I never used to think of myself as old. That’s changing.
I was just a kid when Jimmy Carter was president. I hadn’t quite hit my 10th birthday when the jihadist lunatics in Iran overran our embassy in Tehran and took our people there as hostages. But I do remember how awful a time it was for our country — and particularly when the news hit that our ill-fated Desert One mission to rescue the hostages had failed.
Desert One shortly became a symbol for the weakness and failure of the Carter administration and the low point in American prestige over which he presided. It was a good marker for what our country had become — gas lines, massive inflation, the Soviet Union on the march all around the world, the whole bit.
I brought up Desert One in a conversation with someone of … a younger generation as a reference to what’s happening now earlier this week, and the poor kid hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about. Yes, she said, she knew about the hostages. But no, she had no idea Carter had attempted to rescue them using the U.S. military.
“I mean, it was so long ago,” she said.
And that’s when I realized that I am old.
1. Incompetence Without Pier
But I was able to recover, amid that discouraging turn in the conversation, by noting that Desert One was kinda-sorta similar to Joe Biden’s own horrific symbol of weakness and failure, the ill-fated $320 million Gaza pier which supplied no civilians before it sank into the Mediterranean.
Everything about the Gaza pier has been a complete debacle.
The premise was wholly misguided, because “humanitarian aid” to the Gazans has the effect of PROLONGING THE WAR. What Israel is doing in Gaza, as a response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities that made their destruction a national Israeli imperative, is a siege. The best thing for civilians trapped in a siege is that it end quickly — either because the defenders are able to raise the siege or because the attackers are able to destroy the defenders.
Team Biden thought they’d supply the civilians with goodies, which is a classic case of “that’s not how this works.” The fact that you can no more provide humanitarian aid to Gazan civilians than you can engage in trade with Cuba without enriching the Castro regime adds a second level of stupidity and futility to this exercise.
And then the pier falls into the water after we spend $320 million we don’t have trying to build it.
And look how pathetic this is:
How utterly embarrassing.
This is the second coming of the Carter presidency, except it’s so much worse this time around. Hamas is holding American citizens hostage just as Iran did, but we aren’t utilizing our military to get them out as Carter attempted to do. Instead, we have the military trying and failing to build infrastructure to support the hostage-takers with food and supplies.
And why? So that Biden can turn out the Arab vote in Michigan. Which is a lot pettier and more cynical than Carter, horrific president that he was, could ever have dreamed.
The Trump campaign ought to crank out TV spots by the fistful and deploy them liberally in an effort to paint this debacle with the proper color. It’s as clear a case as can be made for just how chaotic and feeble the Biden administration is.
2. The Democrats Surrender in Ohio, No Thanks to National Review
Yesterday’s column in this space decrying the weakness and sanctimony of our “friends” at National Review, who opted to lecture the Republican-led Ohio legislature and demand they change that state’s ballot deadline to accommodate the clowns at Democrat National Committee headquarters who set their convention too late to get Biden on the ballot in the Buckeye State, was a little harsh.
But I said what needed to be said. The days of good feeling between William F. Buckley conservatives and Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberals who agreed on the basic social goods to be provided in a civilization and merely quibbled as to methods and means? They’re over. Democrats are enemies, not just of Republicans but of Americans in general, and they have to be treated as such.
In that light, what I said wasn’t even so rigid. I simply demanded that considerations be extracted from Team Biden and the Democrats if they wanted Ohio’s Republican-led legislature to change the law to bail out their campaign. Instead, the editors at National Review demanded Ohio’s legislators bend over out of a sense of comity and propriety.
Good job, guys. You look like real superstars given this:
The Democratic National Committee announced on Tuesday that it will nominate President Joe Biden through a “virtual roll call” vote ahead of the August convention to ensure he appears on the Ohio ballot this November.
Ohio’s ballot deadline is Aug. 7, two weeks before the DNC planned to hold its official presidential nomination at an in-person convention in Chicago. Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state, warned last week that Biden would not be on the state’s ballot unless the state lawmakers moved the ballot access deadline to after the Democratic convention. Days later, the DNC announced it would expedite the nominating process, though no date has yet been announced for the virtual roll call.
Oh, you mean the Republicans in the Ohio legislature didn’t actually have to do anything? And that’s state’s RINO governor Mike DeWine and the National Review editors demanding a preemptive surrender did so totally unnecessarily?
Shocking.
Just for good measure, DNC chair Jaime Harrison poured an extra helping of vinegar on these over-friendly Republican clowns with his statement about the virtual nomination:
“Joe Biden will be on the ballot in Ohio and all 50 states, and Ohio Republicans agree. But when the time has come for action, they have failed to act every time, so Democrats will land this plane on our own,” DNC chair Jaime Harrison said in a statement. “Through a virtual roll call, we will ensure that Republicans can’t chip away at our democracy through incompetence or partisan tricks and that Ohioans can exercise their right to vote for the presidential candidate of their choice.”
Why would you give this barking cretin any considerations at all?
The one illuminating feature of this “virtual roll call” in advance of the Ohio ballot deadline is that it’ll make it even harder for the Democrats to eject Biden if and when he shows himself too enfeebled to carry on. Having the convention within all the ballot deadlines would have afforded a remedy for that not-unlikely possibility; now, with the virtual nomination, it seems impossible even to try to replace him at the convention.
It must suck when your efforts at helping your enemies run afoul of those enemies’ actions. But that’s life at National Review these days.
