Trump Does Sarcasm

The Daily Mail (U.K.), which routinely does a better job covering US news than our papers do, reports Donald Trump's advice to Joe Biden on whether to run or retire. The following from his Truth Social online channel.

Crooked Joe Biden should ignore his many critics and move forward with alacrity and strength with his powerful and far-reaching campaign. He should be sharp, precise and energetic just like he was in The Debate.

Trump went on to list all of Biden's failed policies which he urges Joe to defend mightily, finishing with MAKE CHINA GREAT AGAIN! 

Who knew Trump did sarcasm? 

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Deathwatch of a Presidency

I’ve been scanning the sites I regularly consult this a.m. The preponderance of opinion writers believe President Joe Biden will end up dropping out of the presidential race, perhaps leaving the presidency before the end of his first term. 

His interview with Stephanopoulos is widely thought to have done him no good. The feeling I’m getting is of a “deathwatch” where everybody hangs on the news as snippets of additional dismal fact emerge or leak out. 

Major pro-Democrat sources like the New York Times and Washington Post have called for him to exit. Most Republicans are taking Napoleon's advice to let the Democrats' death throes play out without piling on.

Serious Democrats have to be quietly furious that they let their party get itself into this quagmire. It is, of course, the result of a series of satisficing choices made by party leaders. Each looked like the smart bet at the time but, in total, they added up to today's nearly insoluble political dilemma.

If we live long enough, what is happening to Joe Biden happens to everyone who doesn't die while still in reasonable mental health. Most people recognize this fact, even as we simultaneously hope it doesn't happen to us.

What we cannot predict is when it will strike us. Some get "foggy" in their 60s or 70s, more in their 80s, some are still somewhat sharp to 100. The other DrC had an aunt who managed that. 

One thing we know, dementia hardly ever happens quickly. Normally it is a gradual process of several years. The "basement campaign" Joe Biden ran in 2020 tended to obscure his mental acuity, but the suspicion now is that he was already showing beginning signs of deterioration which were kept from us.

Our Times

The other DrC and I were musing over lunch about the "legs" the Biden debate debacle story has demonstrated. Eight days have passed and it still is dominating the news. Doing so is quite rare.

It may be the last time a story held our national attention this long was 9/11, nearly 23 years ago. Unlike that event, the current President isn't a hero of this story, he's more like the proverbial 'emperor' whose unclothed status was just revealed to half the populace.

We certainly live in interesting times....

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's Nation's Cartoonists on 

the Week in Politics.

Independence Day Fireworks

Tonight we watched the Melaleuca fireworks, broadcast from Idaho Falls. They are reputed to be the most lavish display "west of the Mississippi." The program lasted 31 minutes and during those 1860 seconds they fired off in excess of 16,000 shells, nearly 9 every second. It is a knockout show, I recommend it.

Melaleuca is an Amway-style pyramid marketing firm headquartered in Idaho Falls. Each year on the Fourth of July they bring their top sales people to IF, house them in motels, honor them at a banquet, and stage one heck of a fireworks show that everybody for miles around comes to see.

Idaho Falls' population essentially doubles with people driving in from all over to see the show. For years we would drive nearly 100 miles, have dinner, kill time till the program started at 10 pm, watch the fireworks, and then fight an unbelievable traffic jam to get home. We'd get home about 1 am. We were 20 years younger then, now it's too hard. 

Fortunately, my dear lady is technically adept and found an IF TV station was broadcasting it so she located their online feed, linked it via her iPad to our big screen TV. We watched it in the comfort of our living room.

Napoleonic Tactics

Napoleon Bonaparte was a renown tactician. He famously said "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Look it up.

Have you noticed that Joe Biden is in deep trouble following the debate and Donald Trump has mostly gone silent? Do you suppose Trump has finally achieved some self-discipline? Or is that too much to hope for?

Later ... well, DJT did wait a week to weigh in, but today he let fly one of his trademark broadsides dumping on Biden, Harris, and Congressional Dems. In my book, a week really doesn't constitute "self-discipline."

A Milestone

This site’s page view counter quite recently passed the 1.5 million page views milestone. I’m pleased.

Happy Birthday ... United States of America

I write to wish our beloved nation a Happy Birthday. And to add my wish for it to have many more to come. The day celebrates a rebellion, when we declared independence from England. The DrsC are unabashedly patriotic. 

While still teaching, during school holidays we drove a series of 6 RVs all over North America. We've been "wheels on the ground" from San Diego to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and from Key West, Florida, to Fairbanks, Alaska. We've visited all 50 states and all 10 Canadian provinces, plus the Yukon Territory. We loved doing it.

In retirement we've visited some 120 nations and, while we found some we quite liked, have always been happy to return home to the U.S. Ours is an amazing nation. It has suffered from corrupt ideology and we need to
Make America Great Again.

What Are They Thinking?

The other DrC walked into my office and reported that the Democrat governors who met with Joe Biden late this afternoon at the White House came out and announced they support him. Her question to me: "What can those governors be thinking?"

I thought for a moment and responded I believe they understand they will lose the 2024 presidential election and have decided it isn't worth the intraparty grief that would ensue if they tried to oust Biden and dodge Harris. So they'll be "good soldiers" and go along with the fiction that everything's okay. Biden will lose, and they'll get a clean start on the 2028 election when Trump will be term-limited out of office.

