearing epaulets on a hoodie, and a whistle around his neck?”

So I’m looking forward to JD Vance wiping the floor with A-WOLz.

Que Mala is obviously a target-rich environment, too. I taught argument and debate for years, but if I was assigned to prepare her for the debate, I’d tell her to fake a heart attack, and then run the rest of her campaign from an ICU bed, while an aide explained that she can’t talk because she’s intubated.

She has a horrible record, and it’s indefensible. She has only one issue offering a polling advantage over Trump – abortion – and he’s blunted her attack by taking an inoffensive/mushy moderate position. He favors the three common exceptions (rape, incest, life of the mother) that make up 1% of abortions, and his SCOTUS judges have left the issue to the voters, rather than dictating a result, the way Roe did.

All she has is lies and distortions (which she can’t support), empty promises (which she could have carried out since 2021 but hasn’t), and ad hominem attacks (which she can’t spell).

So it all comes down to Trump, and whether we’ll see good Trump – aggressive but charming, focused, and disciplined – or bad Trump – distracted and susceptible to being baited.

We saw both in the last week. Trump’s address to the NY Economics Club on Thursday was great! He laid out a menu of policies that would “Make America Affordable Again,” with facts and examples that would appeal to economy nerds and regular kitchen-table Americans alike.

He hit all the relevant numbers – average increase in net worth and yearly income during his administration, and the erosion of both during Biden-Harris, along with the same pattern working out re: gas prices, groceries, interest rates, etc. Plus Elon Musk is coming on board to analyze ways to streamline federal bureaucracies!

Then we got an hour of bad Trump on Friday, when he gave a rambling press conference blasting E. Jean Carroll and several other accusers. He insulted one of his accusers’ looks, saying she “would not have been the chosen one,” and disparaged his own lawyers.

Obviously Carroll is a loon, and that entire case was a blatant miscarriage of justice, perpetrated by a corrupt NY leftist court system, starting with passing a Trump-targeting law to retroactively change the statute of limitations.

But we’re two months away from a crucial election, and every minute Trump spends on anything other than exposing and defeating Harris-Walz is a boost for the Democrats and a hindrance for Trump.

Please, Mr. President, I’m begging you, leave the lawfare to your lawyers, and focus on winning in November. Give us more of last Thursday, and less of last Friday!

Finally… boy, did Dick Cheney ever live up to his first name or what? To think that a guy I once admired, a guy who shot a lawyer in the face, has sunk to endorsing Que Mala!

I understand that many conservatives have their disagreements with Trump. I’m one of them, as regular readers know. I didn’t appreciate it when he sided with woke mega corp Disney, when he trashed DeSantis, praised evil leftist Stacy “M-1” Abrams over the GOP alternative in GA, etc.

But those are all trivial objections now. Trump is mostly conservative, and his first three years in office gave us the most conservative governance we’ve had since Reagan. And Harris-Walz (and Obama, Imhotep Pelosi and whoever else would be pulling their strings) are far-left disasters who would spend every day in office undermining every conservative principle that our country was founded on.

Given all that, we have a binary choice, and NO conservative of any stripe can possibly choose to support Harris-Walz! It’s not even close, and the Cheneys have shown themselves to be fools, knaves, and many other things I can’t write in a public forum because I’m a gentleman.

No matter how many lawyers you may shoot in the face in the future, you’re dead to me, Dick Cheney!

Hamas delenda est!

Cori Bush is Gone, & What Do the 2 VP Choices Tell Us? (posted 8/9/24)

Let’s start with a little good news today: racial arsonist and professional mean-spirited dullard Cori Bush is out!

Bush became the second Squad member – after Jamaal Bowman, the guy who despite being a middle school principal for years, never figured out how a fire alarm works – to get whipped in a Democrat primary. Thus raising the collective IQ of the Democrat party, in both cases.

(But wow, talk about damning with faint praise!)

Bush reacted to her loss by hollering like a lunatic and blaming the evil Joooos!

Unexpectedly!

Hilariously enough, she also suggested that, in the words of one media report, “she is no longer bound to the decorum of Congress.” Because what word do you think of when you hear the name “Cori Bush?”

That’s right: decorum.

She put it more colorfully, and more ungrammatically. “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down. [All you did was take] some of the strings off. They about to see this other Cori, this other side.”

We’ve seen all sides of you, Cori, and they all hideous. (See what happened there? If you listen to Bush for more than a few seconds, you begin to lose the ability to properly conjugate verbs.)

So good riddance to bad racists.

Turning to another topic, I’ve noticed that the Walz pick is a kind of a funhouse mirror reflection of the Vance pick. Both choices have some surface similarities. Neither one was the most strategically smart pick, in that they don’t obviously (or at least potentially) add voters to the ticket, and they double-down on their party’s prez’s perceived image.

JD is seen as having similar strengths to Trump’s – quick on his feet, eager for a fight – with possibly a little more polish, and a counter-programming up-from-poverty biography. I thought that popular VA governor Youngkin would have been a more balancing pick, increasing the chances of getting VA’s electoral votes, and introducing a less pugilistic and abrasive style that’s more likely to attract people who like Trump’s policies but not his personality.

