We’ll begin this edition of the 5QT with an attitude of gratitude because sometimes you’ve got to just take your victories where you find them.
And this, friends, is a victory.
The continuing purge of the dead wood that is the post-Reagan establishment “conservative” political class continues apace, though at a ferociously slow rate that threatens the future of the nation.
Mitt Romney has finally gotten the message:
U.S. Senator Mitt Romney will not seek reelection in 2024, capping a roller-coaster ride through Republican politics from the height of his party’s 2012 presidential nomination to the depths of tribal warfare in the age of Donald Trump.
Casting aside the hopes and appeals of colleagues, including Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the 76-year-old Utah Republican said on Wednesday he would retire as a one-term senator when his term ends in early 2025, rather than seek another six years among a dwindling number of Republican moderates in Congress.
Romney stood out within his caucus as a rare critic of former President Trump, but his decision to retire effectively surrenders his Utah Senate seat to a successor who could be more closely aligned with Trump and the hardline conservative politics of the state’s other U.S. senator, fellow Republican Mike Lee.
Romney nonetheless said he believed it was time to go.
“At the end of another term I’d be in my mid-80s. Frankly it’s time for a new generation of leaders,” Romney said in a video statement. “While I’m not running for reelection, I’m not retiring from the fight.”
Seems like he retired from the fight when Candy Crowley stitched him up in that second presidential debate in 2012, but whatever.
But “frankly it’s time for a new generation of leaders” is a sensationally excellent line, perhaps the best of Romney’s career. It’s just too bad he didn’t utter it back in 2018 instead of carpetbagging his way into that Senate seat from Utah.
Of course, Romney’s retirement, which we thank him for in any event, isn’t a wholly unilateral thing. It’s highly unlikely he’d get the GOP nomination even in a state where the Romney name is still a big deal. And it isn’t like he was classy in announcing he was hanging it up, either.
The good news is that fight will be avoided, and Mitch McConnell can’t divert millions of dollars that could be spent flipping a Democrat seat to an attempt to save Romney from a conservative challenger in one of the most conservative states in the union.
There’s oh-so-much more I could say about this. But I won’t. I’ll just say Mitt Romney represents a Republican Party that even Republican voters can’t stand — the wooden, corporatist, donor-class-centric, thoroughly out-of-touch political amateurs who never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Romney’s political career was relatively brief and thoroughly undistinguished, but he’s nevertheless a sure-fire entrant into the political Washington Generals hall of fame.
Goodbye and good riddance, Mitt. Keep those dogs off the roof.
The Washington Post’s regime shill columnist David Ignatius said the quiet part out loud this week, opining that it’s time to trash the Biden–Harris ticket for 2024.
It’s a clownish column, about 90 percent of which is sycophantic flapdoodle about how the most tyrannical president since Woodrow Wilson has somehow “brought America together” and the gratitude he’s owed by his subjects, and I’ll neither excerpt it nor give it a link (the Post would only try to charge you a dollar for the privilege of reading it anyway).
But you can see it courtesy of the Wayback Machine, so there is that.
This isn’t quite the first of the regime-hack media types throwing Dirty Joe under the lithium-powered bus, but the reaction to Ignatius’ ever-so-polite dismissal of Team Biden does indicate there is some shifting of the winds. I suggested in a couple of places after Biden’s catastrophic performance in that press conference in Vietnam last weekend that it would be consequential, and it looks like I might have been right.
They’re nervous. They can’t imagine Biden not significantly ahead of Donald Trump, and, well … he’s not significantly ahead of Trump.
Those poll numbers are a problem. And there is no upside to Biden at this point. Not with a meat grinder of an impeachment inquiry and his son’s indictment on federal gun charges around his crack-fueled idiotic decision to buy a gun illegally and then toss it into a dumpster (notably, not tax evasion or FARA violations that could implicate Joe, so thank the DOJ for plenty of nothing with this one), and not with the mounting irrefutability of his own dementia and physical degradation. It gets harder and harder to ride this horse; he’s about ready for the glue factory as it is.
But with Gavin Newsom once again demurring from the 2024 race and going further to then shill for Harris as the Democrats’ heir apparent, what comes next?
Here’s a plausible scenario:
If the internal decision to drop Joe in 2024 has actually been made within the bowels of the system, what you would expect to see next is the emergence of some heretofore overlooked star within the progressive firmament that will suddenly begin to shine bright.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) September 14, 2023
Perhaps so. But I add my caveat: whoever that “heretofore overlooked star” might be must come from the Obama orbit because the Obama machine will not turn its control of the Democrat Party over to anyone. They proved in 2020 that political talent and charisma, much less actual merit, are utterly irrelevant when they chose the two dumbest candidates possible to make up their party’s ticket.
