Five Quick Things: John Kennedy and Various Species of Asses - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Five Quick Things: John Kennedy and Various Species of Asses
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Welcome to this edition of the 5QT, where we offer various nuggets of information highlighting the end of the world as we know it.

And it feels fiiiiiiiine.

1. Sen. Kennedy advises Fidelito, who won’t listen

Wednesday night on Jesse Watters’ Fox News show, Sen. John Kennedy dropped an interesting bit of analysis. He said what’s going on in Canada is an example of the conflict between the “managerial elite” and the ordinary, put-upon folks they’ve been harassing ever more relentlessly in recent years.

That’s a formulation that, in various postures, we’ve seen a great deal of lately. The great Angelo Codevilla, writing here at The American Spectator some dozen years ago in a timeless essay, was perhaps the first to popularize the notion in its modern context by calling the conflict one pitting the “ruling class” against the “country class.” But since then there have been lots of things written about the subject, one excellent recent example being a January piece at Tablet magazine by University of Texas-Austin professor Michael Lind discussing the asymmetry of the cold Civil War going on in the United States between Democrats in the cities and Republicans everywhere else. Lind’s 2020 book The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite is a must-read on the subject. Another recent takedown of the managerial elite, by Francis Sempa here at The American Spectator, traced the beginnings of the managerial elite in America to the bureaucratic explosion of the New Deal during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and rightly condemned FDR for siccing the paper-pushers on us.

Kennedy is obviously reading all the same stuff, which is a good reason to support his re-election. He gets it. And he’s awfully entertaining to listen to. Who else would inform Justin Trudeau, who for some strange reason looks more and more like a young Fidel Castro all the time, that to be a smart-ass it pays to actually be smart?

2. Biden, in his 30s

Don’t take that one the wrong way — Joe Biden’s younger days are long gone. The 30s we’re talking about are job approval numbers, not ages. Sundown Joe is considerably less liked now than he was the last time he was busily attempting to wreck the domestic energy economy.

Back then it was voting against the Alaska pipeline in the middle of an Arab oil embargo. Now it’s presiding over gas prices through the roof by hamstringing domestic oil production.

Nobody cared about a hack Democrat senator from Delaware back then. People are more apt to notice a deranged and demented failure of a president, and the numbers show it.

34 percent approval courtesy of Civiqs.

35 percent approval according to Quinnipiac, which is actually up from 33 percent; call it a dead cat bounce. Or, in Biden’s case, a dead dog bounce. Did you see this?

A Rasmussen poll says two-thirds of Americans think Biden needs to take a cognitive test and release the results to the public. According to a Politico/Morning Consult survey, he’s sitting on a mere 39 percent approval on COVID-19, which used to be the only thing propping up his poll numbers.

You’d say, “Well, this is February, and these numbers could come back up.” OK, but how? What’s Biden got up his sleeve that will restore the country’s confidence?

The economy? We’re looking at crisis in gas prices, and he’s already thrown his Hail Mary pass by dumping oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The panic at the pump only goes away with an increase in supply, something that would require Biden doing a 180 on energy policy, or a decrease in demand. That, you might see; almost every modern recession has come following a steep run-up in oil prices. In any event, it’s hard to imagine the economy will be strong enough for Team Biden to claim much credit.

Foreign affairs? After the Heaven’s Gate act Biden pulled with respect to Russia and Ukraine this week it’s tough to see how that’s going to get better. Nobody will give Biden any credence when he claims to have prevented a war there.

COVID? The 180-degree policy turn I predicted in a recent column is coming to pass, but it’s hard to imagine that’s going to become something Team Biden can brag about.

Feel free in the comments to offer a suggestion of something this crew can credibly argue as a reason to keep Democrats in power. I’m at a loss. Typically, the president’s approval ratings drop in year two of his term, and this president has less credence than any in modern times. I think it gets worse for him.

3. But then there’s the Stupid Party

You’re aware that the current composition of the U.S. Senate affords the Republicans a majority, are you not? It’s true — because New Mexico Democrat Ben Ray Luján is home recovering from brain surgery, there are 50 Republicans in the Senate available daily and only 49 Democrats.

So when Mike Lee offered an amendment that would defund all federal COVID vaccine mandates, it either should have passed or Chuck Schumer, the current Senate minority leader who nonetheless reigns in the body, would have had to engage in legislative shenanigans to force a 60-vote threshold for the amendment.