Walz, as widely discussed, is as far left as Kamala, and brings no new voters to the ticket, as opposed to Shapiro, who might’ve brought PA with him. Shapiro was also perceived as more moderate – he IS more moderate than Walz, though that’s like saying Bernie Sanders is more moderate than Fidel Castro – and so could have reinforced the Dems’ and MSM’s totally dishonest branding of Que Mala as NOT the extreme leftist that she obviously is.

So each pick was a matter of “steering into the skid” for both Trump and Harris.

But the VP nominees also have huge differences.

Vance is competent and smart, with an impressive resume and at least a logical means of appealing to votes Trump needs, via his blue collar background. Walz’s record shows that he’s not competent, and after just a preliminary examination, his veneer of normalcy and accomplishment – football coach, teacher, hunter, long military career – crumbles to reveal something entirely different.

Vance also reflects who Trump actually is, whereas Walz undermines the messaging about who Kamala is.

Additionally, look at the avenues of attack. The left, digging as hard as they can, have found only three attack lines against Vance: the fake couch story, the childless cat lady comment, and the “weird” label. The first is a proven lie, now admitted to by the leftist troll who wrote and posted the fake “excerpt” from Hillbilly Elegy that leftist liars are now repeating. Because they suck.

The second is a pretty harmless joke, made in the context of supporting an essential behavior necessary for the survival of a healthy country: more people need to form stable households and have more kids.

And the third is evidence of the left’s desperation, and a textbook case of projection. Calling someone “weird” over and over again – sans any reasonable examples or evidence – is something you’d expect from a bunch of grade school bullies who are feral in the way that all creepy, peer-pressure-influenced cliques of kids can be feral.

Except that these creeps are highly paid, grown-ass adults with influential jobs.

To quote the late Joe Biden – What’s happened to that guy lately, by the way? Has anybody seen him? – think about it:

If the left had any legitimate grounds on which to attack Vance, do you think they’d be resorting to this schoolyard, “He’s a weirdo!” taunting? If Vance had been caught driving drunk at over 90 mph and then tried to get out of it by claiming that he was deaf, for example, do you think they’d be going with the mean “cat lady” joke?

If he’d lied about his military service, or presided over riots and crime and population flight from his failing state, or supported hugely unpopular policies like destroying our borders or castrating children, do you think the “weirdo” label would be their main focus?

Walz, on the other hand, has the glaring flaws mentioned above. Plus, he’s the one who came up with the “weird” tag for Vance, but he is himself deeply strange.

The guy loves communist China as much as Eric Swalwell likes Chicom honeytraps. He picked the date of his wedding because it was the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre (!), and he chose to honeymoon in that suffering country. (Shades of Bernie Sanders honeymooning in the Soviet Union! I don’t think it’s coincidental that these guys get aroused when in close proximity to a hugely powerful government oppressing regular people.)

He’s creepily gleeful about letting confused kids who are either mentally ill or influenced by a social contagion to make permanently damaging sexual alterations to their bodies against their parents’ will. And his weirdo wife – he tried to give her a hearty handshake rather than a hug or kiss after his nomination, because who can feel amorous when there’s no weeping victims in a gulag nearby? – was giddy about BLM rioting and burning the property of others, saying that she left her windows open so she could smell the smoke from burning tires.

If THAT doesn’t scream “weirdo!” at you, your weirdometer is broken!

Speaking of wives, JD has an Indian wife – pardon me, “a wife of color” – and biracial children. One leftist idiot on MSNBC – it was Molly Jong-Fast, but you’d need a program to be able to tell one moron from another on that network – claimed that his pro-child stance was actually a racist dog whistle, because he clearly only wants more white children.

Which means that she either didn’t know who his wife and children are – in other words, she’s an incredibly lazy journalist — or she is weapons-grade stupid.

Or, to be fair, possibly both.

Since that pathetic smear attempt went over like a John Wayne film festival at a Liz Warren family reunion (#wemustneverstopmockingher), nobody on the left has mentioned JD’s family again, as far as I know.

In summary, the biggest problem the Dems have with Vance is finding a legitimate problem with him to focus on, while the biggest problem the GOP has with Walz is choosing which of his massive liabilities to focus on.

One editorial note: I keep spelling Walz’s name as “Wolz,” for some reason. I had to correct it several times in this column, and I couldn’t understand why.

But then I remembered: it all goes back to one of the top 5 movies of all time, The Godfather. The name of the movie producer who resists giving Johnny Fontane a lead role in an upcoming movie is Jack Woltz, and I think I’ve subconsciously associated his creepiness with whatever is off about Tampon Tim Walz.

On a related note, while it would be truly horrifying to wake up with a horse’s head in your bed, it would be much worse to be woken up by Que Mala’s horse laugh in your bed.

I don’t know how Willie Brown handled it.

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 11^th 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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas delenda est!