Obviously, things between now and Labor Day can change, and like good little pols they can smoothly change their minds and lie that their new position was always what they thought. But for now, they'll go with Joe and hope for the best. 

If you make a life in politics sometimes you lose, virtually every contest has a loser, sometimes more than one. Surviving losses is part of playing the game.

Reflection

I had a moment to ponder earlier this evening and realized the last few days have been very entertaining for someone like me who follows politics. Between the debate debacle and the Supreme Court decisions, there has been a lot going on, and much of it has been to my liking as an admitted conservative.

Even some of the news from overseas hasn't been too bad. Particularly the EU elections followed by Macron's snap parliamentary election which favored the right.

In a long life I've had what feels like more than my share of political disappointments. A week like the last one doesn't come along all that often. It feels like an inflection point, it certainly could be one. 

To quote DJT, we'll see what happens.

Something to Watch For

I wrote below about Biden WH staffers tiptoeing around him and telling him what he wants to hear. Those who really believe he's likely to lose will start updating their resumes and looking for the next job.

In my experience it is nearly always easier to get the next job while still employed. It is harder if you wait until you're out of work.  

When we learn several of these minions are testing the market, dropping hints of availability, we'll know there is a sense the ship is sinking and the smart "rats" are headed ashore. Keep an eye peeled for leavers, listen for rumors.

Politico: Biden a Grouchy Boss

Check out these insights from within the White House, being leaked by staff now being pilloried for letting Joe get himself into big debate trouble. Politico reports.

Inside the White House, Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate, with the senior team’s management of the president growing more strictly controlled as his term has gone on. During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”

The official said, “He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it.”

A key thing for us outsiders to remember, the people talking above aren't civil servants. They are appointees who work at the pleasure of the president and can be out of a job quickly. 

We think, "Just tell him the truth, so what if he gets mad." They think, "If he gets mad I could be unemployed this afternoon, out on my ear. So I'm going to keep him happy, even if doing so isn't in his best interest."

As some pundit noted, one of the characteristics of dementia sufferers is flying into rages.

Wildlife in the Backyard

At her Cruz Talking Two blog, the other DrC has a couple of photos she took this a.m. of a hawk perched on the wind screen of our gas BBQ. Mule deer we get in some numbers, not every day but several times a week. 

Robins, tanagers, hummingbirds and 'wild canaries' are common, plus now and then a magpie. We hear but seldom see owls. 

This is the first up-close perched hawk we've seen in 20+ summers, a real treat. Backyard wildlife watching is a plus of living in a forest. We don't bother them and they entertain us.

Tuesday Snark

Today's actual NYP front page.

Image courtesy of Power Line.

Reminder

To every pundit who wrote presidential debates hardly ever influence an election outcome.

Current idiom refers to what you did as a "self own."

Spengler Rides Again

David P. Goldman writes for Asia Times using the nom de plume Spengler. He isn't uniformly wonderful (who is?), but this is one of his good days. His topic is the relatively general malaise afflicting western governments. See key paragraphs.

For the first time since modern European states were defined by the Treaty of Westphalia, every government of every major Western country is falling or would fall if it had to hold elections. What collective curse has befallen the leaders of the West such that all of their voters have come to despise them by enormous margins?

There is a simple explanation for the collective ruin of the governments of the West: All of them agreed to an agenda that their voters reject because it has degraded the quality of their lives. Spontaneously and simultaneously, the voters of the West are rising up to repudiate their leaders. The damage to the world’s political class is breathtaking.

What is the agenda that the voters of the West have repudiated?

• The first is a global agreement to isolate and debilitate Russia.
• The second was a global agreement to put the climate change agenda ahead of industrial productivity.
• The third agreement responded to the demographic decline of the industrial nations. All leaders of the major Western countries agreed that they would absorb large numbers of immigrants from poor countries to their south.

That's the World Economic Forum/Bilderburg/Aspen agenda. Its admirers, clients and proponents are in near-universal trouble.

Some products and policies just won't sell. It's usually because potential customers don't like them, or find the opportunity costs too high.

Contempt for the Democratic Process

Gerard Baker is Editor at Large of the Wall Street Journal. See his view (not paywalled) of the Biden debacle foisted upon us by the Democratic Party.

It should be we the voters who get to deliver the verdict on the last four years, not a bunch of has-beens, time-servers and fat donors. We should have the opportunity to say what we think about a party and a president who, even as they lectured us for four years about the importance of honesty and the sanctity of democracy, were engaged in an extended act of deceit that itself represents pure contempt for the democratic process.

In inadvertently revealing its hypocrisy, Mr. Biden has improbably done his party one final service, one they don’t want but the country urgently needs.

Amen. 

Monday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's TWIP Special

Biden's Monday in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Breaking: SCOTUS Finds for Trump

In a 6-3 ruling this morning the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents have basically the same immunity from prosecution which sitting presidents have, at least as far as their official actions taken during office are concerned. 

Multiple sources contend this decision basically kills the Jack Smith prosecution directed at Trump’s actions regarding the Jan. 6 disorder at the Capitol. Trump immediately celebrated the decision as a big win, he is likely correct. 

It may also affect the documents retention case against him, as deciding which to retain happened during his presidency. Any insufficiency of security charges are likely moot as Biden acted in a similarly cavalier fashion.

The majority premised their decision on the concept that not giving presidents immunity lasting after their term of office will hamstring the executive from acting boldly on behalf of the nation while in office.