Functionally, the answer to the question in the headline is that it really doesn’t matter and we might now finally have that moment, that utter and complete gaffe-tastic meltdown, which starts to serve as the wrong move that brings the Jenga tower down around Dirty Joe.
I have my doubts about this, though my take — one which was shared by David Catron but not at all by Melissa Mackenzie in an excellent episode of The Spectacle podcast this week — is that eventually, the weight of these serial meltdowns will be too much for the Democrats to overcome. (READ MORE: Macklemore Shows Biden Between a Rock and a Hamas Place)
What are we talking about? Well, this:
1. Was This A Policy Shift?
Mike Johnson wasn’t sure. My buddy Joe Cunningham over at RedState recounted the House Speaker’s reaction to what Biden said in that CNN interview with Erin Burnett:
This betrayal of Israel also brings me back to the current House Speaker.
“And my reaction honestly was: Wow, that is a complete turn from what I have been told even in, you know, recent hours,” Johnson told POLITICO. “I mean, 24 hours ago it was confirmed to me by top administration officials that the policy’s very different than what he stated there. So I hope that’s a senior moment.”
And here was Johnson on Fox News:
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Biden withholding weapons from Israel:
“He’s defying the will of Congress and he’s defying what his own top officials in the White House assured me in writing and verbally.
Cunningham makes an interesting point. Johnson has torn his drawers, if you’ll permit me an old Southern saying, with the Republican base largely over efforts to pass funding for military aid to Israel, and this is what he gets?
And yes, through some modern miracle, he got enough votes from both sides to pass an aid package that, among other things, included the very aid to Israel the Biden administration is now threatening to withhold. Of course Johnson is a bit miffed… publicly, at least. Privately, I assume he’s filled with as much rage as the rest of us, if not more given that he literally put his job on the line to get that aid passed in the first place. If that’s how Biden, who he had to work with to get the aid passed, is going to treat him after that, what motivation does Johnson have to do that ever again?
Yes, yes, I know some of you are screaming “Well what did he expect?!” And that’s absolutely fair. Perhaps he shouldn’t have expected any different, but when you have someone passionately begging for you to work with them on something, only for them to then renege on their end of it because of (very dumb and mathematically inaccurate) political reasons, that will piss anyone off. Every time, the frog is upset that the scorpion stung it. Not because the frog is an idiot, but because the frog was a creature that took the scorpion at its word. The scorpion’s nature remains the villain of the story.
If I had to make a call on this debacle, I would say that the administration’s position hasn’t changed and its holdup of the precision bomb shipment to the Israelis was more about yanking Bibi Netanyahu’s chain than it was shifting sides to supporting Hamas.
I would come down on the side of “senior moment” here.
2. Every Single Democrat Votes To Aid Illegals In Voting And Redrawing Congressional Maps (And The Electoral College)
Seems like a pretty inflammatory claim, right? Well, not so much, because this happened:
ALERT: House Dems just voted UNANIMOUSLY to give illegals representation in Congress AND the Electoral College. House Seats and Electoral College votes WILL BE added to areas with the most illegals (including all Biden illegals) unless Senate passes the bill. Invasion by design. pic.twitter.com/nVjhmsNh34
The Equal Representation Act would eliminate the counting of illegals as part of the census to gauge population figures to be used to apportion congressional seats (which would then obviously affect the Electoral College), not to mention making for much tougher enforcement on the prohibition against illegals voting in American elections.
And every single House Democrat voted against it. Chuck Schumer won’t even give it a vote in the Senate.
Why? You know why.
In the event Trump wins the election and has enough coattails to give the House and Senate to the GOP, it’s a national imperative that the largest mass deportation in American history must occur immediately after he’s inaugurated. (READ MORE: Manhattan Is on Trial)
The thing is, while the border invasion causes lots of negative effects in its own right, the necessity of the mass deportations is less about the illegals themselves than the state of the modern Democrat Party, which is now nothing short of a conspiracy against the American people.
Sure, that sounds like overheated rhetoric. How is it not true? They’re choosing illegals over American citizens — even those citizens who are reliable Democrat voters.
