Inmates Running the Asylum
God knows I’d be the last person on earth who’d wish to be judged on the basis of his son. But, at least I didn’t aid and abet my son Max in his criminal activities, which included theft, illegal gambling and kiting checks, in his early 20s.
God knows I’d be the last person on earth who’d wish to be judged on the basis of his son. But, at least I didn’t aid and abet my son Max in his criminal activities, which included theft, illegal gambling and kiting checks, in his early 20s.
On the other hand, Joe Biden has covered for his 50 year old son Hunter and done everything in his power to encourage him to be the nogootnik he clearly is and always was.
For the first 39 years of Hunter Biden’s life, he was best known as a drunk and a cocaine addict. Suddenly, in 2009, he co-founded Rosemont Seneca Partners, which, coincidentally, was the year his old man became the Vice President of the United States.
In 2014, he was given a place on the board of Burisma Holdings, which, again coincidentally, was the same year that President Obama made his Vice President his go-to guy on all things involving Ukraine. Being a board member for an energy company earned him $84,000-a-month. One can only imagine how much he would have been paid if he knew anything about energy or could speak Ukrainian.
In October, 2019, Hunter resigned from the Board of a Chinese private investment firm because, as he explained, he wanted to avoid “even the appearance of a conflict of interest” while his father was running for president.
There’s still more on the guy’s resumé. In 2013, Hunter applied for a position in the U.S. Navy Reserve and, not too surprisingly, the son of the Vice President received it even though he had a record of having been a cocaine addict. His proud father administered his commissioning oath at the White House.
The very next month, a random urinalysis found cocaine in Biden’s system, and he was booted out of the Navy. With his customary inability to accept responsibility for his own actions, the schmuck blamed others for giving him cigarettes laced with coke.
And, finally, he divorced the mother of his three children in 2017 after having taken up with the widow of his late brother in 2016. He has since married a South African filmmaker but is currently involved in a paternity suit over a baby he sired with yet another woman in 2018.
Ronald Reagan once said he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, that, rather, it left him.
The reverse has been the experience of Bernie Sanders. Although he now calls himself an Independent, he used to more honestly identify as a Socialist.
These days, he no longer has to because his party has joined him on the far left. That is why there’s not an iota of actual difference among those vying for the nomination.
Some believe Biden will be the eventual nominee because black voters connect him to Barack Obama, even though the ex-president has refused to endorse him.
Others believe Sanders will garner the nomination because he’s the most authentic candidate, meaning he’s been pushing the Communist line even long before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born.
So far as normal, sane, people are concerned, that’s the equivalent of saying that Joe Biden has over 40 years of experience in foreign relations while ignoring the fact that he’s been wrong on every foreign policy issue for over 40 years.
When one of my readers suggested that drugs are the reason that so many youngsters rally around Bernie, I disagreed. “I’m sure that some of them smoke pot, but, for the most part, Sanders owes his following to the fact that they’re a bunch of pampered snowflakes who like the idea of getting free stuff without having to work. To them, the old bastard is a combination Pied Piper and Santa Claus.”
On the other hand, Nancy Pelosi can’t even claim, as Bernie Sanders can, that she has principles from which she refuses to waver.
Unlike Sanders, who makes no secret of the fact that he would love to see America become the latter day version of the Soviet Union, all that Nancy Pelosi wants is to retain the speakership of the House. If it came down to whether she remains the Speaker or Donald Trump is evicted from the Oval Office, she wouldn’t hesitate to cast her vote for him next November.
Although she opposed for strictly pragmatic reasons the move to impeach the President, she eventually caved in and made it appear she was even more eager than Maxine Waters to oust #45.
She did it for the same reason that she gave the odious freshman members of the House, including Ilhan Omar, A O-C, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, important committee assignments. She needed their votes to win the speakership in 2018. She will continue to need their support in 2020 if the Democrats manage to hang on to the House.
Judging by my email, I struck a nerve when I wrote about how much I hated reading Herman Melville. I’ll mention that I found Henry David Thoreau nearly as tedious. In fact, the only reason that “Moby Dick” is even more boring than “Walden” is because it’s more than twice as long (116,000 words compared to 49,000).
Thoreau was born in 1817, Melville in 1819, and although the former was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and the latter in New York City, they had a lot in common. Neither could write a decent sentence, neither had even a hint of humor and both seemed to take an unnatural interest in the cost of things. Having slogged through all 165,000 words of their two most famous works, what I remember best were entire chapters devoted to the cost of nails, boards, tarps and other materials required for building cabins or hunting whales. That sort of thing can put you to sleep even quicker than Brahms’ “Lullaby.”
It made me realize that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the two writers knew the price of everything but not the value of moving things along.
I heard from a lot of people who shared my proofreading problems, but it also served to remind me of yet another of my typing land mines.
As if it’s not bad enough that I think faster than my fingers move, so that I often leave out entire words, my brain occasionally goes on automatic pilot and anticipates the word I intend to type. The result is that if I start out with “ev-,” my fingers will wind up typing “even” or “ever” when I actually had “event” or “everything” in mind.
The latest Gallup poll asked Americans how they feel about five major issues and compared the results to a poll taken when Trump assumed the presidency in January, 2017.
On the state of the economy, 68% have a positive response today; it was 46% three years ago.
When it comes to feeling secure from terrorism, the margin is a similar 68% to 50%.
Military preparedness: 81% to 66%; as for policies to reduce crime, 47% to 38%; and even when it comes to the state of race relations under Trump compared to Obama, the score is 36% to 22%.
The House and Senate Democrats must have looked at those numbers, gulped, and asked themselves why in the hell they ever allowed Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler, to lead them down the rabbit hole of impeachment.
I confess I was never in favor of making Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday, especially not when George Washington has to share his with more than 40 other guys. But doesn’t it seem odd that the man who urged us to judge others not by the color of their skin but by their character was himself a serial adulterer?
But I suppose if you’re the person saying it, you get to be the exception to the rule, sort of like the Democrats who constantly accuse Donald Trump of ignoring the U.S. Constitution.