But Schumer didn’t have to do anything, because the Republicans didn’t all show up for the vote:

Four Senate Republicans failed to show up to vote on an amendment that would have defunded President Joe Biden’s remaining vaccine mandates, thus ensuring its failure.

The Senate voted on Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) amendment to the continuing resolution (CR), which would defund Biden’s remaining vaccine mandates. The measure failed 46-47, with Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Richard Burr (R-NC) failing to show up, depriving Senate Republicans a potential majority to pass the amendment to the CR.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) set the vote threshold to a majority, and it remains possible that he could have set the threshold to 60 if Republicans had enough votes to pass with a majority; however, Democrats broke and voted to defund Biden’s private employer mandate the last time they voted on vaccine mandates. This could have put more pressure on Democrats to support the defunding of Biden’s vaccine mandates.

This is correct:

One of the points I make in The Revivalist Manifesto, my forthcoming tome from Bombardier Books due out in May, is that if the Republican Party were only worthy to hold political power the public would shower it upon them at this point. Not even showing up to be counted on an obvious piece of legislation like Lee’s is beyond disgraceful, and none of the four should be nominated for their seats when they next come up for reelection. In Burr’s case that will be never; he’s quitting, and good riddance to him.

By the way, John Thune is the Senate GOP whip. Remember this when you start hearing Mitch McConnell’s pals touting Thune as the next head of the caucus. Because he’s so damned good at his current job, as this fiasco shows.

4. Gross

Did you see this?

Connecticut socialite mother-of-four, 53, admits inappropriately filming minors in her $10 million mansion as part of mysterious plea deal to have OTHER child sex charges dropped

Hadley Palmer, 53, pleaded guilty to two counts of felony voyeurism for sexual gratification in her $10 million mansion

She is accused of filming minors without their knowledge in the home

She was originally facing a charge of enlisting a minor in a sex act too, but that was dropped by prosecutors

Palmer’s plea deal is under seal along with other details about the case

She was married to financier Bradley Palmer for 28 years but she filed for divorce in 2020

The pair are understood to have four children together

Hadley is the daughter of financer Jerrold Fine, who started the Connecticut hedge fund Founder Oaks Management

Child psychologist Dr. Jerome Brodlie was charged with intentionally not reporting Palmer’s alleged crimes to the authorities – as he is legally bound to do.

They keep telling us we’re conspiracy theorists for believing that our ruling elite are shot through with perverts and pedophiles, and we keep reading new reports time and again proving the contention.

A sane society would be publicly executing people guilty of raping kids. This one condones it and practically encourages it in academia and entertainment.

5. This crooked old hag

I’ll defer to others who have done, and will continue to do, a lot better job than me of lighting up the disgusting Hillary Clinton in the wake of the Durham reports making clear there was a vast left-wing conspiracy to spy on Donald Trump both as a presidential candidate and as the occupant of the White House, and that Clinton was its epicenter.

All I’ll say is she needs some new material.

She’s utterly pathetic. And she absolutely will not go away. You’ll have to nuke her from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.

The old saw goes that “if you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Being an old saw (or sow) herself, Hillary simply refuses to explain. And she denies. As she’s done since her husband’s political career oozed up out of the Arkansas muck and carried her along with it to the White House.

I can predict two things about this slow-rolling, sanity-crushing Clinton debacle. First, as badly as America needs there to be some legal consequences for Hillary based on what she did in foisting the Russia Collusion lie on the American people, which includes espionage as Durham is methodically documenting, there won’t be. The best we can hope for is an indictment of the Clintons’ paid legal mercenary Marc Elias, who was also the ringleader behind the 2020 electoral irregularities. But Elias won’t do any jail time in any event. We all know that.

But second, if Hillary Clinton does what it seems she’s threatening to do and runs for president in 2024, it will break the Democrat Party. That party’s voters won’t nominate her. She’s too old, too nasty, and has too much sleaze about her. But as a recent column noted, the party’s bench — to include the current president and vice-president — is so awful that there is nothing standing in the way of a Bernie Sanders takeover in 2024.

And if it’s Hillary that won’t change. She’d be their establishment’s candidate, but she’ll lose to Bernie’s handpicked proxy (Stacey Abrams, anyone? She don’t feel no ways tired, after all), and it could be years before the pieces could be put back together.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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