I had something at The Hayride Thursday talking about how they ought to be dealt with in a state legislative context. Some of you might find that interesting.
3. The Mar-A-Lago Frameup?
This item is not getting quite enough attention:
This image was leaked to the media following the RAID of Mar a Lago, the first time such a dramatic action was taken against a former president. But it turns out those "classified" cover sheets were paper clipped on top of documents by the FBI.
It’s beginning to look like your government, which you fund with your taxes (and the debasement of your currency), actively set out to frame a former president for a crime that does not exist. After all, as president, Donald Trump had plenary power to declassify executive branch records and therefore could not, by definition, be guilty of misappropriating classified records as he’s being charged in the Jack Smith South Florida case.
You have some ugly elements here. You have a shipment of documents to Mar-A-Lago as that case was being prepared — in advance of the raid. You have evidence that the documents taken in the raid were disturbed and their order and chain of custody were violated. And you have evidence that the raid was conducted as a political photo op.
The judge in that case has suspended the proceedings, and it’s beginning to look like she’ll toss the case altogether, or at least put it on ice until after the election. Remember, this was thought to be the meatiest of the four criminal lawfare cases against Trump.
It can’t be stated forcefully enough that the U.S. Department of Justice is going to have to be all but disbanded if Trump wins. There are many agencies of the federal government that have been horribly corrupted over the past 16 years, but the DOJ is so full of monsters that abject fumigation is the only possible option. Tear it down to the studs and start over.
4. The Jokes Are Coming Faster Now
I checked the RealClearPolitics polling average on Joe Biden’s approval Thursday afternoon, and it’s all the way down to 39.3 percent.
Oof.
I don’t need to tell you how rough a number that is. If you’re reading this column, you’re enough of a political junkie that you already know.
But here’s another data point showing how disastrous things are. Call it anecdotal if you want, but when stand-up comedians are straight-up clowning on Team Biden, like for example the way Josh Ocean Thomas just did, it’s bad:
If your a Biden staffer, never tell a comedian during his routine. Take this as a lesson learned. pic.twitter.com/gNeXujNH00
Of course, perhaps the best clowning on Joe Biden, without a doubt, can be found here. The Kindle version is only $3.99 until Sunday night!
5. Thumbs Down On A Man In Full
I’m one of the people who counts Bonfire of the Vanities as one of the better film adaptations of popular books in the past however many years, and I’m a massive Tom Wolfe fan. The aforementioned King of the Jungle was inspired to an extent by Wolfe’s work. And the style of Bonfire and Wolfe’s other novels, in which nobody comes out alive regardless of their station in life, is the essence of social and political satire if it’s to be done correctly.
Wolfe does it correctly.
Brian De Palma, who directed the film version of Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990 (it starred Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Bruce Willis, with performances by Morgan Freeman, Saul Rubinek, F. Murray Abraham, Kim Cattrall, and others), did it correctly. (READ MORE: Film Noir Made Me Conservative)
But David Kelley, the showrunner for A Man In Full, the just-released Netflix series based on Wolfe’s second novel, does not do it correctly.
There is no social or political satire in A Man In Full. All we get instead is preachy pablum. The soul of Wolfe’s novel has been torn out and replaced with a painfully boring, woke facsimile of a story.
Charlie Croker, the main character of the story, is nothing like the Charlie Croker in the book (if you haven’t read it and don’t want to treat yourself to it, here’s a Cliff Notes version), and the plot of the eight-episode series is widely divergent from the novel. Worse is Jeff Daniels’ portrayal of Croker, complete with a Georgia accent almost as bad as Dennis Quaid’s attempt at a Cajun accent in The Big Easy.
The ending is completely different from the book, the plot devices are reconstructed wholesale and the characters are jumbled. In every case, the changes make for a worse story.
It’s terrible art. Offensively bad. I wanted to like this, but as a fan of Wolfe, I would call this an atrocity so profound as to rival the film version of The Sum of All Fears.
Don’t watch A Man In Full. It’s horrible. I could write a whole column about how lousy this is, and if I don’t stop now I probably will.
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