3. Harry Sisson Is Beyond Humiliation, Which Is Probably a Good Thing for Him
If you’re on X and you’re a political observer, you’ve probably been subjected to unwanted posts in your feed from an “influencer” named Harry Sisson, a 21-year-old poli sci major at New York University who somehow has managed to build a gigantic following on TikTok and X with posts like this:
WOW! Dr. Biden PERFECTLY summed up this election “Donald Trump and Joe Biden are pretty much the same age. This election is about character. My husband Joe has integrity, he’s strong, he’s steady, he’s a leader, smart, and he’s energetic. Trump is chaos.” pic.twitter.com/NM82ZyyZcN
— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) May 30, 2024
It makes you grieve for the future if this is what’s coming.
Team Biden sure does like Sisson, though. Look how cringe this is…
Meeting President Biden for the first time! He’s awesome. pic.twitter.com/B3BKYHR3ZL
— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) May 14, 2024
But Sisson is clearly a plant and his following is without a doubt astroturf. He’s not smart enough or interesting enough to have that many real human beings hanging on things he says.
But to the extent there are people who give enough of a damn about him to pay attention, perhaps what happened after Joe Biden’s disastrous speech in Philadelphia.
According to Sisson, it was Awesome, You Guys…
President Biden had a packed house at his rally in Philadelphia today! People are excited to beat Trump AGAIN and for 4 more years of the Biden administration! pic.twitter.com/mBeI8ZGYc0
— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) May 29, 2024
Except … not so much…
Harry Sisson posted a picture of Biden’s poorly attended rally in Philly today.
When I replied w/ what the rally really looked like, he hid my reply.
It would be a shame… pic.twitter.com/q4Fh7deRlF
— ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) May 29, 2024
Sisson tried to defend himself:
BREAKING: Republicans are PANICKING after President Biden had a HUGE rally in Philadelphia. They’re using this photo, which was taken well before the event started, to mislead the public. Sorry MAGA! Won’t work! pic.twitter.com/26rt0fNNvX
— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) May 29, 2024
And that didn’t go so well:
This Harry Sisson Democrat mouthpiece posting a fake picture of the crowd at Biden’s Philadelphia ‘rally’ today and after getting caught he posts the true picture and laughs saying that was hours earlier. Well Harry shadows from natural light do not lie, look at the flag shadow. pic.twitter.com/KUUOEuYNd9
— John Kitchen (@Johngjkitch) May 30, 2024
Wrecked.
Sisson has been paid in excess of $250,000 for propaganda tweets and videos by the Democrat Party, which basically just proves they’re no better with their donors’ money than they are with your tax dollars. How embarrassing for them.
4. A Lesson From Louisiana
We’ve got a minor brouhaha going here in Louisiana over the fact that the state education superintendent, a conservative named Cade Brumley, under whose management Louisiana’s school outcomes have climbed several spots in the past few years, just announced a deal with Prager U to serve as a curriculum asset.
For his trouble, Brumley was set upon Thursday in a hearing of the state Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Heads of state agencies here have to go in front of the Senate to be confirmed, and it turns out that SGA is chaired by a Democrat named Cleo Fields.
Wait, what? Yes, Louisiana’s Republican-supermajority Senate has committees chaired by Democrats, and Fields is one of them.
He’s also the recipient of a brand-new majority-minority congressional district that stretches from Baton Rouge to Shreveport along a thin corridor tracing the path of the Red River. That district was shaped in and voted out of … Fields’s Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
Which has six Republicans among its nine members.
Fields did a deal with GOP Gov. Jeff Landry. He sold out the Democrats’ candidate, a bureaucrat named Shawn Wilson who had no chance to win, and tacitly supported Landry in return for those goodies. At one point it was thought Fields, who has a longtime reputation as an utterly corrupt and highly transactional politician with no particular scruples or principles, might be induced to play ball with the GOP and maybe even flip.
But Fields this week has gone off on a massive power trip — announcing that he wouldn’t even bring a bill for a constitutional convention, one of Landry’s core priorities in this year’s legislative session, up for a vote in his committee, and now committing political assault on Brumley in an “executive session” so the public couldn’t see what he was doing.
The lesson here is that no Democrat should ever have a seat at a Republican table when political power is concerned. Not when they aren’t needed. And in Louisiana, the GOP controls more than two-thirds of both houses. They allowed Fields a seat at the table and he’s overturned the table and made a mess.
Never, ever, ever again. Learn, people.
5. Good God, Atlas Is Awful
I found myself very, very bored last night and surfing through the streaming services, and Netflix seemed very, very insistent that I watch Atlas, the new sci-fi movie starring Jennifer Lopez.
So I did. So you don’t have to.
This thing is so horrifically bad it’ll make you want to smash your TV. Lopez is terrible in it, though it’s probably not altogether her fault given how poorly written her character is. The plot is stupid to the point of insulting, the CGI is clunky and implausible, the arc of the movie is stupid … all of it sucks.
I’ll never get those two hours back. Don’t do the same to yourself.
Audiences have absolutely turned on terrible movies like this. The box-office poison that is Furiosa, starring the lithe and diminutive Anya Taylor-Joy in a role nobody demanded after her story was concluded in Mad Max: Fury Road, is a perfect example.
The public has reached its limit of tolerance for stories featuring unsympathetic, poorly written Strong Female Characters in films and TV shows, and those properties are massive losers even when done fairly well — as Furiosa supposedly is.
Well, Atlas is not. Lopez spends the whole movie emoting about robots and then ultimately embracing them, and at the end you wish there was a power switch to turn her off.
Do better, Netflix. This is how you go out of business.
