Food Fight: Democrat Style
On the 4th of July, Joe Biden said he wasn’t prepared at the second debate for Kamala Harris’s attack. If I’m not mistaken, with his usual gift for clichés, he said: “It came out of the blue.”
On the 4th of July, Joe Biden said he wasn’t prepared at the second debate for Kamala Harris’s attack. If I’m not mistaken, with his usual gift for clichés, he said: “It came out of the blue.”
It made me wonder just how many naps the guy takes. How was it I knew the half-breed had been damning him non-stop for weeks for boasting he’d been able to get along with segregationist senators in the past to get things done.
Of course, Sen, Harris had to pretend that the point he was making was that he approved of their politics when he was obviously pointing out that even though he opposed their bigotry, he and others had been able to agree on legislation, unlike the way it is today when Schumer and the Senate Democrats will automatically oppose anything Trump suggests.
What neither Biden nor Harris bothered mentioning was that Biden, unlike that horse’s patootie, John McCain, who was always bragging that he was reaching across the aisle to work with Democrats, James Eastland and Herman Talmadge were Democrats. They weren’t sitting across the aisle from Biden; they were sitting next to him.
What’s more, along with former Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd, they were the Senate leaders of their party.
Whether or not Biden was prepared for the attack, there’s no getting around the fact that Harris’s poll numbers soared as a result. It strikes me as a very flimsy reason to vote for her. But, on the other hand, as accomplishments go, it’s as impressive as anything Biden has accomplished during his half-century in politics.
I confess I was surprised how moved I was by the Independence Day celebration in our nation’s capital. As a rule, over-hyped events leave me cold. But I can’t imagine any American with a patriotic bone in his body not being inspired as President Trump read off a list of accomplishments attributed not only to the members of the U.S. military, but of people like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Clara Barton and Jackie Robinson.
In fact, I had only two complaints. The first of which was that the cameras weren’t set up to show us the group of individuals in attendance who had had done so much to make this a better nation and a better world, including the man whose medical research greatly increased the survival rate for children suffering from leukemia.
My other disappointment was that in enumerating memorable moments in America’s military history, the President neglected to mention Gen. Tony McAuliffe’s one word response at the Battle of the Bulge when the German commander gave him the ultimatum of surrendering or being annihilated. “Nuts!” said the pithy General.
In case you missed the news, Michigan’s Rep. Justin Amash has decided that he’s the only honest man in Congress and because he’s had it with both Democrats and his own party, he will no longer identify himself as a Republican. My guess is that after the 2020 election, the arrogant turncoat won’t even be able to identify himself as a congressman.
As you all probably know by now, I only watch two Fox shows, Bret Baier’s and Tucker Carlson’s. I don’t mind so much when Carlson goes on vacation because he is either replaced by Tammy Bruce, Brian Kilmeade or Dan Bongino, who all do a workmanlike job of filling his chair.
But when Bret Baier takes off, the chances are he will be replaced by Mike Emanuel. I have nothing personal against Mr. Emanuel, but the animatronic Abe Lincoln attraction at Disneyland is more lifelike than he is.
I have seen zombies in the movies that had more light in their eyes than Baier’s guest host. Every word out of his mouth sounds as if it’s being read (badly) off a teleprompter.
I have no way of knowing who at Fox is in charge of making these decisions, but if Mr. Baier has anything to say about it, I can only assume it’s his idea of job security.
I recently stumbled across one of those laws like Murphy’s (“If anything can possibly go wrong, it will”) and the Peter Principle (“In organizations, people are inevitably promoted to their level of incompetence”) that one immediately recognizes as the truth. Godwin’s Law, named after a lawyer, Mike Godwin, states that as a debate progresses, “It becomes inevitable that someone will compare one’s opponent to Hitler or the Nazis.”
I would only add that the “someone” is inevitably a Democrat. I swear, if Hitler had never been born, the liberals would have had to invent him.
As if it’s not bad enough that knuckleheads have waged an endless campaign to rid the South of every historical reference to the Confederacy, be it a flag or a statue, while other idiots have devoted their every waking hour to removing crosses from military cemeteries and hillsides, Charlottesville, Virginia, has now decided to stop celebrating the birthday of Thomas Jefferson.
Perhaps the city’s leaders will choose instead to use April 13th to celebrate the day that Antifa came to town wearing masks and carrying clubs and put Charlottesville on the map.
The neutering of our language—the process by which janitors become custodial engineers, and bums, addicts and loons, all came to be known as the homeless, as if their problems could be traced back to an eviction notice—is nothing new.
Years ago, as Stephen Hanover reminded me, the late George Carlin did a riff in which he pointed out that after World War I, veterans who came out of the trenches shattered by the experience, were said to be suffering from “shell shock,” two syllables with heart-wrenching impact.
After World War II, the very same condition was called “battle fatigue,” four rather warm and fuzzy syllables.
The description was further diluted after Korea, when it came to be known as “operational exhaustion.”
Finally, post-Vietnam, it was watered down into something called “post-traumatic stress disorder,” Eight syllables signifying something that might be anything from hives to hair loss.
As Carlin concluded: “Perhaps if we’d still been calling it shell shock, some of those returning troops would have received the help they desperately needed at the time.”
I suspect that some of you may wonder why I often post exchanges I’ve had with my readers. Mainly, it’s because I think the exchanges are amusing or informative. Partly it’s because I suspect that if one person has an opinion or a query, it’s very likely that there are others who share it and I wouldn’t wish to preclude them.
It’s a carryover from the days when I was often invited to give a talk. Inevitably, when I would invite questions and comments, two or three people at most would rise to the occasion. But as soon as I’d leave the podium, when you would have assumed people would be fleeing to their cars, I’d find myself surrounded by a mob who all had things to say that, apparently, they didn’t want anyone else to know about.
The more I hear from the 20 Democrats vying to carry their party’s banner in 2020, the more confident I am that Trump will do even better than he did in 2016.
Like most of you, I was very depressed when Obama was elected in 2008 and even more so when he won re-election in 2012. But at least I could take comfort from the fact that he had only needed to defeat a pair of nebbishes named McCain and Romney.
But if Trump doesn’t manage to defeat Biden, Sanders, Harris, O'Rourke, Buttigieg or Michelle Obama, in 2020, it will be awfully hard to hang on to any hope for America’s future.
Russ Mothershed shared a couple of memes with me. The first was “There are so many women coming out against Joe Biden, you’d think Donald Trump had just nominated him for the Supreme Court” and the other was “I’m too old to live under Socialism. That’s because I’ve become addicted to such luxuries as electricity, food, clean water, shoes and toilet paper.”