For the sole reason that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were Obama puppets.
And as much as Gavin Newsom clearly wants to run for president, he’s not doing it because he either can’t get Team Obama’s imprimatur or (what’s more likely) he doesn’t want it but also doesn’t think he can crack the Obamunist hold on that party.
There is much fun to be had watching the ruination of things. The Democrat Party is about to become a cross between Falcon Crest and Lord of the Flies.
I’m not a Kevin McCarthy fan, as our regular readers know. He just doesn’t do it for me. And I especially don’t trust him not to screw up the fight over the federal budget that is going to play itself out for the rest of this month. I’m cringing over that one, for all the same reasons most of you are.
That said, this week McCarthy announced the inception of an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden and his bribes (by the way, I had a little something at The Hayride on Thursday on that subject that you’re welcome to have a gander at here), and it led to this exchange:
FYI, @FarnoushAmiri. You keep saying “without evidence” but here you acknowledged over and over that “that’s what the testimony said.” You understand that testimony is evidence, right? So which is it, are you dumb or dishonest? Cuz those are the only two options here.
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) September 14, 2023
That’s pretty well done, actually. McCarthy dispassionately marched that leftist hack disguised as a journalist through a minefield and she hit every single tripwire along the way. And if anybody tries to flog the stupid “No evidence!” narrative that Team Biden has demanded its media lickspittles regurgitate in conversation with you, you can dismiss them pretty quickly by suggesting that they refute McCarthy’s points as expressed in that video.
Or you can just ask them what all of the Biden grandkids did to earn those fabulous sums of money from the Romanians and Russians and Ukrainians and Chinese.
The thing about politics no longer being about making convincing arguments but instead being about harvesting ballots from dead people and government supplicants is that it makes everything stupid. Just check the comments below and see what the minimum-wage Democrat trolls have to say. They never disappoint.
Next week I’m going to have to do something on the flat-out heroism of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who is braving the wrath of the entire uniparty establishment in Washington by standing more or less alone in blocking scads of military promotions over the woke corruption of the armed services. He’s being eviscerated for it, but he’s absolutely right.
On Monday I had something at The Hayride about Chip Roy’s tour de force of a press conference on the budget, and Roy, to his credit, came to Tuberville’s defense. Amid the 17 minutes of fiery truth Roy let fly in the Capitol rotunda was a pretty simple point: why should the American people be forced to fund things that are manifestly not in our interest? And a military that funds abortion tourism and DEI indoctrination rather than readiness is a perfect example of that.
But naturally, the 17-minute video of the press conference was soon removed from YouTube, making that Hayride post incomplete. So what are you gonna do?
But on the heels of Tuberville’s Stoikiy Muzhik performance, we have this from another notable college coach:
The world just got even more dangerous by another pathetic, weak US foreign policy decision. Rather than giving Iran 6 Billion, I would give em a 6 days. Take another hostage and you get 6 hours. We just made Iran's terrorist regime stronger! Free their people!Know your opponent! https://t.co/NSvK8CxXTp
— Bruce Pearl (@coachbrucepearl) September 12, 2023
Pearl, Auburn’s charismatic basketball coach, is becoming a Stoikiy Muzhik in his own right, at least if you look at the comment tweets (exes?) under that outburst.
Maybe there’s something about having to face down the Nick Sabans and John Caliparis of the world that teaches a man the kind of moral fortitude that we could use a lot more of in our politics.
The top show on Netflix at the moment is a weird pirate fantasy adventure series called One Piece. It’s based on a Japanese manga and anime series by the same name, only this is a live-action remake, albeit with a good amount of CGI. And while I didn’t expect to like it, I gave it a shot the other night and … it’s … fun.
Fun. You remember fun? Like sitting down and watching a show and deriving enjoyment out of it? Yeah. I was pretty surprised.
I’ll let the Critical Drinker handle the bulk of this entry because after watching a couple of episodes I can say I agree with 100 percent of what he says here:
He’s exactly right that Cowboy Bebop was completely unwatchable, and he’s right about the reason.
But most interesting was the main point he made, which was that Eiichiro Oda, the creator of the original IP, never relinquished creative control. And because of that, the Usual Suspects in the film industry weren’t able to do to One Piece what was done to, say, The Witcher. Or practically every Tom Clancy book after The Hunt for Red October.
One Piece is the best-selling manga property of all time. That should tell you something about Oda as a storyteller. The showrunners actually listened to him, and now they’ve got a smash hit that has already been green-lit for a second season.
That tells you something about the talent level of the people who run Hollywood, and it’s a good lesson for all the novelists and writers out there who want to take their stuff to film someday. Yours truly included.
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The Spectacle Ep. 44: Darkest Before Dawn?
